Here are 99 books that Smokepit Fairytales fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am passionate about the Vietnam War because my male relatives served and came back changed by the experience. I spent ten years as the editor of The Patton Saber, writing articles about the experience of World War II soldiers, but when I came across an idea for a novel about past life memories, I decided to focus on memories of the Vietnam War. What I love about this list is that it reflects many facets of the war, including soldiers, nurses, veterans, and the family members touched by those affected by war.
This book offers an unflinching and harrowing portrait of the experiences of 450 men of the First Battalion, Seventh Cavalry, under the command of Lt. Col. Hal Moore. The honest portrayal of the soldiers who were ambushed is at once vivid, horrific, and inspiring.
The authors interviewed hundreds of men who fought there, including the North Vietnamese commanders, and the book offers an authentic, personal account of the horrors of war.
'If you want to know what is was like to go to Vietnam as a young American... and find yourself caught in ferocious, remorseless combat with an enemy as courageous and idealistic as you were, then you must read this book. Moore and Galloway have captured the terror and exhilaration, the comradeship and self-sacrifice, the brutality and compassion that are the dark heart of war' THE TIMES
THE MUST READ CLASSIC OF THE VIETNAM WAR
In November 1965, 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lt.Col. Hal Moore, were dropped by helicopter into a small…
I grew up on a trail mix-style melange of 80’s action movies, Stephen King and The Lord of the Rings (with a special melancholy fondness also for The Once and Future King). High and low brow and everything in between that turned into a fascination for science fiction crossed with military adventure and doomed–or at least long-suffering–heroes. War is getting increasingly technological, detached, and even surreal, with drones, satellites, and hackers now increasingly on the front. But even as tactics and weapons change, the carnage doesn’t. From The Iliad to today, wars and the people who fight and die in them make for stories worth telling.
All the good war stories capture the absurd alongside the epic, and what I love about this book is that both themes are core to this story. The soldiers can only find and fight their alien enemies by traveling thousands of light years almost instantly via “collapsars.”
However, the time dilation caused by each jump means dozens or even hundreds of years elapse on Earth between each fight. So, after each battle, they return to a home that’s increasingly alien to them. As much as I cheered for the heroes, in the end, I think I pitied them more than anything. Some wars just end up being more trouble than they’re worth.
The monumental Hugo and Nebula award winning SF classic-- Featuring a new introduction by John Scalzi
The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand--despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite Military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space and time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict; to perform his duties and do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. But "home" may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time…
I served for seven years in the Irish Reserve Defence Forces, finishing as a weapons specialist in the infantry. I’m very grateful for the time I served in uniform and the lifelong lessons I learned that have helped me in my personal and professional life. Being a lifelong fan of military science fiction, I wrote Big Red from the point of view of a young Irish soldier thrown into a genocidal war on Mars. I’m a co-founder of the British and Irish Writing Community and our online magazine Bard of the Isles.
Ireland is known as the land of a thousand welcomes, but most people aren’t aware of its sixty unbroken years of Peacekeeping duty with the UN and even less know of its elite special forces unit known as the Army Ranger Wing (ARW).
The ARW is seen by many as one of the most effective special forces in operation. Shadow Warriors gives an in depth look into the history of the ARW, set up against the backdrop of rising instances of international terrorism and its deployment in a variety of roles across dozens of countries. This is an easy and straightforward read for anyone interested in military related books.
In the spring of 1980, the Irish Department of Defence sanctioned the establishment of a new unit within the Irish Defence Forces and the Irish Army Ranger Wing (ARW) came into being. In the decades that followed, its soldiers have been deployed on active service at home and abroad, generally without the knowledge of the wider public. The ARW is made up of seasoned men from across the island, who are selected through tough competition. Only the best of the best make it through and are trained in an extraordinary range of specialist skills. Being one of these elite operators…
I’ve been a fan of dinosaurs and other mega-monsters ever since I watched the original Godzilla movie as a kid. It scared me half out of my wits! There’s something about big, scaly, dangerous beasts that makes for a great adventure story. Add fascinating human characters and you’ve got my full attention. I started writing my Dinosaur Wars books precisely to fill the void where there are far too few stories of this type in current literature. Challenges between human heroes and giant beasts have been part of literature from the start, featuring dragons, titans, and ocean leviathans. I see my writings as efforts to continue that tradition.
This book by Robert Heinlein is an action-packed space adventure featuring creepy insect foes in an interstellar battle with Earth. It follows Trooper Johnny Rico in an epic war story set on distant worlds.
The book features a number of combat engagements with gigantic insect-like “Arachnids” and other bug-like creatures. Meanwhile, several love affairs arise and crumble in the face of Rico’s commitment to the warrior life. While the book has been criticized as preachy and moralizing, these are foibles that I tolerated well, knowing that another action sequence would not be long in coming.
