I have been
asked a number of times by friends and colleagues to post the reference of my
favorite books. Here is a list:
Evolution and societies
Two
illuminating accounts of
© Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene.
Richard
Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker. Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a
Universe Without Design. W. W. Norton & Company 1996.
A man whose
insight and generosity make sense of the evolution of human societies:
© Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W. W. Norton
& Company 1999 (Gallimard botched the French
translation).
Jared
Diamond: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
Viking Adult 2004.
Why we have
a big head and play music to our loved one:
Geoffrey
Miller: The Mating Mind: How Sexual
Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. Anchor 2001.
And, finally a witty execution of the most enduring social and political
clichés of the 20th century:
© Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate : The Denial of Human Nature
and Modern Intellectual Life, Viking Adult and Pinguin 2002 (a
French translation exists if you can afford it).
History
Understand
modern Europeans:
© Barbara Tuchman. Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.
Ballantine Books 1987.
The
Renaissance and Reformation wake-up call
William
Manchester: A World Lit Only by Fire: The
Medieval Mind and the Renaissance - Portrait of an Age.
Why the
year 1000 now gives me the creeps
James
Reston: The Last Apocalypse: Europe at
the Year 1000 A.D. Doubleday 1998.
Environment
In spite of
errors, the proof that one can care about environment and still prefer using
one’s brain to smoking a pipe:
Bjorn Lomborg: The
Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World.
Cambridge 2001. (A French translation exists).
Society
The NGOs’
(ONG) tough situation
David Rieff: A Bed for the
Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. Simon and Schuster, 2002.
Psychology
How
language fits into the evolutionary perspective:
© Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. Harper
Perennial Modern Classics 2000.
French society
How the
French differ from North Europeans and Americans:
Raymonde
Carroll: Cultural Misunderstandings : The
French-American Experience.
© Jean-Benoit Nadeau, Julie Barlow: Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why
We Love France but Not the French. Sourcebooks 2003.
Art
Very
special
© Philip Sandblom: Creativity and Disease: How Illness Affects
Literature, Art, and Music.
Science for nearly all of us:
Bill
Bryson: A Short History of Nearly
Everything. Broadway 2004.
White-knuckles
Swordfish
will never taste the same after:
Sebastian Junger: The Perfect Storm : A True Story of Men Against the Sea, Harper 1999
(French translation)
Jon Krakauer: Into Thin Air : A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster,
Anchor 1999 (French translation).
Being the
mother of a Columbine child:
© Lionel Shriever: We need to talk about Kevin, Harper 2004
(French translation).