Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes


Get Off My Lawn #52 | Knick Vs. Dictator


Summary

In this final episode before the holidays, Kevin talks about some of his favorite books to read on the holidays and gives you a list of books to get you through the last few days of the year before the holiday season.


Transcript

00:00:16.000 It was Christmas Eve.
00:00:21.000 Live from New York, it's Get Off My Lawn with Kevin McGuinness.
00:00:29.000 Hi, I didn't see you there.
00:00:31.000 This is our last episode before the Christmas holidays.
00:00:35.000 And I don't know about you, but I like to catch up on my reading on the Christmas holidays.
00:00:39.000 I often get people asking me, what should I read?
00:00:42.000 What are some good reads?
00:00:43.000 And Death of the West by Pat Buchanan changed my life.
00:00:45.000 And I discussed a lot of my favorite books on our debut episodes.
00:00:50.000 But I want to go through some more this episode to show you some fun reads so you can have a better vacation.
00:00:56.000 Now, we'll have pre-taped episodes throughout this Christmas week, so don't worry about a lack of content.
00:01:02.000 But I want this episode to be a better way for you to enjoy your Christmas holiday with some fun reads.
00:01:09.000 Come on in.
00:01:14.000 So here's my, I guess you'd call it a salon.
00:01:18.000 And this is where I do my watching of my shows and my reading of my books for the most part.
00:01:23.000 Well, you almost lost a cameraman there.
00:01:26.000 So let me show you some of my favorite books.
00:01:29.000 All right, what do we got here?
00:01:30.000 We got, oh, this is a book, Good Boss, Bad Boss by Robert L. Sutton, Ph.D. Now, this is one of those books you get at the airport.
00:01:38.000 I got it at the airport, and then I drank a bunch on the plane and fell asleep and never really cracked it, never really read one page of it.
00:01:47.000 But I'm sure it's good.
00:01:48.000 I don't really know.
00:01:50.000 Justin Halpern, I suck at girls.
00:01:53.000 He wrote that sh ⁇ My Dad Says, which is really hilarious.
00:01:56.000 This isn't as good.
00:01:57.000 It's about him falling in love with his girlfriend.
00:02:01.000 Secret Lives of the Great Artists, nah.
00:02:04.000 Ooh, this one's a doozy.
00:02:06.000 The Worm in the Apple by Peter Brimlow.
00:02:08.000 Now, Peter Brimlow has been banished from publishing because he started V-Dare, and he's known as a white nationalist because he's anti-immigration.
00:02:16.000 But this book has nothing to do with any of that.
00:02:18.000 And the book that does have a lot to do with any of that by him is Alien Nation, which is a terrible name because it sounds like a sci-fi movie.
00:02:25.000 But Alien Nation is brilliant.
00:02:27.000 And The Worm in the Apple, how the teachers' unions are destroying American education.
00:02:31.000 And he basically likens them to the mafia.
00:02:34.000 I mean, they literally do slash tires and threaten people's lives.
00:02:37.000 And they are incredibly powerful.
00:02:39.000 You don't cross them.
00:02:40.000 Amazing book, Worm in the Apple.
00:02:42.000 Can't say enough about it.
00:02:43.000 And by the way, when I'm requesting books here, I'm talking about books that are an easy read.
00:02:48.000 I'm dumb.
00:02:49.000 So when I request it, it's not a dense book that's hard to follow.
00:02:53.000 These are all fun reads.
00:02:55.000 The Tyranny of Good Intentions, how prosecutors and law enforcement are tramping the Constitution in the name of justice.
00:03:01.000 I made it to part of the intro of this book.
00:03:04.000 I collect about 17 times more books than I actually read.
00:03:08.000 I keep thinking that eventually I'll get to them.
00:03:10.000 So I can't really tell you about that book.
00:03:15.000 Kathy Acker, Pussy King of the Pirates.
00:03:19.000 I was kind of a feminist when I was in my early 20s.
00:03:23.000 And I had all these sort of sex positive books like Annie Sprinkle and stuff.
00:03:27.000 And I mean, they're much better than the feminists of today.
00:03:31.000 They're pro-sex, but little did they know they were rotting women's ovaries and plotting the future for a very sad group of shit chests.
00:03:41.000 Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.
00:03:45.000 This is Lester Bangs.
00:03:47.000 He was a rock and roll musician.
00:03:49.000 He called himself the last of the white s, and he later reneged on that.
00:03:54.000 But this is an absolute masterpiece.
00:03:57.000 The guy was a fun writer.
00:03:58.000 This is back when music journalists had balls and they would go tour with the band and get high and stuff.
00:04:03.000 Lester Bangs is a lost generation of music writers.
00:04:07.000 It's kind of a Hunter Thompson, but more punk rock.
00:04:09.000 I highly recommend that book.
00:04:12.000 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, an Indian history of the American West.
00:04:15.000 I got a lot of these sort of bummer Indian books, like this one is very popular.
00:04:20.000 Empire of the Summer Moon by S.G. Gwynn.
00:04:23.000 I don't know.
00:04:23.000 I mean, I talked about Trail of Tears, the new Trail of Tears in my opening debut episode.
00:04:28.000 I get a little depressed when I read about the Indians too much.
00:04:31.000 So I'm not going to recommend those.
00:04:34.000 Rats, this book by Robert Sullivan rules.
00:04:38.000 I remember one time I had Janine Garofalo staying at, not staying, but at my house at a party, and she saw two Ann Coulter books, and she's such a megalomaniac that she assumed that those were planted there to make her mad, because even seeing them in the hallway in a bookshelf was enraging.
00:04:55.000 And I just pretended I thought she was talking about rats, and I said, I don't know, you don't like rats?
00:05:00.000 Well, this book isn't very friendly to them.
00:05:01.000 In fact, the guy is disgusted by rats.
00:05:04.000 But this book is Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants.
00:05:11.000 Amazing book because this guy went to the slum, like he went to Lower Manhattan, Wall Street, where they seem to be in Chinatown, and he would stay there for nights upon nights.
00:05:20.000 He did a night shift just examining rats.
00:05:23.000 So this isn't someone sitting at a typewriter and pontificating.
00:05:26.000 This is someone is going out onto the street to meet the rats.
00:05:31.000 What else do we got here?
00:05:32.000 Oh, Keith Richards, life.
00:05:35.000 This book needs an editor.
00:05:37.000 Look how long it is.
00:05:38.000 It's 550 pages.
00:05:42.000 It is his entire life.
00:05:44.000 You go through his childhood.
00:05:47.000 You follow him home at night from school in the fog and dogs lead him home.
00:05:52.000 We hear about his aunt and uncle.
00:05:53.000 There's a whole thing in here about his aunt and uncle.
00:05:57.000 Now, I'm glad I brought this book out because this is something important I want to say about reading.
00:06:01.000 I think a lot of us have too high standards that we probably got from school where you have to read the whole book from beginning to end.
00:06:08.000 No, look at this smorgasbord.
00:06:10.000 It's a buffet.
00:06:11.000 So all you have to do is pick through it and just choose.
00:06:15.000 Like for this book, jump to the Mick Jagger parts and see how pissed off he was when Mick Jagger went solo and he had a whole row of Keiths.
00:06:24.000 He calls himself Keef.
00:06:25.000 He had a whole row of Keefs playing satisfaction and rolling stone songs and Getting paid for it.
00:06:30.000 And he goes, that pissed me off.
00:06:32.000 Go do your solo stuff.
00:06:34.000 That's fine, but you can't do stone songs.
00:06:36.000 Great point, Keith.
00:06:37.000 Good book.
00:06:38.000 If, you know, if you can to if you can skip parts you don't like.