'The historians can't seem to settle whether to call this one 'The Third Space War' (or the fourth), or whether 'The First Interstellar War' fits it better. We just call it 'The Bug War'. Everything up to then and still later were 'incidents', 'patrols' or 'police actions'. However, you are just as dead if you buy the farm in an 'incident' as you are if you buy it in a declared war.'
5,000 years in the future, humanity faces total extermination. Our one defence: highly-trained soldiers who scour the metal-strewn blackness of space to hunt down a terrifying enemy: an…
Writing articles for the education press I became aware of how children and young people were presented as vulnerable, as potential victims. Sometimes they also saw themselves in this way as weak, unable to cope, and lacking in the ability to take control of their lives. This seemed to me to be damaging and needed challenging. But writing about the therapeutic turn was not enough. What had to be challenged was the fear of freedom and speech and debate that were essential to beginning to take control of your life. In response I set up Academics For Academic Freedom, the leading campaign group for free speech, no ifs, no buts.
Claire Fox is the founder of the Academy of Ideas, a think tank that has produced the annual Battle of Ideas Festival for over a decade and a half. Fox is passionate about freedom and speech and debate. This short polemical book begins and ends with how young people have adapted to victim culture. It begins with an example of how genuinely hurt young people are when hearing views that they found offensive. This book is said to have been responsible for the introduction of the concept of the ’snowflake generation’ into the UK. But Fox is nuanced in her approach, and she ends her book with a ‘Letter to the Snowflake Generation’ and a ‘Letter to the Anti-Snowflake Generation’. Her book should be mandatory reading for anyone beginning university.
NEW AND UPDATED EDITION OF THE BOOK THAT INTRODUCED THE TERM `SNOWFLAKE'
When you hear that now ubiquitous phrase `I find that offensive', you know you're being told to shut up. While the terrible murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists demonstrated that those who offend can face the most brutal form of censorship, it also served to intensify the pre-existing climate that dictates we all have to walk on eggshells to avoid saying anything offensive - or else. Indeed, competitive offence-claiming is ratcheting up well beyond religious sensibilities. So, while Islamists and feminists may seem to have little in common,…
I’m an emeritus professor living in Portland, Oregon, officially retired, but still writing articles and books. Although I am a lifelong US citizen, I spent the heart of my career as the Canada Research Chair of Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. Most of my books are about aspects of rationality, especially cognitive biases. I have also worked on tools for measuring individual differences in rationality. Lately, I have focused on ways to reduce political polarization by taming the myside bias that plagues all human thought, and by reforming institutions (especially universities) that are currently failing in their role as knowledge adjudicators.
Campbell and Manning are sociologists who trace how a new moral culture of victimhood has given rise to political correctness. The new moral culture combines the properties of the old culture of honor and the old culture of dignity in a uniquely toxic way. The new victimhood culture borrows from honor culture its extreme sensitivity to insult, but borrows from the culture of dignity the tendency to call upon authorities and institutions to resolve disputes, rather than deal with them on a personal level. The victimhood culture is what has spawned the repressive campus environment of micro-aggressions, deplatforming, and bias response teams.
The Rise of Victimhood Culture offers a framework for understanding recent moral conflicts at U.S. universities, which have bled into society at large. These are not the familiar clashes between liberals and conservatives or the religious and the secular: instead, they are clashes between a new moral culture-victimhood culture-and a more traditional culture of dignity. Even as students increasingly demand trigger warnings and "safe spaces," many young people are quick to police the words and deeds of others, who in turn claim that political correctness has run amok. Interestingly, members of both camps often consider themselves victims of the other.…
I knew I was an anti-authoritarian before I had words for it, and my education in social justice has been long and slow. I have been researching and writing about anarchism for the better part of three decades, and am now a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Anarchy is a subject that engages me both at the level of intellectual passion, what lights up my mind, and on a visceral level, in my revulsion at the inequalities and iniquities in this world and my yearning for a fully emancipated way of life.
When I opened this book, I knew immediately that I was among friends. This is a handbook for constructing the kind of life in which joyful effects—associated with comradeship and mutual empowerment—might flourish. Eminently practical and down-to-earth, but also informed by a philosophical tradition stretching back through the anarchists to Baruch Spinoza in which life is not reducible to the “recipes” of self-help books but is a creative search for wider possibilities, for the “capacity to participate in something life-giving.” Written in contact with Indigenous and feminist social movements, this is also a guide to avoiding the kinds of blockages and dead ends on which such movements often founder.
