My best non-fiction books this year have been .....

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

...

Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber

i have not read a book that so effortlessly re-educates one's mind away from the disasters and false assumptions of the dismal science, to then replace their naive assumptions about money with evidence from history and anthropology, quite possible a book of the century if all the dumb economists read it ...

and Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature ... it has limitations, try this review, Pinker is still at heart a cognitive evo psych, still it doesn't mean you are a bad person ... but he does not embrace social theory/sociology etc ... nonetheless the facts are marshalled by a master academic and are well worth knowing


i have also read and enjoyed Prinz's Beyond Human Nature ... reviewed here

[umslopogaas]

As time passes it gets a bit difficult to remember whether you read it this year or last, but definitely this year:

'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' by William Shirer. OK, this is a cheat, I didnt read all of it, that I have not done since I was seventeen, but I dipped into it extensively. Especially ch. 27, which has a special and awful fascination. If you dont know it, try it, but be warned, it will (almost) certainly shock you and if it doesnt I dont think I want to know you, and it may make you cry.

'Down Under' by Bill Bryson. Full of humorous gems. I'm a fan of Bryson and I particularly liked this one, because I have been to Australia many times and its a great place.

'The Faber Book of Science', ed. John Carey. Science is my subject, so I have a professional interest, but I hope there is enough here to intrigue anyone, scientist or not.

[JFLL]

A book I’ve much enjoyed this year is Lost London 1870-1945, by Philip Davies, with superb photographs from the London County Council photographic archive now held by English Heritage. I say ‘enjoyed’, but one’s feelings after reading it are rather sadness at what has been lost and anger at the wilful destruction of fine buildings and townscapes even before the attentions of the Luftwaffe.

[Thropplenoggin]

The Faber Pocket Guide to Bach - Nicholas Kenyon: the 'Ronseal Quick-Drying Wood Stain' of books. A great resource to dip in and out of.

Beethoven: His Spiritual Development - J.W.N. Sullivan: insights but also rather a lot of blather.

Beethoven - Edmund Morris: an excellent short introduction to his life and works.

Mahler - Jonathan Carr: ditto.

Music and the Mind - Anthony Storr: perhaps dated and lacking in technical aspects. Hasn't stayed with me, nor have I returned to it.

The Mind of God - Paul Davies: a very accessible and stimulating mix of cosmology, physics and philosophy (the ontological arguments). Recommended.

Perfect Rigour - Masha Green: unauthorised biography of hermetic Russian mathematical genius, Grigori Perelman, who provided a proof for the Poincaré Conjecture. A good read.

The Romantic Revolution - Tim Blanning: currently reading. A decent primer and overview of this vast subject, covering the visual arts, literature, architecture, music and philosophy.

A History of Reading - Alberto Manguel: a surprisingly dull plod through the history of books. Overweeningly bookish (and this from a self-styled book fetishist!)

The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi - Andrew Stott: fascinating subject and some delicious anecdotes, which deipnosophists will delight in, but an extremely pedestrian narrative, that works chronologically through the life and takes too many biographical liberties, claiming to know how Grimaldi must have felt about this and that event. Read as research for a novel, but I'd be had pushed to recommend it, given its humdrum, list-like run down of Grimaldi's life on and off the stage.

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius: the evergreen classic of stoicism still provides plenty of succour for the modern mind.

[Roehre]

...'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' by William Shirer. OK, this is a cheat, I didnt read all of it, that I have not done since I was seventeen, but I dipped into it extensively. Especially ch. 27, which has a special and awful fascination. If you dont know it, try it, but be warned, it will (almost) certainly shock you and if it doesnt I dont think I want to know you, and it may make you cry.....

That's why I prefer the chapters 30 and especially 31.

[Pabmusic]

Really serious stuff: The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Stephen Pinker - very detailed stuff, demonstrating how the human race has become much less aggressive over time (despite the excesses of the last century or any other war you can think of).

Ben Miller: It's Not Rocket Science - really good explanations of most 'modern' scientific issues for non-scientists.

[aeolium]

I'm currently enjoying reading Richard Morrison's The LSO: A Century of Triumph and Turbulence, not particularly for the style in which it is written but simply the fascination of the story and some of the strange facts contained in it, for instance that Mahler asked to conduct the recently created self-governing orchestra in 1907 but was turned down by the directors and that the first Ring cycle in concert performances in Britain was given by the new LSO in Bristol.

Other non-fiction books I've found very readable have been the late Eric Hobsbawm's autobiographical work Interesting Times and Matthew Engel's amusing and at times sardonic survey of the history of Britain's railways, Eleven Minutes Late.

