Still Bonkers After All These Years

Given that I am on civic (political) overload, I’ve had to reorganize my thoughts by going back to some of my old undergraduate texts. Steeped in political theory, these are just a few of my primary sources on governance and mankind. As dated as they are, they still provide a foundational understanding for what ails our civic culture. Although I minored in economics, and if I had to do it over, I would supplement my understanding of human ecology with an additional minor in cultural anthropology. However, what I gleaned from the nature of our human condition did not all come from the traditional social sciences alone, but from the humanities and the literature I was reading at the time.

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis 
Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell

Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Selected Essays–by Ralph Waldo Emerson
If BEALE STREET COULD TALK–by James Baldwin
Brave New World–by Aldous Huxley
You Can’t Go Home Again–Thomas Wolfe
Burr–Gore Vidal

Farenheit 451 and the Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The Complete Works–by T.S. Elliot
Selected Poems–by Robert Frost
Selected Works–Nathaniel Hawthorne
Selected Works–Edgar Allan Poe

This list doesn’t even include the readings from my other courses in political science, economics, Roman, Russian, and Japanese history, let alone such works as:

The End of Affluence– by Paul R. Ehrilich
The Closing Circle–by Barry Commoner
Future Shock–by Alvin Toffler
The Greening of America–by Charles A. Robert Reich
Small is Beautiful–by E.F. Schumacher
Silent Spring–by Rachel Carson 
Working–by Studs Terkel 

By 1971, it was clear–I was bonkers. Between then and now, my library has grown by an additional 1,000 texts. As such, I’m now totally bonkers, and for some, banned.

Back then, my idea of light reading was The Source by James A. Michener. Now it’s the Mediterranean Dash Diet.