The most recommended intellectual books

Biography is perhaps my favorite genre because, at their best, biographies show us how people are both made by history and make history themselves.

This book is amongst the best political biographies I’ve ever read as it gives a passionate but also fair and critical account of one of the best-known revolutionaries of the 20th century, Frantz Fanon. 

It is a book both about ideas and the humans behind them and is serious on both counts. Whether it’s deep in explaining Fanon’s turn away from orthodox Marxism or his continued attachment to Caribbean poetry, or when simply painting a picture of an afternoon in Tunis when Fanon interacted with his many friends and colleagues, it is a lively read that was hard for me to put down. 

An expert in French fascism, Kaplan meticulously documents the career and the fate of the anti-Semitic, collaborationist novelist and journalist, Robert Brasillach. He was one of the few prominent intellectuals executed after the Liberation in France. His trial in late 1944 and execution in February 1945 put on the public stage the drama the country had just experienced: the Occupation, collaboration with the Nazis, the Resistance. As Kaplan presents it, Brasillach’s eloquent defense lawyer, the equally eloquent prosecutor, and Brasillach himself articulated the collision of visions of what it meant to be French and what it meant to be a patriot (or a traitor), arguments that still agitate France today. 

In this book, literary theorist Gary Saul Morson describes the competing ways in which Russian ideologues and novelists answered the “timeless questions” about human nature, fate, and politics. Morson’s analysis clearly shows that novelists and poets allow for much more complexity and nuance in their worldviews than ideologues. The famous Russian writers, in other words, appear to excel in the type of open-minded thinking that I argue is conducive to liberal democratic values.

By reading Morson’s book, one sees clearly the importance of Russia’s literary traditions and how their works inform an open-minded outlook on the timeless questions of human existence.

Helen Hamilton Gardener secured crucial support from leading politicians in Washington, DC for the 19th Amendment’s ratification. Despite her significance, few know the story of her exciting and controversial life. Fortunately, Kimberly Hamlin tells Gardener’s dramatic story in her book Free Thinker. Born Alice Chenoweth in 1853, she had to leave her job as a teacher in Ohio after an affair with a married school commissioner in 1876. She adopted the name Helen Hamilton Gardener and a range of modern ideas: women’s rights, opposition to the sexual double standard, and freethought. Gardener eventually became the highest-ranking female official in the federal government by the time of her death in 1925. Free Thinker provides a fascinating glimpse into the behind-the-scenes politics that led to the 19th Amendment’s ratification.

Mike Jay is the best writer I know of when it comes to highlighting the human stories behind the history of drugs. He is also fabulously engaging and original.

Jay’s most recent book is a compelling history of self-experimentation with drugs, which ranges from Romantic-era opium eaters like Thomas de Quincey to pioneer neuroscientists and Siberian shamans—and, of course, the hilariously weird nitrous oxide experiments of William James, who graces the book’s cover. 

Despite a keen interest in Paris, its history and arts, reading straight history books isn’t my thing.

I prefer to learn by reading narrative nonfiction that draws on historical events as does McCullough’s. He focuses on the period in Paris (1830-1900) when the City of Light was the center of culture, the time when American artists, doctors, writers, musicians, and politicians among others ventured across the Atlantic to gain inspiration and knowledge from living in Paris.

McCullough highlights stories of the famous such as Mary Cassatt, Samuel Morse, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as lesser-known folks, interweaving their lives with historical events. One surprise was how American physicians benefited greatly from their Parisian colleagues. Other remarkable accounts await you.

Reading Hofstadter’s essays can be an eerie experience. Yes, he was writing in the early 1960s, and often about historical phenomena (although the recent antics and influence of Senator McCarthy were clearly at the front of his mind). But many of his observations about status anxiety and conspiracy theories feel spookily relevant today. With typical eloquence, Hofstadter wrote that McCarthy was buoyed by Americans who were revolting against the “tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament”; I saw something similar in fascist sympathizers in the interwar years. This edition contains both of Hofstadter’s famous essays on “anti-intellectualism” and “the paranoid style,” along with fifteen other essays. 

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.”

This book is an account of the life of Samuel Johnson, author of the first dictionary in English and a man of enormous talent and learning—and also a man of devastatingly quick wit.

Perhaps his story can be recounted in terms of just a few of these vignettes and quips from the book.  

Johnson was a sophisticated denizen of his beloved London; James Boswell, a Scotsman who tells his story— obviously, himself a man of letters, was a friend, devotee, and admirer of Johnson's, whom he took several times to visit Boswell's beloved Scotland. Johnson: "The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!"

Johnson on sailing vessels: "Being on a ship is [like] being in a jail—with a [greater] chance of being drowned." 

And he could laugh at himself. Johnson: The definition in his dictionary of the word lexicographer: "A writer… show more.

Thomas Sowell is the most important and famous intellectual most people have never heard of.

In an age of disinformation and distrust of authority, he cuts through all the haze, the fake experts, and gives you hope that humanity might actually be able to get to the truth, eventually.

This book brilliantly shows you how “great minds” have gone wrong on almost every topic (law, economy, public policy, race, etc.) because they are too committed to their political programs and self-glory rather than the truth. You will never listen to another talking head or self-confident academic quite the same way after reading Thomas Sowell.