I’ll go with the low-hanging fruit: Mein Kampf. I’ve read it, cover to cover. As a piece of propaganda, it’s good. As an example of good writing? Absolutely not (though I will admit I have only read it in translation). Oh, and the whole fascist, racist, and generally shitty worldview of the author that he infuses into the text. And the fact that the author is literally Hitler. You 5-star that book? You’re a Nazi. Period. And as a Jewish person, I don’t look too kindly on them.
The Bell Curve
As long as my date can read, they are better than most of my exes 🤷🏻♀️
Anything by Ayn Rand
The Bible. I’m an atheist and if they’re that into their religion, it wouldn’t work.
First books that come to mind for me are 48 Laws of Power and Atlas Shrugged.
I always find it amusing that people think The 48 Laws of Power is an instruction manual. I’ve read that book several times, and I never once got that impression. The book is amoral, it doesn’t take a stand for or against anything. Most of what people find objectionable about the book, they find objectionable in actual people who have used these tactics to do terrible things. Which definitely has happened, for thousands of years, long before that book came into existence.
Not sure if we read the same book. I opened it up again just now to confirm, a lot of it is written as “You must…” and like in seconds you can find quotes to confirm: “To this end you must learn to wear many masks and keep a bag full of deceptive tricks.”
How is that not an instruction? And even so, at the very least it‘s a worldview. One people are using without reading the book, sure.
However, as someone who prefers honesty in a partner, the book also instructs readers look at that in this view of playing honesty games too and frankly, it‘s made me a bit paranoid of everyone and even myself.
I prefer not to date with people who see the world and all relationships this way and revealing you read it multiple times or gave 5 star would be a red flag to me for this reason.
What you’ve quoted is only an instruction manual if you take it literally. And the world is far too complicated a place for everything to be taken literally. We still have agency over what we do with the information we take in.
I remember reading this book on a plane years ago and the person next to me had the same misgivings as you. You’re reading about power? So that must mean you want more power? Why would you want more power? Who do you want power over? Etc.
It never occurred to this person that perhaps other people have had power over me, I got taken advantage of, and I wanted to understand how that happened. It’s not paranoia to want to understand how humans are wired a little bit better.
Ok, I know I won‘t get through to you since you‘re such a fan, but for anyone else who might end up reading this exchange I‘ll just go ahead and quote one of these laws. As an example of word choices. They can make up their own mind if the words in question literally sound like an instruction or not:
LEARN TO KEEP PEOPLE DEPENDENT ON YOU
To maintain your independence you must always be needed and wanted. The more you are relied on, the more freedom you have. Make people depend on you for their happiness and prosperity and you have nothing to fear. Never teach them enough so that they can do without you.
It’s not what they literally sound like, it’s whether you as the reader take them literally or not. The day you start thinking for yourself and stop relying on everything to be soon fed to you, you’ll start seeing things like this book much differently.
If you can‘t take the words as they are, the author failed to convey their meaning. All you are doing now is asserting that anyone with a different take on it than you is “not thinking for themselves”, which is condescending. I‘m not interested in saying anything more to you.
You don’t realize it yet, but we agree more than we don’t. I said it’s not an instruction manual, but it can be, if your intention is to have more power over other people. Decent people don’t find a lot of inspiration in these laws. But they can still ring true, because the world is a very imperfect place and people with pathological personalities exist.
There’s a reason Lord Acton said “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Power is a nasty business, and if you’re not knowledgable about its machinations, you can fall victim to it. But power can mean many things, including the power to do good, or even to stop other people from having power over you.
Probably David Irving’s book about how the holocaust never happened.
Yeah I left it unrated when I read it for class, same kinda vibe as lolita etc where I’d rather just not put that opinion out there for misinterpretation
Uh, Lolita’s thesis is that molesting children is bad. Not sure how that’s controversial unless you just never read the book and assumed something else.
you dont really get it, the average person who sees me give lolita 5 stars on goodreads doesnt know anything beyond “oh its that one pedo book” thats the issue
Ohh, I get what you mean now. I think that’s on them tbh but I do get the “hope they don’t misinterpret this” vibe lol. You’re right. I just gave it 5 stars though if you’re on Goodreads and don’t wanna bother finding out about Lolita then I don’t care about your opinion anyway.
Ah i just diodnt bother rating irving because it was genuinely SO intersting as a historical document, it was assigned for us to get used to writing evidential history and so id probably rate it higher out of the value I got out of the book but im not giving a horrible ahistorical mess 3-4 stars so I just left it blank
Yeah Mein Kampf is only 3 stars at best
Having read most of it, even if you leave the politics aside, Mein Kampf is a bad book. Hitler should have stuck with painting.
Marx was a much better political writer. At least his dry political treatises are interesting.
Thing was Hitler didn’t even write Mein Kampf. Each chapter is comprised of rants he gave while in his prison cell to his deputy Rudolf Hess who was also incarcerated. Hess would sit with a typewriter and note down while Hitler walked around giving his usual unhinged rants. It then took around twelve drafts to be able to get the book from incomprehensible gibberish to something readable.
