Human Events, “the national conservative weekly,” has a list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.” Interestingly, the Kinsey report and John Dewey’s Democracy and Education were rated more dangerous than Das Kapital. And Comte’s work on positivism ranks much higher than Origin of Species.

I also like the little, Wikipedia-like summaries:

Keynes was a member of the British elite-educated at Eton and Cambridge-who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

That’s the problem with the administration- they’ve been reading too much Keynes!

But my favorite detail is that the piece links to copies of the books on Amazon, with Human Events’ Amazon Associates number. So if you click through to Beyond Good and Evil (#9) or The Feminine Mystique (#7), at least you’ll be doing a little good in the world.

[via Wonkette]

[To the tune of Dr. Dre, “Keep Their Heads Ringin’,” from the album “Death Row Greatest Hits“.]

Technorati Tags: books

I’m reading John Markoff’s latest book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer. Markoff covers Silicon Valley, and the computer industry more broadly, for the New York Times; he’s also a Palo Alto native, and his book reflects both his professional interests and (much more indirectly) his own history. It has a slightly elusive personal quality to it: there’s nothing autobiographical about it- Markoff himself isn’t a player in the story, and was in middle school and high school through most of the book- but nonetheless you sense his presence in a way you don’t with more conventional histories.

So far, two things stand out in the book.

First, Markoff writes at length about a circle of scientists and engineers who were experimenting with LSD (and to some degree other hallucinogens) in the early and mid-1960s: there was a circle at Ampex, and another centered around Jim Fadiman (a psychologist, author, and nephew of literary lion Clifton Fadiman). But these weren’t fuzzy consciousness-raising experiments: many users tried LSD because they thought it could make them more creative. It was all very nerdy yet cutting-edge, in an identifiably Valley way: less “let’s become one with the Universe” than “let’s figure out how to reconcile quantum physics and relativity.” Doping was what you did with semiconductors; dropping acid was something more akin to visiting a really supercharged, life-changing Starbucks- a quest for something that would help you be smarter, in some really radical way.

Second, the book isn’t about the counterculture in the Bay Area; it’s very specifically about the Palo Alto-Menlo Park area. Markoff never comes out and says it, but I get the feeling that one of the book’s aims is to establish that this area is every bit as important in the history of the Sixties as Berkeley and San Francisco, and maybe even more important. Sure, Berkeley and San Francisco got 99% of the press, and loom larger in the collective memory, but while everyone’s attention was focused on Berkeley, the real world-changing stuff was happening down here in supposedly-sleepy Palo Alto.

Update: My review of the book.

[To the tune of David Bowie & Pat Metheny Group, “This Is Not America,” from the album “Best of Bowie“.]

Technorati Tags: history, Silicon_Valley, What the Dormouse Said