The 25 Best Non-Fiction Books Ever: Readers’ Picks

in Books | June 27th, 2011

Last week, we asked Open Cul­ture read­ers to write in with your favorite non-fic­tion titles of all time, and you did­n’t dis­ap­point. We had a hard time culling from the more than 100 sug­ges­tions, but we did have a few cri­te­ria to guide us:

1. Pri­or­i­ty went to repeat nom­i­nees (Bill Bryson, Hunter S. Thomp­son, and Richard Dawkins, to name a few).

2. We leaned toward books that are avail­able for free online.

3. When all else failed, we relied on our own pref­er­ences — or prej­u­dices.

Thanks again for all of your rec­om­men­da­tions, and may we con­grat­u­late you on your excel­lent taste in non-fic­tion, equalled by only your excel­lent taste in web­sites.

The List

Hunter S. Thomp­son — Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Friedrich Niet­zsche — The Gay Sci­ence

Richard Dawkins - The Self­ish Gene

Wen­dell Berry — The Way of Igno­rance

Joseph Mitchell — Up in the Old Hotel

Bri­an Greene — The Ele­gant Uni­verse

Nor­man Lewis - Voic­es of the Old Sea

Joan Did­ion — The White Album

Ben­jamin Franklin - The Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Ben­jamin Franklin

Tony Judt — Post­war: A His­to­ry of Europe Since 1945

Hen­ry David Thore­au — Walden

Mar­cus Aure­lius — Med­i­ta­tions

Bill Bryson — A Walk in the Woods

George Orwell — Homage to Cat­alo­nia

Han­nah Arendt — Eich­mann in Jerusalem

Book­er T. Wash­ing­ton — Up From Slav­ery

Jorge Luis Borges - Oth­er Inqui­si­tions (1937–1952)

Mar­cus Redik­er — Vil­lains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Gold­en Age

Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi — Flow: The Psy­chol­o­gy of Opti­mal Expe­ri­ence

Lao Tzu, Stephen Mitchell, trans. Tao Te Ching

Vic­tor Klem­per­er — I Will Bear Wit­ness: A Diary of the Nazi Years (1933–1941)

Greil Mar­cus — Lip­stick Traces: A Secret His­to­ry of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry

Philip Goure­vitch — We Wish to Inform You That Tomor­row We Will be Killed with Our Fam­i­lies

Win­ston Churchill — A His­to­ry of the Eng­lish Speak­ing Peo­ples

Last­ly, and only in part because we’ve been warned that we would be round­ly scold­ed for the omis­sion: The Ele­ments of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White

Thanks again, and hap­py read­ing!

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

8,000 Chinese Lanterns over Poland

in Random | June 26th, 2011

Last Tues­day, the res­i­dents of Poz­nan, Poland set a world record when they released 8,000 Chi­nese lanterns into the sky to mark the short­est night of the year — or what’s oth­er­wise called Mid­sum­mer Night. The video above lets you see the lanterns in full flight. The image below offers a close-up view of a lantern before head­ing into the night sky…

via @pourmecoffee

Peter Falk (RIP) in Wings of Desire

in Film | June 25th, 2011

Peter Falk made his career play­ing a quirky detec­tive in the 1960s and 70s tele­vi­sion show Colum­bo. But the art world will remem­ber a moment when Falk played him­self in Wim Wen­ders’ 1987 film, Wings of Desire. In the cred­its, he was list­ed sim­ply as ‘Der Film­star.’ This is our 1:46 trib­ute to Falk, who passed away Fri­day at age 83. H/T @SteveSilberman

Relat­ed:

Free Tarkovsky Films

Free Hitch­cock Films

Free John Wayne Films

Free Noir Films

Darwin’s Personal Library Goes Digital: 330 Books Online

in Literature, Science, Video - Science | June 24th, 2011

When Charles Dar­win fin­ished read­ing Charles Lyel­l’s Prin­ci­ples of Geol­o­gy, a book sug­gest­ing that there are clear lim­its to the vari­a­tion of species, he wrote in the mar­gins: “If this were true adios the­o­ry.” It’s a great piece of mar­gin­a­lia. And it’s just one of many com­ments that adorn books in Dar­win’s per­son­al library, and help illu­mi­nate his intel­lec­tu­al path to writ­ing On The Ori­gin Of Species (1859).

