Five Books to Feed Your Mind

"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free." -Frederick Douglass

📚Hey, good evening!

First off, let's welcome all the new people who joined us since last time!

There are 2,317 of us in total now.

Thank you (yes, you!) for trusting me to bring you the absolute best book recommendations I can each and every week!

As always, these are long emails full of great books and tons of cool surprises.

But I never expect that everyone will be interested in every single thing I publish.

So, feel free to jump around and dive into whatever does interest you!

Today we've got...

  • An introduction to today's "Five Books"

  • The book quote of the week

  • My personal news, and the best of what I'm reading and sharing right now

  • Two online creator friends of mine you need to know about

  • Three of my favorite newsletters that I always open

  • A new book alert: featuring a book that will help you take advantage of one of the most lucrative writing opportunities today

  • The latest book breakdown from the Stairway to Wisdom

  • The Semmelweis Reflex and the consequences of automatically resisting new ideas

  • Optimizing yourself like an Olympic athlete, the best business books, and helping to build humanity’s future

  • Why “achieving” failure is the key to success

  • Why budgets are for broke people - and what you should do instead

  • My top 5 book recommendations this week

  • A special gift for reading all the way to the end

In one sentence…

Stolen Focus is a must-read book about the “attention crisis” facing our society today, and the author, Johann Hari, identifies 12 reasons why many of us are losing the ability to focus on anything.

Real Help is a down-to-earth, friend-to-friend book about all the reasons why society doesn’t want you to succeed, and why none of those reasons matter.

The Personal MBA is an entire business school education contained within the pages of a single book, and it’ll save you approximately $200,000 in tuition as you learn about how to build and grow a profitable business.

Regarding the Pain of Others is an incredibly thoughtful meditation on war photography and other ways we observe violence being done to others and asks some extremely important questions about the role and responsibility of the “viewer.”

Napoleon: A Life is one of the greatest biographies I’ve ever read, just an absolutely gripping read about one of the most intense, impressive, and ambitious leaders who ever lived.

Here in this email are summaries of each book, along with a sample of my best notes, and if you want my complete set of notes on these books, you can find them on my  Patreon .

Pro Learning Tip:

 Getting a membership to Medium is one of the best investments I've ever made in my continuing education. The quality of the writing on Medium is superb, and some of the smartest, most interesting thinkers publish there regularly.

“Do not think you have done enough. It does not matter what you did yesterday. Yesterday is gone. And today: THE COUNT IS ZERO. Wake up with that attitude every day. You have to prove yourself all over again. You have to earn your seat at the table. You have to GET AFTER IT.”

-Jocko Willink, Discipline Equals Freedom

1) My hernia surgery is scheduled for August 14th! I’m going to be fine - all it means is that there will be no emails going out that week.

So no book breakdown email on Monday, no Five Books email on Wednesday, and no book notes email on Friday.

But Five Books will be back on August 23rd, I’ll send out more book notes on the 25th, and I’ll have another book breakdown for you on the 28th.

That’ll be the schedule going forward, but I’ll have my breakdown of Your Next Five Moves, by Patrick Bet-David ready for you before I go under the knife!

2) My friend Cody Adent’s new book, Winning the Moment, is about to blow up on Instagram, and there’s a very good reason why.

Every moment offers us a chance to change the trajectory of our one and only life, and Cody’s book offers a blueprint for how we can make the life-affirming choice every time. Every moment.

It’s a message that I absolutely stand behind, and it’s Cody’s authenticity and genuine desire to help and be of service that is one of this book’s greatest strengths.

So yea, I’ll be talking about this book a lot in the next little while, and you might definitely think about checking it out yourself!

3) I loved this article from learning expert Scott Young, called 7 Expert Opinions I Agree With (That Most People Don’t). 

He talks about preferred learning styles (they’re not real), the efficiency of markets, whether you can actually increase your intelligence, and more things that are just super interesting. Check out the article here.

Scott is also the author of Ultralearning, a book I’ve featured here before and can highly recommend to people who want to learn how to learn.

