74 books like Propaganda

Cialdini is a social psychologist who set out to explore what makes us comply with requests from strangers.

He did this from the inside by taking jobs where he was trained by various organisations to sell their wares. What makes this book so valuable is that Cialdini not only identifies six key methods of persuasion that are routinely deployed but also offers guidance on how to defend yourself against them. This has huge relevance for personal finance.

As banks and other financial institutions increase their fraud detection systems, criminals increasingly see you, the individual, as the weak link they can exploit to defraud you. Cialdini’s book is a great tool to help you detect and rebuff scammers intent on parting you from your money.

Aldo Leopold was a Forest Service ranger stationed in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest when he first began advocating for a new approach to managing national forests. Leopold’s visionary thinking and diligent advocacy resulted in the first-ever Wilderness Area in the U.S.—the Gila Wilderness Area, established in 1922—more than 40 years before the Wilderness Act was passed by Congress in 1964. A Sand County Almanac is Leopold’s best-known work and follows his efforts to restore a patch of cut-over farmland in Wisconsin while also articulating his vision of a land ethic where humans and nature are intertwined and care for people cannot be separated from care for the land. His beautiful writing resonated strongly with me when I first read A Sand County Almanac more than two decades ago, and his vision remains as important now as ever.

The book, which I first read as an assignment in a college class, was my first introduction to both personal narrative and nature writing, and I was hooked. I decided right then and there that I wanted to explore the natural world and write about it when I grew up.

I was—and still am—enamored by Williams’s descriptions of wild birds, the desert landscape around Great Salt Lake, and the solace she derived from the natural world as she faced her mother’s and grandmother’s illnesses. Williams’ lyrical writing and deep knowledge of and love for her home landscape are a constant source of inspiration for my own writing and living.

In a series of long-form journalist pieces, McPhee visits places where human beings are at war with natural forces: the long attempt to control the course of the Mississippi River and its floods, Icelanders trying to control lava flows with hoses, and a system of hardened channels and containments for massive mud and debris flows pouring down from the mountains behind Los Angeles. McPhee is at the height of his powers in this book, with his acerbic wit allowing the heroic futility of these manipulations to speak for itself.

McKibben is an American journalist, researcher, and founder of the environmental organization 350.org. His End of Nature is one of the first trade books to address climate change. Written in clear, accessible language, McKibben argues that nature has been thoroughly subjected to human forces that forever undermine traditional views of an environment set apart, pristine and original, from the things we have done to it. The biggest thing we’ve done is increase the average temperature above industrial norms, and this book is a classic framing of this issue. 

Although it is now a well-known fact that many actors are fighting for our online attention, and will do just about anything to get and keep it, Wu puts it all in historical perspective by going back to the 1800’s and the beginning of print advertising. 

He then traces our relationships with ads across a century and four screens: movies, television, home computers, and finally the cell phone. For the same reason that I enjoy reading history books to try to make some sense of the world’s current political chaos, this masterpiece by Wu should ensure you that nothing about human greed has changed in any major way: the tools of exploitation just get more powerful and more addictive.

This is another classic work in the subfield of propaganda studies, and it’s pretty dense. That said, its arguments on how technology and propaganda come together to enable mediated control of our very thought are powerful. Ellul’s point that propaganda is a sociological phenomenon—something that surrounds us in everything we do, everything we watch, everything we listen to—have also aided me in understanding why experimental or lab-based attempts to understand the specific effects of disinformation and propaganda often come up short. It’s difficult to study these things in a vacuum because they are so contextual, so tied to who is spreading the message, how they are spreading it, what their intentions are, and who they are targeting etc.  

This was the book that kicked off my obsession with mind control, social psychology, and media hacking. Ryan Holiday is one of the modern era's best marketers, and he's a pretty great writer as well. When he ran the marketing at American Apparel (at twenty-something), he took hype to new heights.

A small list of some of his stunts: Hiring a porn star to pose in nothing but socks in an ad for a clothing company, secretly defacing his own clients' billboards to generate publicity, and provoking a famous Internet media startup legend to threaten to punch him in the face in order to drive up book sales.

In this book, he reveals all his tricks while delivering a scathing critique of the broken system that let him do what he did.

Whitney gives a literary coda to World War II cloak-and-dagger, showing how its nests of spies and agencies pivoted and metastasised in the years afterward into the Cold War. The CIA took up where the OSS left off. Where Graham Greene and Kim Philby had run the haunts of Lisbon, then-young writers George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen were cajoled to produce cultural propaganda in Paris and start the Paris Review. The CIA's literary operations continued into the 1960s when it launched a whispering campaign to prevent Pablo Neruda from receiving a Nobel prize, and launched Mundo Nuevo to engage Spanish-language readers.

Ruta Sepetys writes historical fiction like no one else. All her books are wonderful, however, this one is my favorite. Not only does she write about a little-known event in history, she does it masterfully with short chapters told from four distinct points of view, doling out backstory as if it is a treat rather than something a reader must endure. Yes, the story is fascinating, but it is her craft that makes me reread it with a highlighter in hand.