Live from New York, it's Get Off My Lawn with Kevin McGuinness.
Hi, I didn't see you there.
This is our last episode before the Christmas holidays.
And I don't know about you, but I like to catch up on my reading on the Christmas holidays.
I often get people asking me, what should I read?
What are some good reads?
And Death of the West by Pat Buchanan changed my life.
And I discussed a lot of my favorite books on our debut episodes.
But I want to go through some more this episode to show you some fun reads so you can have a better vacation.
Now, we'll have pre-taped episodes throughout this Christmas week, so don't worry about a lack of content.
But I want this episode to be a better way for you to enjoy your Christmas holiday with some fun reads.
Come on in.
So here's my, I guess you'd call it a salon.
And this is where I do my watching of my shows and my reading of my books for the most part.
Well, you almost lost a cameraman there.
So let me show you some of my favorite books.
All right, what do we got here?
We got, oh, this is a book, Good Boss, Bad Boss by Robert L. Sutton, Ph.D. Now, this is one of those books you get at the airport.
I got it at the airport, and then I drank a bunch on the plane and fell asleep and never really cracked it, never really read one page of it.
But I'm sure it's good.
I don't really know.
Justin Halpern, I suck at girls.
He wrote that sh ⁇ My Dad Says, which is really hilarious.
This isn't as good.
It's about him falling in love with his girlfriend.
Secret Lives of the Great Artists, nah.
Ooh, this one's a doozy.
The Worm in the Apple by Peter Brimlow.
Now, Peter Brimlow has been banished from publishing because he started V-Dare, and he's known as a white nationalist because he's anti-immigration.
But this book has nothing to do with any of that.
And the book that does have a lot to do with any of that by him is Alien Nation, which is a terrible name because it sounds like a sci-fi movie.
But Alien Nation is brilliant.
And The Worm in the Apple, how the teachers' unions are destroying American education.
And he basically likens them to the mafia.
I mean, they literally do slash tires and threaten people's lives.
And they are incredibly powerful.
You don't cross them.
Amazing book, Worm in the Apple.
Can't say enough about it.
And by the way, when I'm requesting books here, I'm talking about books that are an easy read.
I'm dumb.
So when I request it, it's not a dense book that's hard to follow.
These are all fun reads.
The Tyranny of Good Intentions, how prosecutors and law enforcement are tramping the Constitution in the name of justice.
I made it to part of the intro of this book.
I collect about 17 times more books than I actually read.
I keep thinking that eventually I'll get to them.
So I can't really tell you about that book.
Kathy Acker, Pussy King of the Pirates.
I was kind of a feminist when I was in my early 20s.
And I had all these sort of sex positive books like Annie Sprinkle and stuff.
And I mean, they're much better than the feminists of today.
They're pro-sex, but little did they know they were rotting women's ovaries and plotting the future for a very sad group of shit chests.
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.
This is Lester Bangs.
He was a rock and roll musician.
He called himself the last of the white s, and he later reneged on that.
But this is an absolute masterpiece.
The guy was a fun writer.
This is back when music journalists had balls and they would go tour with the band and get high and stuff.
Lester Bangs is a lost generation of music writers.
It's kind of a Hunter Thompson, but more punk rock.
I highly recommend that book.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, an Indian history of the American West.
I got a lot of these sort of bummer Indian books, like this one is very popular.
Empire of the Summer Moon by S.G. Gwynn.
I don't know.
I mean, I talked about Trail of Tears, the new Trail of Tears in my opening debut episode.
I get a little depressed when I read about the Indians too much.
So I'm not going to recommend those.
Rats, this book by Robert Sullivan rules.
I remember one time I had Janine Garofalo staying at, not staying, but at my house at a party, and she saw two Ann Coulter books, and she's such a megalomaniac that she assumed that those were planted there to make her mad, because even seeing them in the hallway in a bookshelf was enraging.
