Books like Black Mass — picked by fans

Each chapter in this book wrestles with central themes of Hellenistic Philosophy, which includes Stoicism, but also Epicureanism and Skepticism. The essays are wonderfully written, and deal with pressing eternal problems, such as the political significance of anger, and the nature and pitfalls of physical pleasure. Dr. Nussbaum relates the Stoics and other Hellenistic philosophers to pressing contemporary issues and concerns.

First published in 1958, this is one of Hannah Arendt’s most influential books and in it she attempts to define the human condition in the aftermath of World War II, developing her concept “natality.” 

It’s a challenging book that I’ve wrestled with and argued with and never forgotten. It includes some of her most powerful and frequently cited passages about birth. Lately, I’ve been returning to its opening pages, in which she discusses the launch of Sputnik into space. 

She saw this launch not as an exciting technological breakthrough, but as a fateful repudiation of our earthly existence, an existence that was defined by birth with possibilities and limitations.

Karen Armstrong’s book on St Paul –her second—is wonderful. It takes into account recent scholarship on the historical Paul, and in accessible fashion, explains what was controversial about his agenda, and what was likely omitted or edited out of his work. Paul’s mission was influenced in no small part by the prevalent Stoic thinking—above all, cosmopolitanism: Paul was a cosmopolitan, literally, a citizen of no place—but of the universe itself. And central to his understanding of Jesus’ teaching, Paul wished to wash away the parochial distinctions that divide us. Hence the baptismal cry he advised: no more Greek or Jew, man or woman, master or slave!

The Stoics were expansive philosophers, in that they were concerned about many diverse aspects of our existence: politics, ethics, epistemology, therapy, cosmology. The Stoics also aimed for their philosophy to be practical; hence, they wrote in accessible, readable fashion, so their teachings could reach many. The New York Times philosophers’ column, “The Stone,” shares Stoic concerns in applying philosophical thinking to a wide variety of topics, in a manner accessible to many. The Stone Reader is an anthology of some of the most popular essays from the New York Times column; the essays touch on many subjects, such as violence, anxiety, happiness, faith, and political power.

The best fantasy novel you’ve probably never heard of! British author and screenwriter Chris Wooding has been cranking out top-quality material for years, and he’s only just hitting his peak with the ongoing Darkwater Legacy series beginning with this book.

I love how this multi-POV ensemble cast masterpiece takes the best of traditional black-and-white fantasy and combines it with the best of modern shades-of-grey fantasy. With a large and quirky cast of heroes on a thrilling quest to liberate the world from an evil empire, it’s about as close as I’ve found to Final Fantasy in novel form. The characters are a total delight and the plot twists had me whooping and punching the air in satisfaction.

One of my favorite “But what happened after that?” moments of the original series was the challenge Kirk issued the goateed Spock at the end of "Mirror, Mirror": What will it be? Past or future? Tyranny or freedom? It's up to you. David Mack weaves a three-decade-long epic that answers the questions—with shades of the psychohistory of Asimov’s classic Foundation trilogy—as Spock plays a three-dimensional chess game of moves and countermoves to bring about the downfall of an empire.

The Sorrows of Empire has everything I want from a Mirror Universe story: revolutionary intrigue, imperial treachery, and a cast of interesting mirror versions of characters we know and often love from the “true” universe. It also deftly incorporates the increasingly complicated canon of the Mirror Universe introduced by the other series over the years.

This is the one book on the history of terrorism that I wish I had written. Zamoyski spins out a great tale, one that reads like a spy thriller. It’s the story of how early 19th-century European politicians and statesmen overreacted to small, marginalized, underground revolutionary movements, turning them into existential threats to the civilized order.

In doing so, men like Austrian leader Klemens von Metternich created both our modern understanding of the terrorist boogeyman and the mechanisms and justification of the modern police state. Zamoyski is a great writer, and I eagerly followed him down his conspiratorial rabbit hole. I hesitate to say it, given the subject matter of the book, but this is one fun read.

McNeill, William McNeill’s son, examines the intersection of disease, ecology, race, and international politics to show how infectious disease shaped the fortunes of colonial empires in the Caribbean. In the wake of the encounter between Europeans and the New World which destroyed up to 90 percent of the Amerindian population, European empires restructured the region into a colonial economy of sugar and slavery. Mosquitos bearing malaria and yellow fever flourished in this environment and McNeill shows how anyone seeking power in the region had to reckon with both them and disease.

I loved this 2019 mainly theoretical study because of the ambition it reflected and the major advances it provided. Lawson’s distinctions between revolutionary situations, revolutionary trajectories, and revolutionary outcomes provide an innovative framework for understanding revolutions.

Its analytical methodology, combined with some case studies, constitutes an immensely rich and engaging study of revolution, which helped to clarify much of my own thinking on this subject. This combination of theory and case studies made this a joy to read.

I found this comparative study of England, France and Russia an elegant and theoretically sophisticated analysis of three of what are considered to be the “great revolutions”.

It is a 2014 reworking of the 1938 classic by Crane Brinton and, like its predecessor, its great strength is in its comparative historical analysis. I loved the depth of historical analysis of each of the case studies, with sufficient detail to enable me at times to reach different conclusions from the author.

It was also able to go beyond Brinton’s original, in terms both of its historical detail and theoretical sweep. Its ambition, grounded in the case studies, was exhilarating.