Buy a DNA kit here: bit.ly/LadyoftheLibrary2 Use the coupon code LADY2 for free shipping. As an added bonus, you can start a 30-day free trial of MyHeritage's best subscription for family history research - and enjoy a 50% discount if you decide to continue it.

While being hospitalized for depression in my teens - I was lent Arthur C. Clarks "Rendezvous with Rama". When I got home, I was garbage picking & found (about) 100 SciFi books. HOOKED!!! My library now has MOAR than 1000 novels (+ any other kind of book you can name). YES - BOOKS SAVE LIVES!!!

Marcus Aurelius's Meditation, I know it is nothing but shower thoughts for many. But it is the book that influenced me to keep a journal and write down the things that I do not wish to forget. Keeping a journal has become essential to my life.

@iloveprivacy8167

4 ай бұрын

Same for me. The upside of it being "shower thoughts"/light reading is that you can go straight to it, bypassing the modern startup techbro "Stoics", who maybe read a different book by the same title. 🤭

@inaces1

4 ай бұрын

Totally agree Meditation is source of the best lessons for life. Changed my life.

When I was a teenager, I read the Tao Te Ching and some Chuang Tzu and they blew my little mind.

❤ love the book talks recently, I hope you are well. Take care be well and cuddle your adorable doggies!

@mariamcdonald973

4 ай бұрын

I echo this - the book focus is just lovely - intelligent and inviting.

I love your enthusiasm for these books, and for literacy in general. You're such a genuine creator. It's always fascinating learning about the roots of someone's intellectual journey. Thank you for sharing yours.

@CinziaDuBois

4 ай бұрын

Thank you so much!

"If this is a man" by Primo Levi, "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley and "1984" by George Orwell had such a huge impact on my teenage self, that it still resonates within me today.

Not exactly the way I read, but definitely how I think, Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez. t really highlights a lot of things about our world and society that I did not realize beforehand, but makes all the sense. I had to take breaks from reading it as it was constantly pissing me off.

A few years ago I read All About Love by bell hooks and it was so insightful and challenging and had a huge impact on how I approach my relationships. I read it shortly after becoming estranged from my parents and I felt like it really supported me in my decision. I love bell hooks, I'm really glad that All About Love has become so popular :)

Last year I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Its depressive atmosphere was so thick it shattered me emotionally. I ended the book teary-eyed and decided to leave the house and clear my head. When I opened the front door I was hit with a warm spring day's sunlight, and a feeling of catharsis came over me.

I really like this video and your channel! I'm watching you from Russia, I learn English and I need to improve my perception of audio, because it's well with grammar and reading but not very good with listening. I accidentally found your channel and I just captivated by your personality, appearance, voice, manner of speech and so on! What about top books which influenced on me, there are very many such books, but for example it's: 1) "The Magus" by John Fowles, 2) "And the Wind Returns" - the book by ex-Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, 3) "Latecomers to Summer" by Andriy Lazarchuk, the novel with very saturated, dense, poetic language, but totally underrated, 4) "The Black Prince" by Iris Murdoch, 5) Kir Bulychev "Alice: The Girl from Earth" and "Guest from the Future" which opened the world of science-fiction to me when I was a child. Thank you, good luck! Keep on keeping on!

I love the way you're talking with your hands in this video. It shows you're super passionate!

"Free Will" by Sam Harris completely changed the way I think about the human experience. It's a book I discussed with anyone who would humor me because it presented an unsolvable puzzle. I still don't know where I stand on the concept of free will, but this short book created such fierce personal discussions and introspection that I'm forever grateful for it.

@mousquetaire86

4 ай бұрын

Another acclaimed book on the same topic is "Determined", by Robert Sapolsky.

@mousquetaire86

4 ай бұрын

Another acclaimed book on the same topic is "Determined", by Robert Sapolsky (not sure if I want to read it, though.)

Thanks for recommending books. I think Victor Frankl's "Man's search for meaning" struck me and stuck with me.

Malazan Book of the Fallen changed my life I wave the flag of Fantasy Literature quote proudly as the greatest genre there is within reading And Malazan is the highest and best form of fantasy reading The many themes explored are priceless to me but the most important ones of empathy and compassion are too important to forget

Also, bravo for including two women, two AMAZING women. Good job 👍

I love this topic and I love the range of different people who inspired you, again reminding us that listening to the perspectives of people so different from us is very important for our own growth and our empathy and understanding of the world and others.

