Nonfiction November: Week Four

This week’s host is She Seeks Nonfiction, and the theme is Worldview Shapers:

One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is learning all kinds of things about our world which you never would have known without it. There’s the intriguing, the beautiful, the appalling, and the profound. What nonfiction book or books have impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Is there one book that made you rethink everything? Do you think there is a book that should be required reading for everyone?

I can’t answer this one with just one book, and I can think of a few books that I read before blogging that made me see things differently. However, I’ll stick mostly to ones that I have reviewed on this blog.

One was a book recommended by my brother called Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan, an acclaimed religious scholar. Aslan’s goal was to try to find as much evidence as possible about the man Jesus aside from the religious claims. In other words, the historical record. What he found was that most of what we think we know about his life is myth, created by the gospel writers years after his death to further the claim that Jesus was the Messiah.

On the subject of religion, another book that affected me profoundly before I started the blog was Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, about the beliefs and behavior of some fringe apostolic Mormon groups.

A book that might be popular again now that told me something I didn’t know about from history is Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, which profoundly shocked me when I read it four years ago. As most of you probably know, it’s about members of the wealthy Osage tribe who were murdered by their guardians (the government deeming they were not able to look after their own interests) or white family members in order to get claims to their share of the oil money. The movie that is out now by Martin Scorsese is excellent.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman explains the results of years of scientific experiments that show that most of our decisions are made by our unconscious rather than our conscious mind. This was an entertaining book full of intellectual surprises and little exercises that you can try yourself that show the profound implications of how we make our decisions.

I was aware that DDT was banned as a result of Rachel Carson’s ground-breaking book Silent Spring, but her book about the poisons that we still use every day in agriculture and other industries made me realize why the world seems to be dying of cancer. This book may have been written in 1962, but it still needs to be paid attention to. I think everyone should read it.

Finally, for me personally, the first book I ever reviewed on this blog was revelatory. That is The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, about the foods we eat and how our basis in corn and soy is not really good for us. I was even more profoundly affected by his In Defense of Food, but I read it before starting this blog.