Jordan Peterson Recommended Books, Part 2

Jordan Bernt Peterson (born 12 June 1962) is a Canadian professor of psychology, clinical psychologist, intellectual personality, and author. Afterward, Peterson's lectures and conversations—propagated especially through podcasts and YouTube—gradually gathered millions of views.

This is the second part (7 Books of 15). The first part is one my previous articles and contain the other 8 recommendations

He lists on his website the 15 “scariest” books everyone should read. The reviews are not from him, but from multiple readers across the globe.

If you want to purchase any of the books listed below, click on the titles. They are affiliated links that will take you directly to the store.

See also: Jordan Peterson Recommended Books, Part 1

The Rape of Nanking – Iris Chang

While reading the book "Killing the Rising Sun", Bill O’Rielly and Martin Dugard touched on the Japanese invasion of Nanking China in 1937. After a Vietnam vet friend told me some more history, “The Rape of Nanking” was a must read.

I thought Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot had the corner market on human atrocities, but they had nothing compared to what the Japanese did at Nanking. Nearly 300,000 people raped, mutilated and murdered in a few weeks. A moral outrage of butchery of innocents and the savagery of the Japanese with indisputable evidence that went all the way up to the imperial family.

The acts described in this book are revealing and revolting. The book is an excellent read, captivating and compelling including real life heroes that saved thousands of lives. I was surprised to see this is merely a footnote in history, rarely taught in school and rarely discussed in Japan.

This book is truly a must read.

Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I was brought here by Jordan Peterson and am embarrassed to say I hadn't heard about these volumes of work before. Shockingly (or maybe not so shockingly) the education system failed to mention this, even though I was in private school. That being said, I've felt the need since around March to delve deeper into what we are looking at in the USA - defined by what can only be called a hybrid mix of cultural marxism, communism, post-modernism, and Maoism. It is my belief that we are facing an existential threat to our country.

This book is a horrifying and haunting tale of what could be on deck if Americans don't stand up now. I encourage anyone to read it just to get a small taste of what went on in the Soviet Union, and to understand truly what communism is and what it does/has done to people, but I think it is especially pertinent to the USA as we face down a pseudo maoist cultural revolution that China saw in the 1960s. Between this and the words of the infamous KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, I would say the USA is well into the second 'destabilization' phase and has even entered into the third phase of 'crisis.' I truly would advise people to read these books as a warning, and to take Alexander Solzhenitsyn's words seriously as we face the rest of 2020 and beyond:

"I would like to call upon America to be more careful with its trust and prevent those wise persons who are attempting to establish even finer degrees of justice and even finer legal shades of equality - some because of their distorted outlook, others because of short-sightedness and still others out of self-interest - from falsely using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road. Because they are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat - one which has never been seen before in the history of the world."

See also: 5 Books Recommended by Ben Shapiro

Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl

If you're in pain, read this book. If you're scared, read this book. If you are lost, read this book. If you are happy, read this book. If you have time, read this book. If you don't have time, read this book. Read this book, read this book.

"We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Modern Man in Search of A Soul – Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung held some very strange ideas. Lucky me; I’m a sucker for very strange ideas. But these ideas must have seemed even more strange over a hundred years ago, when Jung was writing about them and publishing them.

As a psychiatrist and the founder of Analytic Psychology, Jung was at the forefront of an entirely new way of thinking about human beings and how we operate in the world. In large part, you could say that he was a man attempting to reconcile the diverging worlds of science and religion. I think in 2017, when a layperson thinks of psychology, many of us think of it as a hard science, completely separate from philosophy, religion, and medicine. But in 1933, those lines weren’t so clear, at least not to Jung.

Some of Jung’s pioneering concepts have taken hold in the modern lexicon, such as the concepts of extraversion, introversion, and the idea of a complexes. Other concepts posited by Jung in Modern Man In Search of a Soul, like the “shadow,” may not ring a bell with the layperson as much in 2017, but to me that’s one of the most interesting topics Jung explores in the book.

Maps Of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief – Jordan B. Peterson

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this book changed the way I view the world. Actually, it wasn’t just the book; like many others, I also follow Dr. Peterson’s University of Toronto lectures that he generously posts for free on Youtube.

So, I’m going to take a stab at briefly reducing some of the overarching themes found in the book for someone thinking about picking it up. Although, don’t expect the book to be reduced; it’s quite technical in parts.

The world can and should be viewed as a place made up of experiences or tools, rather than simply objects, which is how we’ve been trained to do as post-Enlightenment human beings. That’s the primary difference between a person in 2017 CE and a person in 2017 BCE. It’s not intelligence; it’s a matter of viewpoint.

Thus, if you asked an ancient Sumerian to describe a coffee cup, he’d probably say something like: “It looks like a nice place to store my liquid.” If you asked a man today, he might say: “Well it’s a small object made out of glass with a handle on it.”

Maybe you’re thinking so what: What difference does that difference in mindset make? Actually I think it’s central to Peterson’s views. A modern atheist, for example, may say, “look there’s a coffee cup; I can see it; I can touch it; I can break it; therefore it’s real! I can’t see God and I can’t touch God, therefore there is no God.” Peterson argues that of course modern people often come to that conclusion. We’ve been trained to think differently than the people who wrote the Bible, for example.

See also: The Best Books About Navy Seals

A History of Religious Ideas – Mircea Eliade

This is a classic, one that I ordered for my son who has discovered Eliade, of whom I am a fan. The only negative is that this is perhaps not the best place to begin getting acquainted with this fine scholar - a better introduction is his "Rites & Symbols Of Initiation," which I used for years in teaching a college course, "Introduction To Religion" (which most unhappily is not currently in print and hard to come across as used, except for ridiculously high prices). In any event, I can not come up with any higher recommendation than this for while some would say that his written works are dated, to my mind Eliade is still someone who simply must be read even if no longer "the last word," just among the first to be read!

Affective Neuroscience – Jaak Panksepp

It often astonishes me how many of my colleagues continue to argue that emotions are no more than simple reflexes that probably do not even exist in animals. Yet anyone who spends much time with animals constantly observes sophisticated reasoning and highly developed emotions. And it is difficult to try and reduce the sometimes devastating consequences of emotional disturbances in people with mood disorders to a series of reflexes.

Fortunately the understanding of the neurobiology of emotion has taken enormous strides in recent years. Jaak Panksepp, long regarded as one of the leaders in the field, gives us a wonderfully readable account of some of the neurological machinery that helps organize emotion in ALL mammals. For it is becoming clear that emotion is present in every mammal so far studied: even mice show evidence of emotion.

Panksepp includes discussion of arousal and of sleep: this one is of particular importance in the light of the increasing body of clinical work indicating that many mood disorders are secondary to disturbances of sleep, rather than sleep disorders being a consequence of mood disorders. He goes on to discuss systems involved in pleasure and fear, the sources of some forms of anger and rage. He is very good on the neural control of sexuality in animals, as well as the subtle emotions involved maternal care, social loss, and playfulness. The importance of these neurological systems in human beings remains an open question: humans are so astonishingly complex and have so many "extra" dimensions on their behavioral actions, that it is probably unwise to try and reduce these complex behaviors to the firing of groups of neurons.