And I just pretended I thought she was talking about rats, and I said, I don't know, you don't like rats?
Well, this book isn't very friendly to them.
In fact, the guy is disgusted by rats.
But this book is Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants.
Amazing book because this guy went to the slum, like he went to Lower Manhattan, Wall Street, where they seem to be in Chinatown, and he would stay there for nights upon nights.
He did a night shift just examining rats.
So this isn't someone sitting at a typewriter and pontificating.
This is someone is going out onto the street to meet the rats.
What else do we got here?
Oh, Keith Richards, life.
This book needs an editor.
Look how long it is.
It's 550 pages.
It is his entire life.
You go through his childhood.
You follow him home at night from school in the fog and dogs lead him home.
We hear about his aunt and uncle.
There's a whole thing in here about his aunt and uncle.
Now, I'm glad I brought this book out because this is something important I want to say about reading.
I think a lot of us have too high standards that we probably got from school where you have to read the whole book from beginning to end.
No, look at this smorgasbord.
It's a buffet.
So all you have to do is pick through it and just choose.
Like for this book, jump to the Mick Jagger parts and see how pissed off he was when Mick Jagger went solo and he had a whole row of Keiths.
He calls himself Keef.
He had a whole row of Keefs playing satisfaction and rolling stone songs and Getting paid for it.
And he goes, that pissed me off.
Go do your solo stuff.
That's fine, but you can't do stone songs.
Great point, Keith.
Good book.
If, you know, if you can to if you can skip parts you don't like.
This book is a wonderful read.
It goes by super fast.
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant sent An Idiot Abroad, the travel diaries of Carl Pilkington.
This goes by in like an hour.
It is an absolute joy.
Here's a book.
You won't believe who got me to read this.
Nick DiPaulo got me to read this book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah.
Obviously a play on the Slouching Towards Bethlehem hippie book of the time.
Robert H. Bork, brilliant guy, a real fastidious conservative.
But my problem with him is the guy's just so unbelievably conservative.
I mean, he starts talking about rock and roll in it for a bit and how this goddamn music with the hip gyrating and the Elvis and you're like, dude, chill out.
The only future for conservatives in this country is to embrace the youth and get over this social conservatism.
I mean, I understand if you hate gay marriage, but don't hate gays.
That's just dumb.
That's just dumb.
Bernard Mandeville, Collected Works.
This is what my tattoos say about luxury employed a million of the poor.
Don't get this book.
It's boring.
Oh, here's a funny one.
You know, there's a great book, not this one, Don't Get Lateral Thinking, but Edward De Bono has a brilliant book called Six Thinking Hats.
You can just read the Wikipedia page if you want to save time.
But he talks about how every project needs six different hats.
So there's the black hat thinking that says, this isn't going to work.
This project is doomed.
There's the white hat thinking that says, this project is going to rule.
We're going to make it.
There's the green hat thinking that comes up with organic ideas.
Blue hat thinking is business and so on and so on.
Red hat thinking, I think, is passion.
And he talks about how the black hat is the easiest hat to wear because you just go, this is going to suck.
This won't work.
And he said, we're good for black hats.
It's harder to find blue hats and white hats.
And it's such a great book for entrepreneurs if you want to make money.
Here's a stupid book that's fun.
If you're a New Yorker, you've got to read James Brownhouse, Ear In Virons.
And it's all about a bar I like to go to in the West Village called The Ear In.
And it really, like all good books, it's not really about the Ear In.
It's about the evolution of America.
And it starts before the Civil War.
It starts in the 1800s.
It was originally owned, they say, by one of the first freed slaves, James Brown.
And they would pick oysters and stuff off from the East River, the West River, the East River, the Hudson River, and sell them.
And then we see it go through Prohibition, and they've got a secret room in the back.
And it's amazing that this bar has survived through basically all New York's, from when it was farmland up until right now.
It's still open right now.
Roll Jordan Roll.
Now, this book is incredible.
