Books I've Recommended

Long & Short Reviews asks reviewers which books we've recommended and why. Hello? That's what this web site does, pretty much. I recommend that everybody read books. For details about which books for whom, see the whole blog.

But can I recommend a sort of background reading list for the blog, for those who came in late and want to know which books have influenced the way I think, talk, and use words? Can I do a reasonably wordy Top Ten List?

Why not? In fact, how not?

1. The Bible, King James' Authorized Version

If you want to write in English, lack of familiarity with this Book of Books is a handicap. If you want to understand the way I write and think, it helps to begin with documents that presuppose that your mental health is normal, your self-serving bias is strong, and most of the time your ego needs deflation more than boosting. And I respect people's right to be what they are; I respect all sincere beliefs and both read and recommend some books from other faith traditions, and this web site is not usually about specific religious doctrines, but this web site is Christian.

2. The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell

The more education we've had, the more we've heard about helping and serving Humanity. Well, some of what we've heard was actually inspired by a neurotic Frenchman who didn't have the personality to start a personality cult but spent his adult life writing the sacred scriptures for one he hoped someone else would found. And, in a roundabout and thankless way, a critical number of the world's educators actually did. (See The Hate Factory by Erica Carle. Auguste Comte was so far from being a charismatic cult leader that studying his life and writing is actually a good way to debunk the Secular Humanist influence we've all had.) Universities don't usually say they're dedicated to the teaching and practice of Secular Humanism as a religion, but they do quite a good job of teaching us that everything has to be written for a Secular Humanist audience. Anyway, whether we think of "Humanity" as the "real" God or good, or as a part of God's Creation toward which we as humans are most likely to be able to practice the discipline of Love, most of us need to be challenged to think about whether we can really help other people by indulging in a belief that we can know what they need, or can meet their needs in any other way better than by stepping aside and letting them meet their needs themselves. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries other writers raised this challenge. Sowell said it best.

3. The Hillary Trap by Laura Ingraham

This analysis of where the twentieth century's left-wing feminism went wrong really deserved to have been written and packaged as more than an election-year book. Then again, while people are still kicking around Hillary Clinton's calling her political opponents "handmaidens"...Feminism is the belief that women are at least equally as valuable as men. In a world where most of the jobs people did called for male-type muscle, this belief was debatable. In our world, where nearly all the jobs that called for muscle are now done by machinery, it's not. We are all feminists; only a few of us bother to resent it. There is, however, no reason why our feminism needs to resemble Gloria Steinem's or Bella Abzug's or...Hillary Clinton's. In fact Mrs. Clinton's life is a good argument that we should rethink what they thought on at least the ten points raised in this book. There may be some point-scoring, some younger-sisters-gleefully-point-out-older-sister's-bad-examples feeling in this book, but I find it possible to read the book with empathy toward Mrs. Clinton.

4. What Are People For by Wendell Berry

In some ways this late-in-career book summarized the author's previous books, of which I'd recommend reading all that you can find. (They were bold and independent enough that they're not easy to find.) He wrote, often in specific and technical articles for Organic Gardening & Farming and Mother Earth News, about the benefit of living in a Green traditional way on ancestral land. He's been accused of being "patriarchal," but surprise...nobody minds when older people manage to be patriarchs, or matriarchs. Problems arise only when societies try to operate as if all families had been blessed with a patriarch or a matriarch, when in reality many are not. So in my part of the world, if you don't have a grandfather who can help with questions about and beyond how to cultivate your garden, you can borrow Wendell Berry. We've been blessed.

5. No More Wacos by David Kopel and Paul Blackman

For Americans who were conscious in the 1990s, the Waco and Ruby Ridge disasters, in which armed federal agents wrongfully killed innocent citizens, were a turning point. Many of us had accepted the rhetoric of what Sowell called "the anointed" about how a bigger government could help rather than harm people. In 1995 we saw the error in that line of thought: Human government must be made up of human beings who may be just as bad as the human beings from whom it's claimed that others need protection. This book summarizes those stories and several other true stories of government abuses, and outlines methods for constructive activism to add helpful checks and balances on unelected bureaucrats. (In the long run, I think Elon Musk may come to agree that he would have done more good in the US government by reading this book.)

6. How Children Learn by John Holt

He wrote a half-dozen more books on this topic, and a wonderful series of newsletters reflecting his ongoing pen friendships with actual children. (I was just a little too old to be one; my brother was one of those children.) Basically he argues that learning takes place in the moments when children are interested in something and are free to explore it in their own ways. Adults can and should stimulate children's interests in a wider variety of things than most do, not by pushing them through assembly-line-style courses, but just by hanging out and doing things with children and, when appropriate, showing the children how adults reach specific goals. Without some guidance children might never "discover" the alphabet or the multiplication table, but guidance is often more, not less, efficient when it takes the form of "I want to accomplish --. How am I going to do it?" rather than "Sit still, don't look out the window, and pay attention while I repeat what put your mind to sleep last week." I think all children who ever met John Holt liked him.

7. Pain Erasure by Bonnie Prudden

Most of us don't need "pain medication." We need what might be called "pain management skills." I use and recommend a whole library of books on this topic; my own pain management skills include breath control and stretching more than trigger-point massage. However, when I was gaining life experience in the factories near my home town, I saw a lot of laborers liberate themselves from repetitive stress injuries with the help of this first book on trigger-point massage. I've used these techniques on myself. I've used them on other people. They work. I've not used them, myself, to restore sight to the blind (actually it's more often a matter of getting eye test scores above the required level to do a job, or drive, or just restoring the person's ability to enjoy reading) but I know they can restore some sight to some people whose vision loss may reach a level called "blind." I have used the techniques to restore hearing to people with serious hearing loss, and to restore the use of arms and legs to people with disabling injuries.

8. Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss

In the history of naturopathic medicine, several of the biggest names appear in a single story. Sylvester Graham, an unhappy fellow, preached that young people could avoid the many horrible diseases that started with thinking about sex and (horrors!) masturbation by eating whole grains and regularizing their digestion. The reasoning behind this idiocy was that tuberculosis had reached North America, and at a certain stage of that disease some people were apparently obsessed with sex. Their care givers didn't want to inflame anything by saying it in so many words, but that's what can easily be read "between the lines." A lot of people hated Dr. Graham, though. 

Anyway, in the 1840s little Ellen Harmon, the miracle child who had apparently recovered from tuberculosis through a series of dramatic healing visions, endorsed what Graham said. Ellen and the man she married when she grew up, James White, inspired doctors from their Bible study group, notably the Kellogg brothers and Charles Post, to build "sanatoria" for people who had or thought they had tuberculosis. These were a sort of combination of primitive hospitals and spas. Actually a lot of trial and error went on; genius though Ellen Harmon White was, her visions did not lead her directly to everything medical science would learn about the immune system over the next hundred and fifty years. Her visions and her doctor friends' experiments did. If she was divinely guided, and she may have been, she was guided to respect the principles of medical science. Most of their "successful" treatments of tuberculosis, and cancer, led to long remissions but they did learn how to cure cardiovascular disease and diabetes. 

Young Dr. Jethro Kloss came to the sanatorium movement late, about the time Ellen White died (old, in Australia). His own "chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder" was probably just some combination of susceptibility to "colds" and mold allergies, but such conditions made people more vulnerable to pulmonary tuberculosis. Anyway Kloss made a career of treating patients' immune systems, using all that the Whites, the Kelloggs, Post, and many other doctors had learned over their lifetimes, and he wrote down what he learned about diet, exercise, rest, meditation, herbs, massage, and hydrotherapy in this exhaustive reference book for home nurses. There is also a Back to Eden Cookbook, written mostly by the doctor's daughter, to feed into the publicity cycle for her father's book, but Back to Eden is not a cookbook. It's an encyclopedia.

(I should mention that, perhaps because envious people didn't want to believe that little Ellen's lungs had self-collapsed during her visions, later on a young German called Charlotte Selver was able to collapse her own lungs using a self-hypnosis technique she later taught in the US as "Sensory Awareness." Ellen White was born too early to have documentation that she'd had tuberculosis as distinct from, say, a long hard time with pneumonia. Selver was not. In the 1970s one of Selver's students, Marylou McKenna, wrote the delightful Serenity Book about Sensory Awareness. It's hard to find now; in the 1980s I used it during my long hard time with post-vaccine "chronic mononucleosis," and I'd recommend it if people could find it.)

9. The Last Word: On the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense by Suzette Haden Elgin

Not only are there people who don't understand why some people's conversation is so hard on their emotions. There are people who are hard on other people's emotions and don't know why--they just know that modelling their remarks on someone else's sounds "educated," perhaps as part of a regional accent, and has a devastating effect on the arguments, and the feelings, of their "opponents." I was one of those people when, around age twenty, I had the great good fortune to find this book in a public library. It explained exactly what some Marylanders hated about the kind of Maryland accent I'd let myself pick up at college, and how to fix that. Elgin acknowledged that some of the "She's so smart...that's why everyone hates her" routine is misogyny and/or other forms of bigotry, some is jealous envy, some may involve the "smart" person disturbing social hierarchies, but some of it is also a matter of simple rules of grammar that make those "nice knock-down arguments" into emotional abuse. In this book readers learn what makes some "unanswerable" utterances hurtful, and also learn to use the same rules of grammar to build arguments that are convincing but not so hurtful.

10. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron

I'm no expert on how to write great books in English. I can teach people how to write and say things that will be easily recognized as English. I've written a lot of things in English. Most of them didn't sell. Many of them are available at this web site, free of charge, where some may say that they're not doing a great deal to "sell" me as a writer and should probably be suppressed. This web site is finally getting more daily page views than my Associated Content collection did. Some days ten times more, some days a hundred times more! Hurrah! But it's not bringing in thousands of dollars to go with the thousands of page views and it may be being fed into plagiarism programs for computers in the non-English-speaking countries from which so many views come. So, yes, one thing to be learned from my experience, Gentle Readers, is: If you want to keep this web site available, feed it now. You can feed it suggestions for topics (which may include links to your business site) or private requests for research, proofreading, copy-editing, or co-writing, all of which are preferred to "donations," but you need to feed it something in the form of US postal money orders.

Anyway, another thing to be learned is that, twenty-some years ago, Cameron put together a beautiful inspiring collection of beautiful inspiring tips and quotes for "creative" thinkers of all kinds. Hers was not the first, nor will it be the last, but it is the one that best states the need not only for daily practice of our Art, but for daily long brisk solitary walks that feed our "creative" brains. (Actually, if you can do it, I find the most effective way to keep those solitary walks from becoming encounters with all the deservedly unpopular pests and bores in town is to do them with another person, or persons, who understand that the idea is to be silent together. Maintain a healthy distance, don't speak, try to arrange that the people you can see as part of Nature on the road are people with whom you either don't have relationships beyond silent walking or are so close that you can always talk to them later in the day. The next best way is to walk before daylight or in the rain.)