"Absolutely what we need in these days of spreading gloom." —John Holloway, author of Crack Capitalism
"A guide to a fulfilling militant life." —Michael Hardt, co-author of Assembly
"Rigid radicalism" is the congealed and debilitating practices that suck life and inspiration from the fight for a better world. Joyful Militancy investigates how fear, self-righteousness, and moralism infiltrate and take root within liberation movements, what to do about them, and ultimately how tenderness and vulnerability can thrive alongside fierce militant commitment.
Carla Bergman co-edited Stay Solid: A Radical Handbook For Youth.
Nick Montgomery is an organizer and writer currently at Queen's…
I’m an emeritus professor living in Portland, Oregon, officially retired, but still writing articles and books. Although I am a lifelong US citizen, I spent the heart of my career as the Canada Research Chair of Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. Most of my books are about aspects of rationality, especially cognitive biases. I have also worked on tools for measuring individual differences in rationality. Lately, I have focused on ways to reduce political polarization by taming the myside bias that plagues all human thought, and by reforming institutions (especially universities) that are currently failing in their role as knowledge adjudicators.
Kronman is particularly good at describing the “tough” reasoning skills that underlie the thinking styles that have produced modern science and modern democracies. An example of these tough skills is what he calls the “ethic of depersonalization”: expressing arguments in a form available to all—a form not dependent on our emotions or personal experience. Identity politics, in contrast, gives weight to immutable demographic characteristics in ongoing political conversations. It thus reverses centuries of progress in the intellectual march toward open, ecumenical inquiry, where personal characteristics do not trump rational argument.
"I want to call it a cry of the heart, but it's more like a cry of the brain, a calm and erudite one." -Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal
The former dean of Yale Law School argues that the feverish egalitarianism gripping college campuses today is a threat to our democracy.
College education is under attack from all sides these days. Most of the handwringing-over free speech, safe zones, trigger warnings, and the babying of students-has focused on the excesses of political correctness. That may be true, but as Anthony Kronman shows, it's not the real problem.
I’m an emeritus professor living in Portland, Oregon, officially retired, but still writing articles and books. Although I am a lifelong US citizen, I spent the heart of my career as the Canada Research Chair of Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. Most of my books are about aspects of rationality, especially cognitive biases. I have also worked on tools for measuring individual differences in rationality. Lately, I have focused on ways to reduce political polarization by taming the myside bias that plagues all human thought, and by reforming institutions (especially universities) that are currently failing in their role as knowledge adjudicators.
Lilla’s goal in this book is to show how identity politics threatens the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party. He argues that the party has thrown citizenship—the “we” in political conversation—out the window in favor of “personal identities in terms of the inner homunculus, a unique little thing composed of parts tinted by race, sex, and gender,” and that this will be electorally disastrous for the Democrats. But Lilla’s arguments show that it is disastrous for our national conversation as well. When we give personal identity weight in an argument (Lilla is superb at eviscerating the shopworn phrase “speaking as an X”) we turn the intellectual clock back to premodern times when arguments were settled by power and force.
From one of the most internationally admired political thinkers, a controversial polemic on the failures of identity politics and what comes next for the left — in America and beyond.
Following the shocking results of the US election of 2016, public intellectuals across the globe offered theories and explanations, but few were met with such vitriol, panic, and debate as Mark Lilla’s. The Once and Future Liberal is a passionate plea to liberals to turn from the divisive politics of identity and develop a vision of the future that can persuade all citizens that they share a common destiny.
I’m an emeritus professor living in Portland, Oregon, officially retired, but still writing articles and books. Although I am a lifelong US citizen, I spent the heart of my career as the Canada Research Chair of Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. Most of my books are about aspects of rationality, especially cognitive biases. I have also worked on tools for measuring individual differences in rationality. Lately, I have focused on ways to reduce political polarization by taming the myside bias that plagues all human thought, and by reforming institutions (especially universities) that are currently failing in their role as knowledge adjudicators.
Ellis chronicles the history of how the university turned from an institution of open inquiry into a political monoculture that requires those in it to adhere to a particular ideology. Ellis is particularly good at showing how the strengths of the traditional university were turned into weaknesses and allowed it to be captured by the adherents of identity politics. Old-style independent scholars are hard to organize, Ellis points out, because they are just that—independent. But these truly independent scholars were no match for the politically organized groups that wanted to use the university to advance a political agenda.
A series of near-riots on campuses aimed at silencing guest speakers has exposed the fact that our universities are no longer devoted to the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth. But this hostility to free speech is only a symptom of a deeper problem, writes John Ellis.
Having watched the deterioration of academia up close for the past fifty years, Ellis locates the core of the problem in a change in the composition of the faculty during this time, from mildly left-leaning to almost exclusively leftist. He explains how astonishing historical luck led to the success of a…