The World the Slaves Made, Eugene Di Genovese.
And it's been accused of the Slavery Wasn't So Bad book.
It's not that.
It does concede that slavery sucked.
But what's amazing about it is it talks about all these myths of slavery.
Like the idea that every time you see someone who's slightly black or any one mulatto, then they must have been raped by their slave owner.
That's why we have light-skinned blacks and dark-skinned blacks.
And they go, no, that didn't really go down as much as people say it did.
Because you've got a whole family of people there.
You've got brothers and fathers of that girl with pitchforks in their hands all day.
So you don't really tend to do raping.
It's not a very lucrative pastime.
So that's a very sort of politically incorrect look at slavery.
It's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
This is a book.
Whenever I would go to Fox News, I'd pick up all the free books because they're just piled up in boxes.
And then I would take them home and not read them.
Same with Killing Jesus.
It's probably a really good book.
Here's a great one.
I can't say enough about John Stossel.
He's sort of like Michelle Malkin in that the book just sort of zips by.
It's written, and I don't mean any disrespect to Malkin or Stossel here, but they both write in a sort of a people magazine kind of style that's not dense, and you can just sort of whip through it.
Like, this is a great book to read in a hammock.
Get out the shovel.
Why everything you know is wrong.
And it's basically him making up for all these dumb consumer reports where he said, when we come back after the break, will toasters kill you?
Really old book by Tucker Carlson.
Probably a great read.
I don't remember.
Okay, this is only for super smart people.
This is Arthur Herman.
He's the guy who wrote How the Scots Invented the Modern World.
That's an easy read, and maybe I was so inclined because I'm Scottish.
But this book is incredibly intelligent, very enlightening, and it's all about the notion that we've always thought we were going to die.
We've always said this is it, global warming.
Like he goes back 500 years ago, and there are naysayers saying the end is nigh and this is the last generation.
And it's just funny to read about generation after generation talking about the idea of decline and how we blew it.
And, you know, I can't tell you when I go to these conservative conferences how many old people say, boy, I'm glad I'm on the last nine.
Or people tell me, boy, I'm glad I didn't have kids.
I'd hate to have kids in this day and age.
We've always been saying that.
World on fire.
This is Amy Chua.
Remember the tiger mom who said you got to be rough with your kids?
How exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability.
And like Buchanan, she says, yeah, I don't know why we're bringing democracy to Iraq and all these countries.
She goes, they don't want it.
They have different values than us.
Stop helping the world.
They're not ready for our help.
And it reminds me of porn star Mercedes Carrera, who said to me, the problem with all this exporting democracy and infrastructure is a lot of these people aren't ready for it.
A lot of these people aren't good enough to have roads and doctors and medicine.
They end up just breeding more than they're Meant to.
That's why she says India is screwed because we bought them infrastructure too early.
Now, I'm not saying that.
She's saying that.
What else do we got here?
Oh, my knees.
I had to change seating there.
This guy's a brilliant author, Joe Carducci, but you've really got to kind of be deep into music.
He talks about SST and Black Flag and all these punk bands.
If you're really into 80s hardcore, you should read.
He's sort of like the Mark Stein of ancient hardcore, but that's probably not your bag.
Here's an incredible book sort of stuck in the corner here, Plunder by Stephen Greenhutt.
And this guy, how public employee unions are raiding treasuries, controlling our lives, and bankrupting the nation.
And it's just such a great argument, not just against big government, but about government in general.
And he talks about fire departments and how 75% of them in the country are volunteer, but the ones who aren't are just getting paid too much.
Sorry, whether, you know, we remember 9-11, thank you very much, but we don't have that money in the coffers.
And he talks about that idea, you know, I love cops, but he talks about how cops say, yeah, we do get big pensions, but we never live long enough to see them.
No, that's not true.
Most cops, after they retire, live long and happy lives, and it's lives we can't afford to pay for anymore.