Thanks to Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty library and sev­er­al part­ners, 330 of Dar­win’s most heav­i­ly anno­tat­ed texts have now been dig­i­tized and made avail­able online at the web­site of the Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library. More will come in due time. You can begin your tour here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dar­win’s Dan­ger­ous Idea

Dar­win’s Lega­cy

via Cam­bridge News (with thanks to Kirstin But­ler and Brain­Pick­er)

Renata Salecl: The Paradox of Choice

in Current Affairs, Psychology | June 22nd, 2011

With free­dom come choic­es. Every choice is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to select the best pos­si­ble out­come, the one that would make us hap­pi­est. More choic­es lead to more hap­pi­ness, right? Of course we find the oppo­site to be true. As choic­es increase, so does anx­i­ety. In the lat­est install­ment of the RSA ani­mat­ed lec­ture series, Sloven­ian social and legal the­o­rist Rena­ta Sale­cl argues that this anx­i­ety, cou­pled with the cap­i­tal­ist ide­al of the self-made per­son, leads to a kind of social paral­y­sis. “Today’s ide­ol­o­gy of choice,” says Sale­cl, “actu­al­ly paci­fies peo­ple and makes us con­stant­ly turn crit­i­cism to our­selves instead of orga­niz­ing our­selves and mak­ing a cri­tique of the soci­ety we live in.” The ani­mat­ed fea­ture was adapt­ed from a lec­ture Sale­cl gave last sum­mer in Lon­don. (You can watch the entire lec­ture here.) It draws on ideas pre­sent­ed in her book, Choice.

Oth­er RSA Videos:

Sir Ken Robin­son: A Cre­ative Edu­ca­tion

Good Cap­i­tal­ist Kar­ma: Zizek Ani­mat­ed

Smile or Die: The Per­ils of Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy

Steven Pinker: How Innu­en­do Makes Things Work

The Elements of Creativity

in Art, Creativity, Technology | June 22nd, 2011

The Ele­ments of Cre­ativ­i­ty. They come down to this: Copy. Trans­form. Com­bine. Noth­ing is tru­ly orig­i­nal. Every­thing is a remix, more or less.

Direc­tor Kir­by Fer­gu­son first traced this idea through lit­er­a­ture and music, then through film­mak­ing. Next up? Tech­nol­o­gy, com­put­ers and user inter­face. Above we have the third and penul­ti­mate install­ment in the “Every­thing is a Remix” series. (You can watch it in large for­mat here.) Look for the final seg­ment to appear this fall, and con­sid­er sup­port­ing the project here.

Nice work Kir­by and h/t Brain­Pick­ings.

New Fiction by Jonathan Lethem in the Paris Review

in Literature | June 21st, 2011

Best­selling writer Jonathan Lethem — author of one of my favorite con­tem­po­rary nov­els Moth­er­less Brook­lyn — has a new short sto­ry fea­tured in the sum­mer edi­tion of the Paris Review. The sto­ry is called “The Emp­ty Room,” and, once again, the back­ground, child­hood, moves to the fore­ground. It begins:

Ear­li­est mem­o­ry: father trip­ping on strewn toys, hop­ping with toe out­raged, mother’s rolling eyes. For my father had toys him­self. He once brought a traf­fic light home to our apart­ment on the thir­ty-some­thingth floor of the tow­er on Colum­bus Avenue. The light, its taxi yel­low gone mat­te from pen­du­lum-years above some pol­lut­ed inter­sec­tion and crack­led like a Ming vase’s glaze where bolts had been over­tight­ened and then eased, sat to one side of the cof­fee table it was meant to replace as soon as my father found an appro­pri­ate top. In fact, the traf­fic light would fol­low us up the Hud­son, to Dar­by, to the house with the emp­ty room. There it nev­er escaped the garage.

Anoth­er mem­o­ry: my play­mate Max’s par­ents had bor­rowed, from mine, a spare set of chi­na plates. I spent a lot of time vis­it­ing with Max and, when he let us inside his room, Max’s old­er broth­er. So I was present the after­noon my father destroyed the chi­na set. Max’s fam­i­ly lived in a duplex, the base­ment and par­lor floor of a brown­stone, a palace of abun­dance . . . Max and his broth­er had sep­a­rate rooms, and a back­yard. All this would pale beside the spa­cious­ness of our Dar­by farm­house. That was the point.

You can read the full text here. And please note: the Paris Review has just launched its first dig­i­tal edi­tion, let­ting you read the famous lit­er­ary jour­nal on your com­put­er, iPad or mobile device. More on that here. H/T Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Paris Review Inter­views Now Online

Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

The Black Cab Sessions: One Song, One Take, One Cab

in Music | June 21st, 2011

Talk about an inti­mate venue. A group of friends in Eng­land have built an unlike­ly enter­tain­ment fran­chise, film­ing per­for­mances by the musi­cians they admire–in the back­seat of a Lon­don taxi­cab. The project is called “The Black Cab Ses­sions,” and the method is sim­ple: “One Song. One Take. One Cab.”

It start­ed in 2007 as some­thing of a lark–an impro­vised col­lab­o­ra­tion between mem­bers of a music pro­mo­tion com­pa­ny, Hid­den Fruit, and a film com­pa­ny, Just So Films–but the project soon took on a life of its own. Musi­cians respond­ed enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly, embrac­ing the whim­sy and chal­lenge of play­ing in such cramped, unsteady quar­ters. Now there are per­for­mances by about 100 artists on the Black Cab Ses­sions web­site.  Most of the musi­cians are young indie acts, but there are some vet­er­an per­form­ers as well, includ­ing Martha Wain­wright, Richard Thomp­son and Bri­an Wil­son. There are some famous groups, like Weez­er, Mum­ford and Sons, My Morn­ing Jack­et and (yes, of course!) Death Cab for Cutie, but many of the most inspired per­for­mances are by musi­cians you might not have heard about.

