Ask HN: Which book helped you understand the world? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which book helped you understand the world?

59 pointsmanx101 comments

I just finished Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and was mind-blown. What else do you recommend?

Understanding Power by Chomsky had a big impact on me. I read it after this compelling blog post by Aaron Swartz (RIP): http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro. Enormous and incredibly informative about politics, city planning and public relations.

I read this too, and perhaps this isn’t a popular opinion given how people revere this book, but I found it to be 5x longer than it needed to be for the average reader not immersed in NYC from that period. The number of meetings and characters introduced felt unnecessary. I get that he is a historian trying to recreate the record of what happened and did so masterfully, but for the vast majority of readers I think it would be improved to have a “digest” version.

It was much longer and Caro had to cut tons of material, including, infamously, his chapter on Jane Jacobs. That led people to constantly ask him why she isn't in the book. "Every time I’m asked about that, I have this sick feeling."

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/16/studies-in-power-an...

At the time, I asked, “Can’t we do it in two volumes?” Bob Gottlieb answered, “I might get people interested in Robert Moses once. I could never get them interested in him twice.”

Here are two books that explain a lot about politics.

The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World - Tim Marshall

I'll second "The Dictator's Handbook". And if anyone is thinking, "I don't need this, I don't have any plans to become a dictator", you're thinking just like I was thinking a few years ago. When finally I read it, I kicked myself for passing on such a great book because of its silly name. This book does indeed change the way you understand the world (Small caveat: the authors stretch their theory to cover some cases such as corporate governance. That part felt quite weak to me. You can just ignore it. The rest of the book more than makes up for this).

And here's another one that's somewhat similar: "Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook". The title is not just a joke, unfortunately. Some coups were indeed carried out following the advice in this book (which was obviously not the author's intention, but life sometimes takes unexpected turns). The second edition of this book was published in 2015, just one year before the attempted coup in Turkey. Armed with the knowledge from this book, you can go and analyze what happened in Turkey and it's going to make a lot of sense.

I'll 3rd the Dictator's Handbook.

Also the 48 Laws of Power. Once you start seeing things through that lens, the world looks like both a darker, meaner, but at times surprisingly nicer, place.

I put off reading the 48 Laws of Power for a long time for reasons similar to OP.

Probably should have read it sooner but at least I had plenty of experience to compare against it when I finally did suck it up and read it.

I will add Dictator's Handbook to my queue and raise my hand and 4th the 48 Laws of Power

I feel we're going to get a barrage of comments....

I was wondering if folks could also mention--in 1-sentence--what they learned from each book. Why was the book helpful in understanding the world?

I think this would make comments more interesting.

Night by Eli Wiesel and Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl.

Stories of how and why some people survived Auschwitz and found meaning despite their context, from two very different perspectives (a child and a psychologist).

"The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal" by Desmond Morris. Some stuff might be outdated but it definitely helped build a healthy dose of skepticism towards fellow humans - and towards myself. You definitely need that kind of skepticism and keeping your expectations low if you want to survive in an enterprise environment.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think - Hans Rosling

oh man, I love Hans Rosling TED videos... will have to look taht book up.

I'd love to hear his opinion on how we're handling Covid19. Rip.

he would be very very angry at the US I suspect.

His son, Ola Rosling, who continues work on their Gapminder Foundation, was interviewed by Tim Harford on BBC's More or Less: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct0pxk

I enjoyed Fooled By Randomness. Taleb's other books are good too, but Fooled By Randomness was my favorite.

I haven't read any others but anti-fragility is the book that has made me think more than any other I've read in the past few years. If you can get past the childish name calling it's worth it - I'll have to read his others next

A People’s History of the United States. It opened my eyes to a past I didn’t know existed, which helps me understand the present.

I have nearly as many answers to this questions as books I have read. Even fiction helps you to understand another perspective, which I think is really one of the great things about reading.

One of the earliest books that gave me a good leap in understanding is the Tao of Pooh. As a preteen, it was my first real taste of philosophy outside of Christianity, and it was something radically different.

As far as impact, probably Epictetus' Enchiridion. It's literally a manual on how to live a good life. It's uncommonly practical advice and started a love for his school of philosophy that still hasn't faded.

