Current Events > What non-fiction have you read lately?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Better yet, what would you recommend?

I've just wrapped up Necessary Trouble, by Sarah Jaffe, which is an overview of grass-roots leftwing movements over the past decade or so. A lot of it is stuff that I roughly knew already, but she does a good job of tying a bow on things and drawing connections between movements that aren't related on their face.

Finishing this means it's time for me to browse a dozen new books, buy four, and eventually maybe get around to reading one.
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im reading why nations fail. its a slow crawl.
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I'm reading a biography of Thelonious Monk. after that, I'll probably (finally) start my copy of The New Jim Crow
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A River In Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa.

Highly recommended.
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AsI Lay Dying
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I don't really like non-fiction, but maybe some of Saint Agustine's Confessions

unless if Pimp: The Story of My Life counts.
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Just finished The Earth is Weeping by Peter Cozzens. Outstanding book...probably the most impartial, balanced accounts of the post Civil War westward expansion and Indian wars I've ever read.
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Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy.
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Lately I've been reading The Greek Wars: The Failures of Persia by George Cawkwell which attempts to frame the conflicts between the Greeks and the Persians from the perspective of the Persians. Overall I think he brings into perspective some pretty good arguments but I find that he still echoes Herodotus bias against the Persians when he describes them as unarmored.
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Currently reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Tremendous read.
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Principles by Ray dahlio
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bump
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The communist manifesto is a damn good read
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"Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are"
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Do self-help books count?
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Americas Great Depression - Murray Rothbard

He explains how government intervention and loose monetary policy caused the Great Depression. He also explains why Keynesian Economics is wrong.
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Amazon is giving away some free books, btw:

https://www.amazon.com/article/read-the-world

The North Korea book I mentioned happens to be on it.
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Shock troops: Canadians fighting the great war. volume one and two. Amazing read.
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I just finished a book about contemporary art history theory, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Tao Lin is releasing a nonfiction book about drugs, which I will probably have a look at.
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Winter, by Karl Ove Knausgaard
although it's a collection of stories/essays so idk if it's wholly nonficiton but it's well worth it (and Autumn, the first one in the quartet, was good too).
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Lately? I read A Shattered Peace by David Andelman, about the Versailles Peace Conference. It was pretty good: it broke out specific actors and nations into separate chapters and chronicled their efforts and the end results. For example, there's one chapter about the Arabs, one about the Zionists, one about the Czechs and Poles, etc. etc. Needless to say, the Versailles Treaty and its ancillary treaties managed to fail basically everyone. Before that, I read Close to Home, a collection of essays on socialist feminism by French feminist Christine Delphy.

All-time, let me give credit to Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles(it reconstructs a Punic perspective of the history of Carthage from primarily Greek and Roman sources), The Last Days of the Inca by Kim MacQuarrie(attempts largely the same thing, just with Spanish sources and with the Inca), and The Thirty Years War: A European Tragedy by Peter Wilson(an absolute TOME: it's over 1,000 pages, including notes and references, but it's a great exhaustive run-down of the entire war from setting the stage to the aftermath).
I also recently read an excellent biography of Karl Marx and an (equally excellent) book called Young Stalin about, well, Stalin's life up through the Russian Revolution. More details would require me to excavate them, something I cannot do at the moment.

nadja, doesn't really count as non-fiction but it's semi-autobiographical
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The Bible
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Book on the American Civil war
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The Black Book of Communism. Excellent and riveting book. It's about the genocides, artificial famines, and economic collapses caused by communists. Big book and a lot of information to sift through, but it's high quality and should be mandatory reading in high school and college.

silentwing26x posted...

The Black Book of Communism. Excellent and riveting book. It's about the genocides, artificial famines, and economic collapses caused by communists. Big book and a lot of information to sift through, but it's high quality and should be mandatory reading in high school and college.

I have been meaning to get that.
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Elie Wiesels "Night"
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Waiting for my copy of Understanding Media.
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