00:06:45.000 This book is a wonderful read.
00:06:47.000 It goes by super fast.
00:06:48.000 Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant sent An Idiot Abroad, the travel diaries of Carl Pilkington.
00:06:54.000 This goes by in like an hour.
00:06:57.000 It is an absolute joy.
00:06:59.000 Here's a book.
00:07:00.000 You won't believe who got me to read this.
00:07:02.000 Nick DiPaulo got me to read this book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah.
00:07:06.000 Obviously a play on the Slouching Towards Bethlehem hippie book of the time.
00:07:11.000 Robert H. Bork, brilliant guy, a real fastidious conservative.
00:07:16.000 But my problem with him is the guy's just so unbelievably conservative.
00:07:22.000 I mean, he starts talking about rock and roll in it for a bit and how this goddamn music with the hip gyrating and the Elvis and you're like, dude, chill out.
00:07:33.000 The only future for conservatives in this country is to embrace the youth and get over this social conservatism.
00:07:40.000 I mean, I understand if you hate gay marriage, but don't hate gays.
00:07:43.000 That's just dumb.
00:07:44.000 That's just dumb.
00:07:49.000 Bernard Mandeville, Collected Works.
00:07:51.000 This is what my tattoos say about luxury employed a million of the poor.
00:07:55.000 Don't get this book.
00:07:56.000 It's boring.
00:07:58.000 Oh, here's a funny one.
00:08:00.000 You know, there's a great book, not this one, Don't Get Lateral Thinking, but Edward De Bono has a brilliant book called Six Thinking Hats.
00:08:08.000 You can just read the Wikipedia page if you want to save time.
00:08:11.000 But he talks about how every project needs six different hats.
00:08:15.000 So there's the black hat thinking that says, this isn't going to work.
00:08:19.000 This project is doomed.
00:08:20.000 There's the white hat thinking that says, this project is going to rule.
00:08:23.000 We're going to make it.
00:08:24.000 There's the green hat thinking that comes up with organic ideas.
00:08:27.000 Blue hat thinking is business and so on and so on.
00:08:30.000 Red hat thinking, I think, is passion.
00:08:32.000 And he talks about how the black hat is the easiest hat to wear because you just go, this is going to suck.
00:08:36.000 This won't work.
00:08:37.000 And he said, we're good for black hats.
00:08:39.000 It's harder to find blue hats and white hats.
00:08:42.000 And it's such a great book for entrepreneurs if you want to make money.
00:08:47.000 Here's a stupid book that's fun.
00:08:50.000 If you're a New Yorker, you've got to read James Brownhouse, Ear In Virons.
00:08:56.000 And it's all about a bar I like to go to in the West Village called The Ear In.
00:09:00.000 And it really, like all good books, it's not really about the Ear In.
00:09:04.000 It's about the evolution of America.
00:09:06.000 And it starts before the Civil War.
00:09:09.000 It starts in the 1800s.
00:09:13.000 It was originally owned, they say, by one of the first freed slaves, James Brown.
00:09:17.000 And they would pick oysters and stuff off from the East River, the West River, the East River, the Hudson River, and sell them.
00:09:27.000 And then we see it go through Prohibition, and they've got a secret room in the back.
00:09:31.000 And it's amazing that this bar has survived through basically all New York's, from when it was farmland up until right now.
00:09:38.000 It's still open right now.
00:09:41.000 Roll Jordan Roll.
00:09:42.000 Now, this book is incredible.
00:09:44.000 The World the Slaves Made, Eugene Di Genovese.
00:09:48.000 And it's been accused of the Slavery Wasn't So Bad book.
00:09:52.000 It's not that.
00:09:53.000 It does concede that slavery sucked.
00:09:55.000 But what's amazing about it is it talks about all these myths of slavery.
00:10:00.000 Like the idea that every time you see someone who's slightly black or any one mulatto, then they must have been raped by their slave owner.
00:10:07.000 That's why we have light-skinned blacks and dark-skinned blacks.
00:10:10.000 And they go, no, that didn't really go down as much as people say it did.
00:10:14.000 Because you've got a whole family of people there.
00:10:16.000 You've got brothers and fathers of that girl with pitchforks in their hands all day.
00:10:21.000 So you don't really tend to do raping.
00:10:23.000 It's not a very lucrative pastime.
00:10:26.000 So that's a very sort of politically incorrect look at slavery.
00:10:31.000 It's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
00:10:34.000 This is a book.
00:10:35.000 Whenever I would go to Fox News, I'd pick up all the free books because they're just piled up in boxes.
00:10:39.000 And then I would take them home and not read them.
00:10:43.000 Same with Killing Jesus.
00:10:44.000 It's probably a really good book.
00:10:47.000 Here's a great one.
00:10:48.000 I can't say enough about John Stossel.
00:10:50.000 He's sort of like Michelle Malkin in that the book just sort of zips by.
00:10:55.000 It's written, and I don't mean any disrespect to Malkin or Stossel here, but they both write in a sort of a people magazine kind of style that's not dense, and you can just sort of whip through it.
00:11:04.000 Like, this is a great book to read in a hammock.
00:11:07.000 Get out the shovel.
00:11:09.000 Why everything you know is wrong.
00:11:10.000 And it's basically him making up for all these dumb consumer reports where he said, when we come back after the break, will toasters kill you?
00:11:18.000 Really old book by Tucker Carlson.
00:11:20.000 Probably a great read.
00:11:21.000 I don't remember.
00:11:23.000 Okay, this is only for super smart people.
00:11:27.000 This is Arthur Herman.
00:11:28.000 He's the guy who wrote How the Scots Invented the Modern World.
00:11:32.000 That's an easy read, and maybe I was so inclined because I'm Scottish.
00:11:36.000 But this book is incredibly intelligent, very enlightening, and it's all about the notion that we've always thought we were going to die.
00:11:45.000 We've always said this is it, global warming.
00:11:47.000 Like he goes back 500 years ago, and there are naysayers saying the end is nigh and this is the last generation.
00:11:54.000 And it's just funny to read about generation after generation talking about the idea of decline and how we blew it.
00:12:02.000 And, you know, I can't tell you when I go to these conservative conferences how many old people say, boy, I'm glad I'm on the last nine.
00:12:09.000 Or people tell me, boy, I'm glad I didn't have kids.
00:12:12.000 I'd hate to have kids in this day and age.
00:12:14.000 We've always been saying that.
00:12:17.000 World on fire.
00:12:18.000 This is Amy Chua.
00:12:19.000 Remember the tiger mom who said you got to be rough with your kids?
00:12:22.000 How exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability.
00:12:29.000 And like Buchanan, she says, yeah, I don't know why we're bringing democracy to Iraq and all these countries.
00:12:34.000 She goes, they don't want it.
00:12:36.000 They have different values than us.
00:12:38.000 Stop helping the world.
00:12:39.000 They're not ready for our help.
00:12:41.000 And it reminds me of porn star Mercedes Carrera, who said to me, the problem with all this exporting democracy and infrastructure is a lot of these people aren't ready for it.
00:12:53.000 A lot of these people aren't good enough to have roads and doctors and medicine.
00:12:58.000 They end up just breeding more than they're Meant to.
00:13:00.000 That's why she says India is screwed because we bought them infrastructure too early.
00:13:04.000 Now, I'm not saying that.
00:13:05.000 She's saying that.
00:13:06.000 What else do we got here?
00:13:08.000 Oh, my knees.
00:13:11.000 I had to change seating there.
00:13:12.000 This guy's a brilliant author, Joe Carducci, but you've really got to kind of be deep into music.
