I’ve read over 1,000 nonfiction books in my life, and these 33 are the most powerful of them all. I can honestly say they changed my life, who’s to say they won’t change yours too?
Don’t just take my word for it though. Read on for my summary of all 33 books and see for yourself how your next read might just change your life.
The description given for Pinker’s The Blank Slate made me sceptical at best, so I went hunting for critiques and found this https://www.jstor.org/stable/27759451
Sadly it’s pay-walled beyond a preview of the first page.
For a suggestion of my own, The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. It’s a fun romp through the history of the English language with numerous tangents focusing on this or that quirk, written for those who have never formally studied English or linguistics.
As someone who was always more of a “STEM” person, this book completely upended my relationship to language. I used to think there was “one way” of expressing any given idea, and our job as humans, as it were, is to simply learn all the words and their meanings so as to be as precise as possible when expressing ideas. Nowadays I very much trend to see it the other way around: our use of language shapes the language itself, and our changing needs in terms of which ideas we want to express is what makes language evolve over time.
To put it succinctly, this book helped me view language as a tool that we should alter to suit our needs, not some pre-ordained scripture that we need to memorize and adjust ourselves to.
Check out this podcast: If Books Could Kill #ifBooksCouldKill https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/if-books-could-kill/4135025 via @PodcastAddict
I’ll leave this here for cross-referencing.
20% of these look mildly interesting 20% I’m familiar with the point they appear to try to make, but am not at all interested in the book 60% are cringe, I second ‘if books could kill.’
Came here to post a link to the podcast.
https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/if-books-could-kill/4135025
Anything, or anyone, that speaks positively of ‘Coddling of the American Mind’ should be approached with extreme scepticism.
An interesting resource for people looking to combat shit like this is the podcast ‘If Books Could Kill’.
I don’t nessecirily always agree with the hosts’ wider takes on things, but their reading of these types of books is pretty spot on.
I saw a book in the thumbnail that I already own and was looking forward to reading, so I opened the article. At first I was thrown back by some of the shitty books on this list and a little bothered that the book I have would be clumped in with them - then I noticed that it actually went on the list. I’m a little relieved lol. Fwiw, it’s Behave by Robert Sapolsky.