The music ranges widely–from Delta blues to beat­box, and from hip hop to Pagani­ni. One of the most pop­u­lar ses­sions isn’t music at all, in the strictest sense, but a mes­mer­iz­ing poet­ry per­for­mance by Ben­jamin Zepha­ni­ah. The one rule, accord­ing to Black Cab Ses­sions co-founder Jono Stevens, is that the film­mak­ers love the artists’ work. “Big or small,” Stevens said in a TV inter­view, “It real­ly does­n’t mat­ter. It’s about some­one we real­ly, real­ly feel pas­sion­ate about.”

There’s a lot to dis­cov­er on the Black Cab Ses­sions web­site. You can dive right into the col­lec­tion here, or start by sam­pling a few of our favorites, includ­ing Death Cab for Cutie singing No Sun­light above, and:

Lykke Li
Aman­da Palmer
Lang­horne Slim
Kil­la Kela
Sea­sick Steve
Beach House
Ben­jamin Zepha­ni­ah
Char­lie Siem
My Morn­ing Jack­et

Norman Mailer & Martin Amis, No Strangers to Controversy, Talk in 1991

in Literature | June 20th, 2011

Mar­tin Amis will nev­er win a pop­u­lar­i­ty con­test. Nor did Nor­man Mail­er. Back in 1960, Mail­er famous­ly stabbed his wife after a din­ner par­ty in New York City, and even when things weren’t so extreme, he was often behav­ing bad­ly. Take for exam­ple this appear­ance on The Dick Cavett Show with Gore Vidal in 1971. It’s hard to find a less sym­pa­thet­ic fig­ure, at least dur­ing his ear­ly years.

As for Amis, he has nev­er worked hard to make friends, stak­ing out con­tro­ver­sial posi­tions on Mus­lims and euthana­sia and then, ear­li­er this year, going out of his way to mock writ­ing for chil­dren: “Peo­ple ask me if I ever thought of writ­ing a chil­dren’s book. I say, if I had a seri­ous brain injury I might well write a chil­dren’s book, but oth­er­wise the idea of being con­scious of who you’re direct­ing the sto­ry to is anath­e­ma to me, because, in my view, fic­tion is free­dom and any restraints on that are intol­er­a­ble.” You get the drift.

But good writ­ers rarely win pop­u­lar­i­ty con­tests. And few will deny that Mail­er and Amis have put their stamp on the Anglo-Amer­i­can lit­er­ary scene. So here you have it — Mar­tin Amis inter­view­ing Nor­man Mail­er in 1991, upon the release of Mail­er’s sprawl­ing 1400-page CIA epic, Har­lot’s Ghost. The first clip (above) starts with the nov­el, the remain­ing parts move in many dif­fer­ent direc­tions. The writ­ing life, writ­ing about homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, the state of cap­i­tal­ism, Amer­i­ca after the Cold War, Mail­er’s lega­cy — it’s part of the 40 minute con­ver­sa­tion. Find Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

You can find this video per­ma­nent­ly list­ed in our new col­lec­tion of 235 Cul­tur­al Icons.

via Metafil­ter

War & Peace: An Epic of Soviet Cinema

in Film, Literature | June 17th, 2011

It’s hard to do cin­e­mat­ic jus­tice to any good nov­el, let alone the great­est of Rus­si­a’s many great nov­els, Leo Tol­stoy’s War & Peace. But Sovi­et direc­tor Sergei Bon­darchuk some­how man­aged to pull it off. Review­ing Bon­darchuk’s film back in 1969, a young Roger Ebert wrote:

“War and Peace” is the defin­i­tive epic of all time. It is hard to imag­ine that cir­cum­stances will ever again com­bine to make a more spec­tac­u­lar, expen­sive, and — yes — splen­did movie. Per­haps that’s just as well; epics seem to be going out of favor, replaced instead by small­er, more per­son­al films. Per­haps this great­est of the epics will be one of the last, bring­ing the epic form to its ulti­mate state­ment and at the same time sup­ply­ing the epi­taph.

No cor­ners were cut, and no expens­es spared, in mak­ing the film. Indeed, the film (avail­able on DVD here) was made “at a cost of $100,000,000, with a cast of 120,000, all clothed in authen­tic uni­forms, and the Red Army was mobi­lized to recre­ate Napoleon’s bat­tles exact­ly (it is claimed) as they hap­pened.” What’s more, 35,000 cos­tumes were made for the pro­duc­tion, and many Sovi­et muse­ums con­tributed arti­facts for the pro­duc­tion design. That’s stag­ger­ing, even by today’s stan­dards.

Released in four parts between 1965 and 1967, the Acad­e­my Award-win­ning film runs more than sev­en hours and you can now find it play­ing on YouTube. You can watch Part 1 here, and here you have Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. And if you need sub­ti­tles, click CC at the bot­tom of the videos. The film is, of course, list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Thanks Ammar for the heads up on this film!