00:13:18.000 He talks about SST and Black Flag and all these punk bands.
00:13:21.000 If you're really into 80s hardcore, you should read.
00:13:23.000 He's sort of like the Mark Stein of ancient hardcore, but that's probably not your bag.
00:13:32.000 Here's an incredible book sort of stuck in the corner here, Plunder by Stephen Greenhutt.
00:13:38.000 And this guy, how public employee unions are raiding treasuries, controlling our lives, and bankrupting the nation.
00:13:44.000 And it's just such a great argument, not just against big government, but about government in general.
00:13:50.000 And he talks about fire departments and how 75% of them in the country are volunteer, but the ones who aren't are just getting paid too much.
00:13:58.000 Sorry, whether, you know, we remember 9-11, thank you very much, but we don't have that money in the coffers.
00:14:05.000 And he talks about that idea, you know, I love cops, but he talks about how cops say, yeah, we do get big pensions, but we never live long enough to see them.
00:14:14.000 No, that's not true.
00:14:15.000 Most cops, after they retire, live long and happy lives, and it's lives we can't afford to pay for anymore.
00:14:20.000 Sorry, cops.
00:14:21.000 Sorry, public employee unions.
00:14:22.000 And this goes back to that Peter Brimlow book, The Worm and the Apple.
00:14:30.000 More Johnstossel, Bait and Switch.
00:14:33.000 This is a terrible book by Barbara Ehrenreich about the futile pursuit of the American dream.
00:14:38.000 Nickel and Dimed by her is really good, as is Global Woman, where she talks about how we import love from other countries.
00:14:47.000 But the problem with Bait and Switch and the problem with Nickel and Dimed is she skirts over illegal immigration and doesn't talk about how we have tons of illegals in this country.
00:14:59.000 And that might be another reason why the poor have trouble finding jobs.
00:15:03.000 Morgan Spurlock, when he was unemployed for 30 days on his show, also ignored illegal immigrations.
00:15:14.000 Why the Jews, Dennis Prager?
00:15:16.000 I actually got this book in Israel, and it's The Reason for Anti-Semitism.
00:15:21.000 Great book, but of course, Alan Dershowitz is the master of all things Jewish, Israel-based.
00:15:28.000 This is the portable atheist.
00:15:29.000 My father's an atheist, and he makes me read these books, and they're depressing and just, I don't know, they're so specific about the Bible and how that couldn't have happened there.
00:15:39.000 From the number one New York Times best-selling author of God is Not Great, a provocative and entertaining guided tour of atheist agnostic thought through the ages.
00:15:47.000 Just sounds like a bunch of ingrates to me.
00:15:50.000 Joy of Hate is Good by Greg Gutfeld.
00:15:54.000 Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels is overrated.
00:15:57.000 I don't know.
00:15:58.000 Back before, when people had Microsoft Word and they can just cut out entire paragraphs and reorganize things, sometimes I read these old typewriter books and I go, you need to have hammered out some of your thoughts a little better.
00:16:10.000 What else do we got here?
00:16:11.000 Oh, Last Exit to Brooklyn.
00:16:12.000 This is popular with baby boomers.
00:16:14.000 It's just really a writer being floral and indulging himself with all these different voices.
00:16:19.000 Don't get that book.
00:16:20.000 Dangerous by Milo.
00:16:22.000 Now, I'm on the same page with Milo on pretty much everything.
00:16:26.000 So I'm just reading this book going, yeah, I know.
00:16:28.000 Yeah, I know.
00:16:29.000 I feel like this book would be better for a young person who wasn't completely red-pilled.
00:16:34.000 This would be a good gift for your brother who's just sort of teetering on the edge.
00:16:39.000 But I stopped reading it because it was just like reading my own brain.
00:16:43.000 I'm also big into graphic novels because I used to be a cartoonist.
00:16:47.000 And this book is intense.
00:16:48.000 It's Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, Prostitution and Religious Obedience in the Bible by Chester Brown.
00:16:55.000 Now, Chester Brown is a huge fan of prostitution.
00:16:58.000 He's one of these guys that calls it sex workers.
00:17:00.000 And this book meticulously documents instances of prostitution and sex work in the Bible.
00:17:09.000 Now, if you're very religious, you'll probably be offended by it, but I found it fascinating.
00:17:14.000 Another brilliant graphic novelist is Guy DeLille.
00:17:18.000 And he has this book, Jerusalem, Chronicles from the Holy City.
00:17:21.000 Now, his wife is one of these Doctors Without Borders types, so it's very biased to anti-Israel when you read it.
00:17:28.000 All his stuff is anti-American, but that's a very subtle thing you can get over quickly.
00:17:34.000 And it's just fascinating going into these countries and seeing someone document them so meticulously.
00:17:40.000 Especially, he has a book called Pyongyang about North Korea.
00:17:44.000 And you think, they don't allow anyone to take pictures in there or film in there, but a cartoonist is a human video camera.
00:17:50.000 So he gets all kinds of good stuff there.
00:17:52.000 God, this is murder on my knees.
00:17:54.000 This book is a trip.
00:17:57.000 Blood Secrets, The True Story of Demon Worship and Ceremonial Murder by Isaiah Oke.
00:18:03.000 He was a Juju high priest, and he spills all the beans on the weird stuff they do in rituals, from like abandoning someone in the desert with snakes everywhere so they can become magic to stripping the skin off people in ritual ceremonies.
00:18:20.000 Really dark, horrific, crazy stuff.
00:18:23.000 And the craziest part of this book is how common, look at him, how common juju is.
00:18:29.000 Even Christians and stuff worship this voodoo crap.
00:18:33.000 David Cross, I drink for a reason.
00:18:35.000 It's just a series of funny essays that are just like hearing him do stand-up.
00:18:39.000 It's not like there's a long plot here or anything.
00:18:41.000 It's just like brain droppings.
00:18:43.000 And that's what's great for the holidays, too.
00:18:45.000 And that's why I said earlier that you don't need to read a book from beginning to end.
00:18:48.000 Like these are always fun to have around.
00:18:50.000 Great toilet book.
00:18:51.000 Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope.
00:18:54.000 And it's just a collection of his columns of straight dope.
00:18:56.000 This is a perfect holiday book.
00:18:58.000 Another great holiday book collection is Matt Labash, Fly Fishing with Darth Vader.
00:19:03.000 He's a great writer, and this is just a collection of some of his better columns.
00:19:07.000 Here's a book.
00:19:08.000 This is sort of like A Brief History of Time in that it's one of the most purchased and not read books in the history of books.
00:19:14.000 Has anyone really read this?
00:19:16.000 I mean, you start, it's way too hard.
00:19:18.000 When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil, apparently we're all going to become as one soon, thanks to technology, but I'm definitely not going to be reading that book anytime soon.
00:19:30.000 Black, Rednecks, and White Liberals, classic by Thomas Sowell.
00:19:33.000 I highly recommend this book.
00:19:34.000 This is where he basically blames me for the way black people behave right now.
00:19:38.000 You can tell I've only been to page 63, but of those pages, I've enjoyed it thoroughly.
00:19:43.000 Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo, another fun, silly book.
00:19:47.000 Of course, you realize what happens at the very beginning because the protagonist is dead on the front page.
00:19:53.000 But it is fascinating hearing about him going to jail where he designed the prison himself, and he had giraffes and lions running around like a big safari.
00:20:02.000 And he really was not in prison by any means.
00:20:05.000 This book rules the story of Motley Crewe.
00:20:10.000 It's called The Dirt, Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band.
00:20:15.000 And it's sort of like that punk book, Please Kill Me, where they just transcribe things into a tape.
