Academic bestsellers

Seeing Like a State is absolutely wonderful (and, incidentally, Brad DeLong’s review of the book is very, very good). I think Imagined Communities is another wonderful academic bestseller.

I’ll second _Imagined Communities_ and tip my hat to Hobsbawn and Ranger (Eds.) _The Invention of Tradition_, which is often hilarious.

My principal nomination would be Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. But here I’ll nominate:

Rayond Geuss’ The Idea of a Critical Theory (it doesn’t seem to have a single unnecessary word in it)

Hilary Putnam’s Reason, Truth and History

and Moore’s Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship.

Fred Hirsch’s Social Limits to Growth is more timely today than when it was written (30 years ago). It is more referred to than read, I’d guess. Changed my approach to political philosophy completely, and my approach to living substantially.

Although _Making of the English Working Class_ is one of my favorite books, I’m not sure about it’s readability. Certainly, Thompson is entertaining, but the last time I read it I remember thinking–“much of this book is about historiography. Would someone not already invested in these sorts of issues care?” Not sure what I would propose in it’s place, perhaps Hobsbawm’s _Age of Revolution_. I’ld like to second the Genovese and Lasch recommendations. Like Thompson, you can read books by these author’s ten times and still learn interesting stuff. It doesn’t even matter if you agree with their conclusions or their premises–it’s enough to witness a broad and rigorous mind at work. Maybe I just have a thing for crusty old marxists. (I would include Lewis Mumford in this category too).

I’d recommend Jo Wolff’s _Introduction to Political Philosophy_ and Ronald Dworkin’s _Life’s Dominion_. Both are very clearly written, well paced, and do excellent jobs of making difficult material clear. I’d recommend against including Putnam’s _Reason, Truth, and History_, even though I like it, since I think that most non-philosophers will find it very hard going (esp. the model-theoretic argument). Also, I don’t think that semantic anti-realism is really something that has much importance outside of philosophy.

Some more nominees (off the top of my head…there are actually a lot of books that fit into this category):

Just about anything by Richard Hofstadter (though my least favorite thing by him, his essay on the “paranoid style,” is probably what’s most often read).

Michael Rogin’s Ronald Reagan: the Movie

Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws

Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions

I’d nominate Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History. Especially for those Jared Diamond fans out there.

So many of my nominations are mentioned above; Thompson, Braudel, Wolf, Kuhn among others. My addition is David Fischer’s Albion’s Seed. If you want some historical insight into that red state, blue state divide, this is a good place to start.

Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions offers the best description of how science works- what Kuhn calls “normal” science. In this current faith-based era, Kuhn offers the humanties graduate insight into scientific practice, without taking all those nasty math and science courses.

“should find” and “have found” are different. Many of the books that *have* found this market are more likely to mislead than otherwise, either because they’re intellectually simplistic or quirky and unorthodox in ways that the general reader doesn’t recognize, or because they’re so easy to misunderstand and misuse (Kuhn, for one).

In the should-find-*and*-have-found category:

Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars– and, really, most of Walzer, as well as most of Galston and lots of Isaiah Berlin

Mancur Olson, Logic of Collective Action

Shklar, Ordinary Vices

Ernest Gellner, ‘most anything

Let me turn it around a bit and pick a book that became an academic best-seller, but after reading it I don’t think it deserved it: The Golden Bough by Fraser.

There was plenty of interesting stuff in there, but man was it dry. And repetitive. And repetitive. I think it took me 5 or 6 starts and stops before I finally plowed my way through the whole thing. At least, the whole of the abridged 1 volume version.

Academic historians are going to have to learn to write a whole lot better if they want popular success, otherwise their monographs will continue to fall soundlessly to the forest floor. Perhaps a way can be found to widen the number of people given assigned reading. The federal government is requiring that the Constitution be taught one day a year. Perhaps this is a model.

Funny you should mention this – the gap between academic and popular understanding of history is the underlying theme of the OU/BBC Radio 4 series ‘The Things We Forgot to Remember’, of which more here:
http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/
[Interest to declare – it’s my baby]

As for history books, I’d go for Hutton’s _The Restoration_, Edgerton’s _England and the Aeroplane_, Hobsbawm’s _Age of Extremes_, and a new entrant, Bickers’ _Empire Made Me_.

Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, by Bert States.

A really lovely book about phenomenology and the experience of watching plays.

David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed is OK, but sloppy in places. I would suggest, in American History:

Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party
Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale
John Pagan, Anne Orthwood’s Bastard

All three are “microhistories” that make historiographical points that academic historians will pick up on, but are written so that non-specialists can read them, absorb them, and enjoy them.

I would add a non-American history book to my list, David Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara.

_Actually, if you want to know how science is done, you should look at what scientists do, rather than what they say, because they often misdescribe their own methods (e.g., “I’m relying on Popper’s falsifiability”, when they’re doing no such thing)._

Very good point; I should have phrased my comment better.

I second Hacking, definitely a philosopher who both writes very well and says things of interest to a general educated readership. I enjoyed _The Social Construction of What?_

Uncle Kvetch: *Goffman*, of course Goffman. _The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life_ is wonderful – it was my holiday reading for a long weekend in Barcelona, and a fine fine choice.

Kuhn, I’ve only read from a scientist’s perspective on account of that being what I am/was/have been, but I liked it well enough.

