25 best non-fiction books: an Open Culture readers' poll

Open Culture asked its readers to name the best non-fiction books (of all time!) and, as this kind of open-call goes, the results were pretty broad and with a few surprises here and there. The top 25 were selected primarily through a process of repeat nominees, and it would be interesting to see what else was nominated but didn't make the cut -- for example, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

 

Still the list leaves a wide range of reading -- much of it 20th century history, some American school-room classics, and the thoughts of a Roman emperor. Commenters tossed a few zingers: only two women writers made the top 25, and suggested Beryl Markham's excellent West With the Night and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

 

And at least the number one nomination reveals all that heavy reading doesn't ruin a sense of humor.

 

It is encouraging to see that the list isn't top-heavy with university-taught philosophy: whoever the readers of Open Culture might be, they are obviously reading for themselves and not for a college curriculum. And not a single book about the death of the printed word -- an encouraging sign that readers are still cracking open books, although Open Culture contributor Sheerly Avni does admit that the selection process "leaned toward books that are available for free online."

 

The List, in descending order:

Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

Wendell Berry - The Way of Ignorance

Joseph Mitchell - Up in the Old Hotel

Brian Greene - The Elegant Universe

Norman Lewis - Voices of the Old Sea

Joan Didion - The White Album

Benjamin Franklin - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Tony Judt - Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Henry David Thoreau - Walden

Marcus Aurelius - Meditations

Bill Bryson - A Walk in the Woods

George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia

Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem

Booker T. Washington - Up From Slavery

Jorge Luis Borges - Other Inquisitions (1937-1952)

Marcus Rediker - Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Lao Tzu, Stephen Mitchell, trans. Tao Te Ching

Victor Klemperer - I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years (1933-1941)

Greil Marcus - Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

Philip Gourevitch - We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families

Winston Churchill - A History of the English Speaking Peoples

and as any journalist might add to the top 25:

Lastly, and only in part because we’ve been warned that we would be roundly scolded for the omission: The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White.

Summer reading: food from Wendell Berry, trippy fiction, and the Beat brotherhood

When the weather outside is hot, cyber-shopping makes more sense than ever -- with a few clicks  all of us can go back to dreaming of iced tea, barbecue, or whatever makes summer the vacation season for each of us. Here are some books reviewed by others that are worth a browse. Order these right here on Bellemeade Books using the Amazon.com search box -- the books will be on their way and you didn't even have to leave the air conditioning.

Wendell Berry

Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, Wendell Berry, Introduction by Michael Pollan (Counterpoint Press, above) If you aren't already familiar with Wendell Berry's essays and his fiction, Bringing It to the Table is an excellent introduction, and if you're already an admirer, wanting to spread the word to people on your holiday gift list, this book is a fine addition to Berry's recent publications. Born in 1934, Berry has been publishing poetry, fiction in long and short forms, and essays since the 1960s; he has been working a farm in Kentucky for about as many years. In an essay from 2006 he recalls, "In 1964 my wife Tanya and I bought a rough and neglected little farm on which we intended to grow as much of our own food as we could." Although he came from a farming background, he asked for advice from an organic gardener who was his editor at the time, and seeking out the source of that man's principles, he discovered The Soil and Health, by the British agricultural scientist Sir Alfred Howard. Berry says of Howard, "I have been aware of his influence in virtually everything I have done, and I don't expect to graduate from it. That is because his way of dealing with the subject of agriculture is also a way of dealing with the subject of life in this world." (Jim Quitsland, Sound Food)

What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation: Mark Greif, et al (n+1 Books) All descriptions of hipsters are doomed to disappoint, because they will not be the hipsters you know. But to those of you who are reading What Was the Hipster in 2050, I can only say: Everything in this book is true, and its impressions are perfect. When we talk about the contemporary hipster, we’re talking about a kind of cross-subcultural figure who emerges by 1999 and enjoys a fairly narrow but robust first phase of existence from 1999 to 2003. At which point the category of hipster seemed about to dissipate and return to the primordial subcultural soup, for something else to take over. Instead what we witnessed was an increasing spread and durability of the term, in an ongoing second phase from 2003 to the present. The truth was that there was no culture worth speaking of, and the people called hipsters just happened to be young and, more often than not, funny-looking. (Anonymous, Atomic Books)

