Books like The Big Empty — picked by fans

I loved the balance between the anguish of the family of Gary Gilmore’s victims and his desire to be executed as soon as possible. I was moved by the desperate attempts of his self-appointed lawyers to delay his death, and I’m not sure I’ve ever answered the question for myself whether a killer’s wish to die should be respected.

Wouldn’t a life sentence be an even greater punishment?

One of the best sports books ever written? Judge for yourself, but I think it is certainly among the best. Even if you don’t like boxing or martial arts, you’ll enjoy this eminently readable book about “the rumble in the jungle” in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, two heroic athletes in conflict. Although there are moments of self-deprecating humor and Mailer’s usual philosophical concerns, Mailer focuses squarely on the two athletes, their training camps and trainers, the people around them, and the experience of being in Africa. And then of course there is the fight itself, described in vivid and inventive detail that I found is as riveting to other readers as it is to me. The philosophical/metaphysical concerns here are part and parcel of those Mailer developed through his sixty years as a writer, but they are introduced in an easily digestible style and seem to me… show more.

A masterful debut novel, post-WWII, and dealing with characters in the heat of battle, internally and externally.

I was forced to read it in eleventh grade Honors English (what they called AP pre-AP. Like I said, I’m old). I reread it for edification as a young writer and was awed by the craftsmanship. The writing is dense and requires patience. War is never pretty.

Published on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Naked and the Dead, the book is an overview of Mailer’s entire writing career up to 1998, by way of introductions to and excepts from his decades of fiction and nonfiction. I make this recommendation as a risk because the book is a nearly 1300-page-long anthology. No one is going to sit down and read cover to cover, however, so I offer it as a way of seeing the sweep of a major author’s career; here you can dip in and out as you wish to see what’s up with a given work or topic at any point in Mailer’s publishing life, up to 1998. You can decide then what you want to read in the offered excerpt or in full, either from an included short work of magazine journalism or a short story, or from a whole… show more.

This is the briefest of all on my list, at 92 pages. It doesn’t so much narrate world history for you, but structures it. Christian is a pioneer of what is called Big History, which situates human history inside the history of life on earth, inside earth history, inside the history of the Universe. He gives a taste of that approach here, but the main message is his organization of human historical experience into three main eras: the era of foragers, the agrarian era, and the modern era. What separates one from the next, above all else, is the way humans got energy from their surroundings. Very easy to read.

A classic statement of the mentality of the men who fought the American Revolution, A Revolutionary People at War documents how the enthusiasm of the war’s early days, the “rage militaire” in Royster’s memorable phrase, waxed and waned during the brutal conflict as soldiers and civilians settled into an uneasy relationship often in danger of collapsing into anarchy or a military despotism as everyone feared. Royster seems to have read every scrap a soldier or officer produced across the war’s 8 years, and researching the book in the 1970s, he someone kept track of everything, deploying a deft quote time after time, without the aid of a computer. How?

If you’re new to the history of Paris, this is an ideal book to start with. It’s a sweeping account of this fabled city’s story, from Roman times to the turn of the twenty-first century, but while lofty in aim it’s charmingly fun to read, the author being adept at packaging wide-ranging information into a fast-paced narrative. One neat feature is the way Jones highlights certain Parisians or Paris locations, giving them breakout sections that allow readers to delve deeper into the likes of Madame de Sévigné, Rose Bertin, and Josephine Baker. You realise that Paris is so much more than the sum of its stones. Yes, it’s about beautiful monuments, but just as much about the people who have breathed such life into Paris that their spirit lives on to this day.

I always enjoy Bill Bryson’s stories, wherever he travels. He’s like my favorite funny uncle, and I never tire of hearing from him.

After a couple of decades as a Yank in the UK, he was going to move back home. First, he takes us on one last meandering trip all around the nation, to pay homage, to enjoy good memories, and to get amusingly grumpy about inconveniences. His sense of humor is self-effacing, silly, bungling, and very entertaining.  

I love his keen nose for the absurd differences between the two cultures, his collections of comedy place names, and the British slang phrases he never understood. I grew up in the USA but spent all my adult life in the UK, and this had me laughing out loud, frequently. 

The author starts with the question: “Are you smarter than my chimpanzee?” When you finished the book, you’ll be so humble to say: I am not!

While reading the book, I was several times surprised by how adults (including myself) have a distorted perception of reality. For example, eighty percent of children worldwide are vaccinated. This means that almost all human beings alive today have some access to basic modern health care. However, on average, just 13 percent of people get the right answer.

Don’t forget that you can only make correct decisions based on accurate data. For this, you can rely on (the many) reliable databases that are available via the internet.

It was for me the first book that convinced me to think and work more with facts and data, i.e., evidence-based management

Before the Holy Roman Empire, there was Byzantium. Prior to better-known names like Charlemagne or Thomas Aquinas, there were men like Justinian, who codified Roman law for posterity, or Photius the Great, who gave concise theological treatises to eager audiences of the highly literate populace of Asia Minor. Wells explores the heart of Roman civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean where the flourishing Byzantine Empire preserved ancient learning. Sailing from Byzantium investigates the historical and geographic forces at play which eventually made Byzantium a "forgotten" empire, yet which today—whether it's acknowledged or not—has left its indelible mark on the modern world in remarkable ways. This is not just a journey into history, but an intellectual pilgrimage into the time and setting of almost forgotten intellectual and spiritual giants.