Newest book purchases

Got 5 new books! All of these are works I've had on my to-read list for a long time.

The first is Schiller as Philosopher by Frederick Beiser. Schiller is one of the most significant figures in German romanticism, and an influence on both Nietzsche and Marx, while Beiser is a great scholar of German philosophy. His book Weltschmerz is probably the best book on German philosophical pessimism in English (which I used a lot in my video on Philipp Mainländer).

Nietzsche: Life as Literature by Alexander Nehamas is one of the most influential interpretations of Nietzsche written in english, centering the aesthetic, and the literary in particular, in Nietzsche's philosophy.

The other 3 books center on specific locations:

To Save the Land and People by Chad Montrie is a history of the Appalachian people's struggle against strip mining and its destructive social and ecological effects. One of the author's aims is to show that ecological struggle is not just a middle-class affair, as it was led in Appalachia by workers and poor farmers.

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi is a work that's been recommended to me by a wide range of people - one of the most popular and influential histories of the modern Palestinian struggle. Covering 100 years, from 1917 to 2017, it highlights the colonial nature of Zionism.

The City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles by Mike Davis is an influential sociological investigation of LA written in 1990, investigating the various social forces active in the city's development. I really like the notion of "excavating the future". LA is a city that to leftists often appears dystopian, and so I got this book hoping it might show me how hope or a future can be discovered even in a dystopian society.