Fishers of Men – The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest, Adam Elenbaas (Tarcher Press): The cross-generational stories surrounding Elenbaas and his father, and his father and grandfather, sanctify the Freudian influence on drug writing. From the opening chapter when his father lays bleeding, holding a hunting knife, till the final modernist resolution, redefinition of all the relationships occur. It’s very reminiscent of the poem "This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do./ They fill you with the faults they had/ and add some extra, just for you.” The Freudian model, which places so much emphasis on a child’s relationship with its parents as a foundation for personality structure, is being played out once more as a literary structure: “One of the most intense psychological settings in the world – the visionary space of ayahuasca” (201). The combination of the psychedelic experience and psychodynamic models is firm territory, not only in Fishers of Men, but in modern drug writing generally. (Rob, editor, The Psychedelic Press UK)

Brother Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation: Ann and Samuel Charters (University Press of Mississippi): ... Holmes, a good friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and a founding member of the original Beat circle in New York City, also wrote several novels that were respectably reviewed. But he lacked the charisma and theatricality of the later Beat writers, and struggled for literary success even as his friends reached explosive levels of fame. It's only because of these legendary friends, and not because of his own fiction, that John Clellon Holmes merits an extensive literary biography by Ann and Samuel Charters today. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generationis unusual among literary biographies because its hero never had a breakout success. Instead, he filled out his career with dead end manuscripts, odd magazine assignments and college teaching jobs. In this sense, Brother-Souls is actually a more accurate glimpse of how most writers live than any typical biography of a famous writer. (Levi Asher, Literary Kicks)

Walt Whitman & Peter Doyle: "I don't know what I should do if I hadn't you to think of"

Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle, "Pete the Great." 

Today would have been Whitman's 195th birthday. From the recent biography of Doyle by Martin G. Murray: 

"Peter George Doyle's importance in the emotional life of Walt Whitman is well established. The romantic friendship that sprang up in 1865 between the streetcar conductor and the poet spanned the years of Whitman's residence in Washington, D.C, and continued nearly up through Whitman's death in Camden, in 1892. Yet despite the prominent role that Doyle played in Whitman's life, our knowledge of his personal history is incomplete. The following biography fills in some of the missing pieces about this enigmatic figure ....

Although Whitman and Doyle's friendship dates to early 1865, the first extant correspondence between them is in the fall of 1868. At the time, Whitman was in New York visiting family and friends. The very first surviving letter of what was to prove a long correspondence was from Pete, written on September 18.68  He exclaimed, 'I could not resist the inclination to write to you this morning it seems more than a week since i saw you.' On September 25, Walt declared, 'I think of you very often, dearest comrade, & with more calmness than when I was there—I find it first rate to think of you, Pete, & to know that you are there, all right, & that I shall return, & we will be together again. I don't know what I should do if I hadn't you to think of & look forward to.' In the six weeks that they were apart, Doyle wrote at least seven times, and Walt wrote eleven times. ...

Modern-day readers of the Calamus book of Whitman's letters to Doyle and Pete's account of their times together find the book remarkable for its frank acknowledgement of the romantic nature of the attraction between Whitman and Doyle. At the same time, such readers are often cautioned about projecting modern sensibilities onto nineteenth-century correspondence. It is interesting, then, to find that reviews of the Calamus book, written shortly after its initial publication, endorse the late twentieth-century view that this is indeed a book of love letters. For example, the following review appeared in The Critic, on January 1, 1898:

The publishing of the letters addressed by Whitman to Peter Doyle is justified by the fact that they throw all the light that is needed upon the poet's friendships with younger men, and upon that section of "Leaves of Grass" called "Calamus" in which he celebrates "the manly love of comrades." The sentiment in question, depending on a semi-physical attraction, is common among boys, young men of the working class, who can be considered as grown-up boys, and, as we are told by travellers, among savages. These letters show Whitman to have been one of the few in whom this feeling lives on into mature years; he seems to have been always attracted by, and attractive to, young men. The recipient of these letters was a young Confederate soldier, who, being paroled in Washington, became a car-conductor, and in that capacity first encountered Whitman, whose habit of conversing at every opportunity with men of that class is well known.

