The most recommended books on postmodernism

I love this book because Albert Borgmann shows that focal practices are at the core of any good life today.

Consider the end-of-day, carefully prepared family meal: the parents and children together showing gratitude, reviewing the day, arguing over bits, and resolving those arguments. Such moments do not always work.

When they do, they give each participant a sharp identity. There’s no place the participants would rather be, no others they would prefer to be with, and nothing they would rather do. When it works really well, participants sense they will remember it forever. These moments are heaven on earth.

We can make huddles and resource trading meetings play the same role in business. Borgmann writes of the woes of technology first; the focal practice solution comes at the end. 

This is my own favourite. Realising that he could not make up his mind whether he loved Robespierre or hated him, Hampson staged his own dilemma by presenting Robespierre’s life through an imagined set of conversations between a version of himself and three fictional members of the public. Witty and insightful and superbly researched below the water-line, this brilliantly experimental biography is a neglected masterpiece.

While the West was busy with postmodernism, the Soviet world cultivated social realism based on the 19th-century figurative tradition of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. East Germany was no exception with its own figurative tradition at Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. Gottfried Bammes was a professor of art there, and he further developed classical anatomy studies by introducing a more scientific approach. Illustrations in Der Nackte Mensch are precisely measured and reliable, and each of them introduces a new way to look at human anatomy. Concepts such as wire-framing and splitting organic form into geometric shapes appear here. This book is full of ideas, and it has been a huge influence on how I perceive human anatomy. Gottfried Bammes is, in my opinion, the greatest anatomist of the 20th century!

This book is an amazing combination of the philosophy of art, the philosophy of art history, and art criticism. The late Arthur Danto was not only a distinguished philosopher but also an award-winning art critic. In this book, Danto tracks the decline and fall of Modernism (which he describes as “the end of art”) and the advent of our present artistic moment which can be critically characterized as an era of post-historical pluralism. Danto, following GFW Hegel, proposes a partial definition of the artwork as an embodied meaning – thereby addressing the challenge to say what art is -- as it was posed by Clive Bell.

This is a big sprawling story. Do you love books like that or hate them? I love them because they feel like giant puzzles: you kind of lose yourself in them and enjoy the constant twists and turns. DeLillo is a postmodern master so you can trust that he has it all under control. In this book, Billy, a teen mathematician prodigy, wins the Nobel Prize in Mathematics and is spirited away to help decipher a mysterious message from aliens. It’s been compared to Alice in Wonderland for its down-the-rabbit-hole and through-the-looking-glass aspects of plot twists and characters. What makes this satire accessible, however, is the comedy. Billy is us, the readers, and he takes us on a philosophical journey while being surrounded by the strangest of characters.

A sweeping study and critique of modern culture! If you are looking for a comprehensive and passionate analysis of time and space in the “late capitalist era,” this is the one to read. Nobody has written more authoritatively on modern and post-modern “time-space compression” (you have to read the book to see what this means). Harvey’s intellectual breadth and depth are astonishing. No wonder he is one of the most cited scholars of our time.

Eugene Borowitz was the leading liberal Jewish theologian of the 20th and early 21st century. Although this book may be challenging for those disinclined to read dense theology, it is presented in a more popular way and contains a theology that has informed the lives of many Jews, including myself. 

First, this book provides a wonderful history of the important discoveries of the different aspects of the disease. You also learn the stories behind many aspects of the disease that are now taken for granted—even with our 25+ years of treating people with this disease and conducting research to understand it better, we learned a lot. Dr. Karlawish also explains why research into dementia languished for more than 50 years. Finally, he raises many thought-provoking ethical issues that people with dementia, doctors, and society will need to wrestle with if we are going to solve “The Problem of Alzheimer’s.” 

It may be pure fiction, but Harington’s saga of the remote community of Stay More (home, of course, to the Stay Morons) is still the best, most entertaining history of the Ozarks in existence. Beneath the postmodern devices and 1970s-era subversiveness, Harington’s abiding love for the Ozarks and its people shines through. From the backcountry dialect to the intricacies of a century and a half of regional history, it remains – for my money – the best thing ever written about the Ozarks.

Narrative Therapy (of which this book is the founding text) traces its roots back to the French philosopher Michel Foucault and postmodern philosophy. Not that anyone can agree on a definition of postmodernism. Invoking Foucault’s critique of power, narrative therapy sees the DSM-5 (the standard list of mental illness that is akin to the Bible in psychiatry) as grounded not in objective truth but as a mostly fabricated list of pseudo-diseases a profession has conjured up in order to assure it is well-paid. Narrative therapy works not on attempting to change any objective condition the client may inhabit but to motivate the patient to change his subjective view of his condition.