I was watching this video last night about our disposable culture, and it kind of occurred to me that in a sense, we have developed a culture of disposable ideas as well as disposable water bottles. So call me old-fashioned, but here are some very old ideas that I think are worth hanging on to. These are some of my favorite "old" books:
John Holt wrote several books about the educational system and the human learning process. He worked as an elementary schoolteacher and found that the system he worked in had numerous flaws… in modern parlance, one would say the educational system, in his view, did not consider buyer personas, i.e. the students themselves. The two best-known of his books are How Children Learn and Why Children Fail. I confess, I have not read these books in many years, but they made a huge impression on me when I did.
Another book, and I will not be the first person to recommend this to you if you are in any sort of management role anywhere, is The Discourses by Nicolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli is often much maligned as some sort of wicked evil person, when in fact he was just commenting on the realities of politics and power. This is hardly dry reading… all of his ideas are illustrated with fantastic stories of the soap-operatic goings-on of the Roman Empire. (Note, you can also just read The Prince, but that is sort of a Cliff Notes version of The Discourses.)
Also, Erich Fromm wrote several books on psychology… when World War II ended, Fromm and many other psychologists devoted themselves to trying to figure out just exactly how Nazi Germany could have happened, from a psychological perspective. They had access to some very interesting data, so it’s interesting stuff both in historical and psychological terms. I admit, I have not read his books in a long time, but they had a lot to do with forming my current view of the world.
Finally, a book you seldom see mentioned any more is Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell. Some of the essays are, I admit, disposable in the sense that they are old-fashioned and germane to a bygone age. But much of it is some remarkable insight into the eternal workings of human nature from one of the great minds of the 20th century.
And just for fun, if you like either history or spy stories, I recommend The Man Who Never Was, the true story of an amazing counterintelligence plot against the Nazis, carried out before the invasion of Sicily. It’s a short book, you can read it in about an hour, and it’s absolutely fascinating. Note there was a Hollywood movie made from it, but that was really just an adaptation and misses a lot of the basic intrigue of the original book.
