Quote Originally Posted by Lucky Jim View Post
The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker (about a guy trying to write the introduction to a poetry anthology).

Tinkers, Paul Harding (a friend from graduate school, first novel).

The True Believer, Eric Hoffer (a classic as much for it's Nietzsche-like discourse on the individual w/in society as for its well-maintained relevance).

A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander. (" A Pattern Language offers a practical language for building and planning based on natural considerations. A beautifully-done, but quietly reactionary, response to modern and post-modern architecture).

Not to toot my own horn - but I won 1st Place in the B. Frank Hall Philosophy and Religion Society Essay Contest for an article I wrote on Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer."

Hoffer essentially set out to answer the question: How - in the 20th Century - in an educated society - could Nazi Germany happen? His work is regarded as one of the finest on the development of mass movements ever produced.

Hoffer was basically self taught. He was a longshoreman and migrant worker in California for most of his life. After a bout with blindness as a boy (brought on by a fall) - he became a voracious reader - always fearing that his eyesight would disappear.