Reading List (2003)
Explore our curated 2003 reading list featuring the best books of the year. Discover must-read titles, top picks, and hidden gems from 2003's literary collection.
Book
Beyond Good and Evil
by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
If ever there was a thinker who swam against the social and ethical tide of his day, it was Nietzsche. Nineteenth-century Europe was for him a moral wasteland filled with false altruism, duplicity, double standards, and, worst of all, moral complacency. Nietzsche shocked his readers to the core by openly speaking their innermost thoughts: morality serves the social good, which for him meant fostering the best possible society - one that strives for excellence and abhors the herd mentality. By rejecting the "standards" of contemporary morality, Nietzsche thought, one stood a chance of going beyond good and evil to a community in which superior moral agents who understand human nature would rise above vacuous egalitarianism and the dominant schools of ethical theory to construct a moral aristocracy that would spearhead a new social renaissance. Nietzsche is at once unsettling, compelling, and provocative.
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A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
Chronicles United States history from a grassroots perspective and provides an analysis of important events from 1492 through the current war on terrorism.
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Lies My Teacher Told Me
by James W. Loewen
Examines the reasons why wrong information has been provided in American history textbooks.
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Book
How Great Generals Win
by Bevin Alexander
If a key to military victory is to "get there first with the most," the true test of the great general is to decide where "there" is—the enemy's Achilles heel. Here is a narrative account of decisive engagements that succeeded by brilliant strategy more than by direct force. The reader accompanies those who fought, from Roman legionaries and Mongol horsemen to Napoleonic soldiery, American Civil War Rebels and Yankees, World War I Tommies, Lawrence of Arabia's bedouins, Chinese revolutionaries, British Desert Rats, Rommel's Afrika Korps, and Douglas MacArthur's Inchon invaders. However varied their weapons, the soldiers of all these eras followed a commander who faced the same obstacles and demonstrated the strategic and tactical genius essential for victory. "All warfare is based on deception," wrote Sun Tzu in The Art of War in 400 BCE. Bevin Alexander shows how great generals have interpreted this advice, and why it still holds true today.
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ID: 0684852624
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Book
The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand
The revolutionary literary vision that sowed the seeds of Objectivism, Ayn Rand's groundbreaking philosophy, and brought her immediate worldwide acclaim. This modern classic is the story of intransigent young architect Howard Roark, whose integrity was as unyielding as granite...of Dominique Francon, the exquisitely beautiful woman who loved Roark passionately, but married his worst enemy...and of the fanatic denunciation unleashed by an enraged society against a great creator. As fresh today as it was then, Rand’s provocative novel presents one of the most challenging ideas in all of fiction—that man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress... “A writer of great power. She has a subtle and ingenious mind and the capacity of writing brilliantly, beautifully, bitterly...This is the only novel of ideas written by an American woman that I can recall.”—The New York Times
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Book
Manufacturing Consent
by Edward S. Herman
A "compelling indictment of the news media's role in covering up errors and deceptions" (The New York Times Book Review) due to the underlying economics of publishing—from famed scholars Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. With a new introduction. In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order. Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance. Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.
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