Sister Outsider is amazing!! ❤

Thank you so much for sharing these books with us Cinzia!

Animal farm and Candide are two very short and simple classics, but they seem to be perfectly adaptable to any time period in history, which is both fascinating and, let's face it, a little depressing. Marcel Proust's "In the search for lost time" might be a bit heavy for some, but it's an introspective journey I found compelling from the start, and I often find myself reflecting upon that journey. To some degree, I suppose that also goes for "the divine comedy", albeit in a different way. Last, but not least: "Autumn in the heavenly kingdom" is such a strange and bizarre part of history, which in itself is weird because the story is all too familiar when you think about it, and the scope of it is absolutely enormous

@ahsokaventriss3268

4 ай бұрын

I loved Candide!

Love your videos. being dyslexic and in university now (I'm 43) i can sooo relate. I do have a request for your list to be written in the description or links.

I was around 14 when I read Mythology by Edith Hamilton and it made me fall in love with ancient culture. And more specifically the concept that humans had been trying to explain the unexplainable for thousands of years. It opened the doors to thinking about faith, theology, sociology, empathy, and what makes us human.

The books Violeta and The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende, left a profound mark on me. Both are historical fiction and also loosely based on the author's life (she was born in Chile, South America). There's this quote from Kafka that reads "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us (...) A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." .The way she she portrays life, grief, historical events (dictatorships, economical crashes) and hope with such sensitivity and wisdom made me feel much like Kafka's quote above, stabed in the heart in a good way.

I found an awesome book. It is called The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Talks about a girl that wants to die and after she takes a bunch of pills she ends up in this library were she can choose different lives to live. Oh my goodness the feelings and thoughts in this book could have been about me. Very thought provoking

If there was one video that is testament to your destruction of your own imposter syndrome this is it. So excited about Heidegger! PS i'd take book recommendations from you any time

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Additionally, The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel A. van der Kolk is not a self help book. However, it traces the history of modern psychotherapy while offering suggestions for the professional treatment of CPTSD. Clinical and jargon-heavy but not inaccessible. Recommend this over Healing The Fragmented Selves by Janina Fisher because that book is also not self help, but rather intended as training material.

@ashleymcgee3536

4 ай бұрын

Oh I just got to part 5 of The Body Keeps the Score and it does have a self help component.

The great cosmic mother is a good book. It's all about the goddess.

Plato is one of my faves, studied it in school and still follows me. But also other books that, i'm not sure if they changed me, but maybe they influenced me: (sorry if the title is not translated right) the name of the rose- umberto eco, a yankee at king arthurs court -mark twain, a century of solitude - gabriel garcia marques, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead- Olga Tokarczuk, Levantul - Mircea Cărtărescu...and i am pretty sure there are more but those are the first that come to mind. Love your recomandations, you should make some more vids like this. Maybe seasonal recomandations?❤

Thank you for describing how accessible The Republic is. I was always scared of it…based on nothing.

Thank you so much for this list. The way you described the books, they must be the most interesting works I will read in a long time.

Thank you for sharing these Cinzia

The Bully Pulpit is not a self help book but if you ever want to watch the evolution of how popular opinion can influence the political machine, this one is a great read. Juxtaposing the rise in public opinion with the histories of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, you can draw parallels between the workings of the political machine then and see how very little has changed. Great for gaining perspective on current affairs despite concerning the actions of our presidents in the early 20th century.

I’d love to get into your room, I would spend hours looking at all the books, as I once heard “I do not only like books, they are a Love Affair” ❤

Thanks for sharing 🤓

Love me some: Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy", anything Tom Robins, Look Homeward Angel Thomas Wolfe, good ol' Jack Kerouac

This suggestion may be weird, but: The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier I read it as an early teen. Short description: it's about disturbing the universe.

3:40 So are you saying there's a chance your great-great-grandpa is James Joyce?

@CinziaDuBois

4 ай бұрын

Like a 0.0000000000001% chance, probably

Always love these book chats!!! ❤❤

Great vid! Also, omg that sweater is soooo cute!!!

I absolutely love these bookish videos!! Thank you so much, Cinzia! ☺️

Just found this channel. So much to catch up on, so many great topics! Really excited to delve into these books.

