10 Top Educational Books of All Time from Dr. B.

10 Top Educational Books of All Time from Dr. B.    

Here are 10 of my top educational books of all time:  fiction and non fiction, Catholic and non Catholic.

1.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Hardly a grand epic which you might expect, this is rather a murder mystery with the protagonist committing the murder[s] in chapter one.  Dostoyevsky presents a psychological thriller with ongoing diatribes of the then contemporary emerging philosophies  of the day.     Replete with Christian themes, Dostoevsky maintains that perseverance and persistence, commitment and hard work is our calling for true success in life.  A message all from St. Petersburg to Siberia.  And that adherence to God’s commandments is what is required of us regardless of socio-economic circumstances.  No excuses.  But what really fascinated me was that I was there.  I was there in Russia itself in 1861, in that small hidden neighborhood, in those streets, in Raskolnikov’s mind.  Dostoevsky had that ability, and he has been copied ever since.  Genius.  And it was fun reading all those long Russian names.  I felt so sophisticated.

2.  Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

Well, this was an epic.  It spanned generations and Hugo’s research impressive.  He wrote of European politics, French politics, the French Revolution, political ideologies, the Catholic church and religious history.  He further researched military history and the Battle of Waterloo, cultural descriptions of both rich and poor, the penal system, the banking system, the police system, even the Parisian sewer system and its history.  He said baboons lived down there; how in the world did that happen?
The major theme was protagonist’s Jean Valjean’s struggle for redemption. Certainly a more difficult struggle than ours.  A romanticist for sure, Victor Hugo captured my heart as well as my mind and interest.  My conclusion was, no college education is complete without reading the 1032 page masterpiece, ‘Les Miserables’.   Forget those silly musicals.  

3.  Fr. Walter Ciszek, He Leadeth Me

 Talk about inspiration and spirituality,  Father Walter Ciszek offers an accounting of his experiences in the Gulags of the Soviet Union as a testament to God’s providence and graces of God through devotion and perseverance, endurance.  He strove to do the will of God regardless of the circumstances as he was forced to live in the Soviet Union for 39 years. Fr. Ciszek states, “And the greatest grace God can give such a man is to send him a trial he cannot bear with his own powers—and then sustain him with his grace so he may endure to the end and be saved.”  Yes, quite inspiring and spiritual!

4.  Fr. Walter Ciszek, With God in Russia

 Wheras the content in the above book by Father Ciszek is  about 75% spiritual and 25% describing his daily life, this accounting is 75% daily life and 25% spiritual.  Same story with a different emphasis.  The earthly reality of life in the Gulags and Russia proper is fascinating.  And although Fr. Ciszek was an unfortunate visiting alien so to speak, he still was able to win awards as best worker both in jail and in Russian society.  Why? Because  God was with him. He followed Jesuit founder St. Ignatius: “Work like everything depends on  you and pray like everything depends on God.”   President Kennedy finally fenagled some political miracles to free him and Fr. Ciszek returned to the United States in 1963. Great stuff!

 5.  Bill Barich, Big Dreams:  Into the Heart of California

 Everyone has a fascination with California at one time or another in their lives.  This is not that well known a book, nor author. But here we have a history of the quest for a new life in California and it’s promise of infinite possibilities.  Kevin Starr called it the ‘On the Road’ of the 90s.  This book describes the hopeful quests of so many including Native Americans, Afro Americans, wine producers, oil seekers and gold miners, fortune and star seekers of all kinds arriving from the rest of America.  Along with a myriad of spot-on descriptions of the sundry locales in California, Barich has fun  with the people he meets. His research on the history of so many communities was impressive and one certainly gets an understanding of the soul of this state.  Well, in 1994.  Today it is souless.  BTW, I graduated high school with Bill Barich in 1961.

 6.  Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time

[pronounced horn-eye BTW; my college students used to giggle] One of my favorite books when attending undergraduate school in the 60s, through this book I recognized so many of my fellows and guess who else.  It is essentially the western character structure based on our urban competitive life styles.  One of my favorite quotes from this famous neo-Freudian, “ The cry of the neurotic is woe unto you if you are not perfect.”  

Today it shows itself in the form of political correctness or wokeness.  It has been referred to by contemporary psychologists as a collective mental derangement, a phenomenon neurotic in nature pertaining to social and political thought that shouts at us - ‘WOE UNTO YOU IF YOU ARE NOT PERFECT’. You have to be like us; you have to think like us. We are correct. We know better.  Dr. Horney describes western society as an anxiety ridden culture with competition at the center of our neurotic conflicts. This was the 1930s.  Still with us but worse today.    

7.  Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom

Another of my favorite books in the 60s, this was published first in 1941.

It is also a treatise on the isms of the day, especially fascism and communism.  Another neo-Freudian, Fromm calls himself a Marxist who supports socialist humanism  A sane society cannot exist if based on capitalism.  He was a religious Jew who saw people falling for a non humanistic form of socialism. He discusses our  relationship with freedom and humanity.  Unfortunately for humans, individual freedom can cause fear, anxiety and alienation. People will seek relief by relinquishing freedom.   He describes how authoritarianism can be a mechanism of escape, with special emphasis on the psychosocial conditions that enabled the rise of Nazism and communism.  Today’s mechanism of escape is the administrative state and so called global reset.  It seems for so many of us and our so called leaders, nothing spiritual can cure our angst, only centralized governmental bureaucracy and control, nationally and globally.    

8.  Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice

 Well, this is truly a non-fiction classic on the irrational nature of man.  We hear it all the time:  prejudice, racism, ageism, sexism, now transism and their devastating effects. His comprehensive scholarship was impressive and profound.  This was required reading in so many sociology and psychology courses in the day and even my classes up until recently. Why?  Because Allport said it all and in 1951 no less.  Up until my recent retirement, many a lecture originated from this book.  However, don’t be intimidated, it is not difficult to read, yet the scope of knowledge presented is more than grand.  Social and psychologically based, some of his topics include but not limited to in-group/out-group, cognition, stereotypes, social structure, theories of prejudice, learning, anti Catholicism and anti Semitism. Still timely.

 9.  Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Abridged

Thank God there is an abridged version.  As appearing on the back cover, “It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late 20th century.”  And what do you do? For us today it is pray, hold on to your families, support your churches and communities. For him it was being caught between serving a  repressive state or a life in the Siberian Gulags.  Well, through the insights and knowledge of Solzhenitsyn, we can witness the progression of the deep/administrative state at the hands of the lies from the Democrat Party of the United States and worldwide Marxism.   “Live not by lies”, says Solzhenitsyn because it can happen here.  It’s happening.

 10.  St. Louis de Montefort, True Devotion to Mary

 This is considered one of the greatest books ever written on Marian spirituality.  St. Pope John Paul the Great himself says it had a great effect on his own personal walk and devotive life.  It was the decisive turning point in his life.  This is a book guiding one’s journey toward holiness and as stated at the outset “The more we honor the Blessed Virgin, the more we honor Jesus Christ.”  De Montefort includes guides to preparation, practice and consecration toward devotion.

 11. And one for good luck, though I never actually read it.  Rather I took an on-line course from Hillsdale College.  

 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy:  Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.      If you can read it, God Bless.  But it was a fascinating course.  The first people he saw in hell were politicians.  Written 1306-1321.

Related Source:

Baglino, Michael J.  More From a Florida Catholic: Vignettes Plus on Psychology and Culture.  New York:  Penguin Writers, 2022.