4) Not too long ago, my friend Ve invited me to speak as a guest on his podcast, Inside the System. We spoke about books (obviously), but also about self-discipline, finding meaning in life, blasting through obstacles, and more.

It was certainly a wide-ranging, fascinating conversation (I know, I just called myself fascinating, but VE is a pretty fascinating guy himself!), and I know that our listeners got quite a bit out of it.

You can listen to the whole episode here, and, insanely organized guy that he is, Ve even compiled a list of Actionable Takeaways from the podcast, even a full transcript of the whole thing.

I mean, damn. Anyways, you can check out the podcast here if you’d like!

5) I was also a guest on another podcast, this time with my friend, author, and professional speaker John Livesay!

His extremely professional and polished podcast is listened to in over 60 countries and it’s called The Successful Pitch.

John and I talked for about 28 minutes about the transformational power of books and reading, the importance of getting and staying active, both physically and mentally, and a whole lot more having to do with fulfillment, education, wisdom, and peace.

I loved my time talking to John and you can check out that podcast here!

6) I am now SO CLOSE to reaching 1,000 subscribers on YouTube and I need your help! If you aren’t subscribed already, please consider doing so right here to get my video book reviews, reading tips, motivational videos, and more.

As always, let me know what kinds of videos YOU would like to see, and I’ll do what I can to make that happen!

Subscribe to my YouTube channel by clicking here (you know, please haha).

7) In the last week or so, I just opened up premium subscriptions to The Reading Life!

You’ll still get all of the summaries and book notes you’ve been getting until now, but I’m thinking of giving paid members early access to new posts, even more book notes and summaries, and discounts on all my books and courses coming out in the future.

I’d also love to know what YOU would like to receive as a member of The Reading Life, so just respond to this email if you have any suggestions!

Become a Book Club Insider now by joining my premium membership and receive early access to new posts and videos, members-only book summaries, and a free gift after signing up (Value of Gift: $102)!

8) We just broke the $150 mark in the Charity Reading Challenge!

Thank you to everyone who has made a donation so far to First Book, the children’s educational charity, including the latest contributor, Bridget Sanchez! Thanks!

Actually, damn, more than just a simple “thank you” - Bridget just donated FIFTY DOLLARS to help kids everywhere learn to read. I’ll say it in all caps - maybe that’ll help:

THANK YOU, BRIDGET!

This will be an ongoing challenge and you don’t have to donate or anything in order to participate.

It’s open to everyone - and please share this Reading Challenge if you know some people who might like to take part - and if you’d like to donate to First Book, they’d appreciate it a lot!

To participate, all you have to do is set a reading goal for the month and try to reach it.

You don’t have to share your goal with anyone, but you could reply to this email and tell me, or comment on the fundraising page and let everyone know!

Me, I plan to finish Don Quixote this month (I have ~700 pages left), as well as 8 other books (print and digital) and 1 audiobook.

That’s 10 books this month in total! (If my math serves me correctly haha).

I'm also listening to  Living Untethered, by Michael A. Singer on Audible. It’s read by him, which is usually what I look for in an audiobook! I don’t know, it just adds a little something to have the author narrate his own book.

Nowadays, I listen to about 3-4 audiobooks a month, and I always listen to them on Audible. No other audiobook service even compares. You can also get a 30-day free trial  right here .

You know I love to support new and old friends of mine who are doing awesome things (or simply amazing people I've stumbled upon around the internet), and so here are a few great people you should know about:

1) First up is my friend Will, KnowleDJ on Instagram, a Vegas-based DJ who has toured internationally with The Backstreet Boys, Ariana Grande, and more.

He’s also a DEDICATED reader, and you can always rely on him to unearth some incredible book recommendations that not a lot of people know about.

His stated mission is to connect the world with music and if you’ve ever seen one of his epic performances, you know that he’s the PERFECT person to help make that happen.

He’s also got a podcast that I highly recommend listening to called Dangerous Knowledge, and you can find out more about him right here! Thanks for doing what you do, man!

2) Next up are two new Twitter friends of mine, Rebecca Brown and her husband Andrew! Together they have more than a decade of experience in publishing (maybe more haha!) and have helped 500+ writers sell millions of books.