From Pete the Great by Martin G. Murray. More at the Whitman Archive here.

Walt Whitman & Peter Doyle: "I don't know what I should do if I hadn't you to think of"

Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle, "Pete the Great." 

Today would have been Whitman's 195th birthday. From the recent biography of Doyle by Martin G. Murray: 

"Peter George Doyle's importance in the emotional life of Walt Whitman is well established. The romantic friendship that sprang up in 1865 between the streetcar conductor and the poet spanned the years of Whitman's residence in Washington, D.C, and continued nearly up through Whitman's death in Camden, in 1892. Yet despite the prominent role that Doyle played in Whitman's life, our knowledge of his personal history is incomplete. The following biography fills in some of the missing pieces about this enigmatic figure ....

Although Whitman and Doyle's friendship dates to early 1865, the first extant correspondence between them is in the fall of 1868. At the time, Whitman was in New York visiting family and friends. The very first surviving letter of what was to prove a long correspondence was from Pete, written on September 18.68  He exclaimed, 'I could not resist the inclination to write to you this morning it seems more than a week since i saw you.' On September 25, Walt declared, 'I think of you very often, dearest comrade, & with more calmness than when I was there—I find it first rate to think of you, Pete, & to know that you are there, all right, & that I shall return, & we will be together again. I don't know what I should do if I hadn't you to think of & look forward to.' In the six weeks that they were apart, Doyle wrote at least seven times, and Walt wrote eleven times. ...

Modern-day readers of the Calamus book of Whitman's letters to Doyle and Pete's account of their times together find the book remarkable for its frank acknowledgement of the romantic nature of the attraction between Whitman and Doyle. At the same time, such readers are often cautioned about projecting modern sensibilities onto nineteenth-century correspondence. It is interesting, then, to find that reviews of the Calamus book, written shortly after its initial publication, endorse the late twentieth-century view that this is indeed a book of love letters. For example, the following review appeared in The Critic, on January 1, 1898:

The publishing of the letters addressed by Whitman to Peter Doyle is justified by the fact that they throw all the light that is needed upon the poet's friendships with younger men, and upon that section of "Leaves of Grass" called "Calamus" in which he celebrates "the manly love of comrades." The sentiment in question, depending on a semi-physical attraction, is common among boys, young men of the working class, who can be considered as grown-up boys, and, as we are told by travellers, among savages. These letters show Whitman to have been one of the few in whom this feeling lives on into mature years; he seems to have been always attracted by, and attractive to, young men. The recipient of these letters was a young Confederate soldier, who, being paroled in Washington, became a car-conductor, and in that capacity first encountered Whitman, whose habit of conversing at every opportunity with men of that class is well known.

From Pete the Great by Martin G. Murray. More at the Whitman Archive here.

25 suggestions for Memorial Day weekend reading to combat brain-freeze

Admit it: the long Memorial Day weekend is approaching and you just can't decide if you're ready for another beach book, or picture-perfect book about barbeque, or breathless celebrity tell-all brain-freeze. Besides, you have to save something nap-inducing for the long, lazy days of summer, still a month away. What to read now?

Tyler Coates, online at Flavorwire, offers a smart list of 25 essential non-fiction books -- some serious, some humorous, ranging from gimlet-eyed memoir to astute history -- with lesbian / bi / gay / transgender authors and subjects. Several recommended titles qualify as classics (Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant, Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On), and there are more recent books of lives led in- or out-of-the-closet. 

As with any online list, readers have responded with their own additions. The genderbending A Low Life in High Heels by Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn would be a good, entertaining extra. Coates makes the point that the broad selection, with topics from gender politics to AIDS to literary outlaws, isn't meant to be complete. At the very least, The Life of Roman Novarro (André Soares) qualifies as both a Hollywood bio and a beach read that could make it to the waterside before before Labor Day. An excerpt from the list and Coates' comments:

The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America by Charles Kaiser. Kaiser’s historical look at how gay men informed the culture of America’s urban areas — particularly New York City — spans 56 years from the periods of silent acceptance, the tumultuous pre-Stonewall years, the empowering ’70s, and the AIDS crisis of the ’80s.

