Following on my list of top ten fiction books below, something easy for Super Bowl Sunday, lost in the shuffle. Like my fiction list, this is in no analytical order. Some are footnoted research tomes, some are long riffs on a subject, all are good, of course.
1. Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago (Royko)
2. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War (Hummel)
3. UFOs and The National Security State: Vol. 1 (Dolan)
4. Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Voegelin)
5. On Nature and Language (Chomsky)
6. Ideas Have Consequences (Weaver)
7. Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955-1965 (Rosenthal)
8. Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (Ruppert)
9. The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (Parenti)
10. Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln)
10. Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America (Karp)
11. A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Engdahl)
This one also had to go to 11! I am ashamed at forgetting Karp’s seminal work. Holy Blood, Holy Grail is adventuresome good, but Karp is more important. Much more. In fact, his book changed my political outlook like none other.
Currently I’m in the midst of Steve Sailer’s titular pun on Harry Potter, America’s Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s “Story of Race and Inheritance” — a provocative and insightful blend of appreciation of Obama’s literary gifts and skepticism about his political program. While I do not agree with many of his judgments, it is stimulating to read, as nonfiction should be, however opinionated. If we only read what we agree with, then we’ll never get very far, as trite as that sounds.
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