Books like The Black Cat and Other Tales — picked by fans

Aristotle is an obligatory milestone in the history of the main idea of my book: all desire the good or the apparent good.

The Nicomachean Ethics also provides a gallery of interesting and puzzling characters: the akratic, who wants the good but, being weak, goes for what they know to be worse; or the outright vicious, who wholeheartedly chooses the bad, but still under the guise of the good, being misled by pleasant associations with the wrong things.

This is the book that shaped philosophical thinking about action since the past half-century, though I didn’t really understand this the first time I read it.

Among other things, Anscombe single-handedly resuscitates the old idea that all we want, we want under the guise of some good from the relative obscurity it had fallen into, handing it over to new generations of philosophers. She vehemently rejects the idea that people can actually behave like Poe’s characters.

This book personally helped me focus on and get interested in the concept of acting for reasons.

We all do things for reasons (good or bad), e.g. we take an umbrella because outside it’s raining, but what this exactly means is a philosophical puzzle. Dancy is probably the most powerful in arguing that we don’t normally find those reasons in ourselves, but in how things objectively are or might be.

Even when all we can say is “I do it because it’s my desire”, there has to be something attractive in what we desire beyond the fact that we desire it, which is one way to bring us back to the old idea of the guise of the good.

Like for Aristotle, this is no easy read, but Augustine must be credited with planting in the clearest and most dramatic way the central doubt: cannot we want and do something merely for the sake of the evil or wrong we would commit?

His story of the pear theft is bound to leave an impression on anyone, regardless of one’s religious background. Later Christian philosophers will try to get around Augustine’s doubts, with more or less success.

Dr. Baer was a leading clinician and researcher in the area of treating Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is essentially a problematic relationship between an individual and their thoughts. 

His focus was on struggles with thoughts that we identify as “bad” or unacceptable. This book was one of the first texts to fully describe what has come to be called “Pure O” OCD.  

This 1973 book got me started in this field over 50 years ago, and is still endlessly fascinating. Bleuel examines nearly every aspect of Nazi culture: male and female roles, the good wife and mother. There was even special medals (I have one) called Mutters Medal—a bronze for five children; a silver for 7; and a gold medal for 10 or more kids; divorce (actually quite common if the wife could not bear children); adultery (also quite common, as long as it produced babies); legal brothels; and of course “degeneracy” (perverted sex that did not produce Aryan blonds for the Fatherland (homosexuality, abortion, transvestism).

The movie and play Cabaret and the Roku series Berlin Babylon perfectly describe the forces of fascism trying to destroy “abnormal” sex.

Compare this book to Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture and Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin.

Are you tired of Hollywood clichés about Nazi culture? The Princeton historian Anson Rabinbach is your man. His brilliant essays on aspects of Nazi culture as diverse as the popular novel under Nazism, the Nazi-organized leisure industry, and the fate of the humanities at German universities between 1933 and 1945, provide the sharp, well-informed analysis you never got at school. Get started with the interview the author gave to two younger colleagues (pp. 450-480); here things become personal. Of course, Rabinbach is a pro, he knows the critical literature on the topic and cites it to differentiate his argument. But more importantly, his insights and arguments force you to rethink your response to German fascism, and to question the facile opposition of democracy and Nazism portrayed in American pop culture.  

Science collapses when scientists ignore objectivity and unbiased analysis, and Robert N. Proctor argues this effectively in this book.

I had long assumed (incorrectly) that racial doctrine during the Third Reich came directly from Hitler, but many German scientists actively espoused racial policies with supposed scientific justification. It may be hard to accept that some scientists became sympathizers overnight, no doubt for their own welfare and survival.

Proctor illustrates that pure science can be adapted for evil intent and that a self-centered agenda can result in illegitimate outcomes. 

This is the real-life biography of a little-known Canadian from Nova Scotia, Winthrop Bell.

Bell worked as a spy for British MI6 in Germany. Bell understood that Hitler, an insignificant minion, rose to lead the Nazi Party because he served as a tool for extreme and powerful Nationalists who fashioned the genocidal program—the Holocaust.

As Winthrop Bell pursues the truth, the twists and turns of his often dangerous life are fascinating. 

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s Occult Roots of Nazism is arguably the first scholarly monograph to take the relationship between occultism and Nazism seriously, providing a fascinating overview of the “secret Aryan cults” and “Ariosophic” beliefs that ostensibly influenced Nazi ideology.

While Goodrick-Clarke stops short of drawing a direct connection between prewar occult doctrines and Nazi policies during the Third Reich– indeed, his study concludes in 1935––no historian before or since has done as thorough a job, based on copious empirical research, of chronicling the eclectic and ubiquitous occult underground that helped shape the interwar folkish movement that produced Nazism.