Guerrilla warfare

What Hacker News says

1. jamesbrittJan 2009
   Che Guevara's book, Guerrilla Warfare, is quite good.
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2. TheodoresAug 2025
   This was a surprisingly big thing back in the early 2000s with The War Against Terror. I think that it was mostly for reasons of 'chilling effect', but the media made everyone aware that the Department of Homeland Security were paying attention to what books people took out of the library.

   What was curious about this was that, at the time, there were few dangerous books in libraries. Catcher in the Rye and 1984 was about it. You wouldn't find a large print copy of Che Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare, for instance.

   I disagree about how libraries minimise the risk of anyone knowing who is reading what. On the web where so much is tracked by low intelligence marketing people, there is more data than anything that anyone can deal with. In effect, nobody is able to follow you that easily, only machines, with data that humans can't make sense of.

   Meanwhile, libraries have had really good IT systems for decades, with everything tracked in a meaningful form with easy lookups. These systems are state owned, therefore it is no problem for a three letter agency to get the information they want from a library.

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3. jackfoxySep 2011
   I've meant to compile this list, so you just inspired me. I wish the Durants had had the stamina for one more volume. I don't know much about the European revolutions of 1848 and would have like to read about that time from them. I already had read a lot of ancient Greek literature in translation as well as The Pentateuch, all the historical books of the Old Testament and the Gospels. Western Civilization springs from intellectual roots in Athens and Jerusalem, so any survey has to include that heritage. My degree is in Comparative Literature, so I put a lot of stock in origninal source material. The only languages I read are English and German, so everything is in English or translation except Faust, which IMO would be a waste in translation. The books I read for my survey (this was my survey to fill in my personal Bildungslöcke) are not all classics, and not even all to be recommended. It may appear surprisingly heavy on 20th century, but a lot of intellectual threads I thought I should understand better got kicked off in that century. In more or less chronological order by authorship or content (and I've probably forgotten a few):

   Euclid The Elements

   Arrian The Campaigns of Alexander

   Garmonsway (trans.) The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

   Komroff (ed.) The Travels of Marco Polo

   Haydn The Counter-Renaissance

   Braudel The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, Vol I&II

   Pascal The Thoughts

   Spinoza The Ethics

   Christianson In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton & his Times

   Newton Opticks

   Newton Principia (get the modern English translation by U.C. Press)

   Hampson The Enlightenment

   Voltaire Candide

   Rousseau The Social Contract

   Boswell Life of Johnson

   Goethe Faust

   Phillips The Cousins' Wars

   Schom Napoleon Bonaparte

   Heidler & Heidler Old Hickory's War

   Babbage On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures

   de Toqueville Democracy in America

   Darwin On the Origen of Species

   Foote The Civil War: A Narrative

   Maurois Disraeli

   Twain Life on the Mississippi

   Spector Admiral of the New Empire, The Life and Career of George Dewey

   Cardwell The Norton History of Technology

   Abbott Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions

   Meyer & Brysac Tournament of Shaddows, The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia

   Doughty Travels in Arabia Deserta

   Lefevre The Golden Flood

   Massie Dreadnought, Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War

   Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom

   Durant The Story of Philosophy

   Cardozo The Nature of the Judicial Process

   Schapiro The Communist Party of the Soviet Union

   Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery

   Kershaw Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris

   Blemenson (ed.) The Patton Papers (1940-1945)

   Hayek The Road to Serfdom

   von Mises Human Action

   Skinner Walden Two

   Chambers Witness

   Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

   Guevara Guerrilla Warfare

   Cleaver Soul on Ice

   Lacey The Kingdom, Arabia & the House of Saud

   Durant The Lessons of History

   Hackworth Lessons Learned, Vietnam Primer

   Quigley Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time

   EDIT: Just remembered two more

   Hobbes Leviathan

   Locke Two Treatises of Government

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