Interview with Daniel Pick, author of Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control
Daniel Pick, author of Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control recommends some great books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Daniel's book:
Review from Book Depository:
In 1953, a group of prisoners of war who had fought against the communist invasion of South Korea were released. They chose - apparently freely - to move to Mao's China. Among those refusing repatriation were twenty-one American GIs. Their decision sparked alarm in the West: why didn't they want to come home? What was going on?
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control
Soon, people were saying that the POWs' had been 'brainwashed'. Was this something new or a phenomenon that has been around for centuries? The belief that it is possible to marshal scientific knowledge to govern someone's mind gained enormous attention. In an era of Cold War paranoia and experimentation on 'altered states', the idea of brainwashing flourished, appearing in everything from critiques of CIA research on LSD to warnings of corporate groupthink, from visions of automaton assassins to conspiracy theories about 'global elites'. Today, brainwashing is almost taken for granted - built into our psychological and political language, rooted in the way we think about minds and societies. How did we get to this point - and why?
Psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick delves into the mysterious world of brainwashing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from The Manchurian Candidate to ISIS, TV advertising to online algorithms. Mixing fascinating case studies with historical and psychological insights, Brainwashed is a stimulating journey into the mysteries of thought control.
Buy On:
Easons €28.00
Book Depository €15.92
Waterstones £20.00
Wordery $19.68
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Homo Deus, if I’m allowed to treat them as single unit. Harari has a remarkable capacity to engage the reader, to appear to be casually thinking aloud, as he writes (beautifully fluently), and to wear his extensive learning lightly. I have opted to respond by suggesting this pair of books as they are so interconnected. Each distils so much historical knowledge while also engaging in a kind of enlightened ‘futurology’.
A fascinating whirlwind tour of the history of the human species, from cave paintings to the industrial revolution onwards. Provocative concepts delivered with effortless eloquence, well that's how well it reads anyway. (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review from Book Depository:
Sapiens showed us where we came from. In our increasingly uncertain times, Homo Deus shows us where we're going.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Buy On:
Easons €10.44
Book Depository €11.57
Waterstones £10.99
Wordery $11.75
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
The world-renowned historian and intellectual Yuval Noah Harari envisions a near future in which we face a new set of challenges. Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century and beyond - from overcoming death to creating artificial life.
It asks the fundamental questions: how can we protect this fragile world from our own destructive power? And what does our future hold?
Buy On:
Easons €13.99
Book Depository €11.57
Waterstones £10.99
Wordery $12.99
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
I enjoyed Susan Cain’s Quiet. It stimulated a variety of thoughts about the world we are in, and the post-war world that has shaped so much of our social, commercial and cultural life. Around the same time I read ‘Quiet’ I also read, with much interest, Jill Lepore’s fascinating study of the Simulmatics corporation, If Then. That book explores the role that this ‘IT’ organization played in Kennedy’s election campaign in 1960. Lepore sets out a mostly forgotten history highly relevant to the world of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. I do not recall the exact sequence in which I read those two books in the last two years, but can’t help but jot down two other studies I read around the same time, Anne Appelbaum’s The Twilight of Democracy and Sarah Churchwell’s Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream. Both works provide important reflections on present dark times, and on twentieth-century history.
Review from Book Depository:
Quiet, the Sunday Times and New York Times Bestseller by Susan Cain, will permanently change how we see introverts - and how you see yourself.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review from Book Depository:
The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge--decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine it has no past but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review from Book Depository:
In the years just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people from across the political spectrum in Europe and America celebrated a great achievement, felt a common purpose and, very often, forged personal friendships. Yet over the following decades the euphoria evaporated, the common purpose and centre ground gradually disappeared, extremism rose once more and eventually - as this book compellingly relates - the relationships soured too.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review from Book Depository:
'The American dream is dead,' Donald Trump said when announcing his candidacy for president in 2015. How would he revive it? By putting 'America First'.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Our lives are driven by a fact most of us can't name and don't understand: whether we're an introvert or an extrovert. This defines who our friends and lovers are, which careers we choose, and whether we blush when we're embarrassed. At least a third of us are on the introverted side. Some of the world's most talented people are introverts. Without them, we wouldn't have the Apple computer, the theory of relativity and Van Gogh's sunflowers.
