Below, you will find the book list offered up by the astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science. Where possible, we have included links to free versions of the books.
1.) The Bible (eBook) — “to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.”
4.) Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (eBook — Audio Book) — “to learn, among other satirical lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos.”
5.) The Age of Reasonby Thomas Paine (eBook — Audio Book) — “to learn how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world.”
6.) The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (eBook — Audio Book) — “to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself.”
7.) The Art of Warby Sun Tsu (eBook — Audio Book) — “to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art.”
8.) The Prince by Machiavelli (eBook — Audio Book) — “to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it.”
Tyson concludes by saying: “If you read all of the above works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world.”
He has also added some more thoughts in the comments section below, saying:
Thanks for this ongoing interest in my book suggestions. From some of your reflections, it looks like the intent of the list was not as clear as I thought. The one-line comment after each book is not a review but a statement about how the book’s content influenced the behavior of people who shaped the western world. So, for example, it does no good to say what the Bible “really” meant, if its actual influence on human behavior is something else. Again, thanks for your collective interest. ‑NDTyson
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2011.
We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children’s literature. Occupying a space somewhere between the purely didactic and the nonsensical, most children’s books published in the past few hundred years have attempted to find a line between the two poles, seeking a balance between entertainment and instruction. However, that line seems to move closer to one pole or another depending on the prevailing cultural sentiments of the time. And the very fact that children’s books were hardly published at all before the early 18th century tells us a lot about when and how modern ideas of childhood as a separate category of existence began.
“By the end of the 18th century,” writes Newcastle University professor M.O. Grenby, “children’s literature was a flourishing, separate and secure part of the publishing industry in Britain.” The trend accelerated rapidly and has never ceased—children’s and young adult books now drive sales in publishing (with 80% of YA books bought by grown-ups for themselves).
Grenby notes that “the reasons for this sudden rise of children’s literature” and its rapid expansion into a booming market by the early 1800s “have never been fully explained.” We are free to speculate about the social and pedagogical winds that pushed this historical change.
Or we might do so, at least, by examining the children’s literature of the Victorian era, perhaps the most innovative and diverse period for children’s literature thus far by the standards of the time. And we can do so most thoroughly by surveying the thousands of mid- to late 19th century titles at the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. Their digitized collectioncurrently holds over 10,000 books free to read online from cover to cover, allowing you to get a sense of what adults in Britain and the U.S. wanted children to know and believe.
Several genres flourished at the time: religious instruction, naturally, but also language and spelling books, fairy tales, codes of conduct, and, especially, adventure stories—pre-Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew examples of what we would call young adult fiction, these published principally for boys. Adventure stories offered a (very colonialist) view of the wide world; in series like the Boston-published Zig Zag and English books like Afloat with Nelson, both from the 1890s, fact mingled with fiction, natural history and science with battle and travel accounts. But there is another distinctive strain in the children’s literature of the time, one which to us—but not necessarily to the Victorians—would seem contrary to the imperialist young adult novel.
For most Victorian students and readers, poetry was a daily part of life, and it was a central instructional and storytelling form in children’s lit. The A.L.O.E.’s Bible Picture Book from 1871, above, presents “Stories from the Life of Our Lord in Verse,” written “simply for the Lord’s lambs, rhymes more readily than prose attracting the attention of children, and fastening themselves on their memories.” Children and adults regularly memorized poetry, after all. Yet after the explosion in children’s publishing the former readers were often given inferior examples of it. The author of the Bible Picture Book admits as much, begging the indulgence of older readers in the preface for “defects in my work,” given that “the verses were made for the pictures, not the pictures for the verses.”
This is not an author, or perhaps a type of literature, one might suspect, that thinks highly of children’s aesthetic sensibilities. We find precisely the opposite to be the case in the wonderful Elfin Rhymes from 1900, written by the mysterious “Norman” with “40 drawings by Carton Moorepark.” Whoever “Norman” may be (or why his one-word name appears in quotation marks), he gives his readers poems that might be mistaken at first glance for unpublished Christina Rossetti verses; and Mr. Moorepark’s illustrations rival those of the finest book illustrators of the time, presaging the high quality of Caldecott Medal-winning books of later decades. Elfin Rhymes seems like a rare oddity, likely published in a small print run; the care and attention of its layout and design shows a very high opinion of its readers’ imaginative capabilities.