They’re also just…good people, which is pretty much my main filter for new friends and connections online. You can spot it a mile away, and it’s something you can’t fake or force.

Okay, so Andrew has a Substack newsletter where he will show you the power of self-publishing and how to build authority in your niche. That can be found here.

And Rebecca also has a Substack newsletter where she will help you bring your writing to the world. That can be found here. Rebecca also offers professional editing and typesetting services here.

I’m so fortunate to be able to surround myself with wonderful people like Andrew and Rebecca, and now you can go introduce yourself too!

Do you know someone I should know?

I’m always looking to connect with accomplished, inspirational, and good-hearted people who share the same interests that I do…especially books!

So if you have a favorite author, influencer, creator, etc. that you think I might love to meet (and maybe feature here), let me know! You can just hit reply to this email anytime and tell me about them. Thanks!

📚 Alex and Books Newsletter: Become smarter, happier, and wiser with 5-minute book summaries. Plus advice on how to develop a reading habit, become a better reader, & more.

📚 Sahil Bloom’s Curiosity Chronicle: Join 400,000+ others who receive the 2x weekly newsletter, where Sahil provides actionable ideas to help you build a high-performing, healthy, wealthy life.

📚 The Imperfectionist: Oliver Burkeman’s twice-monthly email on productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.

📚 Start Your Own Newsletter with Beehiiv: This is the email platform I use personally to support my publications, The Reading Life, and The Competitive Advantage. I recently switched to Beehiiv and I will never, ever go back!

Cole’s last book, The Art and Business of Online Writing, changed the way I write forever.

It also helped me elevate the quality and substance of every single thing I publish and helped me establish a solid financial base so that I could keep writing forever and never run out of money.

It’s an amazing book, and if you are a writer yourself or want to become one, then definitely check that one out. 

But you don’t have to publish your own work under your own name to make money - a lot of money - as a writer. You can be a ghostwriter, and that’s the subject of Nicolas Cole’s new book.

Here’s what Amazon has to say about it:

Ghostwriting is the single most lucrative way to monetize your talents as a writer.

Over the past 6 years, Nicolas Cole has ghostwritten for more than 300 different industry leaders, C-Suite executives, founders of Silicon Valley startups, venture capitalists, and even Olympic athletes, Grammy-winning musicians, and New York Times bestselling authors. In 2017, Cole founded the first ghostwriting agency specializing in opinion articles online, and to date has ghostwritten more than 3,000 articles (under other people’s names). At its height, Cole’s ghostwriting agency, Digital Press, had more than 80 concurrent clients, employed over 20 writers & editors, and was generating several million dollars in annual revenue.

And in The Art & Business of Ghostwriting, he explains exactly how he did it—so you can start making money as a Premium Ghostwriter, too.

In this book you will learn:

  • The differences between Freelance Writing & Ghostwriting (and why you should never call yourself a “freelance writer” again).

  • Why ghostwriting is much more lucrative (and why it’s the fastest path to earning 6-figures for yourself as a writer).

  • How to “niche down” as a ghostwriter, create your own category, and differentiate yourself from any and all competition.

  • The 5 different archetypes of Client Voices—and how you can create templates to streamline your efficiencies.

  • How to ghostwriting anything: articles, newsletters, Tweets, LinkedIn posts, Medium articles, Quora answers, blog posts, startup fundraising decks, and more.

  • The root fears of pricing, and why so many freelancers struggle to charge more and attract high-quality clients.

  • A roadmap to scaling your 1-person ghostwriting agency.

  • And how to easily find ghostwriting clients.

“Ghostwriting paid me to learn, paid me to practice my craft, and paid me to build a billion-dollar network for myself," says Cole. "Ghostwriting changed my life—and it can change yours, too."

So, what are you waiting for?

There has never been a better time in history to earn a living as a writer.

All you have to do is call yourself a Premium Ghostwriter.

“Truth is a thing that is living from moment to moment - to be discovered, not believed in, not quoted, not formulated. But to see that truth, your mind and your heart must be extremely pliable, alert."

-Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Truth

Thinking that you can find one Ultimate Truth that's going to be final and complete for all time is like a musician trying to hold down one note forever and ever; like trying to close your fist around a flickering flame; or like trying to stop a sunset and hold it in place until the end of time.

Trying to pin down the truth of human existence is an impossible task, and trying to fossilize that truth with words is always a mistake. Not only that, but no one can lead you to the truth either. Sure, they can suggest ways of approaching the truth, but they can never simply hand you the real thing.

Jiddu Krishnamurti understood this from a very early age when in 1929 he voluntarily dissolved the religious organization that sought to name him the new World Teacher and get him to take the lead of their new movement.

In a famous speech entitled Truth is a Pathless Land, he stated that it's impossible to follow anyone to truth and that you'll never find out the basic truth about the structure of Reality by listening to some leader or guru.

So naturally, Krishnamurti in this book - which is a collection of his public talks about the nature of truth and the various ways in which the mind distorts and obscures it - never claims to have access to some special truth that you or I don't have.

In my own life, Krishnamurti motivated me to question everything I thought I knew (and was told) about the world and the mystery of existence. He made me aware of the inner workings of my own mind and helped me see how truth arises when effort stops, when the mind is perfectly empty, and when there is only direct experience of the present moment.

All this is to say that this book won't teach you anything that's "true." Likewise, this breakdown can never claim to feature the Ultimate Truth about anything! There is no authority "out there" that can lead you to the truth, no "script" that you can follow that will lead you to the answers to the most important questions of life. But that's what makes being alive at all so damn exciting!

Dead, lifeless "truths" are just...boring. Life is always moving and changing, and so is the truth of Reality and Existence. The search for what's true is the wildest adventure in the whole damn universe, and we're all living it right now.

The Semmelweis reflex or "Semmelweis effect" is a metaphor for people's tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms or beliefs. That is to say if it disrupts "business as usual," then it's usually going to be viewed with suspicion.

It's got kind of a tragic backstory, and the term derives from the name of Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who basically discovered hand-washing.

Alright, so he didn't exactly "discover hand-washing," but he did notice that child mortality rates dropped significantly whenever doctors disinfected their hands before moving from one patient to another, especially after performing an autopsy.

Yeah, I know. But hey, this was like 1847.

The tragic part was that hardly anyone believed him! Faced with new information, and a new theory, doctors all but shut him down, some even believing that "a gentleman's hand could never transmit disease."

Eventually, people caught on and started washing their hands, but the phenomenon earned the name "Semmelweis Reflex."

Further Reading: The Stairway to Wisdom

Note: This is a sample from my other newsletter, Stairway to Wisdom. Along with the book breakdowns, you get a premium weekly newsletter packed with insights and ideas like this one. Get your 14-day free trial right here .

You know you made it when people start reaching out asking to STUDY YOU!

In all seriousness, I'm not THAT far into the process of building and scaling my business to the level where it fully funds my dream lifestyle, but I'm definitely making progress, and in this video, Dan Heiser interviews me as part of his research for his doctoral program where he has to do an oral history with an entrepreneur.

I guess Alex Hormozi didn't return his calls.

Anyway, I was only too glad to sit down with Dan and talk about the realities of running a business in the age of AI, best practices for succeeding online, my strategy for generating life-changing wealth, honesty and integrity in business, and a lot more.

We even talk a little bit about humanity's future in space and how I want to be a part of it. So yea, we cover quite a bit of ground!

I hope it's helpful/interesting for you and if you'd like me to clarify anything or expand on something, etc., just leave me a comment below and I'll be sure to answer it. Cheers!

Even though I had just achieved muscular failure performing the squat (that’s when you physically, LITERALLY CANNOT perform another rep, not when “you” want to stop), I still had to do the same thing with the linear leg press, leg extensions, leg curls, and seated calf raises, before moving on to decline sit-ups and a final half-hour of walking cardio.

Yea, Wednesdays suck.

But I’m standing there with my legs on fire and I’m thinking:

“No one else is doing this.