Sorry, cops.
Sorry, public employee unions.
And this goes back to that Peter Brimlow book, The Worm and the Apple.
More Johnstossel, Bait and Switch.
This is a terrible book by Barbara Ehrenreich about the futile pursuit of the American dream.
Nickel and Dimed by her is really good, as is Global Woman, where she talks about how we import love from other countries.
But the problem with Bait and Switch and the problem with Nickel and Dimed is she skirts over illegal immigration and doesn't talk about how we have tons of illegals in this country.
And that might be another reason why the poor have trouble finding jobs.
Morgan Spurlock, when he was unemployed for 30 days on his show, also ignored illegal immigrations.
Why the Jews, Dennis Prager?
I actually got this book in Israel, and it's The Reason for Anti-Semitism.
Great book, but of course, Alan Dershowitz is the master of all things Jewish, Israel-based.
This is the portable atheist.
My father's an atheist, and he makes me read these books, and they're depressing and just, I don't know, they're so specific about the Bible and how that couldn't have happened there.
From the number one New York Times best-selling author of God is Not Great, a provocative and entertaining guided tour of atheist agnostic thought through the ages.
Just sounds like a bunch of ingrates to me.
Joy of Hate is Good by Greg Gutfeld.
Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels is overrated.
I don't know.
Back before, when people had Microsoft Word and they can just cut out entire paragraphs and reorganize things, sometimes I read these old typewriter books and I go, you need to have hammered out some of your thoughts a little better.
What else do we got here?
Oh, Last Exit to Brooklyn.
This is popular with baby boomers.
It's just really a writer being floral and indulging himself with all these different voices.
Don't get that book.
Dangerous by Milo.
Now, I'm on the same page with Milo on pretty much everything.
So I'm just reading this book going, yeah, I know.
Yeah, I know.
I feel like this book would be better for a young person who wasn't completely red-pilled.
This would be a good gift for your brother who's just sort of teetering on the edge.
But I stopped reading it because it was just like reading my own brain.
I'm also big into graphic novels because I used to be a cartoonist.
And this book is intense.
It's Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, Prostitution and Religious Obedience in the Bible by Chester Brown.
Now, Chester Brown is a huge fan of prostitution.
He's one of these guys that calls it sex workers.
And this book meticulously documents instances of prostitution and sex work in the Bible.
Now, if you're very religious, you'll probably be offended by it, but I found it fascinating.
Another brilliant graphic novelist is Guy DeLille.
And he has this book, Jerusalem, Chronicles from the Holy City.
Now, his wife is one of these Doctors Without Borders types, so it's very biased to anti-Israel when you read it.
All his stuff is anti-American, but that's a very subtle thing you can get over quickly.
And it's just fascinating going into these countries and seeing someone document them so meticulously.
Especially, he has a book called Pyongyang about North Korea.
And you think, they don't allow anyone to take pictures in there or film in there, but a cartoonist is a human video camera.
So he gets all kinds of good stuff there.
God, this is murder on my knees.
This book is a trip.
Blood Secrets, The True Story of Demon Worship and Ceremonial Murder by Isaiah Oke.
He was a Juju high priest, and he spills all the beans on the weird stuff they do in rituals, from like abandoning someone in the desert with snakes everywhere so they can become magic to stripping the skin off people in ritual ceremonies.
Really dark, horrific, crazy stuff.
And the craziest part of this book is how common, look at him, how common juju is.
Even Christians and stuff worship this voodoo crap.
David Cross, I drink for a reason.
It's just a series of funny essays that are just like hearing him do stand-up.
It's not like there's a long plot here or anything.
It's just like brain droppings.
And that's what's great for the holidays, too.
And that's why I said earlier that you don't need to read a book from beginning to end.
Like these are always fun to have around.
Great toilet book.
Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope.
And it's just a collection of his columns of straight dope.
This is a perfect holiday book.