5 Books that Changed the Way I Think: 1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 2. What I know for Sure by Oprah Winfrey 3. Study in Scarlet by Sherlock Holmes 4. Gone with The Wind by Margaret Mitchell 5. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke ❤❤❤

These are going immediately in my wish list for my birthday !! Thank you xx

I've only read The Republic and some essays by Audre Lorde from your list, but they're definitely on my most influential book list as well! I'd also add de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Thanks for sharing!

I read Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur in junior year in college. Truly eye opening! How being raised by mothers effects people very differently depending on sex. Chapter heads include Higamous Hogamous woman's monogamous...

Love clips such as these. Nice change from all the ‘what I eat in a day’ videos 🙈🙈🙈 But all kidding aside / videos such as these give me additional book ideas / specifically books that are not mainstream or dubbed the newest hot release Thanks for this!

for me it was Kafka on the shore, I read it when I lived in Japan for four years. It sort of made sense there somehow

Thanks for a great list! In particular I've been wanting to read something by Lorde so it's great to have a recommendation on where to start. "Siddhartha" and "All Quiet on the Western Front" are among the most life changing books I've read. And someday I'll get around to "Nicomachean Ethics", which I strongly suspect will join that list (having read a just few pages a decade ago).

Excellent video! There's something very compelling about it. Give us more of this

This is such a beautiful video Cinzia, thank you for sharing! I requested 2 from my university library already and I absolutely can't wait to dig in (the other 3 weren't available for request and I am attempting a no-buy year which I learned about from you in your other channel so I will search for them at my local libraries). A book that has absolutely changed the way I think is Alan Watts' The Book (Against The Taboo of Knowing Who You Are). Ever since I read it, I've been recommending it to any one who was willing to receive book recommendations from me. I absolutely love it and think you will too if you would consider reading it.

Rick Rubins newish book is really decent too - the creative act. Its designed to be read in brief 5-10 minute sections and just offers different takes on the creative process as a whole :)

The Librarian’s Tent City by Marshall Grosspiegel. Darwin’s Collar by Finean J. Hardfinder

The one book that I read in school that has stuck with me and felt profound at the time is, sadly, becoming relevant again. 1984 by George Orwell. Another book that changed my life is The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, I was never taught anything about money or personal finances as a child. I didn’t truly understand debt and all of the ways money and its use can affect me as an individual and the world at large. He doesn’t talk about the last part but as you read the books, listen to people calling his podcast, take classes, and start looking more into the psychology of money and consumerism, it can really be eye-opening.

I read Candide and Beyond Good and Evil when I was pretty young and consider them very personally influential.

the Prophet, also the Orphic Hymns, Id never read them til a few weeks ago it was magical~

The diary of a madman, Timaeus, the lirtle Prince, the stranger, the usefullness of the useless and Salomes writings on love changed my head at different ages

As a phil major I'm glad to hear you suggest Being and Time. For a middle ground in difficulty and equally as perspective morphing trying Spinoza's Ethics. It's short but may require a 2nd read through. It can radically change how you relate reason and emotions to each other.

Murakami books are an experience. I’ve read seven so far and when you recommended one I had never seen I added it to my list to borrow straight away. Gonna be busy reading all 5 books you recommended this winter 😅

Being And Time is unforgettable. Heidegger is gonna Heidegger!

I would recommend Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Rob Persig

Great video - thank you. The book that changed my perspective on "things" was Star Maker by Olaf Stapleden. The sheer scope, scale and size of the story is incredible and I could almost feel my mind expanding as I read it - definitely worth a go (despite being sci-fi, it is quite philosophical).

The best self-help books that changed my life was The Scriptures the 2009 edition. Especially the book of Tehillim and the book of Mishle. Shalom, -Sharron.

First things: Never be afraid of reading ANY book. If you are worried about the content of such book, wait, study some more, then read it. Don't stay away from it because of fear. Don't be afraid of dropping a book because you think is bad, or just boring 😅 And persuade truth (especially) even if you don't like it. Truth is truth no matter what we feel about it. Mine recommendations of books would be: Crime and Punishment- Dostoievski (this one was really a kick in the stomach for me); Demons - Dostoievski (hard to read in the beginning, and soul crashing in the end); The Abolition of Man - C. S. Lewis (had to read it 3 times before fully understand it); And the Bible (no comments necessary for this one, but a channel recommendation with this one: Expedition Bible, it's awesome). Good video!

