Francis Ford Coppola

Jules Dassin
Brian De Palma
Andrew Lau
Sergio Leone
Sam Peckinpah
Guy Ritchie
Martin Scorsese
Quentin Tarantino
Johnny To
John Woo

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Short Stories:

Theodore Sturgeon, When you Care, When You Love

Anatole France, Our Lady's Juggler
Saki, Sredni Vashtar
Robert Heinlein, The Man Who Traveled in Elephants
William Gibson, Burning Chrome
Clive Barker, In the Hills, the Cities

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Twisty Bass', by Neil Finn

How To Disappear Completely, by Radiohead

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The Night Battles, Carlo Ginzburg. An alternative story of how witch and werewolf
beliefs operated in medieval Italy.

The Art of Memory, Frances Yates. How a mnemonic mentioned in Latin and Greek
rhetoric flowered into an impossibly vast magico-philosophic system in the
Renaissance.

Mad Travellers, Ian Hacking. Psychology at work at the end of the 19th century to
explain the problem (real at the time, it seems) of people who walk for thousands
of miles without any memory of having done so. The treatments as strange as the
stories.

Sons of Sinbad, Allan Villiers. The lives and work of Arab seamen on the Indian
Ocean � written in the1930s when the last of them were sailing in the same dhows as
they had for centuries.

Negara, Clifford Geertz. Classic account of the �theatre state� in 19th century
Bali: government as organized spectacle.

The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin. A sort-of-fictionalized story of Chatwin�s

exploration of the meaning and uses of Australian Aboriginal song.

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff. The way different cultures view
the world as exemplified in their language. Don�t invent a language without it.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles McKay. A

debunking of popular stories, legends, miracles, and delusions, written in 1841.
The debunking (full of errors itself) is as amazing as the stories. Famous for its
dissection of the tulip mania.
The Serpent and the Rainbow, Wade Davis. Real Haitian voodoo and the zombie cult.

1491, Charles Mann. The civilizations that thrived in the Americas before the
Europeans.

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty,
Bradley K. Martin. Nearly unbelievable dystopia.

Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian

Revolution, Richard Stites. All the failed, ignored, suppressed possibilities that
preceded the Communist state. Utopia meets Dead Souls.

Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie. A medieval town in
France � beliefs and politics in the period of the Cathar heresy.

Celtic Heritage, Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees. The world of ancient Ireland and
Wales � the shape of the world they experienced.

The World of the Shining Prince, Ivan Morris. Heian-period Japan. Read it with a
brief book of the period, As I Crossed the Bridge of Dreams, in the Morris
translation.

The Floating World, James A. Michener. Lighter treatment, this time Edo Japan.

The Death of the Woman Wang or The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, both by Jonathan
Spence. Among our greatest Western interpreters of Chinese culture.

East is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll, Thomas Gladwin.
Polynesian sailors and their methods for crossing open seas without instruments or
charts, navigation skills which are their culture.

Castle and Cathedral, David Macauley. You probably read them as kids: books by a
great draughtsman about the actual month-to-month and year-to-year building of
these buildings. Let�s get our details right.

Faces of Degeneration A European Disorder, 1848-1918, Daniel Pick. The pseudo-

science of �negative eugenics� (facing the supposed fact of human devolution) �
creepy, horrific in its consequences.

Henry Manne, Ancient Law � some day, writers will realize that not all legal
disputes and systems resemble either Anglo-American common law or post-Roman civil
law.

Basil H. Liddell-Hart, Strategy � some day, writers will realize that virtually all
fantasy-based military stuff is wrong and stupid. Leaving aside the "numberless
hordes" problem � remember, the entire English army at Agincourt was 6,000 or so �
it's just appalling to see the basic strategic errors endemic to commercial
fiction. (Sadly, that includes works by those who should know better, too.)

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Your Birthdate: February 22

You tend to be understated and under appreciated.

You have a hidden force to do amazing things, doing them your own way.
People may see you as strange and shy, but they know little.
Your unconventional ways have more power than they (and even you) know.
Your strength: Standing up for what you know is true
Your weakness: You tend to be picky and rigid
Your power color: Silver
Your power symbol: Square
Your power month: April
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