Below is a list of books that I
recommend. It includes books that I've read, am in the process of
reading or books that I know something about and plan to begin
reading very soon. Most of my choices are about highlighting
important issues, but it's still a work in progress. If you have any
suggestions, please email me here.
Woodward is certainly one of the best journalist of
the modern era, probably one of the best of all time. He's
especially proficient at collecting information from sources in the
government. Obama's Wars is his first book on this administration
and the war in Afghanistan. Woodward doesn't spell things out in a
traditional narrative and it's a bit technical for the laymen, but it
is probably going to remain the definitive account of the
administration's first year and a half in Afghanistan. This
particular book reads a bit easier than Plan of Attack
or State of Denial,
two of his previous books on the Bush Administration, but it's still
not for the beginner.
Douglass's book makes the assertion
that JFK was assassinated by rouge elements within the United States
government primarily for wanting to end the war in Vietnam as well as
for a perceived softness against worldwide communism. Ultimately, a
reader can't hope to independently corroborate the facts, quotes and
other statistics in this book; the task would be gargantuan. That
said, the book does successfully make the case that the CIA had the
will, the motivation, and the opportunity to have a hand in the
Kennedy assassination. The book is highly optimistic about the
concepts of world peace. It might even change the way you view the
world.
A book about American power in the 21st
century from the CEO of Stratfor (a private intelligence agency).
The author makes interesting predictions based on numerous
geopolitical trends that are visible now.
Originally a series of news articles,
author and journalist Gary Webb proves with near certainty that the
CIA actively imported cocain into Los Angeles and distributed it
among drug dealers and used the money to covertly support the Contra
rebels in Nicaragua. It's a rarely mentioned, but far more
disturbing aspect of the Iran/Contra scandal.
Published
in 1973, Prouty, (sometimes amusingly known as Mr. X) a former
liaison officer between the Pentagon and the CIA, disects the CIA's
role in world events from World War II to the late 1960s. The
book suggest that the intelligence agencies like the CIA inevitably
seek to engage in covert activities which has a corrupting effect.
He
maintains that as an "agency" they rarely act on their own, but are
useful tools for the power elite. The book has famously been disappeared from stores over the years, but is now widely available. * Also available free online.
The author is a former employee of the
International Monetary Fund and (indirectly) of the U.S. State
Department. He alleges that during his employment, he would
encourage third world nations to accept loans that would be
impossible to pay off, essentially forcing them to effectively
surrender their sovereignty. Private U.S. contractors would then
come in and develop the country, but often the nation and it's people
would suffer crippling debt in an attempt to pay off the loans.
Countries that resisted would be subject to increasingly hostile
measures including assassination, government overthrow and invasion.
An
assessment of liberalism, both in the macro and micro sense of the
word. In the 1950s, Trilling correctly defined the United States as a
primarily liberal nation, before the term took on other meanings.
Although
it deals with anarchists, the novel is not an exploration or rebuttal
of anarchist thought; Chesterton's ad hoc construction of
"Philosophical Anarchism" is distinguished from ordinary anarchism and
is referred to several times not so much as a rebellion against
government but as a rebellion against God. The novel
has been described as "one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century
writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical
tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the
nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges." - From Wikipedia
L'âge
de raison is concerned with Sartre's conception of freedom as the
ultimate aim of human existence. This work seeks to illustrate the
existentialist notion of ultimate freedom through presenting a detailed
account of the characters' psychologies as they are forced to make
significant decisions in their lives. As the novel progresses,
character narratives espouse Sartre's view of what it means to be free
and how one operates within the framework of society with this
philosophy. This novel is a fictional representation of his main
philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, where one attains ultimate
freedom through nothing, or more precisely, by being nothing. - From Wikipedia
In
this cauterizing thriller, Andrew Vachss' renegade private eye teams up
with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the
catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses
are as dangerous as the basements. Fearfully knowing, crackling with
narrative tension, and written in prose as forceful as a hollow-point
slug, Flood is Burke at his deadliest—and Vachss at the peak of his
form. - From Vachss's website