The Crowd

By Gustave Le Bon,

Book cover of The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

Book description

One of the most influential works of social psychology in history, The Crowd was highly instrumental in creating this field of study by analyzing, in detail, mass behavior. The book had a profound impact not only on Freud but also on such twentieth-century masters of crowd control as Hitler and…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Crowd as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

It was during the earliest days of the first Trump campaign, and I was reading this one-hundred-plus-year-old book with one of the first debates playing in the background. It felt like he had used this book as his operating manual (although I'm almost positive he never read it). When I got home, I started telling my friends, "I think this guy could win." They thought I was crazy. The rest was history.

This book is the definition of timeless. Le Bon was remarkably perceptive about what makes groups of people react in certain ways and how leaders can get them…

From Michael's list on get people to do what you want.

Some academics dismiss this book because it lacks statistical support. They have a point, but it’s still a great book. It’s also over a hundred years old, so what do you expect?

Gustave Le Bon was a medical doctor who became Professor of Psychology and Allied Sciences at the University of Paris. Le Bon’s key proposal is that crowd thinking is not the sum of individuals’ minds but an interdependent psychological entity. The Crowd is a short book and perennially in print.

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Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

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