Rule your World! By Harry Browne - and all other Harry Browne books. Changed the way I view the world.
Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
371–380 of 399 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#372House of Leaves. I've literally never read anything like it.
I never finished House of Leaves. I found the house aspects of the story really interesting, but all the parts outside it (the tattoo artist guy) I found insufferably boring. Does it ever actually have any point to his side of the story? It felt like half the book was a waste of time, but maybe it pays off in the end?
This is exactly how I felt reading the book. If the innermost story were extracted into a standalone work, it would be excellent, even more so if it were expanded upon. All the outer frame stories were painfully uninteresting to me. I'd suggest finishing the house story and just skipping the rest, as I felt similarly to you and got nothing out of the rest, but really enjoyed the house stuff.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#373The Network Revolution – confessions of a computer scientist (1982)¹ is the title which immediately springs to mind. I never see anyone else mention this book, but I liked it. One of the many interesting things it contains is an anonymized telling of what happened with Doug Engelbart and why, even after giving the dazzling “ The Mother of All Demos ”², the SRI company did not succeed in its grand plan for the future…
Vallee is fantastic, and I would strongly recommend his books on UFOs as well. He's the kind of serious & careful researcher we need when it comes to studying complex problems that less serious people deny even exist, & his work stands out as reasonable and of excellent quality even compared to folks like Keel.
Like Keel, Vallee gets attacked by people who don't read him on two sides: by the people who are quite sure that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors, and by the people who are equally quite sure that UFOs are the lies of con artists and the delusions of madmen. Neither explanation holds up to serious scrutiny.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#374"Neurospeak" by Robert Masters A psychoactive book, science-based (YMMV). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/897536.Neurospeak - - - - Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" Impossible to categorize, incredibly challenging. Gurdjieff was a genius on the level of Leonardo da Vinci, but where Leonardo studied the outer world, Gurdjieff studied the inner world. This three-volume tome is his effort to encode an…
I've read a portion of Gurdjieff's "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" and found it boring. Perhaps it would get interesting if I read more. But now I'm reading "the fourth way" by Peter Ouspensky, the most famous (if we don't count Joseph Stalin) of his students and find it awesome. Very rational, explaining everything in an exciting, easy to grok way. It feels like a book I would recommend to everyone.
Beelzebub's Tales was intentionally boring for the first 50 pages in order to scare people off. Gurdjieff famously wanted only the first 50 pages pre-cut (this was during the period when new books would have their pages stuck together & the reader would use a book-knife to separate them) in order to encourage people who were turned off by the beginning to return it. He did a lot of stuff to try to weed out insufficiently dedicated people.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#375Not exactly unknown but rarely mentioned these days: Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life (1960) by Dr Maxwell Maltz, MD. A foundational work in the field of self-image and more generally self-growth. Sort of the missing link between Hill-Carnegie and Covey, it's the first of its kind to shatter the body/mind duality and show facts in hand the power of the whole. A positively enriching read, c…
I really liked most of this book. But near the beginning, he cites some parapsychology research findings that really haven't aged well.
I did more research on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks_Rhine, and it's really quite fascinating that JB Rhine was doing parapyschology research at Harvard and Duke University.
Still, the book is great
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ask all the countries the US invaded or where it initiated coups for its own interests... most of South America and the middle East saw themselves at the receiving end of such events. I personally would prefer the US over China but I'd also prefer NO hegemon, especially when that hegemon tends to abuse its power.
When did China ever invade the United States? Or any other distant western country? Is this the great fear of white Americans? That the Chinese would load a billion soldiers on an aircraft carrier and invade the shores of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles? Does China even have an aircraft carrier that can cross the Pacific? This must surely be the plot of a bad B movie, and starring Ben Affleck.
> Is this the great fear of white Americans? That the Chinese would load a billion soldiers on an aircraft carrier and invade the shores of Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles? Does China even have an aircraft carrier that can cross the Pacific?
Hollowing out US institutions by replacing them with PRC puppets and shell corporations is just as worthwhile to defend against as any invasion would be.