Yet extroverts have taken over. Shyness, sensitivity and seriousness are often seen as being negative. Introverts feel reproached for being the way they are.
In Quiet, Susan Cain shows how the brain chemistry of introverts and extroverts differs, and how society misunderstands and undervalues introverts. She gives introverts the tools to better understand themselves and take full advantage of their strengths.
Buy On:
Book Depository €9.46
Waterstones £9.99
Wordery $10.33
If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and direct human behavior, deploying their "People Machine" from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy's presidential campaign, the New York Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defence.
In If Then, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore, unearths from the archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished corporation, and of the women hidden behind it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lepore argues, Simulmatics invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented, algorithm by algorithm.
Buy On:
Book Depository €9.70
Waterstones £10.99
Wordery $11.75
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
Anne Applebaum traces this history in an unfamiliar way, looking at the trajectories of individuals caught up in the public events of the last three decades. When politics becomes polarized, which side do you back? If you are a journalist, an intellectual, a civic leader, how do you deal with the re-emergence of authoritarian or nationalist ideas in your country? When your leaders appropriate history, or pedal conspiracies, or eviscerate the media and the judiciary, do you go along with it?
Twilight of Democracy is an essay that combines the personal and the political in an original way and brings a fresh understanding to the dynamics of public life in Europe and America, both now and in the recent past.
Buy On:
Easons €19.04
Book Depository €10.27
Waterstones £10.99
Wordery $11.44
Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream
The 'American Dream' and 'America First' are two of the most loaded phrases in America today - and also two of the most misunderstood. As divides within America widen, Sarah Churchwell looks to the past to reveal what the surprising history of these two phrases can tell us about today
Buy On:
Book Depository €10.80
Waterstones £9.99
Wordery $11.33
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
Hard to know where to reach back to exactly, and how far it is possible in some cases for me to differentiate entirely my childhood reading, from my cartoon watching, rapture at the movies, first encounters with theatre, or even later screenings of old Disney animations. I loved as a child, Kipling’s The Jungle Book and Dickens’ Oliver Twist, for instance, and in both cases the texts and the dramatizations overlap in my memories. In short, I’m struggling to choose a single favourite!
Review From Book Depository:
Kipling's best-loved work, now in a gorgeous new clothbound edition designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. These delectable and collectable editions are bound in high-quality, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.
(All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository:
The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers when it was first published. Dickens's tale of childhood innocence beset by evil depicts the dark criminal underworld of a London peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy. Combining elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama, Dickens created an entirely new kind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery.
(All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
The Jungle Books - Penguin Clothbound Classics
The story of Mowgli, the man-cub who is brought up by wolves in the jungles of Central India, is one of the greatest literary myths ever created. As he embarks on a series of thrilling escapades, Mowgli encounters such unforgettable creatures as the bear Baloo, the graceful black panther Bagheera and Shere Khan, the tiger with the blazing eyes. Other animal stories in The Jungle Books range from the dramatic battle between good and evil in 'Rikki-tikki-tavi' to the macabre comedy 'The Undertakers'. With The Jungle Books Rudyard Kipling drew on ancient beast fables, Buddhist philosophy and memories of his Anglo-Indian childhood to create a rich, symbolic portrait of man and nature, and an eternal classic of childhood.
Buy On:
Easons €23.80
Book Depository €16.24
Waterstones £14.99
Wordery $17.38
Oliver Twist - Penguin Clothbound Classics
Buy On:
Easons €20.99
Book Depository €14.70
Waterstones £14.99
Wordery $15.99
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
Paper.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
I’m sure I’m far from alone in responding by saying Shakespeare and Company in Paris. I tend to drift in that direction on occasional visits to the city, beguiled by the atmosphere of the bookshop and the warm invitation to browse and loose a sense of time. As a research student, now long ago, but also sometimes afterwards, as a lecturer, I spent many an hour rummaging around the second-hand collections of the wonderful Skoob Books in Sicilian Avenue in London.
Many thanks to Daniel for recommending some great books! Please don't forget to check out Daniel's book Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Profile Books Ltd (Brainwashed), Penguin Books Ltd (Quiet, Twilight of Democracy, The Jungle Books, Oliver Twist), Vintage Publishing (Sapiens, Homo Deus), John Murray Press (If Then), Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (Behold, America).
< Home
