Stuck in Iso? Don’t worry! The Generation Liberty Campus Coordinators have you
covered! Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be sharing their top tips for getting through the lockdown. Today we have John Hajek from the University of Melbourne with…The top five non-fiction books to read during lockdown.
There’s no point letting the lockdown go to waste, so I’ve been trying to put the extra time to good use by exercising, getting ahead of my study, reading lots of books and learning as much as I can. Here are my top five non-fiction books to read during lockdown.
1. The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Inequality, by Douglas MurrayOver the last few years, it has been impossible to ignore the ever-intensifying shriek of political correctness and identity politics. In The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray explores with admirable clarity the pathology of the ‘woke’ movement, including its origins, motives and maddening effects on our society. Get ready to read a compelling crystallisation of the thoughts that most sane people have been thinking for years, albeit perhaps only semi-consciously.
2. The Second World War, by Antony BeevorGerard Degroot’s review of this book in the Washington Post says it all: ‘This is World War II as Tolstoy would have described it – the great and the small.’ Settle in for a long one as this 1000-page compendium describes in unbelievable depths the tribulations of the biggest and smallest players in the War, flitting seamlessly from the Churchill’s War Cabinet, the German High Command and the Tehran Conference to the dysentery-plagued soldiers diggers in North Africa and the starving, frost-bitten soldiers on the Eastern Front.
3. Letters to a Young Contrarian, by Christopher HitchensIn Letters to a Young Contrarian, the peerless Christopher Hitchens espouses the virtues of going your own way, and of going it alone if necessary. Hitchens draws on examples from history such as the Dreyfus Affair to illustrate how those who are willing to dissent, to buck the majority and defend the despised, are often the only people standing between the majority and rank injustice.
In response to the platitude that some arguments are unnecessarily divisive and ‘shed more heat than light’, Hitchens rejoins that ‘light only comes from heat.’ A firm believer in dispute, dialectic and intellectual confrontation, the central message in this book is that ‘time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.’
4. Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective, by Thomas SowellToo often, inequality is simply equated with injustice, and treated as a sure sign of something nefarious. In Wealth Poverty and Politics, the venerable Thomas Sowell argues that economic outcomes among different countries, populations and even individuals were never going to be the same, and just because one nation, community or individual is wealthier than another does not mean the wealthier one has ripped off the poorer. Sowell explores everything from geography and topology to religion to explain the vast spread of outcomes in wealth and prosperity on every level.
5. You Have the Right to Remain Innocent, by James DuaneWhat do you do if you’re arrested on suspicion of a crime? Simple. First: remain silent and refuse to answer any questions. Second: ask for a lawyer. In this book, James Duane, a veteran criminal defence lawyer, piles example on top of example of suspects who would never had been convicted had they never voluntarily spoken to police. Many of these people were later proven to be innocent by DNA evidence.
Duane explains the many ways that an innocent person, trying to explain the truth to police in their own defence, can accidentally trip up and give the police the evidence to persuade a jury of your guilt. You’ll never want to talk a cop for the rest of your life after reading this.