Books you have to read to avoid being a dumb American
Desmond – Poverty, By America
Fromm – The Sane Society & Escape from Freedom
Chomsky – What Uncle Sam Really Wants & Understanding Power
Veblen – The Theory of the Leisure Class
Palast – Armed Madhouse
Zinn – People’s History of the United States
Wallis – God’s Politics
Bakan – The Corporation
Hartmann – Unequal Protection
Loewens – Lies My Teacher Told Me
Blum – Killing Hope: US Military/CIA Interventions Since WWII
Gatto – Underground History of American Education
Marcuse – One-Dimensional Man & Essay on Liberation
Shay – Odysseus in America & Achilles in Vietnam
Mounk – The People versus Democracy
Rorty – Achieving our Country
Books that made me a better human being
Epictetus – Enchiridion
Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning
Goleman – Social Intelligence
Holloway – Godless Morality
Cain – Quiet
Clarke – Dear Life
Tutu – No Future without Forgiveness
Erich Fromm – Art of Loving
Block & Drucker – Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust
Milgram – Obedience to Authority
Quinn – Ishmael
Dostoevsky – Brothers Karamazov & Notes from Underground
The Bible
Pascal – Pensees
Tolstoy – Confession & Family Happiness
Kierkegaard – Practice in Christianity, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, & Fear and Trembling
Kropotkin – Essays on Anarchism
Proudhon – What is Property?
Marx – “Alienated Labor”
Grossman – On Killing
Nerdy books that you will actually really enjoy
Kierkegaard – Fear & Trembling
Dostoevsky – Brother Karamazov
Dostoevsky – Notes from Underground
Gaarder – Sophie’s World
John D. Caputo – Against Ethics
Tolstoy – Resurrection
Tolstoy – Death of Ivan Illytch
Miller – Death of a Salesman
Plato – Republic
Pascal – Pensees
Sartre – “No Exit”
Camus – The Plague
Camus – The Fall
Augustine – Confession & City of God
Turgenev – Fathers & Sons
Chekhov – Uncle Vanya
Levi – Survival in Auschwitz
Dennett – Consciousness Explained
Ramachandran - Phantoms of the Brain
Trumbo – Johnny Got His Gun
Flaubert – Madame Bovary
Wolfe – Man in Full
Griffin – Black Like Me
More – Utopia
Orwell – 1984
Perkins Gilman – Herland
Pollan – Omnivore’s Dilemma & In Defense of Food
Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow
Bryson – At Home
Pinker – Blank Slate
Haidt – Righteous Mind
McRaney – You are not so smart
Levitt & Dubner – Freakonomics
Rosling – Factfulness
Piketty – A Brief History of Equality
Books that should be required reading for nerds (like me)
Plato – Republic
Plato – Apology & Euthyphro
Kant – Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals
Caputo – Against Ethics
Rousseau – Origin of Inequality
Smith – Theory of Moral Sentiments
MacIntyre – After Virtue
Rorty – Contingency, Irony, & Solidarity
Taylor – Sources of the Self
Marx – “Alienation” in 1844 Manuscripts
Nietzsche – Beyond Good & Evil
Heidegger – Being & Time (Macquarrie translation)
Sartre – Existentialism is a Humanism
Sartre – “The Look” & “Bad Faith” from Being & Nothingness
Camus – Myth of Sisyphus
Milgram – Obedience to Authority
Foucault – Discipline & Punish
Aristotle – Nicomachean Ethics
Descartes – Meditations on First Philosophy
Erickson – Christian Theology
Kierkegaard – Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Arendt – Eichmann in Jerusalem
Kuhn – Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Lao Tzu – Tao te Ching
Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations
Sextus Empiricus – Outlines of Pyrrhonism
Dawkins – The Selfish Gene
Galbraith – The Affluent Society
Graeber – Debt: The First 5,000 Years & The Dawn of Everything
Chomsky – Government in the Future (here’s an excerpt)
Fun Non-Fiction and Science
Zukav – Dancing Wu Li Masters: Overview of the New Physics
Sacks – The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
Ramachandran - Phantoms in the Brain
Yong – I Contain Multitudes and An Immense World
Zimmer – She has Her Mother’s Laugh: Heredity
Hewitt – Conceptual Physics
Bryson – Short History of Nearly Everything & At Home
Kean – The Disappearing Spoon
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Fiction books that I have to admit I loved
Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five, Mother Night, & Cat’s Cradle
Palahniuk – Fight Club & Survivor
Heinlin – Starship Troopers
Bradbury – Martian Chronicles & Fahrenheit 451
Stephenson – Snow Crash
McCarthy – The Road
Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible
Moore – Lamb
Robbins – Skinny Legs and All
Card – Ender’s Game
Lowry – The Giver
Barry – Jennifer Government
Huxley – Brave New World
Gibson – Neuromancer
Rowling – Harry Potter
Lewis – Screwtape Letters
Kreeft – Between Heaven & Hell
Brown – Red Rising
Weir - Project Hail Mary
Important movies that everyone should see
American Beauty
Schindler’s List
The Corporation
Fight Club
Why We Fight
Experimenter
Sick Around the World
Sicko
Bowling for Columbine
Manufacturing Consent
The Last Days
Life is Beautiful
Ghosts of Rwanda
About Schmidt
Six Degrees of Separation
The Yes Men
To End All Wars
Remains of the Day
The Insider
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Bonhoeffer
Life + Debt
One True Thing
My Dinner with Andre
You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train
Stand and Deliver
Cry Freedom
The Barbarian Invasions
JFK
Milgram's Obedience
Unimportant movies that are really good
Spitfire Grill
Friday
Chasing Amy
Annie Hall
Good Will Hunting
Grand Canyon
Monsters Inc.
Shallow Hal
Soul Food
Cinema Paradiso
Wings of the Dove
Sling Blade
The Matrix
Unbreakable
Man on Fire
Radio
Swingers
The Family Man
Love Actually
One Fine Day
When a Man Loves a Woman
Crazy, Stupid, Love