Weird Books

                                   

From the Weird Books Room of AbeBooks.com:

The Pop-Up Book of Phobias

How Green Were the Nazis?

Poop-eaters: Dung Beetles in the Food Chain

The Great Pantyhose Crafts Book

Dead Clients Don't Pay: The Bodyguard's Manual

How to Survive a Robot Uprising

How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction

And many others.  (HT: Tyler Cowen)

Comments

[Tim Zinnecker]

Oh, the beauty of this post, juxtaposed against Al's post on anti-bellum bookcases!

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

I don't have any weird books of this sort, but I do have at least one title that is prima facie strange, particularly if one knows nothing about Tibetan Buddhism: an approximately 1,000 page book by Jeffrey Hopkins: Meditation on Emptiness* (1983)!

*It's an exposition of the Prāsangika-Mādhyamika view of “emptiness” as interpreted by the Gelukpa (monastic) order of Tibetan Buddhism (the order to which the current Dalai Lama belongs).

[Kim Krawiec]

I know, Tim, I thought the same thing. Al posts about antebellum classics, and I post about Poop-Eaters -- go figure.

I did wonder, Patrick, whether you would have read any of the "weird" books listed -- not because you're weird, of course ;-) -- but rather because you're so well-read.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Kim,

I have not read any of these books, however, what appears to be the most scholarly of the bunch, How Green Were the Nazis? (2005), called to mind a book of mine by Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (1989), which I can't find at the moment (this is what happens when you have piles of books not on bookshelves but on the floor in piles and on any flat surface that will support their weight) but as I recall tried a bit too hard to discover some indissoluble historical and theoretical connection between contemporary Green ('ecological' and environmental) political theory/praxis and fascist ideology, owing to the Nazi appropriation of some forms of "nature" philosophy and proto-ecological ideas (cf. her earlier work, Blood and Soil: Walther Darre and Hitler's Green Party, 1985). The subject continues to intrigue historians, e.g., Frank Uekoetter's The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (2006).

This topic was a rather contentious and heated one in early "debates" within the Green movement (i.e., before the Greens in this country formed a political party), prompted largely by the vociferous and tendentious polemics of the anarchist intellectual and Social Ecology theorist, Murray Bookchin. Bookchin and his Social Ecology acolytes accused Earth First! members of Nazi-like strategies and ideas (at best they might have been guilty of overweening fondness for Maulthusian Social Darwinisn and the works of Edward Abbey) and found proto- or neo-Nazi sympathies or ideas among Deep Green political philosophies.

Incidentally, my wife thinks I'm a bit weird (I hope in an endearing and eccentric--not creepy--sort of way).

[Kim Krawiec]

Weird is good.