This title is representative of an emerging genre of late Victorian children’s literature, which still tended on the whole, as it does now, to fall into the trite and formulaic. Elfin Rhymes sits astride the fantasy boom at the turn of the century, heralded by hugely popular books like Frank L. Baum’s Wizard of Oz series and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. These, the Harry Potters of their day, made millions of young people passionate readers of modern fairy tales, representing a slide even further away from the once quite narrow, “remorselessly instructional… or deeply pious” categories available in early writing for children, as Grenby points out.
Where the boundaries for kids’ literature had once been narrowly fixed by Latin grammar books and Pilgrim’s Progress, by the end of the 19th century, the influence of science fiction like Jules Verne’s, and of popular supernatural tales and poems, prepared the ground for comic books, YA dystopias, magician fiction, and dozens of other children’s literature genres we now take for granted, or—in increasingly large numbers—we buy to read for ourselves. Enter the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature here, where you can browse several categories, search for subjects, authors, titles, etc, see full-screen, zoomable images of book covers, download XML versions, and read all of the over 10,000+ books in the collection with comfortable reader views.
Note: This is an updated version of a post that originally appeared on our site in 2016.
Soon after the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four became a bestseller again. Shooting to the top of the American charts, the novel that inspired the term “Orwellian” passed Danielle Steel’s latest opus, the poetry of Rupi Kaur, the eleventh Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, and the memoir of an ambitious young man named J. D. Vance. But how much of its renewed popularity owed to the relevance of a nearly 70-year-old vision of shabby, totalitarian future England to twenty-first century America, and how much to the fact that, as far as influence on popular culture’s image of political dystopia, no other work of literature comes close?
For all the myriad ways one can criticize his two administrations, Trump’s America bears little superficial resemblance to Oceania’s Airstrip One as ruled by The Party. But it can hardly be a coincidence that this period of history has also seen the concept “post-truth” become a fixture in the zeitgeist.
There are many reasons not to want to live in the world Orwell imagines in Nineteen Eighty-Four: the thorough bureaucratization, the lack of pleasure, the unceasing surveillance and propaganda. But none of this is quite so intolerable as what makes it all possible: the rulers’ claim to absolute control over the truth, a form of psychological manipulation hardly limited to regimes we regard as evil.
As James Payne says in his Great Books Explained video on Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell worked for the BBC’s overseas service during the war, and there received a troubling education in the use of information as a political weapon. The experience inspired the Ministry of Truth, where the novel’s protagonist Winston Smith spends his days re-writing history, and the dialect of Newspeak, a severely reduced English designed to narrow its speakers’ range of thought. Orwell may have overestimated the degree to which language can be modified from the top down, but as Payne reminds us, we now all hear culture warriors describe reality in highly slanted, politically-charged, and often thought-terminating ways all day long. Everywhere we look, someone is ready to tell us that two plus two make five; if only they were as obvious about it as Big Brother.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Hunter S. Thompson has been gone for two decades now. When he went out, as the new Pursuit of Wonder video on his life and work reminds us, he did so in a highly American manner: with a gun, and at the moment of his own choosing. Even his longtime fans who respected something about the agency evident in that choice naturally regretted that he’d made it; many of us have wished aloud that we could read his judgments of the past twenty years’ developments in U.S. politics, culture, and society, which would certainly fit in well enough with the narrative of decline he’d pursued since the late sixties.
At the same time, we recognize that Thompson’s manner of living would hardly have allowed him to live into his late eighties (the man himself expressed surprise to have reached his sixties), and that it was inextricable from his manner of writing. Which is not to call it the main ingredient: as generations of imitators have proven, ingestion of controlled substances and a disrespect for traditional narrative structure do not, by themselves, constitute a recipe for the “gonzo journalism” Thompson pioneered. In fact, he had a healthy respect for structure, cultivated through his early career in workaday reportage and a self-imposed training regime that involved re-typing the whole of A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gatsby.
Gonzo journalism, according to the narrator of the video, actually has a serious question to ask: “Are not the particular subjective filters by which facts and events are processed and imagined in a moment in history as relevant as the facts themselves in understanding the truth of that moment, or at least a slice of the truth?” Thompson’s most widely read books Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 stand as two attempts at an answer. But from the late seventies onward, as his “lifelong companions of drugs and chaotic behavior nestled closer, the lines between his larger-than-life character in his work, his public persona, and his true self began to blur.”
