The best books to show that you only think you know who you are

I first read this Pulitzer Prize winner in my early twenties, and it blew my mind, almost literally: I was in a bar in post-revolutionary Prague describing to a friend the book’s central idea – that human character, and the culture it lives in,  are both effectively an illusionary construct that we build around ourselves as a means of denying that we are all doomed to vanish.

As I explained it, the idea suddenly made perfect sense to me and I felt my entire personality briefly dissolve.

Years later, covering wars in the Middle East, it struck me as ironic that we are so afraid of dying that we build gods and afterlives to comfort ourselves, but then end up dying for those imaginary comforts.

Having met with terrorists, kidnappers, land-grabbers, soldiers, and several outright psychopaths in my career, I have often wondered what makes people tick.

Neuropsychologist Paul Broks’ eloquent and philosophical book delves into the question of what makes you “you.” The physicality of the self is often striking – one of Broks’ patients had a fall and damaged the left side of his brain and became an indifferent, emotionless automaton: another injured the opposite side of his brain and became so effusively emotional and empathetic that his wife had to stop him giving his coat to homeless people whenever he left the house.

There’s an old cliche that the victor always get to write the history, yet probably the most enduring story in the world was written by a group of people who pretty much lost every war they fought throughout their long history – the Jewish people.

They lost wars to the Assyrians and the Babylonians, who carted them off to settle in their far-flung empires, were enslaved by the Egyptians, then lost a revolt against the Roman occupiers and were – allegedly -- driven out of their homeland for thousands of years before a Biblical return to the promised land.

Shlomo Sand unearths some fascinating variations on this foundational story, giving a whole new perspective on Israel, the Bible, and the endless conflict in the Middle East.  

Forget everything you’ve been told about “prehistory:” the tales of small bands of hunter gatherers living isolated lives as noble savages.

This huge book up-ends everything you thought you knew about the 200,000-odd years when our ancestors were believed to have been wandering around living in either a garden of Eden or a savage hellscape pitting man against nature.

The authors say it’s impossible they all lived exactly the same way for so long a time, and dig up evidence that they had in a vast and fascinating variety of societies, building monumental structures and often actively rejecting farming because they’d seen what a drag it was.

They claim the modern democracy that emerged from the Enlightenment was less to do with ancient Greece and more to do with Europeans interacting with egalitarian Native American nations.

Before the 1960s drug scene and Timothy Leary’s “Turn on, tune in, drop out” hippie culture, magic mushrooms, and LSD were being hailed as the cure for everything from alcoholism and depression to the fear of death among the terminally ill.

Tests were run at prestigious universities, intellectuals like Aldous Huxley were knocking back psychedelics and LSD was touted on the cover of Time magazine. Then drugs became the centerpiece of the counter-culture in the midst of the Vietnam War, scaring the establishment into declaring a war on drugs.

What was being vaunted as a revolution in consciousness and spiritualism was forced underground like a covert religion, which is now re-emerging among people interested in other states of consciousness. I’ve always been scared of drugs, but it made me want to try – in a very controlled environment – magic mushrooms.