Another great holiday book collection is Matt Labash, Fly Fishing with Darth Vader.
He's a great writer, and this is just a collection of some of his better columns.
Here's a book.
This is sort of like A Brief History of Time in that it's one of the most purchased and not read books in the history of books.
Has anyone really read this?
I mean, you start, it's way too hard.
When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil, apparently we're all going to become as one soon, thanks to technology, but I'm definitely not going to be reading that book anytime soon.
Black, Rednecks, and White Liberals, classic by Thomas Sowell.
I highly recommend this book.
This is where he basically blames me for the way black people behave right now.
You can tell I've only been to page 63, but of those pages, I've enjoyed it thoroughly.
Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo, another fun, silly book.
Of course, you realize what happens at the very beginning because the protagonist is dead on the front page.
But it is fascinating hearing about him going to jail where he designed the prison himself, and he had giraffes and lions running around like a big safari.
And he really was not in prison by any means.
This book rules the story of Motley Crewe.
It's called The Dirt, Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band.
And it's sort of like that punk book, Please Kill Me, where they just transcribe things into a tape.
You know, I met Tommy Lee after he did this, and he said, every time I sort of felt wary of telling the whole story, I would remember your Do's and Don'ts book and how no holds barred it was, and then I would tell the whole story.
So I'm part of the reason that's such an amazing book.
Oh, look, here's the slouching towards Bethlehem I was telling you about that inspired that Robert Brock book.
More atheism here with God No by Penn Gillette.
I didn't read this.
David Foster Wallace is another one I've never read.
He's a really great artist with a great writer with a good reputation, but just too dense and hard.
And look how thick this is.
I'm a girl, basically.
I like fun, silly books that read like magazine articles.
What else do we got here?
Sarah Vowell, she's too quirky.
Jim Norton, he's incredibly funny.
I hate your guts.
I haven't read this book, but I bet it's great.
There's Alien Nation.
That's the book I was talking about that Peter Brimlow did about immigration.
This was a weird book we all had to read as young anarchist punks.
Agents of Repression, The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, Ward Churchill and Jim Vanderwaal.
Ward Churchill is the guy who said 9-11 was the chickens coming home to roost.
But this book is incredible.
And the FBI did do horrible things to the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement.
So if you want a little taste of lefty anarchism, I would definitely check out Agents of Repression.
Michelle Malkin, Unhinged, one of the, I think that's the first thing I ever read from her.
And again, People magazine style, super fun to read.
This is a great graphic novel about Jeffrey Dahmer written by Derf Backderf.
Now, again, you might think it's juvenile to read comic books, but if you ever tried to make them, you'd appreciate the fact that this artist does eight drawings per page, and it only takes you about eight seconds to read them.
I hear they're making this into a movie growing up next to Jeffrey Dahmer.
This book rules hitmen, Frederick Dannon, and it's all about how in the 80s they would buy hit songs.
They would just go to DJs and they'd give them free cocaine and tons of money and say, can you please make this song a hit?
And they did.
And that all got shut down.
So that's all about the payola days of the pop charts.
And you listen to pop music in the 80s, and it's so terrible that it is evident the whole thing was corrupt.
Dad is Fat is a wonderful book by Jim Gaffigan.
Also a very fun read.
This is a great hammock book.
Is my head being cropped on the top of this shot?
I think you should adjust the camera there, Dave.
This book also rules.
Be my baby.
Ronnie Specter with Vince Waldron.
So it's just Ronnie Specter talking to Vince Waldron.
Ronnie, by the way, was a hot kind of a Puerto Rican black chick who was seduced and ended up marrying, what's his name?
Phil Linet?
No, that's the guy from Finn Leslie.
Phil Spector.
Phil Specter, the guy who came with the Wall of Sound that the Beatles used and all those girl groups used.
He was a complete lunatic.
I think he murdered someone recently and was in prison.
I'm not sure where he is right now.
But his stories of his life with Ronnie Specter is amazing.