It could be said that Thompson never recovered the deceptive clarity of his Fear and Loathing-era work, though he remained prolific to the end. Indeed, there’s much of value in his last three decades of writing for readers attuned to who he really was. “He was not merely the character he portrayed in his work and public life, but the man who cared enough, and was talented enough, to create this character in order to explore, understand, and represent a very nuanced condition of the world during his time.” It would, perhaps, have been better if he’d been able, at some point, to retire the drugs, the firearms, the sunglasses, and the paranoia and come up with a new persona. What kept him from doing so? Maybe the notion, as articulated by his great inspiration Fitzgerald, that there are no second acts in American lives.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
As much as you may enjoy a night in with a book, you might not look so eagerly forward to it if that book comprised 314 folios of 1,971 papal letters and other documents relating to ecclesiastical law, all from the thirteenth century. Indeed, even many specialists in the field would hesitate to take on the challenge of such a manuscript in full. But what if we told you it comes with illustrations of demons running amok, knights battling snails, killer rabbits and other animals taking their revenge on humanity, a dead ringer for Yoda, and the penitent harlot Thäis?
These are just a few of the characters that grace the pages of the Smithfield Decretals, the most visually notable of all extant copies of the Decretales of Pope Gregory IX. When it was originally published as an already-illuminated manuscript in the 1230s, writes Spencer McDaniel at Tales of Times Forgotten, “the margins of the text were deliberately left blank by the original French scribes so that future owners of the text could add their own notes and annotations.” Thus “the manuscript would have originally had a lot of blank space in it, especially in the margins.”
“At some point before around 1340, however, the Smithfield Decretals fell into the possession of someone in eastern England, probably in London, who paid a group of illustrators to add even more extensive illustrations to the text.”
They “drew elaborate borders and illustrations on every page of the manuscript, nearly completely filling up all the margins,” adhering to the contemporary “trend among manuscript illustrators in eastern England for drawing ‘drolleries,’ which are bizarre, absurd, and humorous marginal illustrations.”
Bearing no direct relation to the text of the Decretals, some of these elaborate works of fourteenth-century marginalia appear to tell stories of their own. “These tales have analogues in a dizzying variety of textual and visual sources, including the bible, hagiography, romance, preachers’ exempla, and fabliau” (a humorous and risqué form of early French poetry), writes Alixe Bovey at the British Library’s medieval manuscripts blog. “Some of the narratives have no surviving literary analogues; others constitute isolated visual renditions of once-popular tales.”
If you view the Smithfield Decretals’ illustrations here or in the British Library’s digitization at the Internet Archive, you’ll also see the medieval satirical impulse at work. Take the aforementioned, by now much-circulated “Yoda,” who, as McDaniel writes, “is probably supposed to be a representation of the Devil as a professor of canon law.” It seems that “legal scholars in Middle Ages had a similar reputation to lawyers today; they were seen as slimy, dishonest, and more interested in personal gain than in justice.” They might have been good for a cryptic turn of phrase, but those in need of benevolently dispensed wisdom would have done better to ask elsewhere.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Nobody reads books anymore. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve probably heard it expressed fairly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiquity. During that time, as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video above, the “book trade declined with the educated elite that had supported it. The copying of secular texts slowed, and finally ceased. The books in Roman libraries, public and private, crumbled on their shelves. Only a small contingent of survivors found their way into monasteries.” As went the reading culture of the empire, so went the empire itself.
Some may be tempted to draw parallels with certain countries in existence today. But what may be more surprising is the extent of Roman reading at its height. Though only about one in ten Romans could read, Ryan explains, “the Roman elite defined themselves by a sophisticated literary education, and filled their cities with texts.”
Those included the Acta Diurna, a kind of proto-newspaper carved into stone or metal and displayed in public places. But from the reign of Augustus onward, “the city of Rome boasted an impressive array of public libraries,” filled with texts written on papyrus scrolls, and later — especially in the third and fourth centuries — on codices, whose format closely resembles books as we know them today.