00:20:20.000 You know, I met Tommy Lee after he did this, and he said, every time I sort of felt wary of telling the whole story, I would remember your Do's and Don'ts book and how no holds barred it was, and then I would tell the whole story.
00:20:32.000 So I'm part of the reason that's such an amazing book.
00:20:35.000 Oh, look, here's the slouching towards Bethlehem I was telling you about that inspired that Robert Brock book.
00:20:40.000 More atheism here with God No by Penn Gillette.
00:20:44.000 I didn't read this.
00:20:45.000 David Foster Wallace is another one I've never read.
00:20:49.000 He's a really great artist with a great writer with a good reputation, but just too dense and hard.
00:20:55.000 And look how thick this is.
00:20:57.000 I'm a girl, basically.
00:20:58.000 I like fun, silly books that read like magazine articles.
00:21:04.000 What else do we got here?
00:21:05.000 Sarah Vowell, she's too quirky.
00:21:07.000 Jim Norton, he's incredibly funny.
00:21:10.000 I hate your guts.
00:21:11.000 I haven't read this book, but I bet it's great.
00:21:14.000 There's Alien Nation.
00:21:15.000 That's the book I was talking about that Peter Brimlow did about immigration.
00:21:18.000 This was a weird book we all had to read as young anarchist punks.
00:21:22.000 Agents of Repression, The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, Ward Churchill and Jim Vanderwaal.
00:21:31.000 Ward Churchill is the guy who said 9-11 was the chickens coming home to roost.
00:21:35.000 But this book is incredible.
00:21:37.000 And the FBI did do horrible things to the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement.
00:21:43.000 So if you want a little taste of lefty anarchism, I would definitely check out Agents of Repression.
00:21:49.000 Michelle Malkin, Unhinged, one of the, I think that's the first thing I ever read from her.
00:21:53.000 And again, People magazine style, super fun to read.
00:21:56.000 This is a great graphic novel about Jeffrey Dahmer written by Derf Backderf.
00:22:01.000 Now, again, you might think it's juvenile to read comic books, but if you ever tried to make them, you'd appreciate the fact that this artist does eight drawings per page, and it only takes you about eight seconds to read them.
00:22:10.000 I hear they're making this into a movie growing up next to Jeffrey Dahmer.
00:22:14.000 This book rules hitmen, Frederick Dannon, and it's all about how in the 80s they would buy hit songs.
00:22:23.000 They would just go to DJs and they'd give them free cocaine and tons of money and say, can you please make this song a hit?
00:22:30.000 And they did.
00:22:30.000 And that all got shut down.
00:22:31.000 So that's all about the payola days of the pop charts.
00:22:34.000 And you listen to pop music in the 80s, and it's so terrible that it is evident the whole thing was corrupt.
00:22:42.000 Dad is Fat is a wonderful book by Jim Gaffigan.
00:22:46.000 Also a very fun read.
00:22:47.000 This is a great hammock book.
00:22:48.000 Is my head being cropped on the top of this shot?
00:22:51.000 I think you should adjust the camera there, Dave.
00:22:54.000 This book also rules.
00:22:58.000 Be my baby.
00:22:59.000 Ronnie Specter with Vince Waldron.
00:23:01.000 So it's just Ronnie Specter talking to Vince Waldron.
00:23:03.000 Ronnie, by the way, was a hot kind of a Puerto Rican black chick who was seduced and ended up marrying, what's his name?
00:23:12.000 Phil Linet?
00:23:14.000 No, that's the guy from Finn Leslie.
00:23:17.000 Phil Spector.
00:23:18.000 Phil Specter, the guy who came with the Wall of Sound that the Beatles used and all those girl groups used.
00:23:22.000 He was a complete lunatic.
00:23:24.000 I think he murdered someone recently and was in prison.
00:23:27.000 I'm not sure where he is right now.
00:23:28.000 But his stories of his life with Ronnie Specter is amazing.
00:23:31.000 Living with a Madman, a millionaire.
00:23:34.000 This is a great book, War Before Civilization, The Myth of the Peaceful Savage.
00:23:37.000 And this is an anthropologist talking about Indians and how when we got here there was mass graves and all kinds of stuff.
00:23:45.000 Fascinating look at, an unPC look at civilization before we came here.
00:23:51.000 Coloring the News.
00:23:52.000 This is a brilliant book by Bill McGowan, How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism.
00:23:58.000 And this won an award.
00:23:59.000 It won the Author Rouse Award for Press Criticism.
00:24:03.000 What he did here is he just went through thousands and thousands of newspaper articles.
00:24:09.000 Mostly the New York Times gets attacked in this and talks about liberal bias in the media and gives you really concrete examples of how bad it is.
00:24:18.000 This book, I used to buy this book for liberals all the time.
00:24:21.000 They never read it, of course.
00:24:22.000 But I think it's a really good primer.
00:24:25.000 It's sort of like that book Dangerous.
00:24:27.000 It might not be good for those of us who already understand fake news, but for those of you on the edge, that's a brilliant book to get.
00:24:36.000 This book also rules Edward Klein, the amateur, Barack Obama in the White House.
00:24:41.000 And it just talks about how incompetent he is and how he didn't deserve to be there.
00:24:46.000 And I know you might not think that matters.
00:24:48.000 Oh, look at this.
00:24:49.000 I never noticed that before.
00:24:50.000 On the back, there's a write-up.
00:24:52.000 The amateur is the best book I've read on how Barack Obama is wrecking our country.
00:24:56.000 I urge everyone who cares about America to read Edward Klein's eye-opening book.
00:24:59.000 You know who said that?
00:25:00.000 Donald J. Trump about 10 years ago.
00:25:05.000 Wow.
00:25:05.000 And if you don't think Obama is relevant today, you're wrong.
00:25:08.000 We just discovered that he was letting Hezbollah get away with dealing billions of dollars in cocaine and funding terrorism all over the world, killing untold millions of people just so he could facilitate this stupid Iran deal, which I never even understood why we want them to have nuclear power so bad.
00:25:28.000 All right, I think that's about it for this.
00:25:30.000 Oh, this book is terrible.
00:25:32.000 This is Paved with Good Intentions.
00:25:34.000 It's written by a white nationalist.
00:25:35.000 Never read anything by racists.
00:25:37.000 This book, actually, I'm just going to put in the fire because I burn books that I disagree with.
00:25:43.000 Okay, I think we should move up to another bookshelf.
00:25:47.000 This is my home office.
00:25:50.000 Look, I got, can you see this?
00:25:51.000 I got pictures of my little babies here.
00:25:54.000 My three kids when they were being weighed.
00:25:57.000 How much was this guy?
00:25:59.000 Nine pounds?
00:26:01.000 And then there's Duncan.
00:26:04.000 You can kind of see with little babies.
00:26:06.000 You can see the face that's there.
00:26:08.000 Like, I can tell that's Johnny.
00:26:09.000 Everyone weighs nine pounds.
00:26:12.000 Those are big babies.
00:26:13.000 I don't know if you have a vagina, but getting something that's nine pounds out of it is not easy.
00:26:17.000 Fortunately, my wife has had a lot of practice because I'm incredibly well endowed.
00:26:22.000 So I'm looking through my books here.
00:26:24.000 Trump, The Art of the Deal.
00:26:26.000 Never read it.
00:26:27.000 Here it's really good.
00:26:28.000 This one's a trip.
00:26:29.000 Whoops.
00:26:30.000 Woman Rebel, The Margaret Sanger Story.
00:26:33.000 Now, this is by Peter Bagg, one of my favorite cartoonists, and he actually likes Margaret Sanger, the woman who started Planned Parenthood.
00:26:42.000 I guess he's pro-choice.