This is going to be different, and is not intended to be sarcastic.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin First read during my high school years in the Amazing SF magazine; and was later published as a book. The work was criticized by the 'elite' of the SF community at the time. Have recently re-read and got the same impressions of how as both a species and as individuals we are fools that understand very little; that is, we are too stupid to know that we are stupid.

Calvin and Hobbs by Bill Waterson. Was my favorite non-mandatory read during my college years. Calvin Ball can teach us much about life, and his snow-men art is the dark that we always be in all of humans.

Marine Corps Reference Publication (MCRP) 3 Rifle Marksmanship. [this is the current version, but am not certain of the designation for this manual when I first read it during the late 1970s]. This summarized the philosophy of combat, the physics of interior and exterior ballistics, and describes the zen-like state of the marksman. It is not as sterile as the US Army marksmanship manual, is more complete treatise of combat shooting and weapons care, and is brutally honest in that the USMC is preparing you to efficiently kill other humans. Very sobering.

> Marine Corps Reference Publication (MCRP) 3 Rifle Marksmanship

Not nearly as sobering, but I found the MCDP series on USMC doctrine fairly enlightening. Friction, Centers of Gravity, and a heavy importance on Logistics have been concepts that served me well in IT and project mgmt.

You might specifically mean Warfighting, MCDP 1. That's the first book we read as new Lts. and has stuck with me over a decade later and served me well in tech.

There were 6 MCDP handbooks -- I helped edit a re-release of #6 as a policy intern/college student after getting out of the USMC.

But I agree with parent's point -- MDCP #1 Warfighting is pretty good. If you're a military nerd all 6 are great, but if you're just going read one of them then definitely stick to Warfighting.

MCDP 1 Warfighting is also great with broadly applicable concepts.

No. No. And no.

If remembered correctly, FMFM 1 came about in the 1980s; please correct if otherwise. I was in enlisted bootcamp during the 1970s, and excerpts from the marksmanship manual, which is the fundamental skill of a Marine, were the first manual, other the the 'red' guidebook, that I read during my enlistment. These original marksmanship manuals were truly good literature. And they were mostly written by experienced SNCOs.

It is disappointing, although not surprising, to see some former officers jump into assumptions prior to completely reading and parsing the comments.

Thinking Fast and Slow - it helped me to understand cognitive biases. I think understanding these really helped to see what our lens does to how we see the world.

I'm working on it now, but Behave by Robert Sapolsky has been fantastic so far. All about evolutionary biology and how it influences behavior/psychology.

I'm reading Sapiens right now. I wouldn't say "mind blown" as I was at least a little familiar with a lot of it before, but the way that Harari writes really makes you think about things differently.

Here are a couple of other books that have been pretty influential for me:

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

"Main Street" by Sinclair Lewis

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis

An entertaining read about just how fragile and naive western financial systems can be.

Stories of the Law and How It's Broken - The Secret Barrister

Gives a (mostly anecdotal) insight about how broken the English legal system is. I had to pause several times while reading because it conflicted so much with my world view.

The Chickenshit Club by Jesse Eisinger is a great teardown of gov vs corporations legal action

Two books about economic development that I love:

Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson

Poor Economics by Banerjee and Duflo

The first deals with why nations stay poor, the second covers how the poor in the third world live and how to actually help them

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

I'd second this one!

FYI that book is very poorly regarded by mainstream historians and anthropologists for being scientifically inaccurate.

Source? The Royal Society seemed to like it.

>FYI that book is very poorly regarded by mainstream historians and anthropologists for being scientifically inaccurate.

That's a bit of a stretch. It isn't without (legitimate) criticism --as any work of this scope is-- but Diamond is mainstream, and the book has won several scientific awards and a lot of praise.

The over-arching premise, that luck and circumstance played a huge role in the development of civilizations, isn't really disputed. And there are lessons in there for today: not everything you've earned is a product of your abilities.

