Reading Suggestions and Top Ten Books

[lightningBugout]

and in its own class altogether,

if i could recommend only one book to a teenager it'd be

The Situationist International Anthology edited by Ken Knabb

REALLY would be interested in that one. But thus far in my very limited research of situationism I've had a hard time understanding the movement. Is it a good, thorough introduction to the movement?

this'll sound snarky but its not meant to - probably the key tenet of the SI was that there was nothing called "situationism," and by design, no movement.

the irony is that in the past, say, 12 years, lots of critical theory types in academia, architecture and fine art have ignored that intention and wholly canonized the SI. the result, one seen in the diy collectives of any even mid-sized major city today, is exactly what the situationists felt repugnant - romantic nostalgia for a previous avant-garde, ivory soap rebellion and a dogmatic overlord, retroactive in the visage of guy debord.

that said - I used to know the breadth of available writing on the SI very well and this is by far the most useful no-bullshit book about them, given that is has essentially zero commentary and is just a collection of the writing of debord, hausman, chchetglov, etc.

ps. a book that i would either avoid or approach with a heavily critical mind is Greil Marcus' book Lipstick Traces. romantic rubbish.

[monster]

The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles

I've just finished the first two of the trilogy... these books are fiction, but they're historical fiction, and they introduce a lot of obscure facts and interesting speculation that would make for a good report.

[jingofever]

A book that I will read in my downtime and have to do a book report on.

In that case I suggest Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It doesn't fit any of the criteria you put down but it's a doozy.

[monster]

As an aside, you can see the books on a few RigInters' bookshelves over at the Our Eye Flickr group.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

You've already got quite a good book list, T4Y.

.....
Once again HMW, didn't Prouty promote some rather "out there" things; ie: The Report From Iron Mountain, the "umbrella" man, etc.

No, not "out there."

The umbrella weapon was quite real and so was the umbrella man in the sun right where JFK's head was blown off. Doesn't prove he fired anything but it deserves that much confirmation as being possible.
At the very least 'umbrella man' served to focus the triangulated fire in Dealey Plaza and was then photographed sitting down with 'radio man' while everyone else ran around.

Don't believe anything Chip Berlet writes about Prouty or Mark Lane or a few of the other anchor whistleblowers against CIA.
Berlet is CIA and badjackets who he can as 'right wing kooks' while scorning "conspiracism." That should tell you plenty about Berlet's agenda.

Prouty's comments on 'Mountain' were that...the thinking represented in that book was very much like that of the real people he worked with in the National Security State elite, the people he wrote his book about.
And if you read 'Mountain,' you'll see that it really is.
Mostly.
Especially the part about military spending being a critical part of the national economy that couldn't be (easily) replaced.

1967 is also the year of G. William Dunhoff's 'Who Rules America?' which has a footnote for the chapter called 'The Military, the CIA, and the FBI' that refers to several articles by economists on the importance of military spending. Since the Vietnam War was being vigorously lost and cities had been erupting into riots for a few years, this is dangerous information since all that money was supposedly spent to Save Liberty from Evil.

All of which means that book is complicated, a hoax within a hoax, joking on the mark, creating sophistication on national security topics in the guise of entertainment while minimizing whistleblowers.

It was really viral marketing of dangerous information using manufactured controversy to achieve forestalling among the intelligentsia, a common dissemination tactic for counterpropaganda.

Context:
There were reasons to do this when the book was published, one of them being the lid coming off the JFK cover-up big time with D.A. Jim Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw.

Ramparts magazine was exposing the CIA's financing of student organizations, unions, culture, etc.

'The Espionage Establishment' by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross was published around this time, too. Those authors had a best seller on the charts for months in 1964 called 'The Invisible Government' detailing lots of CIA dirt such as the Bay of Pigs debacle.

I already mentioned the book, 'Who Rules America?' with the military spending citations.

So it was a prime time for a pretend fake book to confuse the reading public into first wondering if 'Mountain' was true and then telling them "naaaw, couldn't be. April Fools!"

UFO woo was also ramped up at this time to discredit the idea of eye-witnesses and increase general skepticism about any cover-ups.

Hope that answered your question about Prouty's comments.

[Jeff]

Barracuda, I had forgotten about the Book Forum. But I think its better that I posted this in General Discussion as it doesn't seem many people occupy that area of RI.

It's a shame. I hope this thread prompts more people to check it out.

For Colin Wilson fiction I recommend The Philosopher's Stone. Academics researching consciousness tap into genetic memory, then discover something tangibly evil in deep prehistory blocking further investigation. A very literate cosmic horror I think many RIers would appreciate.

Also if anyone has "thumb's up" or "thumb's down" opinions on these books, it'd be appreciated:

The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA by Jonathan Kwitney

The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush by Peter Brewton

Thumbs up on both.

[compared2what?]

I add my up-thumbs for Brewton, and also take my hat off to him. That was some bad-ass thoroughly solid reporting, and plenty of it.

The single most enlightening and informative non-fiction book on right-now current events that I've ever read is, beyond question,
A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David Fromkin, even though it was published in, like, 1989 and deals solely with events that occurred between 1914 and 1922. Mostly because they've never stopped occurring. The book just happens to cover them in their initial stages.

