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Truly mind expanding books you have read
341gerbig:
Really, the only books I really enjoy reading are ones that expand my mind and really teach me something.
Be it science, politics, history, sociology, psychology, health/fitness, etc etc, as long as the author adds to my knowledge of the world in a substantial way.
Anybody got any book suggestions along those lines?
Neutral Milk:
Rai:
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann was one of the most mind-blowing things I've ever read, collecting all the most important research about the Pre-Columbian Americas, most of which is yet yet to enter common knowledge. It is brilliantly written and extremely well-researched.
I could also recommend The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor, which explores what people in Classical Antiquity thought of the fossilised remains of animals they found. Also on Antiquity, J. E. Lendon's Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity is a superb piece on how misplaced beliefs in the truth-value of Homeric descriptions of warfare influenced military thinking for centuries.
I'm also reading Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust which is a pretty damn mind-expanding book on the Rwanda-esque behaviour of the Rebels during the Spanish Civil War. It is very enlightening especially concerning the sexual, social, religious and political motivations of this less-known mass extermination.
Jonzard:
While it may be one of those "opens your mind so much that your brain falls out" books, The Singularity is Near is pretty mind-expansion inducing.
Johnny Slick:
Everything Bad Is Good For You by Stephen Johnston, although he may be preaching to the choir a bit there
The Drunkard's Walk by whathisname Mlodinow is pretty cool
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen is still, to me, *the* book to read if you want to understand why high school history is so boring even though actual history is so awesome
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