Not only is there no one else here (I mean, it WAS midnight after all), but virtually no one else in the entire world is willing to put in THIS MUCH EFFORT to win; they’re not willing to go through THIS MUCH PAIN; and they’re not willing to do this for as many DECADES as I’M willing to do this for.

This is f***ing NORMAL for me, and that’s why I win.”

This mindset wasn’t an accident, and I’m also not just referring to what it does for me in the gym.

This is my daily, 16-hours-a-day attitude, and it’s a major reason why I’ve moved so far ahead in life and why most people will never catch up to me.

Adopting it will set YOU apart as well if that’s something you want for yourself.

After going through years of checking your credit card balance before buying $25 worth of groceries, you never forget the first time you’re able to toss over your card without even looking at the register.

Or footing the bill for a $400 dinner and not even thinking twice.

Or [Insert your own definition of “Rich Life” here].

This is my reality today, and budgeting helped me get here, but the day I decided to stop using a budget was the first day of my journey to real wealth. [Read Time: 5 Mins ]

This important book demands the kind of attention and deep, nuanced thought that we as individuals and as a society are becoming less able to devote to anything.

In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari investigates 12 distinct causes of our dwindling attention spans - several of them systematic causes - and offers a degree of hope, even though none of us are able to win the battle for our attention alone.

Perhaps one of the most important takeaways from the entire book is that your increasing inability to focus is not completely your fault, and believing that it is a personal failing of yours is simply unhelpful in the very worst way.

The fact is that you and I are living within a society that is systematically siphoning off your attention, and as valuable as self-discipline is, it's not going to be enough to solve what Hari calls "the attention crisis."

And it really is a crisis. I mean, you've got the average American worker being distracted roughly once every three minutes, and even the average CEO of a Fortune 500 company gets just twenty-eight uninterrupted minutes a day. A day!

The reality is that today, around one in five car accidents is due to a distracted driver, and untold millions of people struggle every day with the simple act of putting down their phones. But it's not their fault, says Hari, because every time you try to put down your phone, there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you. What kind of personal will or self-discipline can stand alone against that?

So, it's obvious that our ability to pay attention is collapsing, but Johann Hari was determined to find out why this is happening.

In the process of attempting to reclaim his own mind and his own ability to focus, he ended up interviewing a multitude of experts - computer scientists, social scientists, educators, psychologists, neuroscientists, technologists, etc. - and the result is this impeccably researched and insightful book.

“The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world's attention burns."

***

“On the long walks I try to go on now without any devices at all, I spend a lot of time reflecting on Marcus's metaphor. A few days ago, I wondered if it could be taken further.

If thinking is like a symphony that requires all these different kinds of thought, then right now, the stage has been invaded. One of those heavy-metal bands who bite the heads off bats and spit them at the audience has charged the stage, and they are standing in front of the orchestra, screaming."

***

“I went to see the Mona Lisa in Paris, only to find she is now permanently hidden behind a rugby scrum of people from everywhere on earth, all jostling their way to the front, only for them to immediately turn their backs on her, snap a selfie, and fight their way out again.

On the day I was there, I watched the crowd from the side for more than an hour. Nobody - not one person - looked at the Mona Lisa for more than a few seconds."

***

“Later, I asked him - if I put you in charge of the world, and you wanted to ruin people's ability to pay attention, what would you do? He thought about it for a moment, and said: 'Probably about what our society is doing.'"

This book isn't going to rescue you. For better or for worse, that's something you'll have to do for yourself.

The truth, however, is that facing the fact that no one is going to come save you is what's actually going to save you. And I can't think of too many people better qualified to deliver this critically important message than Ayodeji Awosika.

Awosika is one of the most popular writers on Medium.com ever, with nearly 100,000 followers, a TEDx speaker, a self-taught 3-time author, and a world-renowned personal development expert who reaches millions of readers per year with his message of radical personal responsibility and radical self-determination.

This is a book that tells you what you need to know, not what you want to hear. This is a book that tells you how the world actually works, not how you think it should work.

