Top Hacker News Book Recommendations in Politics & Social Sciences (all time)

All Time Past 6 Months

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Douglas A. Blackmon

4.8 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual

Ward Farnsworth

4.8 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The Library Book

Susan Orlean

4.3 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Face: One Square Foot of Skin

Justine Bateman

4.2 on Amazon

3 HN comments

The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

Michael J. Sandel

4.5 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Caste: A Brief History of Racism, Sexism, Classism, Ageism, Homophobia, Religious Intolerance, Xenophobia, and Reasons for Hope

University Press

3.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Patrick Radden Keefe, Matthew Blaney, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting (now with Bébé Day by Day: 100 Keys to French Parenting)

Pamela Druckerman

4.7 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media's Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption

Alex Marlow

4.9 on Amazon

3 HN comments

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

4.8 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century

Josh Rogin, Robert Petkoff, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds

Michael Knowles

? on Amazon

2 HN comments

Coraline

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

4.8 on Amazon

2 HN comments

The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire

William Dalrymple

4.5 on Amazon

2 HN comments

What We Owe to Each Other

T. M. Scanlon

4.7 on Amazon

2 HN comments

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gdubsonFeb 10, 2017

Also just got James Fallows' book "Breaking the News" – he's one of my favorite writers at the Atlantic, and so far it's a great book – don't know if it talks about this aspect of the news, but still worth checking out.

jseligeronOct 5, 2009

People have been arguing this for quite a while: I just read and posted about James Fallows' _Breaking the News_, (see http://jseliger.com/2009/10/04/breaking-the-news/ ), which was published in 1996 and yet still feels equally relevant today. Most of Gillmor's suggestions could have been derived from that book, which leads one to the question: why haven't things changed?

gdubsonMay 4, 2019

To me it wasn’t about that at all. I read it in the context of the movie “Network” — the evolution of news from a public service towards one of profit generation. The point seems to be that as a culture we take “news” as reality. But ultimately it’s its own construct; having more to do with pulling emotional strings for attention than pushing a particular agenda. [Bias and propaganda certainly exist; but the argument here is about a different, overriding bias that serves the aims of “news” itself.]

James Fallows of the Atlantic has a great book from a long time ago called “Breaking the News” which offers a compelling take on how we ended up in this state, and what the news is really about.

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