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. This collection of speeches and essays from the influential and outspoken Audre Lorde touches on racism, sexism, and homophobia without losing a sense of hope for positive results in the face of class struggles. 

Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring. A contemporary of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Samuel Steward lived an extraordinary secret sexual life which he chronicled in great detail in a collection of journals.  

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Alison Bechdel’s gorgeous and heartbreaking graphic memoir follows the artist as she grapples with both her own sexuality and the revelation that her cold, distant father led a secret life as a gay man. 

Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas. The internationally renowned poet shares his life story, from his adolescence spent fighting for the Castro regime to his imprisonment for his sexuality to his flight from Cuba to his deathbed in New York City. 

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein. Legendary transgender activist and writer Kate Bornstein details her transition from a heterosexual man to a lesbian woman in this modern classic about challenging gender and cultural norms. 

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio. Bayard Rush was responsible for teaching the principles of non-violent protest to Martin Luther King, Jr., yet his status as an openly gay man in the midst of the civil rights movement kept him from being recognized for the efforts and activism he accomplished. 

Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro by André Soares. This biography tells the story of the first Latin American movie star, whose death was one of the most shocking scandals of the early days of Hollywood. 

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 by George Chauncy. Chauncy’s history of gay life in New York decades before the impact of the Stonewall riots is a surprising account that defies the notion that homosexuality was hidden out of view until the 1960s.

25 non-fiction LGBT reads to overcome summer brain-freeze

Admit it: it's still summertime and your mind just can't take another "summer read" -- not another beach book, or picture-perfect book about barbeque, or breathless celebrity tell-all brain-freeze. Besides, you have to save something nap-inducing for the long, lazy Labor Day weekend, still a month away. What to read now?

Tyler Coates, online at Flavorwire, offers a smart list of 25 essential non-fiction books -- some serious, some humorous, ranging from gimlet-eyed memoir to astute history -- with lesbian / bi / gay / transgender authors and subjects. Several recommended titles qualify as classics (Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant, Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On), and there are more recent books of lives led in- or out-of-the-closet. 

As with any online list, readers have responded with their own additions. The genderbending A Low Life in High Heels by Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn would be a good, entertaining extra. Coates makes the point that the broad selection, with topics from gender politics to AIDS to literary outlaws, isn't meant to be complete. At the very least, The Life of Roman Novarro (André Soares) qualifies as both a Hollywood bio and a beach read that could make it to the waterside before before Labor Day. An excerpt from the list and Coates' comments:

The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America by Charles Kaiser. Kaiser’s historical look at how gay men informed the culture of America’s urban areas — particularly New York City — spans 56 years from the periods of silent acceptance, the tumultuous pre-Stonewall years, the empowering ’70s, and the AIDS crisis of the ’80s.

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. This collection of speeches and essays from the influential and outspoken Audre Lorde touches on racism, sexism, and homophobia without losing a sense of hope for positive results in the face of class struggles. 

Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring. A contemporary of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and Thornton Wilder, Samuel Steward lived an extraordinary secret sexual life which he chronicled in great detail in a collection of journals.  

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Alison Bechdel’s gorgeous and heartbreaking graphic memoir follows the artist as she grapples with both her own sexuality and the revelation that her cold, distant father led a secret life as a gay man. 

Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas. The internationally renowned poet shares his life story, from his adolescence spent fighting for the Castro regime to his imprisonment for his sexuality to his flight from Cuba to his deathbed in New York City. 

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein. Legendary transgender activist and writer Kate Bornstein details her transition from a heterosexual man to a lesbian woman in this modern classic about challenging gender and cultural norms. 

Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio. Bayard Rush was responsible for teaching the principles of non-violent protest to Martin Luther King, Jr., yet his status as an openly gay man in the midst of the civil rights movement kept him from being recognized for the efforts and activism he accomplished. 

Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro by André Soares. This biography tells the story of the first Latin American movie star, whose death was one of the most shocking scandals of the early days of Hollywood. 

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 by George Chauncy. Chauncy’s history of gay life in New York decades before the impact of the Stonewall riots is a surprising account that defies the notion that homosexuality was hidden out of view until the 1960s.

Ginsberg to Kissinger, 1971: "I gather you don't know how to get out of the war"

Without much further comment (which would be wildly superfluous in any case -- disentangling the decade of the 1970s is tougher than explaining the 1960s, for those of us who lived them: the remnants of a bad acid trip, mostly) an item in Harper's magazine details a declassified telephone conversation between Allen Ginsberg and Henry Kissinger. 

Nixon is in the White House promising "peace with honor" in Vietnam, Elvis wants to be a deputy in the war on drugs, "Joy To the World" by Three Dog Night is number one on the radio. And Karl Rove is attending the University of Utah; he became the Executive Director of the College Republican National Committee in June, 1971. How on earth did some of us survive that bad acid trip? Oh, yeah -- more drugs.

Om Land Security

From an April 23, 1971, telephone conversation between Allen Ginsberg and Henry Kissinger, then national security advisor to President Richard Nixon. Eugene McCarthy had left the Senate that January. Richard Helms was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Rennie Davis and David Dellinger were leaders in the anti-war movement; Ralph Abernathy was a civil-rights activist and President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The transcript was made public in December by the National Security Archive.

ALLEN GINSBERG: My idea is to arrange a conversation between yourself, Helms, McCarthy, and maybe even Nixon with Rennie Davis, Dellinger, and Abernathy. It can be done at any time. They were willing to show their peaceableness, and perhaps you don't know how to get out of the war, and by a private meeting --
HENRY KISSINGER: I have been meeting with many members of peace groups, but what I find is that they always then rush right out and and give the contents of that meeting to the press. But I like to do this -- not just for the enlightenment of the people I talk to but to give me a feel of what concerned people think. I would be prepared to meet, in principle, on a private basis.

Ginsberg on the phone, San Francisco June 1966

GINSBERG: That's true, but it is a question of personal delicacy. In dealing with human consciousness it is hard to set limits.
KISSINGER: You can't set limits to human consciousness but --
GINSBERG: We can try to come to some kind of understanding.
KISSINGER: You can set limits to what you say publicly.
GINSBERG: It would be even more useful if we could do it naked on television.
KISSINGER: (Laughs)
GINSBERG: What should I tell them that would be encouraging?
KISSINGER: That I would think about it very seriously.
GINSBERG: Good deal.
KISSINGER: When did you intend to do this?
GINSBERG: During the May Day meetings in Washington. They will be lobbying, and they could meet with you May 2 or 3.
KISSINGER: May 2 or 3. Damn it! I would like to do it in principle, but --
GINSBERG: It is a good principle.

KISSINGER: Now, wait a minute. I don't know about those dates, I may not be in town, but we can do it at some other reasonable date.
GINSBERG: I gather you don't know how to get out of the war.
KISSINGER: I thought we did, but I'm always interested in hearing other views.
GINSBERG: If you see Helms, ask him if he has begun meditating yet. He promised to meditate one hour a day. I still have to teach him how to hold his back straight.

Henry Kissinger on the phone, 1975 (George Washington University website)

KISSINGER: How do I reach you?
GINSBERG: City Lights, San Francisco.
KISSINGER: Where are you calling from?
GINSBERG: Sacramento, California. I just gave a talk on gay liberation to the students here, and I am going to San Francisco to join the march there. I will be at the following number --
KISSINGER: I won't be able to call you, I am leaving town. I will call McCarthy.

GINSBERG: Talk to him. I will try to arrange a private meeting. It would be good to talk to the Army too. You know, the war people and the antiwar people.
KISSINGER: It is barely conceivable that there are people who like war.
GINSBERG: They might have some ideas. They have been to Hanoi.
KISSINGER: I will call McCarthy. If we can set it up on the basis of --
GINSBERG: You may have to subject yourself to prayer.
KISSINGER: That is a private matter. That is permissible.