Dear L.,
Here is a list of some books I’ve read in the past few years. Given my pretty rigid leftist mindset, Simone Weil’s maxim was often on my mind in reading the following… “Method of investigation— as soon as one has arrived at any position, try to find in what sense the contrary is true.”
That this has been going on for a while is evident at my web site, when I had a few posts on “Problematizing My Faves”: For example, I had read many of Allen Ginsberg’s books … and eventually read Podhoretz’s memoir.
So, I’ve tried to be more in line, reading-wise, with Nhat Hanh’s precept (and not just pay lip service to it)— Do not think that the knowledge that you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice nonattachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.
There’s a big world out there!!!
Cheers!
Mark
Wilfred Reilly, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula
Wilfred Reilly, Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About
Victor Davis Hanson, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
Douglas Murray, Islamophilia
Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
Oriana Fallaci, Interviews with History and Conversations with Power
Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride
Brendan O’Neill, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation
Bernard-Henri Lévy, Israel Alone
Bernard-Henri Lévy, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
Thomas Sowell, Social Justice Fallacies
Jason L. Riley, Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell
Martin Peretz, The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center
Nellie Bowles, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History
Yasmine Mohammed Unveiled: How the West Empowers Radical Muslims
Liel Leibovitz, A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen
Liel Leibovitz, Zionism: The Tablet Guide
Joseph Berger, Elie Wiesel: Confronting the Silence
Matti Friedman, Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai
Amos Oz, What Makes an Apple?: Six Conversations about Writing, Love, Guilt, and Other Pleasures
Robert Alter, Amos Oz: Writer, Activist, Icon
David Mamet, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred, and the Jews
Steven T. Katz, Elie Wiesel: Jewish, Literary, and Moral Perspectives
Richard. L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism
Peter Cole, Hebrew Writers on Writing The Anti-Chomsky Reader
Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Anti-Chomsky Reader
Ruth R. Wisse, If I Am Not For Myself…: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jew
Ruth R. Wisse, Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation
Ruth R. Wisse, Jews and Power
Celia Farber, Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS
Tucker Carlson, The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism
Liz Collin, They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd
Truong Nhu Tang, A Viet Cong Memoir
Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters
Ayaan Hirsi Ali , Infidel
Bari Weiss, How to Fight Anti-Semitism
Melanie Phillips, Guardian Angel: My Journey from Leftism to Sanity
Deborah Soh, The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society
Hillel Halkin, Letters to an American Jewish friend: A Zionist’s polemic
Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsburg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer
Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy
Nancy Sinkoff, From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History
Susie Linfield, The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky
John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America