00:26:44.000 And it's interesting hearing the other side's perspective on her.
00:26:47.000 They really downplay all the racist stuff and say that that's been exaggerated.
00:26:51.000 And, you know, she said one thing at a Klan rally and it's become her personality.
00:26:57.000 I don't know.
00:26:57.000 I like seeing the other side.
00:26:58.000 Speaking of the other side, obviously can't say enough about Ann Coulter.
00:27:02.000 One really infuriating thing about her that everyone says to me is, well, how much of what she says is for shock value?
00:27:10.000 And how much of it does she actually believe?
00:27:13.000 And I go, what sentence from what book are you talking about?
00:27:16.000 They've never read a page of her books.
00:27:18.000 And one thing that I was surprised when I started reading her is how funny they all are.
00:27:24.000 They're really amusing.
00:27:25.000 And again, this whole episode is about fun holiday books.
00:27:30.000 I'm not going to, I'll tell you when I'm dealing with the heavy one, like Mark Stein.
00:27:36.000 Mark Stein is too good of a writer.
00:27:39.000 I don't enjoy him.
00:27:41.000 Unless I'm on vacation and I've had a big breakfast and I'm not hungover and I have a pen in my hand and can write notes on the pages, which I always do in his books, I get overwhelmed.
00:27:51.000 It's too good.
00:27:53.000 It's so dense and rich that one sentence will haunt me for days, like when he said, the Empire State Building and the Capitol Building, no, sorry, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building were both built during the Great Depression under budget and within a year and a half.
00:28:10.000 And I just thought, then you look at that stupid Freedom Tower, which to me looks like a giant shrine to 9-11.
00:28:16.000 And I think, how over budget and past deadline was that monstrosity, that giant, stupid handkerchief.
00:28:23.000 Anyway, so I've put these, let's just reverse the orders here.
00:28:31.000 I have all her books, but my parents are so cheap that they'll often steal them.
00:28:36.000 They rob from me.
00:28:37.000 Every time they're here, I'll see my books slowly vanish because they go, he can just get another one.
00:28:42.000 He's already read it.
00:28:43.000 Yeah, but I collect them, Mom.
00:28:45.000 So this is one of her first treason, Liberal Treachery from the Cold War on Terrorism.
00:28:51.000 And she just talks about, you know what's great about this book?
00:28:53.000 She talks about McCarthyism and the vilification we had of these Hollywood liberals.
00:29:01.000 They were communists.
00:29:02.000 And communism was a major problem, is a major problem in the world.
00:29:07.000 So it's good that McCarthyism exists.
00:29:09.000 This whole fake Nazi hunting they do now, those are witch hunts.
00:29:13.000 The Nazis aren't a thing.
00:29:15.000 The communists were a thing.
00:29:17.000 And the reason I put these in order, too, is that Anne's books should be read in order.
00:29:22.000 I mean, if you need just a fun one like Adios America is a good one to start with or in Trump We Trust, but if you really want to get involved, then I would lay them all out and go chronologically.
00:29:34.000 So anyway, Slanders After That, and it's all the lies that the left says about the right.
00:29:39.000 So the first book, it's not her first book, I don't think, but the first book I'm listing here talks about how we were right to vilify the communists and the left.
00:29:46.000 And then the second one is how the left is wrong to vilify us.
00:29:50.000 And then these two are, oh, sorry, then there's guilty, liberal victims and their assault on America.
00:29:56.000 And these all seem prophetic at this point now, because all these hate crime hoaxes we're having this year shows that victim culture, she essentially predicted victim culture.
00:30:06.000 And then we get into Demonic.
00:30:08.000 This is a very Buchanan-esque book that talks about the anti-Christian, the sheer blasphemy of the left and how it isn't just bad, it is evil.
00:30:21.000 And I think this was written a year after Mugged, Racial Demagoguery from the 70s to Obama.
00:30:27.000 And the title is obviously a reference to black crime and how we're all taught to ignore it.
00:30:34.000 Something that's very serious in Britain now with the Muslim crime they're too scared to report on.
00:30:38.000 This book, she churned out in no time at all.
00:30:40.000 I got a few copies of that.
00:30:41.000 And it's hilarious and funny and a wild ride.
00:30:47.000 Anyway, Ann Coulter, very underrated author from anyone from the left.
00:30:52.000 Oh yeah, if Democrats had any brains, they'd be Republicans is a good one too.
00:30:56.000 This book sucks so much crap.
00:30:59.000 Bill Weiss.
00:31:01.000 It's a man who went to hell.
00:31:03.000 And he almost died and he went there and he described it.
00:31:07.000 And he wrote a book about it.
00:31:09.000 This isn't even the book he wrote.
00:31:10.000 This is another book about a book he wrote about when he went to hell.
00:31:15.000 Sorry, Bill, you didn't go to hell.
00:31:17.000 Go to hell.
00:31:19.000 Obviously, this book changed my life.
00:31:20.000 Greatest book ever.
00:31:21.000 We read from it every Proud Boys Meetup, The Death of the West, How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Apparel Our Country and Civilization.
00:31:30.000 This book changed my life.
00:31:32.000 And Patrick J. Buchanan basically says, you know what?
00:31:36.000 If you're an atheist, be an atheist, but you have to at least revere Christianity.
00:31:39.000 It's the very foundation of the Western world.
00:31:41.000 And he says, one of my favorite lines is this, he goes, we didn't start slavery, we ended it.
00:31:49.000 Unlearning Liberty, Campus Censorship, and the End of American Debate.
00:31:53.000 This is Greg Lukianoff.
00:31:55.000 He runs a free speech center that fights for free speech all over America.
00:31:59.000 I've met him once, kind of a lefty guy, but he's on the front lines of fighting for free speech in America.
00:32:08.000 This is a fun book.
00:32:09.000 Free Radicals, the best-selling author of 13 Things of Biblical Make Sense, and Michael Brooks, The Secret Anarchy of Science.
00:32:17.000 And he basically talks about how science is punk rock.
00:32:20.000 I think this is the book, too, that talks about how many scientists credit LSD with their success.
00:32:26.000 And I really believe that.
00:32:27.000 I had a big fight with my dad recently about atheism.
00:32:30.000 And I said, I think the problem is you never did acid.
00:32:33.000 Because acid takes you to a place in your brain that it just stretches it.
00:32:38.000 And you're capable of thinking of weirder things.
00:32:40.000 It also makes you better at curing hiccups.
00:32:44.000 When you get the hiccups and you've done acid, you can just go, I do not want these anymore.
00:32:49.000 And your hiccups go away.
00:32:51.000 You'll notice, by the way, I only read nonfiction.
00:32:54.000 Fiction is for homosexuals and women.
00:32:57.000 The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks.
00:32:59.000 This is an amazing story about this woman.
00:33:01.000 She's been dead for 60 years, and they took her cells when she was sick.
00:33:06.000 She was working on some farm that used to be owned by her slavery ancestors, her slave ancestors, and they took some cells, and they were able to recreate them.
00:33:14.000 It was the first time they could recreate cells.
00:33:16.000 And they've done that tens of millions of times.
00:33:20.000 If you put all the cells they've made from her original cells, it would weigh thousands and thousands of pounds.
00:33:28.000 And they've done, they helped cure cancer with this.
00:33:31.000 They helped try to fight cancer with this.
00:33:35.000 They got the polio vaccine from her cells.
00:33:38.000 They studied the ramifications of nuclear weapons on her cells.
00:33:43.000 Amazing book.
00:33:44.000 What else do we got here?
00:33:47.000 I love Billie Idol, so this is a fascinating book.
00:33:50.000 And it's a great story about a British entrepreneur coming to New York and maintaining a career in pop culture, but you probably wouldn't like that.
