Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz

On the lighter side for movies Harvey with James Stewart is always a good classic.

This may not be the proper forum for this, but I will state my ‘idea’/'proposal’ anyway, and see if anyone is intrigued by my reasoning.

[Moved to the forum - admin.]

I don’t know how this got left off.

Bellomo, The Common Legal Past of Europe, 1000-1800
Rene David, Major Legal Systems in the World Today
Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals
Patrick Devlin, The Judge,
Patrick Devlin, Trial by Jury
Richard Ducann, The Art of the Advocate
Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law
S.E. Forman, Esentials in Civil Government (1904)
Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutinal Right
Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty
Ron Harris, Industrializing English Law: Entrepreneurship and Business Organization, 1720-1844
Arthur R. Hogue, Origins of the Common Law
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Collected Legal Papers
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law
John W. Johnson, American Legal Culture, 1908-1940
Stanley I. Kutler, Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case
F.W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England
F.W. Maitland, Selected Essays
F.W. Maitland, Historical Essays
F.W. Maitland, Cecil Fifoot, ed., The Letters of Frederic William Maitland
James Oldham, Engish Common Law in the Age of Mansfield
Roscoe Pound, The Formative Era of American Law

Reuven Brenner, The Force of Finance
Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
Ronald H. Coase, The Firm, the Market and the Law
Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else
Milton & Rose Friedman, Free to Choose
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man
Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity
Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century
Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy
Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing our Minds, Our Bodies — And What it Means to be Human
Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Friedrich A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order
Friedrich A. Hayek, Capitalism and the Historians
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Joel Kotkin, Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy
Alan Macfarlane, The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan and the Malthusian Trap
Alan Macfarlane, The Riddle of the Modern World: Of Liberty, Wealth and Equality
Alan Macfarlane, The Making of the Modern World: Visions From East and West
Alan Macfarlane, Glass: A World History
Alan Macfarlane, Letters to Lily: On How the World Works
Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism
Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action
Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations
Madsen Pirie, Dismantling the State: The Theory and Practice of Privatization
Gustav Schmoller, The Mercantile System and its Historical Significance
Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions
Thomas Sowell, Education: Assumptions Versus History
Thomas Sowell, The Economics and Politics of Race
Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
Thomas Sowell, Compassion v. Guilt and Other Essays
Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History
Thomas Sowell, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics
Thomas Sowell, Preferential Policies: An International Perspective
Thomas Sowell, Classical Economics Reconsidered
Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture
Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals
George J. Stigler, The Economist as Preacher and Other Essays
George J. Stigler, The Orgnanization of Industry
George J. Stigler, The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation
George J. Stigler, Essays in the History of Economics
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Nicholas V. Riasanovksy, A History of Russia
Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy
Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime
Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology
Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution
Robert Conquest, Stalin, Breaker of Nations
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment
Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Vol. 1)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: The Destructive Labor Camps, The Soul and Barbed Wire (Vol. 2)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: Katorga, Exile, Stalin is no More (Vol. 3)
Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Untold Story
V.M. Molotov, Felix Chuev ed., Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics, Conversations with Felix Chuev
Milovan Djilas, Conversations With Stalin
Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs
Boris Yeltsin, Against the Grain: An Autobiography
Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power
Eugenia Ginsberg, Journey Into the Whirlwind

Arden Bucholz, Hans Delbruck and the German Miitary Establishment
Ludwig Dehio, Germany and World Politics in the Twentieth Century
Gordon A. Craig, From Bismarck to Adenauer, Aspects of German Statecraft
Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army
Dennis Showalter, Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology and the Unification of Germany
Holger Herwig, The Politics of Frustration: The United States in German Naval Planning, 1889-1941
Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War
Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair:: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology
Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World
Fritz Stern, Dreams and Delusions: National Socialism in the Drama of the German Past
Marion Countess Donhoff, Before the Storm: Memories of My Youth in Old Prussia
Marie Vassiltchikov, Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945

Edward Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society

W.J.F. Jenner, The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis

C.V. Wedgewood, William the Silent

D.K. Palit, War in High Himalaya

Stanley Jaki, The Road to Science and the Ways to God

Steven Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President, 1952-1969

Trying to go with the themes I see above, I will limit my recommendations to two (I think people should read all his (finished) novels, but people may think that a bit much): Hard Times and Martin Chuzzlewit. Hard Times is Dickens’ most modern novel and extremely short. I think some who think they know Dickens may be a little surprised by the book.

Martin Chuzzlewit is full of comic genius, though it ultimately is extremely dark (there was an excellent adaptation for Masterpiece Theater, but there’s a crucial bit missing). However, to get a good idea of British attitudes on America in the 1840s/1850s, one should read the bit of youn Martin’s excursion into America. There’s a huge backstory from Dickens’ own life, and underlying this is a huge international copyright dispute (i.e., international copyright did not exist at the time) – one should read the bit he added as preface after he visited the U.S. a second time after the Civil War.

Anyway, Hard Times and Martin Chuzzlewit. Plenty to chew on in both. Hard Times for the lazy, and Martin Chuzzlewit for the avid reader. ;)

A)Series: Magnum, P.I., with Tom Selleck. This series emphasizes the brotherhood of men in the three Viet vets loyalty, welded in battle; it demonstrates the similar vision of the British and the Americans, as Higgins joins them. Higgins’ role as a quite British mentor reinforces the relationship we have as the “younger” nation. The series also demonstrates that an unusually high level of patriotism delineates the differences between the British and Americans, but also that strong feelings increase rather than decrease the understanding of and therefore sympathy for the other.

Made for t.v. movie: Tom Selleck again. Ike: Countdown to D-Day. The comments on both Netflix and Amazon emphasize the focus on leadership, on the difficulties of leading in what was both battle and politics, as the French, English & Americans prepare for D-Day. Selleck plays a restrained & tense Eisenhower; his interview with Churchill is, again, a meeting of the two cultures. The film was shot in New Zealand – so we have Anglosphere culture in that way, too. This is not a war movie but a psychological, character-driven work; it clearly tried to be as accurate and historical as it could within the constraints of such a film.

Band of Brothers is a series that I’ve never seen, but I’ve heard many quite different veterans praise.

What about the folktales of J. Frank Dobie?