Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Want to Understand? Read Books!

The following is an incomplete list of books I've read in the last couple of years that have coloured my thinking and in my estimation, lent a certain understanding of the world in which we live. I feel it should give people a certain sense of where I am coming from when I talk/write, although I'll add that I have sometimes read books from this list just to get a sense of where someone else is coming from.

As I read more, I'll update the list.

As always you can make suggestions for books I should read in the comments.

The Great Transformation – Karl Polanyi
The Cancer Stage of Capitalism – John McMurtry
Limits to Growth: 30 Year Update – Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis Meadows
Fleeing Vesuvius – Edited by Richard Douthwaite
Being Wrong – Kathryn Schulz
Carbon Shift – Thomas Homer-Dixon
The Upside of Down – Thomas Homer-Dixon
The Party’s Over – Richard Heinberg
Power Down – Richard Heinberg
Collapse –Jared Diamond
The Mountain People – Colin Turnbull
The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One – William K. Black
Web of Debt – Ellen Brown
Tyranny of Words – Stuart Chase
Economic in One Lesson – Henry Hazlitt
Future Tense – Gwynne Dyer
Climate Wars – Gwynne Dyer
The Story of Stuff – Annie Leonard
Violence – James Gilligan
The Singularity is Near – Ray Kurzweil
Confessions of an Economic Hitman – John Perkins
The Secret History of the American Empire – John Perkins
The End of Work – Jermey Rifkin
The Spirit Level – Richard Wilkinson
A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn
The Gift – Marcel Mauss
The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein
Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky
The Host and The Parasite – Greg Felton
Denialism – Michael Spector
The Long Emergency – James Howard Kunstler
The Grand Chessboard – Zbigniew Brzezinski
Fast Food Nation – Eric Schlosser
The End of America – Naomi Wolf
Give Me Liberty – Naomi Wolf
Sustainability and the Civil Commons – Jennifer Sumner
Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller – Jeff Rubin
Reinventing Collapse – Dmitry Orlov
The Pursuit of Happiness – David G. Myers
In the Age of Spiritual Machines – Ray Kurzweil
The End of Growth – Richard Heinberg
The End of Nature – Bill McKibben
Eaarth – Bill McKibben
The Ingenuity Gap – Thomas Homer-Dixon
A Language Older than Words – Derrick Jensen
Seeing Like a State – James C. Scott
The Collapse of Complex Societies – Joseph Tainter
End Game – Derrick Jensen
Small is Beautiful – E.F. Schumacher
Your Money or Your Life – Vicki Robins and Joe Dominguez
Deep Economy – Bill McKibben
Peak Everything – Richard Heinberg
Plenitude – Juliet Schor
Heat – George Monbiot
Ecological Economics and the Ecology of Economics – Herman Daly
Cool It – Bjorn Lomborg
End of Poverty – Jeffery D Sachs
As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things you can do to stay in Denial
– Derrick Jensen and Stephanie Miller
Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges
American Fascists - Chris Hedges
Days of Destruction, Days of Rage - Chris Hedges
What's the Worst that Could Happen - Greg Craven
Poisoned for Pennies - Frank Ackerman
Prefabulous & Almost off the Grid - Sheri Koones
The End of Growth - Jeff Rubin
Wrong - David H. Freedman
The Value of Nothing - Raj Patel
The Vegetarian Myth - Lierre Keith
Listening to Grasshoppers - Arundhati Roy
The Next American Civil War- Lee Harris
$20 per Gallon - Christopher Steiner
Water Conciousness - Various
Overshoot - William Catton
Bottleneck - William Catton
Unity of Law - Henry Charles Carey
Free to Choose - Milton Friedman
Road To Serfdom - Friedrich Hayek
The Economics and Ethics of Private Property – Hans-Hermann Hoppe
The Economics of Needs and Limits – Frank Rotering
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
The Culture of Make Believe – Derrick Jensen
Shoveling Fuel For a Runaway Train – Brian Czech
Counting For Nothing- Marilyn Waring
Don't Sleep, There are Snakes - Daniel Everett
End Game Vol 2: Resistance – Derrick Jensen
Crossing the Rubicon – Michael Ruppert
Economics Unmasked – Manfred Max-Neef
Global Warming for Dummies – Elizabeth May
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet – Mark Lynas
Why We Disagree on Climate Change – Mike Hulme
Confronting Collapse - Michael C. Ruppert
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations – Dave Montgomery
Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
The Enemy Of Nature – Joel Kovel
The Crash Course – Chris Martenson
No Contest: The Case Against Competition – Alfie Kohn
Walking Away From Empire – Guy McPherson
Prosperity Without Growth – Tim Jackson

2 comments:

Kyler J. said...

A New Green History of the World by Clive Pointing, the updated version

The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith

We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity by Bell Hooks

Deep Green Resistance by Aric McBay, Derrick Jensen, and Lierre Kieth

Anything by Lewis Mumford

The Culture of Cities
The Myth of the Machine etc.

Vasper85 said...

Thank Kyler for your contribution. As I have a long commute, I am always up for more reading material. Lately I've been reading much libertarian and objectivist material (as it is good to understand the philosophy of the our future oppressors). Of course it is wearing to read so much of what I disagree with so I'm taking a break and reading Jensen's The Culture of Make Believe.