If I remember correctly China doesn't even let you have dual citizenships. So a lot of people with connections to mainland are going to be in a position of personally deciding where their support goes even if they are born with US citizenships.
As far as wielding hard power goes, one example for China they've been testing the waters of wielding military power in territory that is typically controlled by US allies in the Spratley Islands to see how much they can get away with in occupying that location.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
...mostly known for being a ufologist I remember a book he wrote, something about "Magonia". Not sure he considered UFOs "real" but more of a collective psyche phenomenon. Actually he collected a lot of ancient stories from previous centuries: fairy tales, Mother Mary visions, strange happenings of 1800s and befor 1950... it was very entertaining.
I happen to have almost all of his ufology books including "Passport to Magonia" and you're right that he covers those subjects, but he doesn't claim it's a collective psyche phenomenon. Instead he argues that it has elements of this but guided by an external control system, which is itself part of some, for lack of a better word coming to my mind right now, extradimensional intelligence (he never makes this specific…
How does he come to the conclusion that it's an external controlling system rather than just cultural iconography and individual psychology?
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#378Not exactly unknown but rarely mentioned these days: Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life (1960) by Dr Maxwell Maltz, MD. A foundational work in the field of self-image and more generally self-growth. Sort of the missing link between Hill-Carnegie and Covey, it's the first of its kind to shatter the body/mind duality and show facts in hand the power of the whole. A positively enriching read, c…
I really liked most of this book. But near the beginning, he cites some parapsychology research findings that really haven't aged well. I did more research on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks_Rhine , and it's really quite fascinating that JB Rhine was doing parapyschology research at Harvard and Duke University. Still, the book is great
Very interesting to know!
> parapsychology research at Harvard and Duke
Takes us back a ways away, huh? Different world, but don't get too comfy in this one, things have a cyclic tendency IME. ;-)
I'll tell you this: I can see why they went there, Maxwell and Rhine and so many others. All of my research into such topics¹ shows that the mind-body connection and its manifestations (consciousness, "soul", etc) have always been such "hard problems" that they've always been met with supra- or para-normal solutions — whether in myths, in philosophies ancient and recent, in the generally benevolent groups (spiritual, friendly, etc). And it's still very much an open question, thus lending itself to beliefs.
I think there are also metaphors, images that were so good and are now so old that they became their own thing, and lost almost all connection to the things they described. "Magic" is a good example of that — the power of the word, and behind that knowledge. Magic as a concept is "old speak" (pre-recorded history) for power, very human and very real power.
I find it actually fascinating that we hold such beliefs about possible superpowers, I can't help but think this ability to image (imagine) more is what actually drives civilization at the lowest level.
[1]: I mean self-development/help/growth, philosophy in the pre-20th century common meaning of a "practice", "recipes for good living", not the "science" or study thereof we made it out later and to this day.
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#379The most interesting unknown book I've read was Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible by Russell E. Gmirkin. It'a an academic thesis and not really written for readability by the general public, but the ideas it presents are mind blowing. The gist is a theory that the Hebrew Bible was written by pre-Jewish scholars and politicians who studied Plato's works at the Library at Alexandria with the goal of uniting (12) disparate pre-Jewish tribes into one nation modeled after Plato's Republic. It's interesting both as a challenge to the mainstream theory that Plato's works were inspired by the Hebrew Bible, and as a look at an ancient social engineering project that still has huge implications thousands of years later. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32183185-plato-and-the-c...
Re: Ask HN: What are the best unknown books you have read?
#380Travels in Tartary, Thibet, and China, by Evariste Regis Huc He's an early 1800s French Catholic monk and is possibly the greatest travel writer of all time. Not only is the trip amazing, but the way he writes about it? Incredible. In the sequel, the Chinese empire summons him to stand trial for being a Christian, since it was mostly illegal to be so in the empire at the time. It, too, is amazing. https://www.gutenbe…
Thanks for the recommendation. I've started reading it and it's a little hard to digest with the way it's written but I'm quite enjoying it :)