Recommended reading

Anyone got some good non-fiction for the literate anon?

(And of course, by "literate", I mean "capable of reading more than two trolls and a flame before needing a fap-break)

(Oh, and in b4 "What, intelligent life in 4chan? You kidding?")


My 2 cents: "The Crusades through Arab eyes" by Amin Maalouf.

Relevance for the modern anon:
- whatever they say on Fox et al, history did NOT start 5 seconds ago. For starters, the "war on terror" has elements stretching back centuries
- the Crusaders lost for a number of reasons. Among them were inflexible military thinking and underestimating a unified enemy (in b4 "hurr durr america > all")

Much interesting to learn, like:
- back then, the Moslems were keen on education and learning, while the Christians were largely superstitious, illiterate thugs
- the Crusades started well for the Crusaders, cos Moslems couldn't stand together (at least at first)
- nor could the Crusaders (both sides were many nations, never one), this being the third main reason they were eventually beaten back
- the Moslem world was so traumatised by the Crusades that their culture went into a stagnation that they're still struggling with

OK, the tl;dr lamp is blinking. Next!

also please provide download links for the books because there's no fucking way i'll ever pay for books not related to engineering or science

Anything by Alex de Tocqueville.  All of his works are public domain so you can find them on Google Books

>>1
That argument "they were inflexible" is an old tired worn out cliche used by shit historians. Everything else though seems fine.

>>4
Here, actually
>the Moslem world was so traumatised by the Crusades that their culture went into a stagnation that they're still struggling with
is retarded, it didn't stop the Ottomans pwning eastern europe for 3 centuries so it wasn't traumatic, far less traumatic than say the total obliteration of persian civilisation by the Mongols during the same period.

Anything by Chomsky will bring you some srsly underweight hipster booty.

>>2
Heard about file-sharing? P2P networks tend to have search engines...
Btw; http://www.amazon.com/0805208984

>>7
Damn, URL format error.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?field-keywords=0805208984

>>5
I said "their culture". Their military did just enough learning to give Europe some headaches for a while (or at least the Turks did, before fucking up their own ruling class). They basically stopped doing much in the way of science, cultural input & stuff, though.

Also, I did not say the Crusades were the only trauma of their day. The Mongols had a fair shot at actually conquering Mecca (which the Crusaders didn't give much of a hoot about), the way they'd already taken all of Persia. Mainly for that reason, the Mongol invasion didn't exactly soften the blow that was the Crusades.

Btw, one particular Moslem butthurt was succession of leadership. When a Christian leader kicked the bucket, his corpse wasn't even cold before everyone knew - and obeyed - his successor. Among the Moslems, a dead leader meant civil war over who was gonna take over.

While the Moslems suffered greatly over this ...lack of clarity (e.g. one of the things that eventually fubar'ed the Ottomans), they were helped by it precisely once; the Mongols had the same problem. When the esteemed Mongol Khan died, the resulting civil war gave the Moslems the breathing room to rout them. When the Mongols got their stuff back together, they had enough else on their plate.

>>9
You seem to blow many small factors out of proportion, succession crisis are usually just a focal point in time for frictions in society rather than being entirely caused by the process of succession itself, though I agree that instability was a major cause of the stagnation of the Islamic world.

>>10
I said "one particular". As in "there's more, but this is the one most relevant to this particular point".

>>11
My point was relevant in the context of the causes of instability during successions, not in the context of the cause of economic and technological stagnation in the Islamic world.

"The Bell Curve," Richard Herrenstein & Charles Murray
"Decline of the West," Oswald Spengler
"A Study of History," Arnold Toynbee
"Which Way, Western Man?" William G. Simpson

>>13
Books you pretended to read?

>>14
Cool story, bro.