And Hobsbawn is too a fine writer, but his _Age of …_ series is disqualified in having very clearly been written for a lay audience (as well).

Wonderful Wife endorses Goffman as well. I confess to being a bit more sympathetic to Lakatos than to Kuhn or Feyerabend, but I fully agree with des von bladet’s nomination of The Invention of Tradition.

Henry: this thread is fantastic. I’ve been beefing up my wish list. Speaking of social networks, it’s fun to see two people with whom I have a mere two degrees of separation appear on the list, one of them being my academic grandfather, the other being linked to me via two different people, one of them my father. That’s pretty cool, for someone who grew up in diminutive and invisible Third World country X.

A strong second for Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.

I’ve recommended this book far and wide. Also of interest, Harold Berman: Law & Revolution, Law & Revolution II
These books are THE History of Western Law. Beautifully researched, well written. A true treasure for any historian.

Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies Vols 1&2
Not enough can be said about these books.

W W Bartley: The Retreat to Commitment
If you’ve read any Kuhn, Lakatos, Tarski or Feyerabend, you aren’t finished until you’ve read Bartley. Bartley answers Popper’s unanswered questions.

Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation

A strong vote for anything by Peter Brown, starting with his wonderful Augustine of Hippo, followed by The Body and Society. As a writer, he is nigh-on invisible, perceptible mainly through the generosity of his vision.

Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini. It’s in its nth revision at this point, but it started out as the text book for a course on social psychology. The version I read had exercises and essay questions at the end of the chapter and was a gripping read.

None of these titles include metaphor, Postmodernity, Subculture or Style, so you can tell I’m a bit past it.

Barbara Tuchman, A Distant mirror and The March of Folly

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345349571/104-3819668-7817550?v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345308239/ref=pd_sim_b_4/104-3819668-7817550?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

Not truly academic works, though…?

Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood
http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/children/aries.html

…Examples of some “paradigm shifts” with regard to thinking about children.

Hmm, let’s see:

Niall Ferguson’s ‘The Pity of War’ about the Great War is very readable and has an interesting thesis: Britain shouldn’t have joined in, in doing so it made the Age of Catastrophe.

A. J. P. Talor’s ‘England, 1914 – 45’ is fantastic: funnny and penetrating.

Carlo Ginzberg, ‘The Cheese and the Worms’ is gripping both as a tale and a methodologically brilliant approach to pre-modern peasant consciousness.

I second the Carlo Ginzburg, the Clifford Geertz (The Interpretation of Cultures is priceless), the James Scott, the Hebdidge, the Auerbach (oh that astonishing chapter on Odysseus! One of the most impressive critical setpieces I’ve read, and through the wisdom of an undergrad mentor, one of the first. I was spoiled early by the best stuff). This thread is a treasure!

Maybe it’s cheating because he was my advisor, but Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers, his big early statement on science fiction fan culture, is both a rich synthesis of scholarly threads and a nonstop pleasure to read. Henry’s a real popularizer, and I think he always writes with as wide a readership in mind as possible, so Textual Poachers takes time to spell out at every step where his arguments are coming from – but it still makes what were, at the time (and still will be for the uninitiated), pretty radical claims about the richness of fan culture. The best recommendation I can give? Fans all over the place cite Henry and his book as necessary reading, and no scholar of fandom can write without it. (And for the record: he’s a jewel of a human being.)

There’s a book of articles from the first three issues of the journal Artificial Life journal, edited by Christopher Langton – the book’s just called Artificial Life: An Overview. The articles bring across a sense of excitement at the early stages of a field’s development, and though they’re scholarly articles there’s nothing too difficult for a bright layman in there.

Speaking of which, though: the best-written technical book in any field is Larry Wall’s ‘Camel Book’, Programming in Perl. The opening chapters are an object lesson in bringing across huge ideas with both style and seriousness. The back half is the standard Perl reference work. Even a non-programmer can gain a lot from the early matter, including a brief Perl tutorial.

And where’s the mention of Northrop Frye?

Second William Cronon’s _Nature’s Metropolis_, which really is a wonderful book (I preferred it to his first book), and in the history arena I’d add Robert Gross’s _The Minutemen and Their World_.

Interesting lists. I’ll put in another vote for Goffman’s “Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.” And I’ll also nominate Raymond Williams, “The Country and the City.” And Thomas Nagel’s “Mortal Questions,” at least the essay on moral luck and a few others. And A. O. Hirschman’s “The Passions and the Interests.”

Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death by F.W.H Myers is a perennial classic.

If you want Hilary Putnam in a more readable form, try his Pragmatism – wonderful book, shorter than RT&H and did I mention, wonderful?

I’ll support anything by AO Hirschman, and JK Galbraith too – there are many good novels that are not as enjoyable as anything Galbraith wrote.

Walzer is sometimes sloppy but always readable. In that vein, include Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish and the Intro to his History of Sexuality (yes, he disavowed it later in the series, but it’s really enjoyable nad thought-provoking, which are the criteria here, right?

And as mentioned in a thread a long time ago, Courtesans and Fishcakes can’t be beat.

Too much hard science stuff…

How about Edward Shorter’s history of the female body (gruesomely gripping), March Bloch’s The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (just plain fun), or Propp’s Analysis of Folk Tales (the answer to sooo many questions!).