Rome even had tabernae librariae, which we’d recognize as bookstores, whose techniques included painting the titles of bestsellers on their exterior columns. Some of them also published the books they sold, setting an early example of what we’d call “vertical integration.” Roman readers of the first century would all have had at least some familiarity with Martial’s Epigrams, but even such a big contemporary hit would have been outsold by a classic like the Aeneid, “the one book that any family with a library owned.” With 99 percent of its literature lost to us, we’re unlikely ever to determine if, like modern-day America, ancient Rome was really saturated with less-respectable works, its own equivalents of self help, business memoir, and genre fiction. Who knows? Perhaps Rome, too, had romantasy.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Despite its status as one of the most widely known and studied epic poems of all time, Homer’s Iliad has proven surprisingly resistant to adaptation. However much inspiration it has provided to modern-day novelists working in a variety of different traditions, it’s translated somewhat less powerfully to visual media. Perhaps people still watch Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, the very loose, Brad Pitt-starring cinematic Iliad adaptation from 2004. But chances are, a century or two from now, humanity on the whole will still be more impressed by the 52 illustrations of the Ambrosian Iliad, which was made in Constantinople or Alexandria around the turn of the sixth century.
As noted at HistoryofInformation.com, “along with the Vergilius Vaticanus [previously featured on Open Culture] and the Vergilius Romanus, [the Ambrosian Iliad] is one of only three illustrated manuscripts of classical literature that survived from antiquity.” It’s also the only ancient manuscript that depicts scenes from the Iliad. Its illustrations, which “show the names of places and characters,” offer “an insight into early manuscript illumination.” They “show a considerable diversity of compositional schemes, from single combat to complex battle scenes,” as Kurt Weitzmann writes in Late Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination. “This indicates that, by that time, Iliad illustration had passed through various stages of development and thus had a long history behind it.”
Above, you can see the Ambrosian Iliad’s illustrations of the capture of Dolon (top), Achilles sacrificing to Zeus for Patroclus’ safe return (middle), and Hector killing Patroclus as Automedon escapes (bottom). You can find more scans at the Warburg Institute Iconographic Database, along with other Iliad-related artifacts. Some of the later artistic renditions of Homer in that collection date from the fifteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and even the nineteenth centuries, each interpreting these age-old poems for their own time. Indeed, the Iliad and Odyssey have proven enduringly resonant for the better part of three millennia, and there’s no reason to believe that they won’t continue to find new artistic forms for just as long to come. But there’s something especially powerful about seeing Homer rendered by artists who, though they may have come centuries and centuries after the blind poet himself, knew full well what it was to live in antiquity.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Nobody opens a Stephen King novel expecting to see a reflection of the real world. Then again, as those who get hooked on his books can attest, never is his work ever wholly detached from reality. Time and time again, he delivers lurid visions of the macabre, grotesque, and bizarre, but they always work most powerfully when he weaves them into the coarse fabric of ordinary, makeshift, down-at-the-heels America. Though long rich and famous, King hasn’t lost his understanding of a certain downtrodden stratum of society, or at least one that regards itself as downtrodden — the very demographic, in other words, often blamed for the rise of Donald Trump.
“I started thinking Donald Trump might win the presidency in September of 2016,” King writes in a Guardian piece from Trump’s first presidential term. “By the end of October, I was almost sure.” For most of that year, he’d sensed “a feeling that people were both frightened of the status quo and sick of it. Voters saw a vast and overloaded apple cart lumbering past them. They wanted to upset the motherfucker, and would worry about picking up those spilled apples later. Or just leave them to rot.” They “didn’t just want change; they wanted a man on horseback. Trump filled the bill. I had written about such men before.”
King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”
Further Stillson-Trump parallels are examined in the NowThis interview clip at the top of the post. “I was sort of convinced that it was possible that a politician would arise who was so outside the mainstream and so willing to say anything that he would capture the imaginations of the American people.” Read now, Stillson’s demagogical rhetoric — describing himself as “a real mover and shaker,” promising to “throw the bums out” of Washington — sounds rather mild compared to what Trump says at his own rallies. Perhaps King himself does have a touch of Johnny Smith-like prescience. Or perhaps he suspects, on some level, that Trump isn’t so much the disease as the symptom, a manifestation of a much deeper and longer-festering condition of the American soul. Now there’s a frightening notion.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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