/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18301853]

Is anything even worth reading after this?

[Anonymous No.18301863]

>>18301853
Idk, I haven't read it. Why not?

[Anonymous No.18301868]

>>18301853
the god delusion,the selfish gene,a primate's memoir and Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst?

[Anonymous No.18301869]

No. Not even /pol/ but it's what you would expect from a gay liberal Israeli.

[Anonymous No.18301871]

>>18301853
No because you're clearly a fucking retard that will never learn anything if you even considered reading that shit.

[Anonymous No.18301881]

>>18301868
jesus christ dude

[Anonymous No.18301932]

>>18301853
Everyone I know who’s even slightly literate recognized this as the trash it is within the first couple of pages. I’m sure the NYT opinion section loved it though, so if you loved it too, no, nothing is worth reading afterwards because good books are clearly not for you.

[Anonymous No.18301938]

We keep having this thread and the same bait posts occur over and over. I swear this board is a circle. Life keeps repeating exactly the same way.

[Anonymous No.18301953]

>>18301853
Yes. There are plenty of other works that have a similar goal but advance other arguments and view points.

I would say Pinker's The Blank Slate and Fukayama's Origins of Political Order are great places to start. Fukayama provides an excellent overview and analysis of the entire field of societal development, from Plato to Machiavelli, to Weber, to what books such as Why Nations Fail, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, and Guns, Germs, and Steel get wrong and what they have to offer as plausible theories. The second volume, Political Order and Political Decay is good too.

But if you want to understand history you need to understand detail and nuance. No one gets you a road map of development with more elegance than Durant.

If you pull out all the sections in Durant on philosophy and the history of thought, you probably get a 1,000+ page tomb that BTFOs Russel in completeness and style and rivals Kenney. However, in the 11,000 other pages you get an amazing survery of political development, Durant's own excellent insights and analysis, as well as art history and theology. Truly a masterwork.

It is a shame that the dated language would cause a PC woke shit storm today because I fear Durant's influence will be lost despite his accolades, Pulitzers and the Medal of Freedom, because assigning him in universities today would be perilous.

I've have a graduate degree in philosophy and have read a ton of thinkers and few can compete with him for lucid analysis, organization, and prose, let alone all three.

I personally find Malcom Gladwell somewhat annoying, but he does have ok accessible treatments of big picture ideas too, even if they vear into pop sci bullshit a lot of the time. I recommend Fukayama because his later opus avoids this, and the entire "selecting on the dependant variable to explain everything" trap. It is a shame he is known mostly for his early work. Pinker also has become annoying. Bogged down in politics, he approached pseudom in later works, but that doesn't take away from The Blank Slate, which is a fantastic examination of human nature, insights from biology, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology, framed by the philosophy of Rousseau (leftist) and Hobbes (conservative).

The Teaching Company had two courses, Mind Body Philosophy and Redefining Reality that are also full of "whoa, never thought of it that way," moments. Unfortunately modern academia has bled into /lit/ and made people focus on highly specialized texts, instead of high level synthesis.

[Anonymous No.18302246]

>Book approved by Obama

[Anonymous No.18302510]

>>18301853
Whole on the topic what does /lit/ think of other such books such as Toynbee‘a A Study of History, or perhaps even the Cambridge Ancient, Medieval and Modern histories?

[Anonymous No.18302518]

>>18302246
>white race
into the trash it goes

[Anonymous No.18302545]

No, but that’s because you have been irredeemably misinformed by a devious rat person hiding his dastardly ideology in a book supposedly about anthropology

[Anonymous No.18302552]

>>18302518
>there is no white race
>all white languages just happen to share certain words across nearly every language

[Anonymous No.18302567]

>>18302518
It's a trash book but because of the execution, not the topic.

[Anonymous No.18302586]

>>18302552
nice reading comprehension, retard

[Anonymous No.18302596]

>>18302586
What did you get your panties in a twist over then retard?

[Anonymous No.18302598]

>>18302552
nice reading comprehension lol

[Anonymous No.18302615]

>>18302567
>but because of the execution
The real problem with this book was the Nordic supremacism, which does not hold up especially in regards to the Egyptians (they were Indi European just no Nordic) and the book was also lacking, or wrong on many details. However I would say it is as good as a high school education in history, if not with even more information and touching on obscurer topics to compensate for its failings. I much rather if I had a child have him read MOT than Sapiens which is just a distortion of history to push soulless globalism. Im not even full white though I look it but I trust “schizos” and “neo nazis” over some Israeli author who Bill Gates and Obama praised. Also the very brunt title of the book makes it a great foil to post in threads with OPs book or any other cringe history like A People’s History of The United States or some crap like that.

[Anonymous No.18302618]

>>18302586
>>18302598
YWNBAW, go back to breadtube

[Anonymous No.18302624]

>>18302618
go back to school

[Anonymous No.18302625]

>>18302615
Fair enough

[Anonymous No.18302640]

>>18302518
Indo-Aryan.

[Anonymous No.18302662]

>>18301953
Do you have any recommendations on where to even buy this?

[Anonymous No.18302685]

>>18302662
If you want I can link you a torrent of the audiobook
https://1lib.us/book/2494148/27186

[Anonymous No.18302705]

>>18302685

Incredible - thank you

[Anonymous No.18302712]

>>18302662
Audiobook
http://audiobookbay.nl/audio-books/the-story-of-civilization-complete-series-will-durant-ariel-durant/
PDF

https://archive.org/details/TheStoryOfCivilizationcomplete

As for the epub I posted you can read it on your PC using calibre, download it into ibooks directly on our iPhone/ipad, or if you have a kindle turn it to a mobi using calibre and put it in downloads.

[Anonymous No.18302722]

>>18302705
Np enjoy. If you need books in the future just go to libgen.is, z library, internet archive, project Gutenberg, internet sacred text archive, or wiki source.

[Anonymous No.18303349]

>>18301853
Please fuck off that book was good until it wasn’t