Dr. Atkins' NEW Diet Revolution by the late Dr. Robert C. Atkins. Lose weight, eat lots, improve health. See my page on the subject: The Atkins Diet.
"The Death of Common Sense (How Law is Suffocating America)" by Philip K. Howard. Very very good. Rules and laws have taken over from common sense, as you may have noticed, and here are a few of quotes --
Process was intended to make sure everything was done responsibly. It has instead become a device for manipulation, even extortion.
Imposing due process ... is inconsistent with helping human beings. Abiding by its formalisms, and satisfying uniformity, carves a chasm between helper and helpee. The welfare state is reduced to throwing crumbs from a distance because of a tragic misfit of legal ideology and social objectives.
As citizens and officials, we are allowed to argue during the lawmaking stage, but, day to day, we are precluded from making sense of the problems before us.
"Laws of Form" by George Spencer Brown. Just as one & zero are not numbers but rather the stuff numbers are made out of, Laws of Form is a proto-mathematic, the stuff that mathematics are made out of. [Spencer] Brown has conducted at least one seminar or workshop or whatever in the U.S., a few years back, and I think it was in or near San Francisco. A prerequisite for the course was getting off caffeine at least two weeks before the session. I shoulda gone. Drat.
"A Reader" by George Steiner, being his own selections from his various works. This guy's writing is like chocolate mousse. Not the stuff in the supermarket, I mean real chocolate mousse, like you get in Paris, or in Ranchos de Taos. I checked this book out of the library a few years ago, read half of the first page of the introduction, immediately took it back to the library, and went and bought myself a copy.
"Chocolate to Morphine -- Understanding Mind-Active Drugs" by Andrew Weil MD and Winifred Rosen. ISBN 0-395-33190-0, Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1983. Very interesting reading. If you've been subjected to "drug education" in our so-called schools, you'll see from this book how much you've been fed pure BS.
"Adventures of a Bystander" by Peter Drucker, the management guru. Different from anything else he's written because it's memoirs, about some very interesting people he's met along the way. Very very. Get it.
"Up the Organization" and the newer "Further Up the Organization" by Robert Townsend. Drucker calls this approach "Pop Management" but I call it excellent bathroom reading and a lot of good advice from the guy who made Avis #2 and a legend. Many short essays about running a business (and all in alphabetical order).
"How to Lie With Statistics" by Darrell Huff. Here's an example: "If you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing." Reading this might not give you X-Ray Vision but it will help you see through smokescreens.
"A Story Like the Wind" and "A Far-Off Place" by Laurens Van der Post. The two books go together. The original story, before Disney barfed all over it. While you're at it, read anything you can find by Van der Post, including the item I'm reading right now (June 1998): "A Walk With a White Bushman".
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