Books like Uncommon People — picked by fans

This is a very old book–written when merchant capitalism just started to take off. It always impresses me–I have read it several times now–how 500 years ago, such an agglomeration of innovative ideas, of visions for a future society, could have been formulated.

A vision, that today is as vibrant and thought-provoking for an author and scientist like me, as it must have been at the time when it was written. Simply stupendous!

I found this a fun and brilliant story. I actually read it to my three nieces when they were 5, 7, and 11. It was great hearing their opinions on the story.  It’s one of those books that can be understood on different levels. 

In the simplest form, it is exactly what is written on the pages—a story about some farm animals who take over the farm. However, there are many layers to this simple tale. 

I love being able to re-read a book and understand it on a different level each time. To me, that is excellent writing, especially when combined with a fun and entertaining tale.

László’s book is a masterpiece of interweaving exciting storytelling with prudent proposals for a new view on seemingly unexplainable ‘bursts’ of behavior. I like the sudden breaks in the text, which abruptly jump from focus to focus—this keeps me alert and induces me to invent my own overarching interpretation.

A new stage of understanding the manyfold links in our social world has to include sudden breaks in standard behavior—this is the main message that the eminent network researcher Barabasi has in store for me. 

This book reached me when I was a young rebellious man in 1971, and it had an immediate impact on my behavior. The youth revolt that we not only could watch on TV since 1968, but which we also could live with our anti-authoritarian behavior at schools, universities, and at work, this new style was given a fresh and funny voice in this book.

Later, Frank Zappa elevated it to more intellectual grounds in lyrics and Jazz-Rock. But for me, Rubin's book still is the best starter for getting the original spirit of the youth revolt of 68. 

Travis is an apprentice engineer of trans-quantum chambers, stations that transport people to cities all over the universe. On a risky maintenance assignment, something goes wrong, trapping Travis on a distant planet with limited resources as he tries to solve the mystery of what killed all the humans on this world.

The world-building here is a lot of fun to imagine. Combine that with Wilson's descriptive prowess, and you have an immersive adventure to the stars that appeals to the sci-fi nerd that I am.

A highly opinionated, and thus sometimes frustrating, analysis of the pre-Civil War minstrel show, and how it impacted both oppressed African-Americans and the working-class whites who made the shows so popular. This was the first major book to advance the idea that the minstrel show was not only an exploitation of black culture (the “theft”), but also appreciated that culture and began its integration into the American musical mainstream (the “love”), which would prove to have profound implications in decades to come. An influential book that has been frequently cited in subsequent works.

Rick Bragg’s obsession with a grandfather he ever knew was fascinating. This was a man who lived during the Great Depression. He didn’t wear clothes with holes in them because that was popular, he did it because those were the only clothes he owned. It unveiled the ability of an ordinary man to do extraordinary things, an impressive accomplishment.

I first came across this book as an undergraduate student many years ago. I was drawn to the book because it covered a topic that was not very common at the time, namely the Egyptian working class. Beinin and Lockman’s study of how the working class navigated the three major intellectual currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—nationalism, religion, and Communism—opened my eyes to social history as no other book had done. Workers on the Nile analyses how Egypt brutally is drawn into the global capitalist system in the nineteenth century and how this process produced a native working class (alongside a large community of European ex-pat workers). Gradually the working class comes of age by organising its labour, and eventually, this gives rise to more radical politics in the shape of Communism, Islamic activism, and nationalist tendencies.

This book simply changed the way I do business as a historian and a reader. I love the groundbreaking use of diaries, census records, worker’s memoirs, and library registers to sketch a detailed picture of real books read by real people—not just the official academic record of fine editions with countless mentions of that nameless creature, the “nineteenth-century reader.”

It inspired me to pursue the stories behind the names and comments scratched into abandoned books that find their way onto eBay and the dusty shelves of second-hand bookstores.

When I studied with James Alan McPherson at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop over twenty years ago, he played stand-up records from the 1970s and asked students to read ancient drama translated from Latin.

He was teaching us how comedy works, and he had a long gaze. His collection Elbow Room is similarly expansive. The past bubbles into the present abruptly, as in the story “A Loaf of Bread,” where “older people began grabbing, as if the secret lusts of a lifetime had suddenly seized command of their arms and eyes.”