00:33:57.000 John Lydon, he's just basically written the same book twice.
00:34:00.000 It's just his life.
00:34:01.000 He has another book called No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.
00:34:03.000 Same book.
00:34:04.000 But he's a good writer and it's fun.
00:34:05.000 I prefer No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.
00:34:07.000 Here's a conclusive history of punk I really don't recommend.
00:34:10.000 It includes, remember I was talking about Keith Richards' life?
00:34:13.000 This is everything.
00:34:14.000 This is Malcolm McLaren's grandmother's home.
00:34:17.000 He's the guy who started the sex pistols.
00:34:19.000 You don't need to read that crap.
00:34:21.000 Ezra Levant is a great writer.
00:34:24.000 The enemy within terror, lies, and the whitewashing of Omar Kader.
00:34:28.000 That was this terrorist in Afghanistan, I believe, who murdered the medics that were trying to save him, shot people after trying to blow them up.
00:34:37.000 We put him in Abu Ghira, and when he got out, Pierre Trudeau felt so bad, the Prime Minister of Canada, they gave him $10.5 million to apologize to a terrorist who was, by the way, air helicoptered to safety and operated on by fancy German doctors, while the medics that he shot at were just treated locally and lost his eye.
00:34:59.000 Disgusting.
00:35:00.000 Hillary's America, Dinesh D'Souza is a great writer.
00:35:02.000 Very conclusive.
00:35:05.000 What else do we have here?
00:35:07.000 This is a really stupid book that's a lot of fun.
00:35:09.000 Over the Edge, Death in Grand Canyon.
00:35:11.000 It just documents everyone who died in the Grand Canyon.
00:35:14.000 And there hasn't been that many.
00:35:16.000 There's been like one a month, basically.
00:35:18.000 I got a lot of fun coffee table books, too.
00:35:21.000 This is a great one, The New Way Things Work.
00:35:25.000 You know, I think that we need to discipline ourselves to read because we're so addicted to our phones.
00:35:31.000 And coffee table books, stupid, silly little books, it's a great way to sort of train your brain to be able to sit with a thing that has paper on it.
00:35:39.000 You know, baby steps.
00:35:40.000 It's like going on a diet reading.
00:35:42.000 It takes some discipline.
00:35:43.000 I've mentioned this book before, I'm sure, Glenn Beck, Miracles and Massacres.
00:35:46.000 It's my favorite Beck book.
00:35:47.000 And it's true in Untold Stories of the Making of America.
00:35:50.000 It's not political.
00:35:51.000 They just talk about, oh, you like Paul Revere.
00:35:53.000 What about this guy that went and stopped George Washington getting assassinated?
00:35:57.000 And he talks about the Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee.
00:36:00.000 And I've mentioned this a million times, but my favorite part of the book is his conclusion, which is, every time man fails, it's because he entrusted his liberty to someone else.
00:36:11.000 And when people are independent, sovereign human citizens, they're all the better for it.
00:36:19.000 I believe that's a message that God has sort of planted in our DNA.
00:36:24.000 When you let someone else play God, as in communism, you suffer.
00:36:28.000 This book is very important.
00:36:29.000 It's kind of the, it sums up the reason for my show and what I'm trying to do here.
00:36:34.000 What to expect when no one's expecting America's coming demographic disaster.
00:36:39.000 And, you know, this is why every time I see young people, I go, what's going on?
00:36:43.000 Did you put a ring on it yet?
00:36:44.000 When are you guys getting married?
00:36:45.000 You got a breed.
00:36:46.000 I text Lauren Southern and Faith Goldie all the time.
00:36:48.000 I just text the word, breed.
00:36:50.000 We need more babies from families.
00:36:53.000 We need more Western families.
00:36:55.000 All right, what do I got over here?
00:36:58.000 Remember, I was talking about my podcast on how to make money in TV?
00:37:02.000 Here's a book I had to read because we were going to pitch a show about the art world.
00:37:07.000 Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton.
00:37:09.000 The art world is fascinating.
00:37:12.000 The kind of crimes that go on and the amount of bullshit that is involved with it.
00:37:17.000 Like they'll take someone like, say, Richard Prince, and a bunch of guys will start bidding on his paintings.
00:37:24.000 And they'll all of a sudden make him famous just because everyone's bidding on it.
00:37:28.000 They create a market.
00:37:29.000 It's like Bitcoin in a way.
00:37:31.000 And then he gets up.
00:37:33.000 He becomes valuable.
00:37:34.000 They buy all his stuff.
00:37:36.000 They sell it for a massive markup because, sorry, they've already bought his stuff.
00:37:40.000 You buy an okay artist like Richard Prince, then you start bidding like crazy on his paintings, make him very valuable.
00:37:47.000 Then you sell all your old stock, and then you sort of just dump him, and all of a sudden his stock crashes and he's back to zero again.
00:37:55.000 They do that all the time.
00:37:56.000 So many bizarre crimes.
00:37:57.000 I think I talked about this earlier, Nickel and Dined by Barbara Ehrenreich.
00:38:00.000 Great book.
00:38:01.000 She becomes working class.
00:38:03.000 She just dumps herself in the middle of nowhere.
00:38:05.000 I actually did a TV show based on it called America on Zero Dollars a Day.
00:38:09.000 She neglects to mention illegal aliens.
00:38:11.000 So that's a major flaw with that book.
00:38:14.000 Classic lefties.
00:38:16.000 A.J. Jacobs is a big A.J. Jacobs fan.
00:38:19.000 He's quite chuffed with himself.
00:38:22.000 But he noticed that he's very smart.
00:38:25.000 So he read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica from A to Z. The know-it-all, one man's humble quest to become the smartest person in the world.
00:38:33.000 If you can get over how smug he is as a liberal, it's a really good book, and he's a great writer.
00:38:38.000 Speaking of smug liberals, Aziz Ansari, Modern Romance.
00:38:41.000 This is a wonderful book about dating in the 21st century.
00:38:46.000 His politics are brutal, but they don't permeate this book, so you might get over it.
00:38:50.000 Look at this.
00:38:51.000 I have shaving cream everywhere because the kids make slime out of it.
00:38:56.000 What do we got here?
00:38:57.000 Growing up Mafia by Frank DeMatteo.
00:38:57.000 Oh, yeah.
00:39:00.000 This is about a guy in South Brooklyn who grew up what's called Red Hook Now, and it's not the best written book in the world because it's by a guy who was an old wise guy.
00:39:11.000 You know, he was surrounded by wise guys his whole life.
00:39:14.000 But it is an amazing book.
00:39:15.000 And you know what's fun about this book is you're reading about a place where the mob ruled, and you're reading about 1940s, 50s New York, and you go, I think that was the greatest childhood of all time.
00:39:25.000 Even though you'd see the dead body, just like the streets full of kids with no curfew, well, they had curfews, but no rules.
00:39:33.000 And if someone saw a kid hitting another kid, the mom would get involved and slap him around.
00:39:37.000 I mean, I honestly believe if you could go from the beginning of time to now, the greatest sense of community America ever had was 1950s Italian New York.
00:39:46.000 Maybe that's why the movies were so obsessed with Greece and all this Saturday Night Fever and everything.
00:39:54.000 This is a must-have for parents.
00:39:57.000 Lenore Skinese, Free Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children Without Going Nuts with Worry.
00:40:04.000 Now, she's the one who let her kid find his way home from Manhattan back to Brooklyn or vice versa using the trains when he was eight years old.
00:40:13.000 And she got in a lot of crap for it.
00:40:15.000 She was called the worst mom in America.