Not everyone will resonate with his somewhat harsher, more realistic style, but one thing that no one can ever say about his writing is that he's being inauthentic or dishonest. There may not be Absolute Truth in this world, but this book represents his hard-won truth, which is damn near close enough, as far as I can tell.

Read this book if you want to learn from the valuable experiences of someone who has actually achieved the kinds of results that most of us want in our own lives:

*The freedom to do work that excites you and stretches you creatively.

*The opportunity to make a great living doing what you love and what you're good at.

*The mental toughness necessary to thrive in an unfair world.

*The ability to build life-changing habits and execute them on auto-pilot (even if you’ve tried and failed before).

All of the advice in this book has been battle-tested in the real world. You and I live in the real world too, and if we want to succeed there, we have to learn how to be both optimistic and realistic at the exact same time.

We need to learn how to hold two different, contradictory, opposing viewpoints in our minds at the same time without retreating to the false comfort and safety of either one of them.

There are very few guarantees in life, and you know this already. But one of them is that your existence can become an incredible adventure, once you choose to see it that way. And, crucially, once you decide once and for all to take action to shape your own future.

The real world has broken untold masses of people before our time, but it doesn't have to break us. You can break the pattern and break free. You have personal power and agency, and now you also have this book.

“The biggest obstacle to clarity is focusing on the way things should work as opposed to how they do work. Instead, accept the idea that society has incentives to keep you from improving. Get over it, and move forward with the proper understanding."

***

“The politicians and media companies make you sad, angry, and depressed. When you're sad, angry, and depressed, you work out less and eat more. When you work out less and eat more, you get sick, and someone is there to provide the perfect pill to cure you just enough for you to go through the entire cycle all over again."

***

“If you understood the unfathomable power of compounding and embraced it, you’d behave much differently.”

***

“When you think about success, you should think about building the type of successful life that would occur repeatedly if you were to run simulations of your own life over and over again."

The legendary entrepreneur Derek Sivers called this book a “masterpiece,” and he says it’s now the one “START HERE” book he recommends to everybody interested in business.

The Personal MBA is a wide-ranging, comprehensive overview of everything you need to know to succeed as a business owner, and there’s a reason it’s sold more than a million copies. Fun Fact: Derek actually asked Josh Kaufman to be his personal coach and mentor after he finished reading it!

Not only that, but it also passes the “Investment Test” with flying colors. Ask yourself: If you were to trade 10 dollars and 10 hours of your time, and in exchange, you’d save one hour a week for the next two years, would you take that offer?

If you value your time at, say, just $10/hour (a gross underestimation, in my opinion), then after that time, you’d have saved $1,040 ($10/hour, for 104 weeks = $1,040, minus your initial investment). Yes, this book can save you a ton of time and frustration, but it goes much deeper than that, considering the exorbitant cost of business school today!

Attending one of the top three business schools (in America) will saddle you with around $150,000 worth of student debt, but you’ll also lose $100,000 or more (as an estimate) in lost salary or opportunity costs because you were in school “learning” when you could have been out in the real world earning.

At the time of this writing, there are eight different US business schools where the cost of an MBA exceeds $300,000. This book? The Personal MBA? You can get it for free from the library, for just a few dollars at a used book store or on Amazon, and this breakdown is included in your membership to the Stairway to Wisdom. Total savings for you? Nearly $400,000!

The fact is that MBA programs don’t have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge. You can learn these things without drowning in debt, and this book is an excellent start.

“Here’s how I define a business: Every successful business (1) creates or provides something of value that (2) other people want or need (3) at a price they’re willing to pay, in a way that (4) satisfies the purchaser’s needs and expectations, and (5) provides the business sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation.”

***

“At the core, all successful businesses sell the promise of some combination of money, status, power, love, knowledge, protection, pleasure, and excitement. The better you articulate how your offer satisfies one or more of these drives, the more attractive your offer will become.”

***

“Value comparison is usually the optimal way to price your offer, since the value of an offer to a specific group can be quite high, resulting in a much better price. Use the other methods as a baseline, but focus on discovering how much your offer is worth to the party you hope to sell it to, then set your price appropriately.”

