100 books like A History of Knowledge

I was privileged to know Marty Sherwin in person. He was the friendliest person ever with a tremendous sense of humour – and a magnificent, honest scholar.

He was the friendliest person ever with a tremendous sense of humour – and a magnificent, honest scholar. History, as Paul Ricoeur has reminded, is not a record to be played. The Cold War nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, and mainly, the Cuban missile crisis did not have to end as they did, peacefully.

When two A bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945, a genie was released that the world will not be able to get rid of any time soon. Martin J. Sherwin, the doyen of American nuclear historians always argued that this did not have to be so. Nuclear technology could have been placed under international supervision and arms race and proliferation could have been… show more.

Believers in God see him as the creator of man and women in his own image. Firm believers tried throughout history to model themselves as they imagined God. But God, the author says, evolves through his relationship with man, and man becomes rival to God. So believers and non-believers discover that God, the protector of the poor and weak, becomes a warrior who nearly destroys all humans and animals he created by causing the flood. So rational people realize that God is a tribal chief who gets angry, kills, destroys, loves some and forgets many more. This book is a must-read for all believers and non-believers. I found this book unusual in telling amazing stories about God and his actions and reactions. 

This book shows that America, since its inception, has followed an imperialistic policy to dominate the world; it built the strongest army in history, and the most advanced military industry. To project power and be able to intervene anywhere, America built about 750 military bases overseas in 80 countries. However, America’s relative decline due to China’s rise, lead America’s policymakers to transform many states into failed states that cannot control all their territories, weak for America to dominate, but unstable to create headaches for their neighbors as the cases of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen demonstrate. America’s military budget for 2023 is $858 billion, the equivalent of 1/3 of the combined gross domestic product of the 54 African countries. Does this scare you, or comfort you?

This book was published after communism collapsed. Heilbroner doubted America’s intention to reform the market system, he saw a new society emerging that does not believe in the promise of progress. Heilbroner saw the communist collapse as giving corporations the opportunity to control the economy and reshape society. As I wrote in my books, the communist system was politics’ last attempt to control economics, therefore, the collapse of communism allowed large corporations and banks to control the political process, corrupt politics, and politicians, and control global wealth. The latest report by Oxfam says that since 2020, the richest 1% of the world’s population took 63% or $26 trillion of the global wealth, leaving %37 or $16 trillion for 99% of the world’s population. 

History isn’t just “what happened.” Trillions of things happened. History is about the patterns to be found among those trillions of facts. Getting at such patterns means following deep themes, and what could be deeper than ideas? Watson explores when, where, how, and why significant ideas emerged in history, how ideas led to more ideas, to inventions, to cultural changes…we witness the emergence of a soul as a concept, we’re there to see Freud construct his tripartite model of the human psyche… Every idea is part of a thread and this book is woven of many threads. 

This is a rare book, but in spite of the 1945 language, the author breaks down the principles of financial success. It tells what can motivate you to succeed, and what will be your ruin. When I reviewed this again recently, I was surprised how many of these key principles were common in other success and “make money” books. Well worth getting your own copy if you can find it.

In this novel, time becomes almost a character. It is an empty time, although so heavy and thick, to fill in all the space around the protagonist Dino and to enter into him.

Art and sex, the only Dino’s activities, are not characterized by their distinctive passion and enthusiasm that sometimes destroy and sometimes raise a man. Art and sex become a dead pastime dominated by time alone.      

Who gets to claim “childhood innocence” and the protections that come with this designation? Certainly not Black children in nineteenth-century America, according to Robin Bernstein. They were instead pictured as “pickaninnies”—comic figures who felt no pain, whatever mischief befell them. This book won a slew of awards for good reason: reading the racial ‘scripts’ in seemingly innocuous cultural products like children’s picture books, dolls, and knickknacks, Bernstein reveals how race-making hides in plain sight.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o is not just a celebrated writer, but a respected critic of African literature, known for his advocacy of African languages. In this book, wa Thiong'o provides an exploration of slavery’s effects on the historical, cultural, and literary lives of Africans. His focus is on the fragmentations that slavery created in African identities and how these play out in literature. The book advocates for a re-membering of fragments created by slavery. I think this book – and frankly any work by wa Thiong'o – is a necessary addition to the collection of any reader interested in African literature, particularly the legacy of slavery and colonialism in African writings.  

Much of what we do and think comes from imagination, generated by our minds rather than by the physical world. This includes art, literature, music, religion, even science. Our dreams are spontaneous acts of creativity, and even memory itself can be distorted by the restless mind.  Fernandez-Armesto argues that many animals have better memories than we do, because the human system produces spontaneously creative thoughts at the expense of fidelity. That’s why memories are often false. The author is a historian with an interest in how the mind works, and his book is an amazingly comprehensive history of the human imagination.