POLLARD’S ‘MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS OF 2003’

Continuing the dubious tradition of winding up the year with lists of the year’s best everything, here’s my list of the ‘most important’ (to me, and potentially to those of like mind) books of 2003. They are ‘most important’ because they all changed how I thought about the world. They are not necessarily the best written, or the most entertaining. They’re in no particular order below. Links are to articles where I’ve discussed them in these pages.

The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell — what makes things change
The Future of Freedom, by Fareed Zakaria — why we can’t change another country’s culture from outside it
The New Rules of the World, by John Pilger — an accurate, devastating portrait of the world in 2003
Elizabeth Costello, by JM Coetzee — why we tolerate a holocaust against our fellow creatures on Earth
People Before Profit, by Charles Derber — how rampant corporatism ravaged the vast majority of people worldwide in the 1800s, and is doing so again
The Unconquerable World, by Jon Schell — why non-violence and consensus-building are the only viable way forward
The Support Economy, by Shoshana Zuboff — a deeply flawed but intellectually stimulating model for a post-capitalist economy
Unequal Protection, by Thom Hartmann — the case for denying ‘personhood’ to corporations
Radical Simplicity, by Jim Merkel — how to free yourself from possessions and wage slavery without sacrifice (reviewed yesterday)

The nine books above supplement the 18 items in the Radical Environmentalist’s Essential Reading List, which I put together at the start of this year. Missing from this reading list too are the following four items which I just discovered this year, though they were written earlier:

The World We Want, by Mark Kingwell (why we are best served by trusting our instincts rather than what we are persuaded is moral or rational)
The Demon in the Freezer, by Richard Preston (how vulnerable we all are to individual acts of terror, chaos and sabotage)
At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman (how self-organizing, self-managing systems work)
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, essay by Jared Diamond (why the adoption of agriculture was ‘a catastrophe from which we have never recovered’)

I’m still making my way through Charles Handy’s and Peter Drucker’s recent writings, and hope to add something of theirs to the list. Considering the number of business books written, it’s disappointing that I haven’t yet found a handbook for operating the new collaborative enterprises needed to build the next economy. I’m also eagerly awaiting Jared Diamond’s new book Ecocide, publication of which has now been pushed back a year to next November.

5 Responses to POLLARD’S ‘MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS OF 2003’

Raging Bee says:

December 3, 2003 at 10:59

“‘The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,’ essay by Jared Diamond (why the adoption of agriculture was ‘a catastrophe from which we have never recovered’)?”This is a joke, right? Sort of like that bit in the “Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy” where the high-tech humans with the digital watches get to wondering whether climbing down from the trees was such a good idea after all?What, pray tell, would the enlightened Jared Diamond have done instead?
Dave Pollard says:

December 3, 2003 at 11:32

Why don’t you read the essay and find out?
Raging Bee says:

December 3, 2003 at 12:31

Okay, I just wasted about twenty minutes reading this essay, and I find it long on rhetoric and short on solid reasoning.The best thing I can say about it is that it proves that farmers made certain choices in what crops to grow that made sense in the short term but showed human costs in the long term – which is a far cry from proving that agriculture in general was a mistake.The author’s credibility starts to slip with his constant references to the “progressivist party line” – as if the prevailing opinion he’s trying to refute was handed down to us by a “party” that covered up the truth for lo these many years.The author fails to answer one crucial question: if agriculture was so obviously harmful to the masses, and if so many people lost so much that was precious as a result, and gained so little in return, why didn’t they chuck the whole enterprise altogether?Perhaps it’s because the hunter-gatherer’s life was not as idyllic as the overstressed urban sophisticates imagine it to be. The author hints at this when he admits: “Partly, too, it
Dave Pollard says:

December 3, 2003 at 15:25

Well, Dave-the-PTW, I think our views — political and otherwise — are so far apart that there’s not much point in debating. But to answer your original question (though probably not to your satisfaction) what our ancestors should have done 30,000 years ago instead of inventing agriculture (as a response to the drop-off in the amount of big, easy game animals), is exactly what all animals have always done when their food supply diminishes, and that is have fewer offspring until the number of prey animals recovered. It’s called the balance of nature, and it’s remarkably efficient and, contrary to religious dogma, not at all brutal.
Raging Bee says:

December 4, 2003 at 07:01

I had believed that our views were not that far apart, give or take the elaborate load of bollocks that some new-age muffinheads use to argue for the simple life (as opposed to, y’know, just living the simple life); however, given your refusal even to attempt to answer the questions I posed in my criticism of the Diamond article, perhaps you’re right.Did someone say “religious dogma?”