> by mainstream historians and anthropologists

Indeed it is but mainstream historians and anthropologists are not the arbiters of good science. The criticisms, that I'm aware of, come down to incomplete research on Yali (not a critical aspect of the narrative and absent from The Third Chimpanzee) and an over-enthusiastic pre-emptive argument against a neo-darwinian interpretation of genetic data.

I agree with carterklein13, Guns, Germs, and Steel is near the top of my list of influential books.

+1 for this recommendation.

I'll add The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley. It's gems are a little metaphorical, but a great read nonetheless.

The Design of Everyday Things

Ways of Seeing

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

The Origins of Political Order: From prehuman times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Political_Ord...

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York By Robert Caro

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_Broker

I would add the 'Political Decay' as a must after 'Political Order'.

IMHO 'Decay' its more important as it digs into current trends (i.e. mechanisms of undermining institutions).

Debt: The first 5000 years

And then I have not yet read it myself, although I have it on the shelf, but others recommended it for the exact same question as yours:

Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, 1930 (free online text), https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_and_First_Men

> A work of unprecedented scale in the genre, it describes the history of humanity from the present onwards across two billion years and eighteen distinct human species, of which our own is the first.

At Home by Bill Bryson

This is not a Sapiens-style retelling of the history of mankind. It's light reading - a quaint look at the history of the modern house, room-by-room, with many diversions into whatever topic that takes the author. But it ends up touching on a lot of interesting interconnections of how the western world developed.

It's a great read to escape the oppressive grind of 2020 while still learning tons of interesting things on every page.

> This is not a Sapiens-style retelling of the history of mankind.

Although he did write that one as well! A Short History of Nearly Everything

The Epistle to the Romans and Proverbs were game-changers for how I understand the world around me, and why people do what they do.

Forward looking:

Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

Historical:

The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

General:

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

Anna Karenina - I'm an eastern european raised in the US. It was really eye opening.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The First and Last Freedom By J. Krishnamurti

Try "Sapiens: A brief history of human kind". It teaches you about human history and more important, how we get there. Sometimes the author gets smart, seems like he doesn't believe in anything and human are bad for this planet. But it's worth it. Bill Gates recommended the book too.

Tribe, by Sebastian Junger. It covers a journalist's experience in a war zone, and how it changed his model of society. Man was meant to live in tribes, where individuals are most fulfilled giving their last bit of food, rather than a society where people grab what they can for themselves.

Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Taleb

Letters from a Stoic - Seneca

The Bible

Beyond Good and Evil - Nietzsche

Psychological Types - Carl Jung

The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error' - Sidney Dekker

He hes a short review of his book on YouTube in 5 parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw3SwEXc3PU

Metaphors We Live By - George Lakoff, Mark Johnson

It's a linguistics focused book that suggests people use metaphor to understand abstract constructs. It also helped me understand people, conversation, and intent in an especially eye opening way.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

Interesting. Metaphors We Live By is near the top of my list of theories that were once a popular mainstream meme that dramatically crashed and burned when applied in the real world. The Democratic Party's embrace of Don't Think of an Elephant did not go well. My memory might be flawed, it usually is.

I'm not old enough to have been aware of the rise and fall of the mainstream movement, very interesting! I am possibly just finding the first look into the theory as tantalizing as everyone else did.

Excellent. If I remember correctly, the linguists sorted into two opposing camps, Lakoff/Johnson on one side, Pinker/Chomsky on the other.

The Pinker argument is that the metaphor aspect is only important during the short period of time when we are first introduced to a new term. Once the term enters our vocabulary, it takes its own unique slot in our minds that is independent of the word origins. Our minds do not have trouble distinguishing between cordless, cellular, and wireless phones once the terms are familiar to us. I'm sure you can find much greater insight than I can provide with a few web searches.

Thank you. That's a great intro.

The Things They Carried by O’Brian - it’s ostensibly a war book but is nothing about war. It’s about empathy. The world, unfortunately, mostly operates without empathy. Knowing that helps to understand various actions people take.

#1: "Western Esotericism: a guide for the perplexed"

You just wouldn't believe it. Extremely good scholarship.

