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11-05-2014, 02:40 PM
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#1 (permalink) |
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Toasted Poster
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: SoCal by way of Boston
Posts: 11,332
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Life Changing Non-Fiction Books?
Both of these were game changers for me.
Religion and Science: Bertrand Russell, Michael Ruse: 9780195115512: Amazon.com: Books http://www.amazon.com/The-Case-God-K...+casae+for+god
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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” |
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11-05-2014, 03:06 PM
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#2 (permalink) | |
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V8s & 12 Bars
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: British Columbia
Posts: 955
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Carl Sagan's work was pretty much single handedly responsible for me finding any sort of direction in life. For most of my life before that I didn't have many passions outside of music and art, nothing I could confidently take forward as a career prospect. Eventually I accidentally stumbled upon his book COSMOS through music message boards / online communities. The world through Sagan's lens was exactly what I needed at that point in my life, it was so unusually refreshing. My family was in a really dark place at the time, my brother was in and out of prison, my mother was in the process of dealing with drug addiction, my father was still bitter and lonely from a messy divorce several years earlier, and I was doing quite poorly in school. I desperately needed some sort of guidance and escapism, Sagan's books provided just that.
It was originally his commentaries on technological evolution and radio astronomy that provoked me to pursue electronics as both an academic interest and career. COSMOS pretty much did for me what The Bible does for Christians. I've read nearly all of Sagan's works since then, they are collectively by far the most influential books I've ever experienced.  The only other books that have come close were the many non-fiction works of Isaac Asimov and Howard Bloom's Global Brain.
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11-14-2014, 06:42 PM
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#5 (permalink) |
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Dude... What?
Join Date: Oct 2013
Posts: 1,322
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Hard for me to say. Any book that comes to mind is one of fiction. I have to say though that "The History of San Francisco" helped me appreciate my home city a lot more. "How We Decide" was a surprisingly interesting one that I read in a college course too. Also I remember reading a collection of essays, journals, and letters by Segmund Freud in high school that really amazed me.
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12-08-2014, 12:07 PM
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#10 (permalink) |
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Just Keep Swimming...
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: See signature...
Posts: 7,766
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The Art of Peace by Morihei Ueshiba:
http://www.aikidoseiki.com/doc/aikid..._peace_eng.pdf ...and for the life of me, I can't find it, but Pragmatic Philosophy by (?)William James(?).
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