Living with a Madman, a millionaire.
This is a great book, War Before Civilization, The Myth of the Peaceful Savage.
And this is an anthropologist talking about Indians and how when we got here there was mass graves and all kinds of stuff.
Fascinating look at, an unPC look at civilization before we came here.
Coloring the News.
This is a brilliant book by Bill McGowan, How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism.
And this won an award.
It won the Author Rouse Award for Press Criticism.
What he did here is he just went through thousands and thousands of newspaper articles.
Mostly the New York Times gets attacked in this and talks about liberal bias in the media and gives you really concrete examples of how bad it is.
This book, I used to buy this book for liberals all the time.
They never read it, of course.
But I think it's a really good primer.
It's sort of like that book Dangerous.
It might not be good for those of us who already understand fake news, but for those of you on the edge, that's a brilliant book to get.
This book also rules Edward Klein, the amateur, Barack Obama in the White House.
And it just talks about how incompetent he is and how he didn't deserve to be there.
And I know you might not think that matters.
Oh, look at this.
I never noticed that before.
On the back, there's a write-up.
The amateur is the best book I've read on how Barack Obama is wrecking our country.
I urge everyone who cares about America to read Edward Klein's eye-opening book.
You know who said that?
Donald J. Trump about 10 years ago.
Wow.
And if you don't think Obama is relevant today, you're wrong.
We just discovered that he was letting Hezbollah get away with dealing billions of dollars in cocaine and funding terrorism all over the world, killing untold millions of people just so he could facilitate this stupid Iran deal, which I never even understood why we want them to have nuclear power so bad.
All right, I think that's about it for this.
Oh, this book is terrible.
This is Paved with Good Intentions.
It's written by a white nationalist.
Never read anything by racists.
This book, actually, I'm just going to put in the fire because I burn books that I disagree with.
Okay, I think we should move up to another bookshelf.
This is my home office.
Look, I got, can you see this?
I got pictures of my little babies here.
My three kids when they were being weighed.
How much was this guy?
Nine pounds?
And then there's Duncan.
You can kind of see with little babies.
You can see the face that's there.
Like, I can tell that's Johnny.
Everyone weighs nine pounds.
Those are big babies.
I don't know if you have a vagina, but getting something that's nine pounds out of it is not easy.
Fortunately, my wife has had a lot of practice because I'm incredibly well endowed.
So I'm looking through my books here.
Trump, The Art of the Deal.
Never read it.
Here it's really good.
This one's a trip.
Whoops.
Woman Rebel, The Margaret Sanger Story.
Now, this is by Peter Bagg, one of my favorite cartoonists, and he actually likes Margaret Sanger, the woman who started Planned Parenthood.
I guess he's pro-choice.
And it's interesting hearing the other side's perspective on her.
They really downplay all the racist stuff and say that that's been exaggerated.
And, you know, she said one thing at a Klan rally and it's become her personality.
I don't know.
I like seeing the other side.
Speaking of the other side, obviously can't say enough about Ann Coulter.
One really infuriating thing about her that everyone says to me is, well, how much of what she says is for shock value?
And how much of it does she actually believe?
And I go, what sentence from what book are you talking about?
They've never read a page of her books.
And one thing that I was surprised when I started reading her is how funny they all are.
They're really amusing.
And again, this whole episode is about fun holiday books.
I'm not going to, I'll tell you when I'm dealing with the heavy one, like Mark Stein.
Mark Stein is too good of a writer.
I don't enjoy him.
Unless I'm on vacation and I've had a big breakfast and I'm not hungover and I have a pen in my hand and can write notes on the pages, which I always do in his books, I get overwhelmed.
It's too good.
It's so dense and rich that one sentence will haunt me for days, like when he said, the Empire State Building and the Capitol Building, no, sorry, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building were both built during the Great Depression under budget and within a year and a half.
