Discovering New Worlds

Frederick Crews, 2017

While never a dedicated fan of psychoanalysis, I have often found Freud’s writings and Freudian ideas stimulating and useful. A visit to Freud’s home in Vienna led me to think of him in a more progressive and female-friendly way than I had previously. I am still awed by Freud’s literary and rhetorical skills and still marvel at the brilliance of the yarns he spun on so many subjects. But Crews’s biography is such a powerful, systematic, and detailed dissection of Freud’s life, his relationships with friends, associates, and women, and the bold-faced lying he did about his “experiments” and “research” that it radically changed my view of the man. More significantly, it also reduced the deference I have been accustomed to extending to claims made with scientistic language but without access to data or opportunities to evaluate the use of evidence. Particularly shocking and instructive are Crews’s demonstrations of the extent to which Freud’s acolytes used their control over access to his original manuscripts to hide inconvenient and embarrassing truths about his work and his methods.

Daniel C. Dennett, 2014

Dan Dennett, who passed away just recently, was not only a first-rate philosopher and a leading theorist and explicator of evolution but a scintillating writer as well. In this book, he makes an excellent case that evolution by natural selection is very probably the best idea in the history of humankind. The volume, which I have read multiple times, simply set my mind on fire. I can still remember an ecstatic epiphany I experienced reading his analysis of John Conway’s Game of Life. From metallurgy to linguistics to botany, biology, consciousness, computer science, and culture, Dennett lays the groundwork for the central and astonishingly creative role played by algorithmic processes in the worlds we inhabit and build. Although there is almost no trace of social science in this book, reading it sparked ideas about politics, constructivist identity theory, and agent-based computer simulation that opened me to whole new worlds of investigation and helped me develop virtual tools for testing social science propositions and making forecasts about large and complex political systems.

CuChullaine O'Reilly, 2001

The jacket blurb on this book reads, “You do not read ‘Khyber Knights’. You survive it.” This 600-page account is a true story of a ride on horseback in 1983 from northern Pakistan through the most remote areas of Afghanistan and back into Pakistan when war raged between the Soviet Union and Afghan fighters and Islamicized military rule was entrenching itself in Pakistan. From encounters with tribes living more or less the same way they did when visited by the soldiers of Alexander the Great to harrowing descriptions of life inside a Pakistani prison, this book brought me into fierce, beautiful, and terrifying worlds I never knew existed and would never have wanted to visit personally, but deepened my understanding of Afghanistan and Pakistan in ways I never could have achieved otherwise. Plus, I learned more than I ever knew one could about long-distance horseback riding. This is a book as wonderful as it is obscure.

Laurence Sterne, 2010

I had heard of this book as containing a crucial clue in an obscure episode of Perry Mason, but I never thought to read it until recently. I have read a few other eighteenth-century novels, but while reading (actually while listening to) this one, I kept shaking my head, bewildered that anything like this—so filled with irony, authorial self-deprecation, and Woody Allen-style digressive conversations with the reader, could have been written before the late twentieth century. There are parts of this book that are simply hilarious, others that are absurd and yet so familiar as to make me feel as at home in eighteenth-century England as in twenty-first-century America. Yes, this is a path-breaking “stream of consciousness” novel, but aside from its contribution to Joycean techniques of narration, it revealed a shared sense of humor that made me feel much closer to a remote historical setting than I had imagined possible. Plus, I learned much, much, much more about early modern techniques of siege warfare than I ever planned to know.

Olga Tokarczuk, 2023

The author is a Polish clinical psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2018. Set in Poland, Ukraine, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire in the mid-1700s, this epic historical novel offers an intimate, often graphic, detailed, and theologically sophisticated view of Jewish life, Jewish consciousness, and the struggles of Jews with the Gentile world, with themselves, and with a God that seems to have either died or is sending so many messages so often that interpreting them becomes either impossible or filled with ecstatic opportunities. Traumatized by the Khymelnytsky massacre of three hundred thousand Jews in the previous century, and scarred by the (apparent) failure of Shabbatai Zvi’s appearance as the Messiah soon afterward, the Jewish world is transfixed by the (historically valid) figure of Jacob Frank. He and his followers use the Zohar as inspiration for a radical break with traditional Jewish theology and law, plunging the Jewish world into turmoil. The Frankists’ inversion of Jewish values, especially toward Christianity and toward the role of women in Jewish life, scandalizes the “Talmudists.” Hurling blood libels at one another, the sectarian hatreds and furies of Jews against Jews are shocking and yet chillingly familiar. With Tokarczuk’s help I could inhabit centuries of Jewish life made survivable by beliefs in the imminent redemption of the world and the end of Jewish suffering it would bring.

Alexander Mikaberidze, 2020

The book argues and convincingly demonstrates that World War I and World War II are misnomers. The first war fought globally pitted England and its allies against Napoleonic France and its clients. For sixteen years at the beginning of the 19th century, from Egypt to Italy, Spain to Russia, Latin America to India, Persia to North America, and all across Europe, the armies and navies of Britain and France threw everything they had at one another. Instead of focusing on the persona of Napoleon or limiting his treatment to the European theatre of these wars, Mikaberidze shows us that the entire planet was the real arena of this struggle. His work deepened enormously my understanding of geopolitics and the origins of what we traditionally take to be the modern world.