A list of possible books of interest … Previously, when Giza had a Forum of this type, from time to time I posted lists of books that over the years I have enjoyed and found very informative. In this spirit I’m posting these lists again in the hope that you might find them useful as well.
“To be a philosopher, or a scientific man, you must be as a little child, with all the sincerity and simple-mindedness of the child’s vision, with all the plasticity of the child’s mental habits.
What are the exercises conducive to this? Extensive reading to begin with. A hundred volumes a year or 3 2/3 days per volume does not sound like hard work. Fifty volumes are easily read, if you can find so many good books. Real reading consists in putting oneself into the author’s position, and assimilating his ways of thinking. Conversation with all sorts of people whom we do not altogether understand, freshens the mind; but then interesting people are as hard to find as interesting books. As a corrective to all that a suitable dose of rumination and solitude is indicated; provided that it not be idling, but intense and systematic activity of the most definite and diagrammatic thought.
In order to make thought systematic it should be recorded. The record should be brief and almost tabular. No laconism is to be permitted in the record. It should have the style of the obelisk which sets force that which [it] has to express completely, clearly, and purely. Carry your train of thought to its terminus, and draw up the schedule of it in a copy book devoted to it, in such shape that thirty years after, if you wish to recur to it, the force and good sense and unity of the idea may compel you to say, ‘After all, I wasn’t such a fool in respect to what I did see, however much I may have failed to see.’”
- Charles S. Peirce from Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898
1). Vincent, Isabel – Hitler’s Silent Partners: Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and The Pursuit of Justice, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997.
2). Kung, David – How Music and Mathematics Relate, in The Great Courses, Course # 1373, 2013, ISBN 159803920-2.
3). Springarn-Korf, Jason - (film), Life 2.0: Virtual World New Reality, 2012, Virgil Films & Entertainment.
4). Nicolson, Harold – The Evolution of Diplomatic Method, London: Cassell, 1954.
5). Trento, Salvatore Michael – The Search for Lost America: Mysteries of the Stone Ruins in the United States, Penguin: Middlesex, 1979.
6). Halle, Louis J. – The Ideological Imagination: The Rise of Mass Bigotry in our time, and its roots in the thought of Hobbes, Rosseau, and Marx, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972. … see his other titles as well.
7). Kaplan, Robert D. – The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (see also his Balkan Ghosts), New York: Vintage / Random House, 2000.
8). Houghton, Neal D. (Ed.), Struggle Against History: U.S. Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolution, New York: Washington Square Press, 1968.
9). Gilder, Louisa – The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics was Reborn, New York: Knopf, 2008.
10). Scott, Laurence - The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World, London: Heinemann, 2015.
11). Johnson, George – Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics, New York: Knopf, 1999.
12). Ramo. Joshua Cooper – The Age of The Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It, New York, Little: Brown and Company, 2009. Even though a New World Order guy himself … still useful to read what they write.
13). Achen, Sven Tito – Symbols Around Us, New York, et al.:Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1978. a nice little book to get into the idea of symbols. The book contains 62 common images from around the world and gives a little background information about each.