Fans pick 100 books like Dreyfus

This book is great because Norberg is calm, methodical, rational, and optimistic: we have come a long way, we live in the best of times, and let’s get on with it. I love the modern as I’ve said, and appreciate historians who understand that, from a material perspective at least (health, wealth, freedom, and security), most people today are in the top 99.999999 percentile of all the humans who have ever lived.

I so admire (and share) Norberg’s belief in our brilliance and problem-solving skills and admire, too, his arguments which are complex but easy to follow. Modernity gives us plenty to celebrate, and Norberg, I feel, makes this eminently clear.

It is a book that serves as the perfect balance to Barrat’s and to Kurzweil’s. Although the three together will lead to cognitive dissonance, which, in my view, is as healthy as having one’s mind blown periodically.

This book is one of the nuttiest I’ve read in its imaginings of a modern world on steroids. The part that teases most is that its predictions might come true.

I know our smartphones and laptops have changed our world, but cures that would extend longevity ad infinitum? Neural interfaces that would connect us directly to the internet? Nanobots that would reduce the cost of goods to zero?

Because the topic of modernity has come to engross me so, the big question always is, “How far will it carry us?” The answer to which (according to Kurzweil) is much farther than you can possibly imagine and much sooner than you think. One should have one’s mind blown every couple of years, and Kurzweil does exactly that.

Just when I thought the future was bright and sunny (in part due to Kurzweil), I learn from James Barrat that ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) might well mark the end of our species (and the start of an ever-expanding artificial replacement).

I was fascinated by the people Barrat introduces us to like an expert on the psychology of ASI, and his description of a perfect machine and its runaway implications. I realized this is modernity at its best and worst: we push forward to improve the world but are always at the risk of creating new, unseen problems.

The most troubling question of all (to my way of thinking) is that our idea of perfected humanity (both a modern and a pre-modern aim) ends in the vision of machines like Watson playing endless games of Jeopardy among themselves.

I loved this book because it ties in with an obsession of mine, the interface between modernity and the past.

It is the autobiography of Edmund Gosse, who grew up with strict, devout parents (even by mid-19th-century standards). However, the father was a biologist just at the time Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. I was intrigued by Gosse’s growing awareness that his parents’ worldview was so out of sync with the times, just as I was fascinated by the father’s anguish as his faith pulled him one way and his reason another.

Gosse’s description of the passing of a world is so entrancing (even from today’s perspective), yet the closeness (and neurosis) of family bonds is endearingly the same.

Taking us inside the artist balls, music halls, and into the hidden bohemian enclaves of Paris, Kerley examines the myriad ways that the sexualized female body was commodified and spectacularized at the turn of the twentieth century. At this time, the nude female body reigned supreme as a subject of fine art as well as on the commercial stages of the bustling metropolis. Nude women were everywhere, even as respectable women were increasingly told to cover up. How to reconcile the contradiction between woman as housewife, woman as a harlot? This is a central question of Kerley’s beautifully written, thoughtful book.

I enthusiastically recommend Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France, a must-read for those intrigued by the complex interplay of literature, history, and cultural context.

This book provides an insightful exploration of the writings of four influential figures—Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, Jean Giraudoux, and Andre Gide—in the context of France's pre-World War II history of anti-Jewish thought. Mehlman's essays dive into a range of fascinating topics, from Blanchot's unique conception of literature to Lacan's distinctive style, Giraudoux's connection to Racine, and the intricacies of sexual politics in Gide's work.

I found Mehlman's insights into Giraudoux particularly enlightening. Especially his analysis of The Madwoman of Chaillot broadens our understanding of how historical context shapes literary works, offering invaluable perspectives on the intellectual history of contemporary France.

The banquiers that the Madwoman of Chaillot kills in the 1942 play are openly described as Jews in a 1938 Giraudoux’s text: Pleins Pouvoirs. Don't miss the… show more.

There’s so much texture on this cover, and the Renoir painting stands out because it’s probably the most recognizable part. The story involves Irene Cahen d’Anvers, the woman who sat for Renoir as a young girl, and how she came from a prominent Jewish family in France. Irene made some pivotal decisions that would forever change the lives of her ex-husband and daughter.

This is the first novel by Modiano, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014.  It has been translated into English but with a French title, which contains a pun that can’t be translated (referring both to a location in Paris and to the infamous badge imposed by the Nazis). A darkly comic and shocking send-up of French antisemitic literature, the novel features a clownish protagonist named Raphaël Schlemilovitch who embraces every antisemitic stereotype imaginable, becoming in turn, a cosmopolitan, a traitor, a collaborator, and a pimp before winding up on the couch of Sigmund Freud begging to be put out of his misery.  Modiano wrote this novel to exorcise the demons of French literature and it helped him carve out a place as a distinctly Jewish voice in the French literary pantheon.

Where to begin? Proust’s gigantic masterpiece is the proverbial gift that keeps giving, none more so than in its explication and then repeated “demonstration” of the very thing it describes, the sensory triggers of what Proust calls involuntary memory but that here become the emotional propulsion for this book about writing the very beautiful book (or books—it comes in six volumes) you are reading.

Plenty of Resistance activity in the Lot, certainly, but it was also the home of the vicious anti-semite Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who rounded up many Jews to their deaths on behalf of the Vichy Government. Years later, Carmen Callil, founder of Virago, was seeking psychiatric help when she came across his daughter Anne, a psychiatrist, who had been abandoned by her despicable parents.

It was Anne’s death by suicide that set Callil off on a stunning attempt to track the life of Darquier, a drunkard, a rapist, and a man of few if any redeeming features. He disgraced his family and native town, where his father was mayor of Cahors, capital of the Lot. He was sentenced to death but, protected by Franco, died a free man in Spain.

“Only lice were ever gassed at Auschwitz” was his mantra as he sent children off to the gas chambers.