Hacker News Books

I read his History of the Peloponnesian War in the tenth grade. Thank you Mr Chrome!

I remember really enjoying it but it may have been my teacher.

"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." - History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides

I was very pleasantly surprised to see Don Kagan's "Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War" in the list. His "Introduction to Ancient Greece" class is really good (and available online for free).

I'd also strongly suggest anyone interested in that topic to read Thucydides' original "History of the Peloponnesian War," which is probably the most influential history book ever written.

Chronologically, The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides makes most sense. It's a shift from the Greek-Persian conflict to Athens vs. Sparta.

You can read Plutarch's Lives in parallel (no pun intended), it's pure entertainment.

I have recently been reading The history of the Peloponnesian war and honestly, if you got rid of the greek names, the ancient weapons and other anachronisms.. it could be easily set in modern society.

Our technology has improved. That's pretty much it! We're certainly no more intelligent than our ancient cousins...

In the book History of the Peloponnesian War (possibly the first historical text ever written.) There is a passage that remarks about how death does not deter crime. People have been trying to use death as punishment for most of human history and it hasn't made a difference. This was written in 431 BC.

I am currently reading Skiena, Algorithm Design Manual and Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.

Next up is Cipolla, Clocks and Culture and Chiusano and Bjarnason, Functional Programming in Scala.

Eh, they certainly tend to avoid fluff, and by definition, until you get to Marx, James, Freud you're not going to find "pop psychology"! A lot of them are very much worth reading, I personally would recommend:

Homer and a few Greek plays

Sample a bit of the great story teller Herodotus, then read the birth of historiography in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, which by itself is also very interesting and important (wonder why the Founder of the US didn't like direct democracy? There are very important object lessons in it).

Surely Plato and Aristotle deserve some attention! The contents of the latter's Rhetoric is essential for when you can't reach people with dialectic.

Euclid's Elements is still about as good as you can get for what it teaches.

Plutarch is great, but I really like that period of history. To it I would add reading some of the earlier bits of Livy.

Read, or better yet listen to audio of a few of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, out loud you can follow their Middle English.

Machiavelli's The Prince is still damned good, and a landmark in talking about politics as it is, not as how people would like it to be.

Shakespeare surely needs some attention by English speakers. Swift's Gulliver's Travels were amusing when I read them in their original, and obviously very influential.

So, yeah, check out some of the classics.

Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War

Older Stuff: The Bible/Quran, The Republic (Plato), The Social Contract (Rousseau), Tao Te Ching (Laozi), Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)

Newer Stuff: Nine Stories (Salinger), The Razor's Edge (Maugham), Nausea (Sartre), Siddartha (Hesse), Road to Serfdom (Hayek), The Book (Watts), Design of Everyday Things (Norman), Atlas Shrugged (Rand), Invisible Man (Ellison), Debunking Economics (Keen), Blood Meridian (McCarthy), The Center Cannot Hold (Saks), This Time Is Different (Reinhart/Rogoff), Infinite Jest (Wallace), Calvin and Hobbes (Watterson)

All of these books are well written and have given me some perspective on interesting people/situations/ways of thinking.

> He left behind one or two books that are still worth reading, but his most important legacy was his simplest.

Was this irony/sarcasm? Because my detector is off.

First of all, I read his 2 volumes of "Democracy in America" a couple of years ago, right after I had read Thucydides's "History of the Peloponnesian War" and just before reading Lord Acton's essays on liberty, and I challenge any of today's economists/political thinkers to come up with something at least 50% better.

Second, Tocqueville's "L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution" is in my opinion the book that best describes/explains the French Revolution, which I also think is the event that most defines the last 200 years of Western history and political thought, starting from Kant and continuing with guys like Marx and Lenin.

Uhm, what? You couldn't be more off. Traditionally, any liberal arts education would include extensive familiarity with the classics. That means Plato & Dante, at the minimum, whether a BA or BS. You were expected to know Latin and Greek because you were expected to read Latin and Greek. If you were pursuing a BS, then perhaps you would read Euclid's "Elements" instead of Thucydides' "The History of the Peloponnesian War". (&c., It's not like those were the only texts one would encounter.) But languages were a prerequisite because they lacked the chronological hubris of our age. Hence the tight coupling with Geography: notice the ties between Xenophon in translation & the role of the Ten Thousand in Geography.

I used to have a lot more time for non CS reading and actually made an Amazon list on this topic back in 2005:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullview/2INJSM38...

1. On War (Everyman's Library (Cloth)) by Carl Von Clausewitz

2. Leadership: The Warrior's Art by Barry R. McCaffrey

3. Small Unit Leadership: A Commonsense Approach by Dandridge M. Malone

4. The Defense of Hill 781: An Allegory of Modern Mechanized Combat by James R. McDonough

5. The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver-Warfare Theory and AirLand Battle by Robert Leonhard

6. Strategy: Second Revised Edition (Meridian) by B. H. Liddell Hart

7. The Art of War by Niccolò Machiavelli

8. Hagakure: The Book of the Samauri by Tsunetomo Yamamoto

9. The Emperor's Handbook: A New Translation of The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

10. The Art of War (Shambhala classics) by Sun Tzu

11. The Prince (Bantam Classics) by Niccolo Machiavelli

12. Evolutionary Game Theory by Jörgen W. Weibull

13. On Guerrilla Warfare by Mao Tse-tung

14. The History of the Peloponnesian War: Revised Edition (Penguin Classics) by Thucydides

15. The Histories (Penguin Classics) by Herodotus

16. The Persian Expedition (Penguin Classics) by Xenophon

17. Plutarch: Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans (Modern Library Series, Vol. 1) by Plutarch

18. Plutarch's Lives, Volume 2 (Modern Library Classics) by Plutarch

19. Livy: The Early History of Rome, Books I-V (Penguin Classics) (Bks. 1-5) by Titus Livy

20. The History of Rome from Its Foundation, Books XXI-XXX: The War with Hannibal (Penguin Classics) (Bks. 21-30) by Titus Livius Livy