I’m thinking particularly non-fiction type books that maybe you had to pick up and read some of in your college years.
Mine is Bernard Manin’s “Principles of Representative Government.” It’s a really really REALLY good review of the Founding Fathers and what they intended government to be. It’s tougher to read but the points he makes and the way he makes them make the reading well worth your time and effort.
Brilliant thinker and I’ve long searched for people who have heard of him as well. If anyone else has heard of him, I’d love to hear what you think.
If you define “unknown” that might help. A scribbled screed by a schizophrenic hermit in the woods that you stumble across while geocaching? Or just a widely printed and respected nonfiction book that hasn’t ever been on bestseller lists, and not entered the daily awareness of most people?
Anyway: A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. That’s my Bible. I read it like a religious text. It’s both soothing and revelatory–and makes perfect sense to me. Live my life by it. Love it.
I would argue that fiction may actually have more of an impact than non-fiction on affecting people and influenced their people’s thinking. For a totally ‘well known’ example - “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson has had more of an affect on me than all the non-fiction books I’ve read combined. Would you averse to adding fiction here? I know you indicated “particularly non-fiction”.
Most recently, Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It may be a NY Times best seller but when I mention it to most people I get blank looks. It has really made me pay attention to systemic failures, how they occur, and how to get past them.
I love that book. I read the crap out of it. I am a big Montaigne fan, so Taleb’s reverence for him was the last straw. I started a thread on it a few years ago.
I was wondering what folks would offer. I can’t point to obsure books, but more likely books that are well-regarded but typically only read in college or by folks focused in the field.
Actually, with you posting here swampy, it does bring to mind a different book: I think it was called the Basics of Guitar Repair by Hideo Kamamoto. I think he was a Berkeley-based luthier and guitar tech. Really dug into how to work on guitars. Made me feel it was okay to take guitars apart and figure out how they work.
While neither of these probably count as “unknown,” I’m going to go ahead and mention two books that have affected me.
Justice by Michael J. Sandel really made me question a lot of my fundamental values. It presents a lot of hypothetical situations and philosophical analysis of the motives and consequences behind different decisions and reactions. I could see the importance of putting the community’s needs over the individual; I could see why the ends would not justify the means; I could see why something good was not fully good unless it was also done for the right reasons; I could see why material wealth is so much less important than we consider it to be. And moreover, because both his arguments and his counter-arguments were so well-reasoned, the book humbled me. It helped me to see how people could have completely different perspectives, and both perspectives could be intelligent and valid.
Life Without Limits by Nick Vujicic also transformed my life. It was rather surprising, too, since he’s a Christian inspirational speaker, and I’m not religious. His book talked about the importance of looking beyond yourself and focusing on other people. It’s a message I’ve heard countless times before, but every previous time, I had felt as though the speaker was lecturing me, which made me defensive and resistant to the message. But the way Vujicic wrote got through to me, and I could suddenly see why focusing on other people would actually enrich my life, and why it was something I *wanted *to do, as opposed to some dreary thing I *should *do.
My mom has gone a little culty over The Black Swan. I read it and enjoyed it, but it seriously blew her mind, and she actually buys extra copies to give to random people.
Nonfiction for me, it isn’t really that obscure, but I think a lot about the info in Amanda Ripley’s The Unthinkable.
Fiction, it IS obscure, and deservedly so, the man writes abominably, but the idea is so fascinating and the atmosphere is so pervasive: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Lands. Very early sci-fi/horror, think if Lovecraft were less hung up on cucumber-tentacles, but ate thesauri in his spare time. I can’t quite figure out what about it draws me so strongly, but it’s made a huge impact.
Upton Sinclair’s 'The Jungle ’ really influenced my thinking , I stopped eating
meat after I read it ! When I was in college a teacher brought this book up to talk about and I was surprise I was about the only student to read it.
The teacher said 'The Jungle ’ can influenced you a lot and I agreed with him.
As a teen, someone gave me a copy of The Fool’s Progress by Edward Abbey. I was immediately sucked in having had not a great family life to start with. I definitely saw some parallels with my father’s life in the protagonist Henry Lightcap. It’s easy to early on dismiss it as misogynistic and crude, but by the end it comes full circle to show how really deep down all anyone wants is to be loved, have some sort of family, and to be able to go home. The split narrative working on alternate chapters (one set starting as a child and working to middle age, the other staring at middle age and progressing to the end made for a fascinating structure i hadn’t experienced before. You could read about this beast of a man and then next read about things that defined how that personality came to be.
In the end I think it also helped show me that acting tough and macho is no real defense when things fall apart.
One book that had a huge impact on me was Accidental Empires by Robert Cringely. It discusses the dawn of Silicon Valley and the people behind the first great companies. It’s very informative and funny, and it helped me understand the big picture behind software development.
Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (big when it came out in the early '60s, practically unknown when I read it a decade later)
Peter Kropotkin (no relation) The Conquest of Bread
Alexander Berkman, What is Communist Anarchism?
I don’t know how obscure it is, but Isaiah Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity fundamentally changed me from a leftist radical to a leftist liberal. It’s probably the single biggest nonfiction influence on my outlook, two decades after reading it.
In about the 6th grade I encountered the first book that made me realize that there might be other people that had greatly different views of the world than I had grown up with. :eek:
What Sort of People Should There Be by Jonathan Glover.
A nice introduction to philosophy and ethics, with a focus on human-altering technologies (genetic modification, etc.) If you could make a major change in human nature…should you?
After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection by James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle. Its subject is examining historical evidence. But the ideas it provides go well beyond that. It’s an interesting enough book that I’ve sought out different editions so I can read the revisions the authors have made.
I don’t know how “unknown” it is, but Sundown Towns by James W. Loewen had a pretty intense effect on me. I knew — or thought I knew — about institutional racism, Jim Crow, etc., and had heard vaguely about the phenomenon of sundown towns, but I had no idea how widespread they were, and how rigidly all-white communities remained barred to minorities even after Jim Crow had supposedly been relegated to the past. One of the rare books that really explains why the world around you looks the way it does.
I read Music of the Spheres by Guy Murchie when it came out in 1961 when I was nine. The Wikipedia entry on Murchie says that Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut praised it highly, and I heard Christopher Priest talk about how great he thought it was. I consider it the reason I became a scientist (well, to be specific, a mathematician, although it’s more about physics).