It's fun to read, too, because he's both a really good historian and a non-academic historian. So he writes quite nicely. In a similar vein, Abuse of Power, by Theodore Draper. But....Well. I really like his work without qualification, myself. But it's not very stimulating in any RI way, and it might be old news to most people. He just calmly, lucidly documents the criminal nature of America's conduct during the Vietnam War so that there's no way you can walk away not knowing that's what it was, and in what basic ways. But he doesn't do deep, as such, he just does as much as it was possible to do impeccably in scholarly terms at the time of writing and gets out of Dodge.

But never mind all that. Because I'm really heavily lobbying for A Peace to End All Peace. So just pretend that's the only one I mentioned.

[stefano]

Great thread, thanks everyone. My to-read list just got a little longer.

I haven't read The Devils of Loudon. The only non-sci fi of Huxley's I've read was Antic Hay, and I wasn't that impressed. His non-fiction is also very good, check out The Human Situation and The Perennial Philosophy. As for Anthony Burgess, he's one of the most brilliant writers in English, every single one of his books is different to all the others. Another of his books I really liked was The Kingdom of the Wicked.

[Fat Lady Singing]

I've read The War Against the Weak, which is quite eye-opening. While I'd been aware of some of the subject matter, this book is so incredibly thorough and well-sourced that I just couldn't help but learn more. I had no idea the eugenics movement was so widespread, long-lasting, and institutionalized in this country. And I was surprised to learn just who the major players were. I daresay RI-ers would get much out of it.

On the other hand... look, I was an English major and I have a passion for reading, but even I would say that it's really, uh, long. Let's put it this way: it ain't fun, light reading, although from the book list you're proposing, T4Y, it doesn't seem like you'd want a good beach book anyway.

[brekin]

This is an interesting thread.

I was just curious if Hugh had a favorite fiction novel?

Fiction wise, I think too many people read Orwell's big two, Animal Farm and 1984, and miss out on some incredible writing like Burmese Days, Keep the Aphistra Flying, Down and Out in London and Paris (actually a little more nonfiction the last one.)

I got into Herman Hesse when I was younger, and have started returning.

The Glass Bead Game: (paraphrasing from memory.) "All history, no matter how dry and factual is literature. Fiction is the third dimension of history."

Non-Fiction wise Robert Grave's Goodbye To All That is incredible. His account of going from Oxford to World War 1 and back again.

[mulebone]

I'd recommend
In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II by Yosef Grodzinsky.

While it didn't change my life, it did show the ruthlessness of the Zionists in the aftermath of WW2.

The book deals with how the Zionists pressured the Jews in Displaced Person camps to emigrate to Palestine. Any Jew that resisted the DP draft instituted by the Zionists were fired from their jobs, denied extra food rations, &, in many cases, beaten quite soundly.

Grodzinsky is an Israeli scholar so any accusations of anti-Semitism that could be leveled at the book to de-fang it are pretty baseless.

[nathan28]

You have to do a report for school?

Anything by John Taylor Gatto will do. Throw in something from the SI and print the report on sandpaper.

[FreeLancer]

Read Naked Lunch. It covers everything you need to know about the modern world and it's funny as hell.

[pepsified thinker]

[...]
The single most enlightening and informative non-fiction book on right-now current events that I've ever read is, beyond question,
A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David Fromkin, even though it was published in, like, 1989 and deals solely with events that occurred between 1914 and 1922. Mostly because they've never stopped occurring. The book just happens to cover them in their initial stages.

It's fun to read, too, because he's both a really good historian and a non-academic historian. So he writes quite nicely.[...] I'm really heavily lobbying for A Peace to End All Peace. So just pretend that's the only one I mentioned.

I encountered Fromkin by watching 'Blood and Oil'



Here's more on it (from Nov. '06): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-young/we-can-no-longer-ignore-_b_34493.html

"The planet is dying, as are our soldiers," says B&O producer Marty Callaghan. "We need to go back to 1914 to learn what was true then remains true today: we have no business having a military presence in the Middle East. For over 85 years we've been sowing the seeds of anti-Western hatred. We have to make changes now. We need to stop subsidizing the military industrial complex as well as the oil companies. We need to make it a national priority, creating what would be a new Manhattan Project to find and develop alternative sources of energy."

(Sounds sorta Obama-ish, eh?)

It's reassuring to have someone who reads here endorse him. I tried to look up Fromkin, and mostly found google page after google page of listings of his books--but not much commentary. That, and finding that he's written in Foreign Affairs made me a little suspicious--I wondered just what version of history he was promoting.

He's no Howard Zinn, but he seems generally willing to tell it like it was within limits (as you point out) and without any agenda--which means he's not turning over the rocks to look for dirty secrets, or dredging the swamps for bodies, but he's willing to point out the underlying reasons for military actions, as opposed to those touted by govt. spokespeople.

[KeenInsight]

The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles

I've just finished the first two of the trilogy... these books are fiction, but they're historical fiction, and they introduce a lot of obscure facts and interesting speculation that would make for a good report.

Any Illuminati book other than Angels&Demons sounds good enough to me.