I was always told- and always read- in history classes that Hitler was “charismatic and persuasive” and that’s one of the ways he rallied so many people to his cause. Was that an exaggeration or one of those “you had to be there” type things?
Sort of. He had a dramatic way of speaking that drew you in. People would be enrapt in the rage and passion with which he spoke, and eventually he got enough airtime that people started to believe the crazy he was talking. The main thing with Hitler is you have to realise Germany was in turmoil for nearly a decade prior to his election. Multiple elections happened over the space of a couple years because no leader could get the country out of the economic rut it was in as a hangover from WWI and then the reparations demanded by other countries impacted by Germany in WWI. Some governments by the end were lasting maybe 6 months tops, failing at the post then being turfed out because the country was at a standstill. With the Great Depression being felt as well probably hardest in Germany, many were out on the street, unemployed, or straight up pissed at how the country was being run. And in this climate of uncertainty, crisis, and mismanagement Hitler was given the vacuum to rise off of his ‘inspiring’ political speeches that were more channeling people’s rage than anything else. He was a leader who seemed to speak for everyone’s anger. And in his speeches he gave people clear targets to direct their hatred where other political leaders were more reserved – Hitler would go “you are in this mess because The Jews took all your money” or “economically this country is in the dumpster because of the Treaty of Versailles (the reparations to countries). I will rip up that treaty first thing I do.” and a sizeable portion of the nation figured “well this guy is actually on the same page as us, pissed off with the political system, and he’s giving us the reasons where other leaders aren’t” and his normally fringe party gained prominence through the big parties failing hard.
He really was a product of a very specific portion of turmoil in Germany’s history. If the country were functioning normally at a government level, someone like Hitler would never have gotten even close to power. And then he was elected on the proviso of the conservative government in a coalition with the Nazi party, needing both to form government as the elections were a hung parliament. They figured Hitler could be the populist puppet the conservative leaders could control and use while they got things working again. Of course, that never happened and Hitler as soon as he got power started eliminating any sense of power sharing within a year or two.
Thank you for this. That was more informative than years of public school coverage of WWII and the lead up to it.
I knew about the Treaty of Versailles and how harsh it was- or was at least perceived to be- but not about Hitler’s promise to do away with it.
Do you have any preferred authors/books for further reading on the subject? I’m still trying to undo years of poor education from being taught in a conservative school.
Most of my knowledge comes from Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler. He’s one of the foremost English-language academic historians studying Nazi Germany. He gives an excellent overview of the conditions in Germany, the political machinations throughout as well as an in-depth study of Hitler both as a person and his moves as dictator. I was interested in the subject mostly because I find Hollywood and more standard school education doesn’t really go into detail as to how the Nazis ran the Axis side of the war or what life was like in Nazi Germany, and Hitler’s characterisation is mostly a “big bad villain guy” with nothing beyond that. Kershaw’s biography filled in those blanks for me.
Thank you kindly! I’ll be hitting up the nonfiction section of my local bookshops to try and find them.
I’ve always been curious about that period in history.
The Celestine Prophecy - far-fetched new-age nonsense.
Lol, the book is referenced in an Italian indie movie, “Santa Maradona”: the costumer of a bookstore asks to a character (who is NOT part of the bookstore staff) where she can find a book with a mix’n’match title between this one and Stefano Benni’s “The Company of the Celestines”. He gently answer that she may have confounded the two books: Benni’s book is slip-mainstream “and we don’t sell mainstream-ish books which appeal the masses”, while this one “is a nutty new age book full of poppycockeries and we don’t sell this kind of trash”. Then, with passive-aggressive kindness, he invites the costumer to go away. (She is then approacjed by an actual bookstore staff memeber and insults him).
Any self-help book if that opinion also includes fiction being a waste of time.
One of my partners doesn’t really read fiction, but does love a particular kind of self help book. Her reason for not liking fiction, though, is that she has aphantasia, meaning that reading the fiction does not create visual world in her head, the way it does for me and many others, making narratives less engaging. The self-help and non-fiction she reads though are generally wonderful, beautiful books, that she engages with because they have relevance and bearing on her life.
Do you have multiple partners?
Yep, 2 partners
Are they aware of each other? 🤭
I’d say so. They also have a relationship with each other, making us a triad. It’s pretty chill.
Anyone who likes a book supporting the Bering Sea Land Bridge Theory. Indigenous people have been in North and South America for Hundreds of thousands of years. Stop telling native people how they came to be. They had their own history but no one listened.
So how would they say they scientifically ended up here? I think Most of the indigenous peoples histories where I live in the southwest start with creation stories, and I didn’t think there was any indication of large scale human evolution in the Americas. They had to come from somewhere else at some point right?
Consider the San Diego Skulls discovered by Malcolm J Rogers. When judging the skulls antiquity, George F. Carter (previously a Curator of Anthropology at the San Diego Museum and Senior Geologist at the Texas A and M University) judged them to be 40,000 years old. There are plenty of other artifacts and remains that have been dated well before the time window in which the Land Bridge theory would allow.