100 books like Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

I have never been brought so close to a battle and a battlefield experience as when reading this book.

The horror, tension, excitement, valor, and regret of warfare are clearly depicted. The motivations for fighting for a terrible cause are examined. The determination to see things through to the bitter end is in evidence. It is a blueprint for writing warfare and helps the reader understand the excitement and tension in leading troops to the fear and futility of being on the line.

Best of all, Shaara has been able to bring life to Lee, who so often is referred to as a marble man. Here, he’s been humanized, and this alone makes our reading of history so much more personal and relevant.

As a historian, some books just keep coming back to you. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples is just such a book. 

He is really the first historian to outline the dramatic impact that infectious diseases have had on human history. He outlines the spread of smallpox, diphtheria, Yellow Fever, Malaria, the Plague, and many others, as they originate mostly in Africa and come into the Mediterranean Ocean, to produce cycles of death. 

But the people who lived on the edge of that ocean soon came to develop antibodies, and ultimately, master the impact of such terrible diseases.  

Unfortunately, those diseases were soon transferred to the Americas, where perhaps a hundred million American Indians died from them. They had no immunities!

Had such a calamity not occurred, the two western hemispheric continents might easily be dominated by Natives, who spoke a different language and prayed to a different God.

No book pulls you in like this one.

It starts with a “kinship” analysis of the British Army at mid-century, 1850. Officers purchased their ranks and most were of the aristocracy. When the Crimean War broke out, two cavalry (Light and Heavy) brigades went into action.

The commander of both brigades despised the commander of the Light Brigade—they were relatives who did not speak to each other. Thus, a fatal written order was misconstrued and the Light Brigade charged into a valley surrounded by Russian artillery.

It was a slaughter to some extent, but the officer in command led the assault, never looking back to see if his troops were following. Thus, a few of the cavalrymen actually reached the Russian emplacements at the end of the valley—and then retreated. An absolutely incredible story!

Readers will not put this book down!

The co-creator of SPY magazine, Kurt Andersen was my hero in high school. He’s been an NPR radio host, a novelist, a magazine editor, and a co-author with Alec Baldwin on their Trump book. But this book feels like all the thinking he’s done in those places put in one place. It’s a textbook of American history from the Puritans until today, through the lens of our special predilection for conspiracy, con artists, and fabulists, both on the left and the right, and how it all culminates in the 1960s. So smart, so funny, so jealous.

Finished in 1907, this famed book is worth rereading today for awareness that its pervasive pessimism proved totally wrong. Adams declared that western democracy was doomed, that freedom had no chance if forced into war versus dictatorship, that the pace change was overwhelming, that the U.S. educational system could not possibly teach science. A century later, democracy prevailed in both world wars, free nations out-produce dictatorships 10 to 1, and America has won more Nobel prizes in the sciences than the next five nations combined. Pessimism has long been with us – and almost always been wrong.

A biting quip in the debate about whether computers are on the verge of surpassing (or have already surpassed) human intelligence is, “It is not that computers are getting smarter but that humans are getting dumber.”

In the same spirit, Nichols argues that “These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had access to so much knowledge, and yet been so resistant to learning anything.”

If you’ve ever wondered if people today are dumber than people in the past, you should watch Idiocracy. And then read this book. It shows how we’ve devolved into people who look at lists of the best five books and never actually read those books. In 2008, for a column for the L.A. Times, I had her take a quiz from the author of the book How Dumb Are You?: The Great American Stupidity Quiz and she got two wrong. I got 11 wrong. The point is: Read her book instead of mine.

Morrison, the winner of two Bancroft Prizes and Two Pulitzer Prizes (likely the most by anyone in history) was a close friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

He was given the rank of Admiral, in the Reserves and went to the Pacific, where he had full access to all naval reports and correspondence. Morrison’s 15 volumes are extremely well written and unsurpassed for their accuracy in describing the incredible struggle that began on December 7, 1941 and finally ended in August in Tokyo Bay.  

Morrison is particularly interested in the naval battles, and no one could tell them better than Morrison. He is particularly good at the incredible orders that Admiral Halsey gave to Admirals Scott and Callaghan, full well knowing that they were going to their deaths; with light cruisers and destroyers, they pitched into a battle with a far superior Japanese naval force, losing most of their… show more.

Reading Kenzaburo Oë is like falling into a dreamscape. I love this book because it weaves the personal and the fictional in ways that make it impossible to distinguish them.

Is not all of life a melding of dream, reality, and the stuff we make up? Much of Oë’s writing is influenced by his son, Hikari, who was born with cognitive disabilities. This makes the story of the young man in A Personal Matter, who is struggling with the stress of his sick newborn, a fiction heavily informed by personal history.

To take one’s own story and use it to bring to life another one is the height of art-making. It felt like a healing to read.

In a vain effort to prevent the disaster they knew was coming, Russia’s leading religious philosophers in 1909 called on the increasingly radical Russian intelligentsia to return to religion as a means of grounding the individual. The philosopher, Nikolai Beryaev wrote that the intelligentsia sought a universal theory but was only ready to accept one that supported their social goals. They, therefore, denied man’s absolute significance. Bogdan Kistyakovsky wrote that the intelligentsia’s attraction to formalism and bureaucracy as well as its faith in the omnipotence of rules contained the seeds of a future police state. The authors of the various essays in this classic book, in fact, foresaw all of the characteristics of the future Soviet police state that arose out of the drive of Russian radicals to create “heaven on earth.”