Social Darwinism in American Thought

9 best books like Social Darwinism in American Thought (Richard Hofstadter): Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Truth and Beauty, The Second Mountain, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury: A Personal Tour of Some of the World's Best Books, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, My Losing Season: A Memoir, The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone, Siege: Trump Under Fire

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Author	Michel Foucault
ISBN	0679752552

This book begins with a bang – in fact, a series of bangs. That is the point, you see. We need to be shocked about what is, after all, our relatively recent past. We too easily forget that there was a time when ‘people like us’ actually span back in history for nearly as far as the mind could imagine. Now,...

Truth and Beauty

Author	Ann Patchett
ISBN	0060572159

Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Grealy’s critically acclaimed memoir Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw...

The Second Mountain

Author	David Brooks
ISBN	0812993268

In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. In The Second Mountain,...

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Author	Steven Pinker
ISBN	0525427570

If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.

Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress...

Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury: A Personal Tour of Some of the World's Best Books

Author	Robert Kanigel
ISBN	0963124676

I’m a retired librarian, so I like books. I really like books about books, and that is what this is. I probably bought it (so long ago that I can’t remember when) because the author bought my old house.

I stumbled upon it in a recent reorganizing project and started reading. To be honest, I didn’t...

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Author	Matthew Frye Jacobson
ISBN	0674951913

America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective...

My Losing Season: A Memoir

Author	Pat Conroy
ISBN	0553381903

PAT CONROY—AMERICA’S MOST BELOVED STORYTELLER—IS BACK!

“I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one. . . .There was a time in my life when I walked through the world known to myself and others as an athlete. It was part of my own definition of who I was and certainly the part I...

The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone

Author

Scott Samuelson

Winner of the 2015 Hiett Prize in the Humanities. 

Sometimes it seems like you need a PhD just to open a book of philosophy. We leave philosophical matters to the philosophers in the same way that we leave science to scientists. Scott Samuelson thinks this is tragic, for our lives as well as for...

Siege: Trump Under Fire

Author	Michael Wolff
ISBN	1250253829

Michael Wolff, author of the bombshell bestseller Fire and Fury, once again takes us inside the Trump presidency to reveal a White House under siege.

With Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff defined the first phase of the Trump administration; now, in Siege, he has written an equally essential and...