@nmcduff4891

3 ай бұрын

Crime and Punishment left me in tears at the bus stop. Heart-wrenching.

@PabluchoViision

3 ай бұрын

Abolition!!! Agreed. 80 years ago… A map of our time

Congratulations for reading The Republic cover to cover. Most people just read book 7 for the allegory of the cave and call it quits after that. Long time ago I got suggested Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, best intro philosophy book that’s not a textbook I’ve ever come across. Nothing will warp your brain quite like quantum physics though. There’s two books which didn’t exactly reshape my thoughts but The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi and Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) are worth reading.

@nmcduff4891

3 ай бұрын

Hi there. If you have read Sophie's World (different approaches to understanding), you should follow it up with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. Not all minds think alike!.

Hi! Great video! My top self-help books would be (in no particular order): 1. New Earth by E. Tolle 2. Loveability by R. Holden 3. Courage to be Disliked by I. Kishimi If you struggle with self-esteem, victimisation and finding purpose, I highly recommend you have a read. Much love, JoJo

Between Past and Future is historically far-reaching but still so relevant, surprising and fertile. Arendt is a favourite. I'll have to look into your other recommendations now, but Being and Time is daunting!

Deerskin by Robin McKinley (SA TW) and The Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle both changed my life and the ways I looked at the world. They remain favorites to this day.

“Plato is simply a record-keeper - he has not a single idea of his own! He is a devoted lover of Socrates, and whatever Socrates says, he goes on recording it, writing it. Socrates has not written anything - just as no great master has ever written anything. And Plato is certainly a great writer; perhaps Socrates may not have been able to write so beautifully. Plato has made Socrates’ teachings as beautiful as possible, but he himself is no one. Now the same work can be done by a tape recorder. And Aristotle is merely an intellectual, with no understanding of being, or even a desire to search for it. These people are taught in the universities. I was constantly in a fight with my professors. When they started teaching Plato, I said, “This is absolute nonsense, because Plato has nothing to say of his own. It is better to teach about Socrates. Plato can be referred to - he has compiled it all. But Socrates’ name has become almost a fiction, and Plato has become the reality Plato’s allegory is of slaves who, working in a cave, see only their shadows on the walls and believe that what is happening on the walls is the only reality. They don’t know of any other reality except those shadows… they don’t even know that those shadows are their own. They know nothing about the outside world, outside their cave; it doesn’t exist for them. This is one of the most beautiful allegories - of tremendous importance. It is our allegory. Translated into our life, it means we are living in a certain cave and we are seeing shadows on a certain screen and we know nothing else about the screen. We know nothing about there being a world beyond the screen; we know nothing about these shadows on the screen, even that they are our own. Looked at rightly, it is the allegory of our mind. What do you know of the world? Just a small skull is your cave; and just the screen of your mind… and the things which you call thoughts, emotions, sentiments, feelings, are all shadows - they don’t have any substance in them. And you get angry, you get depressed, you are in anguish - because you have learned to be identified with those shadows. You are projecting them; they are your own shadows. It is your own anger that is projected on the screen of the mind. And then it becomes a vicious circle: that anger makes you more angry, more anger projects more anger, and so on and so forth. And we go on living our whole life without ever thinking that there is a world of reality beyond the mind, on the outside, and there is also a world of reality beyond all these sentiments, feelings, emotions - beyond your ego. That is your awareness. Plato’s allegory rightly depicts the situation which we are in. But Plato never went further than that. Plato himself was never a meditator; the allegory remained a philosophical idea. If he had interpreted this allegory and had given it a turn towards meditation, the whole Western mind would have been different. This allegory would have changed the whole Western mind and the history that followed Plato - because Plato is the founder of the whole Western mind. Socrates never wrote anything; he was Plato’s master. Whatever we have about Socrates is from Plato’s notes of him talking with others - the famous Socratic dialogues. As a student he was just taking notes on them. Those notes have survived. In those notes is this allegory. It is difficult to know for what purpose Socrates was using the allegory, but it is certain that Plato misused it - he was not a man who was in search of truth, he was a man who wanted to think about truth. But to search for truth is one thing and to think about truth is totally different: thinking keeps you within the cave. It is only non-thinking that can take you out of the cave."