In the same vein, "Music, science and natural magic in 17th century England" (about the birth of the Royal Society)

Be Here Now by Ram Dass

https://smile.amazon.com/Be-Here-Now-Ram-Dass/dp/0517543052

Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows

Finite and Infinite Games - James Carse

"Conversations with an Executioner" is IMHO the best book giving insight into a mind of a real nazist. It's direct and honest, much more profound than classical historical book.

Looks like the English translation is out of print and copies are going for $70 or so on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0131719181/ref=sr_1_...

I loved Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner!

The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

edit: I should mention this is a book recommended by Yuval Noah Harari himself. I read it myself and it is a great companion to his fantastic books.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. It is short, and written in a Socratic dialogue, and helped me understand how and why society appears to be destroying itself.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Summa Theologiae by St Thomas Aquinas

All three books by Yuval Noah Harari.

The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times by René Guénon.

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.

A timeless classic.

Along similar lines I'd recommend "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America", by Daniel Boorstin (former Librarian of Congress).

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut. Also NurtureShock taught me a lot about parenting.

48 Laws of Power

The Power Broker

History of Western Philosophy

The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer

The Tao Te Ching.

"The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" by Carl Sagan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Also around the age of 8 or 9 I read some Erich von Däniken book and got quite excited by what it contained. However, I eventually realised that it was complete nonsense and I got really affronted that people could write books that contained stuff that wasn't true. A useful lesson!

Edit: Another one is "Why People Believe Weird Things":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_People_Believe_Weird_Thing...

The Evil Haunted World by Carl Sagan

Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker

(Also Sapiens :)

Range - David Epstein

Journey to Ixtlan.

The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli

The 48 Rules of Power - Robert Greene

Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big - Scott Adams

Basic Economics - Thomas Sowell

The World Is Flat - Thomas L. Friedman

The Penguin History of the World: Sixth Edition - J. M. Roberts and Odd Arne Westad

Let’s say no context, which one would you recommend reading first?

Probably Sowell's Basic Economics

Anyone who enjoys Sowell's perspective and is interested in (and irritated by) modern politics should also take a look at "The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy".

Thanks for that. I wasn't familiar with that work, despite being a big fan of Sowell. I'm definitely adding that to my reading list.

Selfish Gene

Good one. I can't believe I forgot to include that one. Definitely an important book.

On a related note, I just finished The Blind Watchmaker, also by Dawkins, and it's also very good.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein (2007)

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Eudardo Galeano (1971)

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. HANDS DOWN!

Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged

It's a shame you're going to get downvoted by a lot of knee-jerk "ooh, I hate Ayn Rand" types (most of whom have probably never read a word she wrote), but FWIW, I second your mention. Atlas Shrugged is definitely worth reading.

I won't say it's a great book in many ways - Rand's language is a bit awkward and stilted (especially by contemporary standards), and it probably is a bit too long. But in terms of getting to the heart of the divide between those who adhere to an individualist / internal locus of control mindset, and those who don't, it's very enlightening.

Also, FWIW, I enjoyed The Fountainhead more than Atlas Shrugged, and usually recommend that anyone who is new to Rand start with it first.

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

If anybody is thinking of getting this the Hayes translation is probably the easiest to read.

"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly."

Not even the emperor of Rome was immune from Sturgeon's law.

    人之初
    性本善
    性相近
    習相遠

("When people are born, they all start good, but even though they all start out about the same, you ought to see them after they have had time to become different from one another by picking up habits here and there!". Translation Dr. Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith)

The Quran.

I didn’t think you would get downvoted for that.

Me neither :) It shows the true nature of some people on here.

I'm not surprised. There are a fair number of people here who are somewhat hostile to religion. Heck, you could borderline count me as one of them. I think religion is a blight on our world. But I wouldn't downvote somebody for mentioning a religious text in this context because - like it or not - these works tend to be HIGHLY influential, and if you want to "understand the world" I think that understanding absolutely has to incorporate some knowledge of religion and religious beliefs.

I'm an atheist myself, but I have a whole shelf full of religious texts, including the Quran, several Bibles, Bhagavad Gita, Gnostic Bible, the Norse myths, etc. for just this reason. I doubt the historicity and literal veracity of a lot of this stuff, but knowing it has value when many other people do take it all literally.

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