00:40:17.000 But she has all these revolutionary ideas.
00:40:21.000 Like, it's illegal, I believe, for an eight-year-old and a four-year-old to walk back alone from the park.
00:40:25.000 And she goes, do it.
00:40:26.000 Let's get a rest.
00:40:27.000 They can't arrest us all.
00:40:28.000 And she has, lead the kids at the park day, where we all fight back to get back to this notion of a 70s childhood where you just hop on your bike and go over to Darren Alberti's house.
00:40:38.000 Whatever happened to that?
00:40:40.000 These books you got to take with a pinch of salt.
00:40:42.000 London is Stan by Melanie Phillips.
00:40:44.000 And I don't mean a pinch of salt that they're not true.
00:40:46.000 I mean, I'm trying to show you fun books to enjoy the holiday with, and I get real depressed when I hear about the Islamification of Britain.
00:40:54.000 My dad and I were talking about that the other day.
00:40:56.000 Here's a book I edited.
00:40:58.000 Knockout, Emmanuel for Success, My Million Dollar Shift.
00:41:01.000 He was about $300,000 in debt, and then he was $500,000 or $700,000 up by the time he wrote this book.
00:41:10.000 And it's just about getting organized, getting in shape, clean your room, stop watching TV, stop masturbating.
00:41:15.000 It's a self-help book, but it's really good, and no one's ever heard of it.
00:41:19.000 Mike Kennedy is his name.
00:41:21.000 What else do we got here?
00:41:22.000 Oh, here's a great book.
00:41:24.000 Popular Economics by John Tamney.
00:41:27.000 He uses what the Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey, and LeBron James can teach you about economics.
00:41:31.000 So it's just a fun book that teaches economics in a pop culture-y way using pop culture references.
00:41:37.000 And he says fascinating stuff like the death tax.
00:41:40.000 We don't need the death tax.
00:41:41.000 He said, it's good that someone has a huge chunk of money.
00:41:44.000 Don't tax billionaires.
00:41:46.000 Let them pass on a fortune to their son.
00:41:48.000 And he talks about ESPN who couldn't afford their $40,000 a month bill for accruing all the sports in America.
00:41:57.000 And some rich kid goes, I'll invest in your company through, I don't know, $500 million down.
00:42:03.000 And it's a bad time to be talking about ESPN because Colin Kaepernick has ruined sports.
00:42:07.000 But they have moved on to be, I don't know what they are, a $3 billion company.
00:42:12.000 I forget the exact number of employees, but it's in the thousands.
00:42:14.000 And it's all because some rich kid didn't have his inheritance taxed to death.
00:42:19.000 That's the kind of stuff you find in there.
00:42:22.000 What else do we got here?
00:42:24.000 Oh, this book is one of my favorites.
00:42:26.000 So Peter Bagg, my favorite cartoonist, he works for Reason Mag, and he goes and does cartoon reporting, where he goes and he checks out people who grow pot, or he goes to these various political conventions, or he talks to, you know, poor people in the hood and rich people on the Upper East Side, and then he documents it all in cartoon form.
00:42:48.000 I know cartoons can be a hard sell to people, but if you are interested in libertarian politics and comics at the same time, Everybody is Stupid Except for Me and other astute observations is one of the funnest books I've ever read, one of the best graphic novels ever written.
00:43:03.000 It's a great bathroom book, too.
00:43:06.000 All right, what do we got here?
00:43:07.000 We got my hallway.
00:43:10.000 Oh, David Sederis is the funniest writer in the world.
00:43:14.000 There's very few writers where I laugh out loud.
00:43:17.000 Confederacy of Dunces, which I think I got over there, is another example of that.
00:43:21.000 But this is laugh out loud, funny.
00:43:24.000 Every book by David Sedaris is equally good.
00:43:26.000 If you want to start with one, I would get Me Talk Pretty one Day.
00:43:30.000 Here's a good graphic novel, Fun Home by Allison Bechdell.
00:43:36.000 She has another one, Are You My Mother?
00:43:38.000 This one blows.
00:43:39.000 Don't get it.
00:43:40.000 But this is about, it's a graphic novel about growing up in a funeral home, as she did.
00:43:46.000 Her dad, I think, killed himself.
00:43:47.000 He was a closeted gay.
00:43:49.000 And it's a fascinating book.
00:43:51.000 This, by the way, I spoke about earlier, Guy DeLeo Pyongyang, A Journey in North Korea.
00:43:56.000 You will not see a more conclusive expose on North Korea than Guy DeLeo's book.
00:44:04.000 But here is a really fascinating one.
00:44:07.000 The Lost City, A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.
00:44:10.000 And it's about this guy in the 20s.
00:44:13.000 What the hell was his name?
00:44:15.000 Fawcett.
00:44:16.000 PJ Fawcett or something?
00:44:18.000 And this guy went into the Amazon to find the lot.
00:44:31.000 Like poisonous blow darts that you'll get in the neck.
00:44:35.000 And people go insane trying to find this lost city.
00:44:37.000 I won't ruin it and tell you whether they find it or not.
00:44:40.000 But the amount of doom and gloom and scariness that goes on.
00:44:46.000 And when you're reading it, you're trying to find, because it talks about all the people after Fawcett who went to find his party and went to try to continue his mission.
00:44:54.000 And as you're reading it, it's like you're on the journey in the lost city of Z. My grandfather painted that.
00:45:02.000 He was an artist.
00:45:04.000 He never really sold his art, though.
00:45:06.000 He just kept it under his couch.
00:45:07.000 Weird guy.
00:45:09.000 This is sort of the kids' area, but I found some of my own books here.
00:45:14.000 Doug Williams from Cop to Crusader.
00:45:16.000 This book could be written better, but it is a fascinating story about a guy who was the top polygraph dude, worked in the White House, and then realized these things don't work.
00:45:26.000 They're a lie.
00:45:27.000 He just got out of two years in prison for making that truth public.
00:45:32.000 This is the funniest book ever written.
00:45:34.000 I think it's the only nonfiction we'll be looking at today, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
00:45:41.000 It is an absolute masterpiece.
00:45:44.000 They've been trying to make a movie of it forever.
00:45:45.000 I think Jack Black was going to be Ignatius P. Riley.
00:45:49.000 But if you're going to read one piece of nonfiction, it should be the funniest book ever made.
00:45:54.000 Like this book, The Botany of Desire.
00:45:57.000 Michael Pollen is a writer.
00:45:58.000 He actually helped me stop being a vegetarian.
00:46:01.000 I was a vegetarian for 15 years.
00:46:03.000 And in this book, the reason I stopped being a vegetarian is he talked about ethical meat and how if you buy like organic beef, it's really better for a cow than even a cow being out in the wild.
00:46:14.000 It wouldn't even last.
00:46:15.000 So anyway, that is called An Animal's Place, that article.
00:46:18.000 You can look it up.
00:46:19.000 But this book, The Botany of Desire, isn't about that.
00:46:22.000 It's about, do we control the plants or do the plants control us?
00:46:25.000 A plant's eye view of the world.
00:46:27.000 And it's an interesting concept, like with apple trees, for example.
00:46:30.000 Apples used to taste gross.
00:46:32.000 They used to taste like potatoes, but we bred them to be sugary, and now they taste like candy.
00:46:37.000 And the apples, Paulin argues, sort of evolutionarily notice that they get planted more when they're sweet, so they start producing more sugar.
00:46:46.000 So are we making apples sweeter, or are sweet apples duping us into propagating their species?
00:46:53.000 I'm not doing his argument justice, but it's a fascinating book to read.
00:46:56.000 One of the best books ever, The Gangs of New York.
