Non-Fiction Books that Changed the Way I Think: Part I ...

In today's post, Miss Warner explores some of the non-fiction books that have had a significant impact on the way she looks at the world.

The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin
This book is one of my all time favourites. It is a patchwork of musings that really stay with you; a cultural tour de force!

'To great writers,' Walter Benjamin once wrote, 'finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labour their entire lives.' Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--'the theater,' as Benjamin called it, 'of all my struggles and all my ideas.'

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centres of consumerism, Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as 'Fashion,' 'Boredom,' 'Dream City,' 'Photography,' 'Catacombs,' 'Advertising,' 'Prostitution,' 'Baudelaire,' and 'Theory of Progress.' His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things - a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

Walter Benjamin

The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed 'true history' that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by 'progress,' Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

An intelligent and provocative collection of essays that testify to the critical brilliance of the late Joan Didion.

Joan Didion's savage masterpiece, which, since first publication in 1968, has been acknowledged as an unparalleled report on the state of America during the upheaval of the Sixties Revolution. Joan Didion has inspired writers and readers for decades. Her journalism, memoirs, and cultural and political commentary made her a unique chronicler of 20th-century culture.

In her own words….
'We tell ourselves stories in order to live.' – The White Album (1979)

'Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.' – Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Joan Didion

'I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.' – Why I Write (essay originally published in the New York Times Book Review in 1976)

'To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.' – Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power (essay originally published in Vogue in 1961)

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

A heartbreaking but important book.

In her award-winning modern classic, Samantha Power presents a deeply researched and powerfully argued answer to this haunting question. Disproving claims that successive American leaders were unaware of genocidal horrors occurring around the world, Power tells the stories of courageous individuals who risked their careers and lives in an effort to save others, revealing how policy makers and outsiders alike ignored chilling warnings and rationalised inaction. A riveting account, A Problem From Hell has forever reshaped debates about foreign policy, while inspiring a new generation to raise their voices in the face of contemporary injustice.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

A lyrical masterpiece: stirring and beautiful.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two ways of knowledge together.

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings - asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass - offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Many thanks to Miss Warner for these excellent recommendations: we'll be publishing Part II of this post later in the term, so look out for it!