I don't read much fiction these days. But I love reading books that kinda warp your perception of the world, get you to think in new ways. I don't know what percentage of these books is truth and what percentage is complete BS. But they're really fun, fascinating reads.
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond
Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years. "”Amazon
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, by Ray Kurzweil
How much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us in smarts? If so, we'd better pull the plug right now, because if Ray Kurzweil is right we've only got until about 2020 before computers outpace the human brain in computational power. Kurzweil, artificial intelligence expert and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines, shows that technological evolution moves at an exponential pace. Further, he asserts, in a sort of swirling postulate, time speeds up as order increases, and vice versa. He calls this the "Law of Time and Chaos," and it means that although entropy is slowing the stream of time down for the universe overall, and thus vastly increasing the amount of time between major events, in the eddy of technological evolution the exact opposite is happening, and events will soon be coming faster and more furiously. This means that we'd better figure out how to deal with conscious machines as soon as possible--they'll soon not only be able to beat us at chess, but also likely demand civil rights, and might at last realize the very human dream of immortality. "”Amazon
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why, by Richard E. Nisbett
This book may mark the beginning of a new front in the science wars. Nisbett, an eminent psychologist and co-author of a seminal Psychological Review paper on how people talk about their decision making, reports on some of his latest work in cultural psychology. He contends that "[h]uman cognition is not everywhere the same"-that those brought up in Western and East Asian cultures think differently from one another in scientifically measurable ways. Such a contention pits his work squarely against evolutionary psychology (as articulated by Steven Pinker and others) and cognitive science, which assume all appreciable human characteristics are "hard wired." Initial chapters lay out the traditional differences between Aristotle and Confucius, and the social practices that produced (and have grown out of) these differing "homeostatic approaches" to the world: Westerners tend to inculcate individualism and choice (40 breakfast cereals at the supermarket), while East Asians are oriented toward group relations and obligations ("the tall poppy is cut down" remains a popular Chinese aphorism). Next, Nisbett presents his actual experiments and data, many of which measure reaction times in recalling previously shown objects. They seem to show East Asians (a term Nisbett uses as a catch-all for Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and others) measurably more holistic in their perceptions (taking in whole scenes rather than a few stand-out objects). Westerners, or those brought up in Northern European and Anglo-Saxon-descended cultures, have a "tunnel-vision perceptual style" that focuses much more on identifying what's prominent in certain scenes and remembering it. Writing dispassionately yet with engagement, Nisbett explains the differences as "an inevitable consequence of using different tools to understand the world." If his explanation turns out to be generally accepted, it means a big victory for memes in their struggle with genes. "”Publishers Weekly
The Muslim Discovery of Europe, Bernard Lewis
Turning the traditional focus of western scholarship on its head, Professor Bernard Lewis, one of the world's foremost experts on Islamic history, examines the sources and nature of Muslim knowledge of the West. His lively book explores the subtle ways in which Europe and Islam have influenced each other over many centuries, retelling familiar historical events such as the battle of Tours, the Crusades, the battle of Lepanto, and the Siege of Vienna from a Muslim perspective. Quoting from Islamic writers and scholars, he recounts their reactions to the West, their impressions of western gardens, paintings, parliaments, hygiene, manners and even the necklines of western women. "”From the Publisher
The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, by William Strauss and Neil Howe
Expanding on the cyclical view of history set forth in their bestsellers Generations: The History of America's Future and 13th-GEN, Strauss and Howe focus on the three "turnings," or recurring 20-year generational periods, that have supposedly marked the post-WWII era-and on the fourth, pivotal "Crisis" period that will begin, by their reckoning, around 2005. Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, we learn, presided over the first postwar turning, an "upbeat" time of orderly suburbia, conformity and nascent rebellion. The second turning, an "Awakening" that began around JFK's assassination, brought a "consciousness revolution," tax revolts, hostility to authority. Americans turned cynical and voters split ideologically in the "Unraveling," the third turning, as Reagan-era yuppie greed gave way to national drift and civic decay. The fourth turning, the "Crisis," could see dangerous demagogues, civil violence and war, but it will also usher in a new communitarianism. The authors' simplistic framework makes newspaper astrology look like a pure science. The book's appeal lies in the way they link an all-embracing theory of history to current strivings for self-actualization and to the average person's desire for peace and prosperity. "”Publishers Weekly