00:46:59.000 This is what inspired Scorsese to do the movie, and it's got all these funny references.
00:47:05.000 Bill the Butcher's in here.
00:47:07.000 We learn all about him and his feud with priest.
00:47:09.000 That was all true.
00:47:10.000 The Gangs of New York, half the stuff you see there, even that woman, the cat lady with the weird claw fingers, she existed.
00:47:17.000 It was a really bizarre time.
00:47:18.000 I think it was linked to the Industrial Revolution just sort of stirring up the dirt on the entire world and everyone coming to New York because it was too chaotic back where they were from.
00:47:28.000 Lenny Bruce, the story of his life.
00:47:30.000 Ladies and gentlemen, Lenny Bruce by Albert Goldman from the Journalism of Lawrence Schiller.
00:47:35.000 Fascinating book that goes from his young days as a Jewish kid in New York to ODing on, I think it was mescaline or something, some weird drug he OD'd on.
00:47:45.000 But that's a really interesting story to read about, especially as a free speech advocate and to see what one of the first people to push the boundaries of free speech, what he had to endure.
00:47:54.000 I mean, he was arrested for his jokes.
00:47:57.000 This is a great book, Gig.
00:47:59.000 Americans Talk About Their Jobs, edited by John Bo, Marissa Bo.
00:48:02.000 I ended up meeting her.
00:48:03.000 And it's just, this is a good one to start with, too.
00:48:05.000 It's just a list of hundreds of people describing their job, from a bartender who saw a skinheads fight to a brain surgeon to engineers, inventors, to garbage men.
00:48:17.000 You just hear what their typical day is like.
00:48:19.000 It's fascinating.
00:48:20.000 It's actually kind of an homage to a previous version of the same thing.
00:48:23.000 This is another amazing book.
00:48:26.000 Laura Hillenbrand.
00:48:28.000 I know I say women can't write, but when they write, they can write like hell.
00:48:32.000 Like I'm reading a book right now called Hero of the Empire about Winston Churchill, and it's done by Abroad.
00:48:38.000 And she writes sort of like this, like really thorough and engaging.
00:48:41.000 But this is about Louis Zamparini, the World War II vet.
00:48:46.000 I hope I didn't mention this in my debut episode.
00:48:49.000 And it's about him surviving in World War II and discovering God at the very end there.
00:48:53.000 Something Angelina Jolie left out of the movie for some reason.
00:48:56.000 Here's a liberal.
00:48:57.000 John Ronson.
00:48:58.000 So you've been publicly shamed.
00:49:00.000 And this is just about going viral, getting shamed, losing your job.
00:49:05.000 I mean, it really matches up right now with all this controversy with these sex scandals and how their careers are instantly ended.
00:49:14.000 Fascinating book, not just about being a meme who gets humiliated, but it's also about shame in general.
00:49:24.000 This book rules Chuck Zito, Street Justice, about him becoming a Hell's Angel.
00:49:31.000 It's kind of weird seeing his boobies on the cover, isn't it?
00:49:34.000 About him being a Hell's Angel.
00:49:36.000 He's still around.
00:49:37.000 He has his own restaurant, I think, in the Bronx.
00:49:40.000 But this is a really fun story.
00:49:42.000 And by the way, it also talks about how him hanging out with his biker buddies and being in a biker gang ultimately ruined his marriage and led to his marriage falling apart, which he feels terrible about.
00:49:53.000 So there's stuff in there for chicks, too.
00:49:56.000 This is a very similar book from the other side, Street Warrior, Ralph Friedman, the most decorated detective in all of New York.
00:50:03.000 He's got a show on Discovery where he goes through all these piece by piece.
00:50:07.000 There's actually, you could say that it's a movie version of this book because it's the same stories, but acted out.
00:50:12.000 It's really good.
00:50:13.000 This book is amazing.
00:50:16.000 Among the Thugs, Bill Buford.
00:50:18.000 Bill went undercover with soccer hooligans in England and lived with them, fought with them, drank with them, fell in love with them.
00:50:26.000 You know, not in a gay way.
00:50:28.000 No homo.
00:50:29.000 And that's a great look inside the violent street culture of England.
00:50:34.000 This book is also a total stunner.
00:50:37.000 The joke's over.
00:50:39.000 Ralph Steadman.
00:50:40.000 Now, Ralph Steadman, obviously, he did the cover.
00:50:42.000 It's a portrait of Hunter S. Thompson.
00:50:44.000 And this is the guy who did all the illustrations for Hunter Thompson's articles.
00:50:48.000 And it's about his life with Hunter, including Hunter's suicide.
00:50:52.000 And he can write really, really well.
00:50:55.000 It's really compelling going back over these stories.
00:50:57.000 He's almost as good as Hunter Thompson.
00:50:59.000 So I recommend this book to almost everyone I meet.
00:51:02.000 I've bought it a few times over.
00:51:03.000 It's a really, really fun read.
00:51:06.000 Speaking of fun reads, James O'Keefe has a new book coming out called American Pravda.
00:51:11.000 This is his previous book, Breakthrough.
00:51:13.000 And I think my write-up is on the front of the new print.
00:51:17.000 But it is a roller coaster ride about all the times he got arrested.
00:51:21.000 It starts with him in prison.
00:51:22.000 It's not just this sort of pedantic trope talking about the history of this controversy, and I've got a hidden camera here.
00:51:30.000 It's about getting the hidden cameras there and getting arrested and getting thrown in jail and chasing this guy and running from that guy.
00:51:36.000 It's a really wild ride.
00:51:38.000 This book is a history of punk.
00:51:39.000 If you haven't read this yet, I don't know what the hell is the matter with you.
00:51:43.000 If you want to read it, don't read it in public, okay?
00:51:45.000 Don't be seen reading this on the train.
00:51:48.000 It's like being seen reading Catcher in the Rye or Moby Dick or something.
00:51:51.000 This is a staple you should have already read.
00:51:54.000 And this is another great book, Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee.
00:51:57.000 You have to be really into free speech to enjoy this.
00:52:00.000 It's by Nate Hentoff, Nat Hentoff, sorry.
00:52:02.000 And how the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.
00:52:05.000 This book, you have to really be into free speech.
00:52:08.000 It's really just a compendium of the major court cases, the major trials involving free speech throughout the years.
00:52:15.000 And what's interesting about it is you learn that when free speech cases make it to the Supreme Court, the court tends to err on the side of the First Amendment.
00:52:25.000 It's when they don't that people get pilloried because we have these kangaroo courts of social media now where we get people fired for saying something or for thinking something like Clivin Bundy was vilified for wondering something.
00:52:39.000 Larry Summers at Harvard was fired for posing a question.
00:52:43.000 So the government is actually better than the mob when it comes to free speech.
00:52:49.000 And that leaves one last book.
00:52:52.000 Hold on.
00:52:53.000 Last and least is this book, Death of Kool.
00:52:57.000 That's my book.
00:52:57.000 I wrote this book.
00:52:59.000 And it's disgusting.
00:53:00.000 It's mostly sex stories, lots of violence, lots of drugs.
00:53:04.000 It's about the party years.
00:53:06.000 At the end, I guess I say, oh, those years were fun, but marriage is important.
00:53:09.000 Having a family is what really matters.
00:53:11.000 Yeah, why did you devote two pages to that?
00:53:13.000 And the other 260 are all about partying.
00:53:17.000 This book is for liberals.
00:53:19.000 It's not what a conservative should be reading.
00:53:21.000 Don't get it.
00:53:22.000 But get all those other books and enjoy your Christmas vacation.
00:53:26.000 I think it's very important that we enjoy our families on this trip, but it's also a good time to sit back, relax, and enjoy a good book.