[Petrushka]

I read Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1969 when I was 15. Still the standard work in my view.

My non-fiction read of 2012 was Munich:the 1938 Appeasement Crisis by David Faber, a fascinating read and wonderfully well written. Strongly recommended. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Munich-Appea...5597974&sr=1-1

[umslopogaas]

Petrusha, I can only agree, it is a standard work. What can we do to ensure that the next generation does not overlook the messages from the last?

I have no children, but I have many nephews and nieces, who are now producing yet another generation. What am I supposed to say to these innocents? I dont know, but I will say, for sure, and without doubt, read this. All I can do is provide a memory. Those who do not understand the past are condemned to re-live it.

My parents fought in that war.

[Nick Armstrong]

A book I’ve much enjoyed this year is Lost London 1870-1945, by Philip Davies, with superb photographs from the London County Council photographic archive now held by English Heritage. I say ‘enjoyed’, but one’s feelings after reading it are rather sadness at what has been lost and anger at the wilful destruction of fine buildings and townscapes even before the attentions of the Luftwaffe.

JFLL: likewise!!

I was given this book last Christmas and find it riveting and haunting. Under £20 now online e.g. http://www.waterstones.com/waterston...-1945/6810499/

[JFLL]

My non-fiction read of 2012 was Munich:the 1938 Appeasement Crisis by David Faber, a fascinating read and wonderfully well written. Strongly recommended. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Munich-Appea...5597974&sr=1-1

Thanks for this, Petrushka. On the theme of appeasement, you might be interested in (or perhaps know) Eric Gedye’s Fallen Bastions, first published in 1939, which I also read this year, I think. The Amazon blurb for the 2009 reissue says this:

‘G. E. R. Gedye was a journalist, and more to the point, in the words of Hugh Greene, 'That Gedye was the greatest British foreign correspondent of the inter-war years can hardly be disputed. Fallen Bastions is his angriest and possibly his greatest book. From his vantage point of Vienna, where he was central European correspondent for a number of newspapers from 1925 to 1939, he saw the evils of Nazism earlier than most. The book, in a vivid and compelling narrative, charts the inexorable descent to the Nazi invasion of Austria, the Anschluss, and finishes with the equally infamous piece of irredentism, the occupation of the Sudetenland in the Czechoslovak Republic.
The book is a phillipic against not just Nazism but also the policy of appeasement, to the extent that the Daily Telegraph (not greatly in favour of appeasement, it must be admitted), sacked him. The editor announced he had resigned by 'mutual consent'. 'That', Gedye sardonically commented, 'is corrrect. It is equally correct that Herr Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia by ''mutual consent'' with President Hacha.' Seldom can a subtitle - The Central European Tragedy - have been more apt, and seldom has it been told with more verve.’

His exposure of the appeasers in the British establishment is lacerating. No wonder he was sacked.

[MrGongGong]

This year I have mostly been reading

Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, the Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young Jeremy Grimshaw

Delete, The virtue of forgetting in the digital age Viktor Mayer-Schonberger

The Unwanted sound of everything we want, A Book about noise Garret Keizer

Sound Composition Trevor Wishart

The Music of Sounds Leigh Landy

[amateur51]

This year I have mostly been reading

Draw a Straight Line and Follow It, the Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young Jeremy Grimshaw

Delete, The virtue of forgetting in the digital age Viktor Mayer-Schonberger

The Unwanted sound of everything we want, A Book about noise Garret Keizer

Sound Composition Trevor Wishart

The Music of Sounds Leigh Landy

several of which sound fascinating as titles MrGG - any recommendations for the general reader?

[MrGongGong]

several of which sound fascinating as titles MrGG - any recommendations for the general reader?

Delete is a very easily readable book and makes some very interesting points about the nature of how we deal with information.
Some of the others are a little esoteric ? but Leigh's book has much to say about what he would distinguish as "sound based" as opposed to "note based" music.

I've also been reading this

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/word-events-9781441173102/

which is essential reading IMV for anyone interested in the edges of notated music

and also this ........

http://sounds-from-dangerous-places.org/chernobyl.html

[amateur51]

Delete is a very easily readable book and makes some very interesting points about the nature of how we deal with information.
Some of the others are a little esoteric ? but Leigh's book has much to say about what he would distinguish as "sound based" as opposed to "note based" music.

I've also been reading this

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/word-events-9781441173102/

which is essential reading IMV for anyone interested in the edges of notated music

and also this ........

http://sounds-from-dangerous-places.org/chernobyl.html

the latter one's CD clips are rather moving, worth investigating further. I'll check up on your recommendations too Many thanks