And I just thought, then you look at that stupid Freedom Tower, which to me looks like a giant shrine to 9-11.
And I think, how over budget and past deadline was that monstrosity, that giant, stupid handkerchief.
Anyway, so I've put these, let's just reverse the orders here.
I have all her books, but my parents are so cheap that they'll often steal them.
They rob from me.
Every time they're here, I'll see my books slowly vanish because they go, he can just get another one.
He's already read it.
Yeah, but I collect them, Mom.
So this is one of her first treason, Liberal Treachery from the Cold War on Terrorism.
And she just talks about, you know what's great about this book?
She talks about McCarthyism and the vilification we had of these Hollywood liberals.
They were communists.
And communism was a major problem, is a major problem in the world.
So it's good that McCarthyism exists.
This whole fake Nazi hunting they do now, those are witch hunts.
The Nazis aren't a thing.
The communists were a thing.
And the reason I put these in order, too, is that Anne's books should be read in order.
I mean, if you need just a fun one like Adios America is a good one to start with or in Trump We Trust, but if you really want to get involved, then I would lay them all out and go chronologically.
So anyway, Slanders After That, and it's all the lies that the left says about the right.
So the first book, it's not her first book, I don't think, but the first book I'm listing here talks about how we were right to vilify the communists and the left.
And then the second one is how the left is wrong to vilify us.
And then these two are, oh, sorry, then there's guilty, liberal victims and their assault on America.
And these all seem prophetic at this point now, because all these hate crime hoaxes we're having this year shows that victim culture, she essentially predicted victim culture.
And then we get into Demonic.
This is a very Buchanan-esque book that talks about the anti-Christian, the sheer blasphemy of the left and how it isn't just bad, it is evil.
And I think this was written a year after Mugged, Racial Demagoguery from the 70s to Obama.
And the title is obviously a reference to black crime and how we're all taught to ignore it.
Something that's very serious in Britain now with the Muslim crime they're too scared to report on.
This book, she churned out in no time at all.
I got a few copies of that.
And it's hilarious and funny and a wild ride.
Anyway, Ann Coulter, very underrated author from anyone from the left.
Oh yeah, if Democrats had any brains, they'd be Republicans is a good one too.
This book sucks so much crap.
Bill Weiss.
It's a man who went to hell.
And he almost died and he went there and he described it.
And he wrote a book about it.
This isn't even the book he wrote.
This is another book about a book he wrote about when he went to hell.
Sorry, Bill, you didn't go to hell.
Go to hell.
Obviously, this book changed my life.
Greatest book ever.
We read from it every Proud Boys Meetup, The Death of the West, How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Apparel Our Country and Civilization.
This book changed my life.
And Patrick J. Buchanan basically says, you know what?
If you're an atheist, be an atheist, but you have to at least revere Christianity.
It's the very foundation of the Western world.
And he says, one of my favorite lines is this, he goes, we didn't start slavery, we ended it.
Unlearning Liberty, Campus Censorship, and the End of American Debate.
This is Greg Lukianoff.
He runs a free speech center that fights for free speech all over America.
I've met him once, kind of a lefty guy, but he's on the front lines of fighting for free speech in America.
This is a fun book.
Free Radicals, the best-selling author of 13 Things of Biblical Make Sense, and Michael Brooks, The Secret Anarchy of Science.
And he basically talks about how science is punk rock.
I think this is the book, too, that talks about how many scientists credit LSD with their success.
And I really believe that.
I had a big fight with my dad recently about atheism.
And I said, I think the problem is you never did acid.
Because acid takes you to a place in your brain that it just stretches it.
And you're capable of thinking of weirder things.
It also makes you better at curing hiccups.
When you get the hiccups and you've done acid, you can just go, I do not want these anymore.
And your hiccups go away.
You'll notice, by the way, I only read nonfiction.
Fiction is for homosexuals and women.
The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks.
This is an amazing story about this woman.