***

“Business degrees are often a poor investment, but business skills are always useful, no matter how you acquire them.”

Are we changed by the images we're constantly exposed to during the day? Especially where images of violence, suffering, and misery are concerned, are we moved to action? Inspired to help? Informed? Depressed? Do they teach us, or numb us?

These are the questions that the brilliant essayist Susan Sontag asks us to consider for ourselves in this book-length essay that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was her last published book before her death in 2004.

Regarding the Pain of Others is concerned mainly with photography, especially war photography. One of its aims is to answer Virginia Woolf's question from her book, Three Guineas, "How, in your opinion, are we to prevent war?"

Sontag wastes no words in examining what it means to care about what we see, and whether, eventually, we become anesthetized by the images we see so often, no matter what their graphic nature or the extremely unsettling moral claims they make on our attention and our actions.

Where it gets really interesting is when she focuses specifically on famous photos from history that have later been found to have been staged.

If a corpse or a bloody helmet is moved to a more "photogenic" location, does it have the same meaning as one that's more...candid? And can gruesome photos be artistic? Should they be?

What about framing - can't whatever the photographer leaves out change the whole meaning and reception of the image? If yes, isn't that also true of the caption? And what about the victims/subjects? Should they be named? What about privacy, dignity, and decency?

It's astounding how one photograph can lead us to ask so many uncomfortable - albeit fascinating - questions and Sontag faces them all down with inimitable insight, compassion, and subdued, righteous anger.

To experience someone else's pain is probably too much to ask from photography; there's always going to be a sense of distance, an essential difference between "viewer" and "subject." But I think to remain unaffected - or even to believe that you can remain unaffected is a mistake.

In Adam Smith's lesser-known book, The Theory of Moral Senses, he places sympathy at the center of "social gravity," and Sontag makes a persuasive case in her book that once we lose our sympathy, we've taken a significant step toward losing our humanity.

“To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.”

***

“The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.”

***

“To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan wars, the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption, and the children’s deaths could be used and reused.”

***

“The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing – may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget. This is not quite the same as asking people to remember a particularly monstrous bout of evil. (‘Never forget.’)

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.

So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us – grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together.

But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.

If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life, then it is desirable that the amount of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another.”

It’s difficult to imagine how someone so active, so energetic, so alive could now be so still. There have been more books written with the word "Napoleon" in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821, but in a very real, visceral sense, this book brought him back to life, at least in my imagination.

It's more than a biography - it's a complete reimagining of Napoleon's adventures, impact, and legacy. In this, the shortest 800-page book I've ever read, I found myself repeatedly swept up in the larger-than-life majesty of Napoleon's life and campaigns, and I've pulled out some invaluable lessons that we can all apply to live bigger and better.

Even just the massive scale and scope of Napoleon's campaigns, his sweeping vision, and yes, his humanity...they all come together via Roberts' masterful storytelling to make this one of the greatest books I've ever read.

It’s actually astonishing how many of the institutions and laws and reforms that exist today come directly from him. Meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education and so much more were ushered in during Napoleon’s reign, and he championed all of them.

“They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person. I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.”

***

“There was nothing he valued so much as books and a good education.”

***

“The ideas that underpin our modern world – meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on – were championed, consolidated, codified, and geographically extended by Napoleon.

To them, he added rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism, and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire.

At the same time, he dispensed with the absurd revolutionary calendar of ten-day weeks, the theology of the Cult of the Supreme Being, the corruption and cronyism of the Directory, and the hyperinflation that had characterized the dying days of the Republic.

‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ he told an early meeting of his Conseil d’Etat, ‘we must now commence its history.’ For his reforms to work they needed one commodity that Europe’s monarchs were determined to deny him: time.”

***

“My own interpretation is very different from other historians’. What brought Napoleon down was not some deep-seated personality disorder but a combination of unforeseeable circumstances coupled with a handful of significant miscalculations: something altogether more believable, human, and fascinating.”

Today’s Five Books on Amazon:

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Matt Karamazov

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