For nonfiction The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman. It changed my thoughts about media. He discusses how we react to text as opposed to images. (Basically image gets inside us instantly and cannot really be argued with.) Fiction is Theodore Roszak The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein. It is all about the argument of female naturism and male science knowledge. It is truly great. First time seeing you. Nice presentation and I need to read Plato after your recommendation. Thanks

Thank you for the book recommendations. Some books that are very important to me include the following: On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Zoological Philosophy by Jeane Lamarck. The Origin of Continents and Oceans by Alfred Wegner. The Analects of Confucius. The Gospel of John in the original Greek. Bye.

I have a strange one I think. It's a juvenile fiction, but the philosophy behind the way the people interact and how the world views magic are really fascinating. As someone who has multiple intellectual disabilities J fiction is a great love and an often underrated genre. There can be a lot of beautiful messages and ways to look at the world in these texts. My view altering selection is The Language of Spells by Garret Weyr. It's full of thought provoking moments and what might be the true consequences of a world of magic.

Life changing books which aren't overtly self help ... Tempting to start with Tao Te Ching, but depending on the translation can leave you cold, so The Tao of Pooh. Painless intro to Eastern thought/philosophy for Westerners who grew up with Winnie the Pooh. Not to be underestimated. The Woodwright's Shop by Roy Underhill. It's a book about traditional woodworking ... and it's not. The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. Bonus, it's really Campbell interviewed by Bill Moyers, so you can watch the six hour video and read the book. Call it an intro to ... *everything*. I have too many internal debates about the next two so I'll quit at three. Keep up the good work.

I’m 57% into John Truby’s Anatomy of Story. There’s much built upon his Anatomy of Story plus there is some fascinating overlap with Sapiens [and Homo Deus?] I agree that books save lives… StoryCraft needs to become how we channel out the groves forward. Or at least get us to the canal work the locks & elevate.

Adding Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki to my tbr, it sounds like something I would connect to. Thank you for this selection of book recommendations 😊

If you love history, check out “Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History” by Michel-Rolph Trouillot. It blows my mind every time I read it-and I’ve read it three times so far.

Plato's Phaedrus is my favorite of his works. It's a sexy, funny exploration of the intertwinings of love, rhetoric (two senses of the word), knowledge, and discerning the best path among all of these. It's the only Platonic text in which Socrates leaves the city of Athens and lounges underneath trees next to a stream while conversing with Phaedrus. I love Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness for its serious treatment of the question of what a world/society/culture without gender would be like, and how it would affect the identity and psychology of a displaced outsider. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Toni Morrison's The Song of Solomon. William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! My list could be extremely long - that's probably more than enough for now.

*SPOILERS FOR Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage DONT READ FURTHER IF YOU DONT WANNA BE SPOILED” Honestly that book kind of lost me with the whole rape false accusation aspect of it. I hate it when ESPECIALLY MEN write about women falsely accusing a man of rape since it’s so rare that it actually happens. It fully took me out after that.

It's funny how much we seem to have in common in our lives and interests, and yet how distant our foundational experiences seem to be. One of my life-changing books contains famous and violent criticisms of two of yours (though I will admit that I have come to criticise some of these criticisms). Anyway. My first life-changing book, or set of books, were the novels of Thomas Mann, especially Doktor Faustus. And at this time of day it's a bit difficult to summarize what they did for me. Let's just say that they awakened my imagination and invested me with a sense of the seriousness, danger and value of life. Next, the work of historian Georges Dumézil, my experience of which began with his Archaic Roman Religion. I was already interested in comparative mythology, but this masterpiece opened my eyes to dozens of ways in which mythology, religion, culture, exist in the real world, how they can be interpreted and understood and studied. Then the one which will no doubt be problematic for you, Karl R.Popper's The Open Society And Its Enemies. I have had decades to come to a cogent criticism of his famous attack on Plato, which nevertheless needs to be read; both because his criticism of Plato, though flawed, is about something real, and because it is itself, in its own positive contention, about as stirring, convincing, and penetrating, a defence of the free society - "the open society", as he calls it - as anything ever written. I left it with a lifelong conviction that liberty is something always worth fighting for, and if necessary dying for. And finally, and here there really is no way to reduce this to one book: practically everything that GK Chesterton ever wrote has lit up my path in so many different ways that it would be ridiculous to try and summarize it. The only way I can describe what he did for me is the Latin motto: NIhil tetigit quid non adornavit, he never touched anything without putting a shine on it.

What are your top 10 books? Can be any genre. Would make an interesting video topic.

