Book Recommendation

[stony]

The best thing I've had the pleasure to read in years...

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-Evolution/dp/059306173X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286447840&sr=1-2" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.amazon.co.uk/Greatest-Show-E ... 840&sr=1-2</a>

Heathen

 

[Anonymous]

The best thing I've had the pleasure to read in years...

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-Evolution/dp/059306173X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286447840&sr=1-2" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.amazon.co.uk/Greatest-Show-E ... 840&sr=1-2</a>

Heathen

Oops! Sorry, that selection might upset some I suppose ;-)

 

[Dave Ewing's Back 'eader]

No need to buy - Central Library'll have a copy. If yer can get past the first five pages . . . . . . . . . !

Just finished reading Antony Beavor's The Battle for Spain about the Spanish Civil War. Cracking read - yer can see from where all the Barcelona/Madrid present day enmity stems.

Good author.Stalingrad and Berlin great reads.I just bought a book called 900 days about the siege of lenningrad.

Anybody who wants to know about the Second World War wouldn't do better than start with those three from Beavor. Savage, desperate times.

 

[johnny on the spot]

This one's great for a laugh. The author's this mentalist who's spent the last five years working out how to make his own takeaway food.

 

[alib]

Good author.Stalingrad and Berlin great reads.I just bought a book called 900 days about the siege of lenningrad.

Anybody who wants to know about the Second World War wouldn't do better than start with those three from Beavor. Savage, desperate times.

Beavor's most recent book about D Day is very good as well

 

[persvenality cult]

I find the philosophical tracts are often quite useless unless placed in a proper context.

For example, Rosseau's work in itself may contain interesting ideas, but what makes it significant only becomes apparant when it's placed in a historical context. many of his ideas will ring true today, many others will have been ripped to shreds intellectually, or shown to lead to horrible consequences.

so:

how it proposed a way of thinking that was different from what had come before, how it became 'romanticism', yet can still be seen as part of the wider 'enlightenment'
how his ideas became central to the revolutions in France and America,
how he influenced the ethics of the major philosphers who followed.

And it must all be seen in the context of the major social upheavals that occured in the Industrial Revolution, and the boom in the availability of books.

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Modern-Mind-Intellectual-Centuries/dp/1565857283" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Modern-Mind ... 1565857283</a>

for the story of medieval thinking>empricism>enlightenment>philosophes>romanticism

150 quid, for a CD-ROM? no, I didn't pay that either ;)

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0038x93" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0038x93</a>

Interesting discussion on the 'Encyclopedie', which Rousseau and his companions collated, and how it became the key document which inspired/guided revolutionary thinking.

who has the time to read books anyway?

 

[Always Ali]

One Day - David Nicholls
One of the best books I have ever had the good fortune to read, brilliantly written and the characters are so well developed.

 

[Damocles]

The best thing I've had the pleasure to read in years...

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Greatest-Show-Earth-Evidence-Evolution/dp/059306173X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286447840&sr=1-2" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.amazon.co.uk/Greatest-Show-E ... 840&sr=1-2</a>

I'm not a fan of Dawkins' books, as I find his agenda driven science a bit unpleasing. His books tend to present a small amount of science, then use this to show how other people are all stupid and wrong, and this tends to be repeated ad nauseum.

This is the best book concerning evolution that I've ever had the pleasure of reading:

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Evolution-Douglas-Futuyma/dp/0878932232/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1286469634&sr=1-7" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.amazon.co.uk/Evolution-Dougl ... 634&sr=1-7</a>

I don't really know what the best book that I've ever read is, to be honest. I think The Republic was a book that really changed my thought process, though I wouldn't say it was the best book I've ever read - same with Brief History of Time. Perhaps one of the Carl Sagan's books, as they made me see science not as some rigid beast that conquers all of the 'fun' and beautiful things in the world, but instead to see it as something that adds to them. The importance that I place on scientific and rational thinking comes directly from his books, mainly a "Candle in the Dark". I still have the whole series of Cosmos on my computer, and is one of the first things that I re-download after a disk wipe. If there was a single human in history who I could spend an hour talking to, it would most certainly be him. The fact that he existed gives me hope for our species.

Thanks for the reviews on the Social Contract, and I think that I'll pick it up purely down to curiosity now.

 

[waterloo blue]

It's not Phil Rousseau is it,wondered what he'd been up to.

 

[mcfc01]

One Day - David Nicholls
One of the best books I have ever had the good fortune to read, brilliantly written and the characters are so well developed.

I also really enjoyed this book ,the concept of 1 day out of every year
was a very original idea and vividly captured the zeitgeist of the decades involved.
I was shocked by the ending!