I hope these books can count as one book. “Moral Letters”: Seneca. “Enchiridion” and “Discourses”: Epictetus. “Meditations”: Marcus Aurelius. They have guided me away from constant internal rage. I hope everything goes well for you.

I've read the G.M.A. Grube translation of _Republic_ and I still own it. I don't agree with Plato on most of his points, but I can recognize when someone is writing their ideas clearly and economically. I have the Vintage Spiritual Classics edition of St. Ignatius' _The Spiritual Exercises_ and I _certainly_ don't agree with him, but he also was an excellent communicator of his ideas; again, lean and to the point. Niccolò Machiavelli, both in _The Prince_ and _The Discourses [on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius]_ was also open and direct in his writing style and in what he wished to convey. Charles Darwin in his _On the Origin of Species_ of which I have a 6th edition from 1906, was another writer able to convey complex (and revolutionary) ideas in a clear and understandable style. And, finally, perhaps the finest English-language political writer of the 20th century - George Orwell - had all these skills in abundance in his essay writing.

Murakami, checked.

We should start a book club

Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood. It changed my life.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea

I recall reading Aristotle and realizing that he got something wrong. This amazed me, pumped up of my ego and humbled me too. Aristotle is arguably the greatest intellectual in western history. Yet, he was wrong. And I could figure this out. Of course, this told me that even world historical geniuses get stuff wrong. Arendt is a great choice My top books: R.D. Laing: Self and Others, Divided Selves Karl Marx: Early Writings, The 18th Brumaire Max Weber: Economy and Society Herbert Marcuse: One Dimensional Man D.W. Winnicott: Playing and Reality Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception J-P Sartre: No Exit, Nausea Books that were too difficult to enjoy but were important to me: Marx: Capital Hegel: Everything Kant: Everything Husserl: Everything Luhmann: Everything Parsons: Everything

Have you tried reading them on THC though

Hello there again: May I ask if anyone knows if it's better to read either Kant or Heidinger (both German in Language I assume) in English or German? I happen to be fairly fluent in both and unsure as to which one is easier for uneducated people like me. Thank you and until next time.

The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz. It focuses mainly on post WWII Poland and communism but applies really well to any kind of totalitarian, authoritarian, or fascist thinking. I grew up in a borderline cult within christian fundamentalism and there were times when I felt like instead of reading about history I was having my mind read by the author. The way he described how communism is talked about in the west and how people can be radicalised into supporting violent groups is also true to my experience as someone who’s more left wing politically. I’ve very recently watched a number of left wing people whose entire moral philosophy once centred around non-violence and believing women start openly supporting the use of sexual violence as a tool of war, as long as it’s used against the “correct” group any war crime is now acceptable apparently... Some people felt very shocked and betrayed by this, as they should, but I had enough awareness and miserable experience with humanity to not be blindsided by it. Even so this book still helped me think much more clearly about what I’m witnessing around me, both online in mostly left leaning spaces and in my own country, which elected a right wing govt that’s partnering with a minor party whose entire platform is no more human rights, that’s literally what they say. And it was also really helpful to have my mind read in terms of how I interact with that borderline cult group (I’ve left mentally but not physically)

This is off topic, forgive me. But I'm estranged from my family as well. No one ever talks about it. As if it's something shameful. Thank you for being transparent about it.

Friends of Plato, unite! ❤

I would say the 48 laws of power and Sun Tzu art of war. You may not like what you read but it’s how the world works. It’s not just you.

John Pickwell.

💜

My studies in philosophy have really changed the way I think, especially the works of Slavoj Zizek! ❤ Being and Event by Alain Badiou is a marvelous read! What is Se×? by Alanka Zupančič, is another highly recommended book! You Irish, I couldn't tell at all! 😂 actually it was obvious, Congrats I just found out I'm part Irish, and mostly German!

48 Laws of Power and Empowered Wife by Laura Doyle 😊 Also the Hebrew Bible 🙏🏽😇✡️ Thats funny, you don't look Buddhist by Sylvia Boorstein

Guns , Germs and Steel

I wonder how Being in Time can be anti-NS philosophy, since Heidegger himself thinks of his own project as something which no longer holds any normative views on matters of ethics (although he does say that we "should" be authentic on p. 287). Why do you think that Being and Time and Heidegger's Nazism are contradictory?

In these times, when authoritarianism is a threat to all of us, Arendt is an important voice for democracy and enlightened thinking.