She's been dead for 60 years, and they took her cells when she was sick.
She was working on some farm that used to be owned by her slavery ancestors, her slave ancestors, and they took some cells, and they were able to recreate them.
It was the first time they could recreate cells.
And they've done that tens of millions of times.
If you put all the cells they've made from her original cells, it would weigh thousands and thousands of pounds.
And they've done, they helped cure cancer with this.
They helped try to fight cancer with this.
They got the polio vaccine from her cells.
They studied the ramifications of nuclear weapons on her cells.
Amazing book.
What else do we got here?
I love Billie Idol, so this is a fascinating book.
And it's a great story about a British entrepreneur coming to New York and maintaining a career in pop culture, but you probably wouldn't like that.
John Lydon, he's just basically written the same book twice.
It's just his life.
He has another book called No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.
Same book.
But he's a good writer and it's fun.
I prefer No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.
Here's a conclusive history of punk I really don't recommend.
It includes, remember I was talking about Keith Richards' life?
This is everything.
This is Malcolm McLaren's grandmother's home.
He's the guy who started the sex pistols.
You don't need to read that crap.
Ezra Levant is a great writer.
The enemy within terror, lies, and the whitewashing of Omar Kader.
That was this terrorist in Afghanistan, I believe, who murdered the medics that were trying to save him, shot people after trying to blow them up.
We put him in Abu Ghira, and when he got out, Pierre Trudeau felt so bad, the Prime Minister of Canada, they gave him $10.5 million to apologize to a terrorist who was, by the way, air helicoptered to safety and operated on by fancy German doctors, while the medics that he shot at were just treated locally and lost his eye.
Disgusting.
Hillary's America, Dinesh D'Souza is a great writer.
Very conclusive.
What else do we have here?
This is a really stupid book that's a lot of fun.
Over the Edge, Death in Grand Canyon.
It just documents everyone who died in the Grand Canyon.
And there hasn't been that many.
There's been like one a month, basically.
I got a lot of fun coffee table books, too.
This is a great one, The New Way Things Work.
You know, I think that we need to discipline ourselves to read because we're so addicted to our phones.
And coffee table books, stupid, silly little books, it's a great way to sort of train your brain to be able to sit with a thing that has paper on it.
You know, baby steps.
It's like going on a diet reading.
It takes some discipline.
I've mentioned this book before, I'm sure, Glenn Beck, Miracles and Massacres.
It's my favorite Beck book.
And it's true in Untold Stories of the Making of America.
It's not political.
They just talk about, oh, you like Paul Revere.
What about this guy that went and stopped George Washington getting assassinated?
And he talks about the Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee.
And I've mentioned this a million times, but my favorite part of the book is his conclusion, which is, every time man fails, it's because he entrusted his liberty to someone else.
And when people are independent, sovereign human citizens, they're all the better for it.
I believe that's a message that God has sort of planted in our DNA.
When you let someone else play God, as in communism, you suffer.
This book is very important.
It's kind of the, it sums up the reason for my show and what I'm trying to do here.
What to expect when no one's expecting America's coming demographic disaster.
And, you know, this is why every time I see young people, I go, what's going on?
Did you put a ring on it yet?
When are you guys getting married?
You got a breed.
I text Lauren Southern and Faith Goldie all the time.
I just text the word, breed.
We need more babies from families.
We need more Western families.
All right, what do I got over here?
Remember, I was talking about my podcast on how to make money in TV?
Here's a book I had to read because we were going to pitch a show about the art world.
Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton.
The art world is fascinating.
The kind of crimes that go on and the amount of bullshit that is involved with it.
Like they'll take someone like, say, Richard Prince, and a bunch of guys will start bidding on his paintings.
And they'll all of a sudden make him famous just because everyone's bidding on it.
They create a market.
It's like Bitcoin in a way.
And then he gets up.
He becomes valuable.
They buy all his stuff.
They sell it for a massive markup because, sorry, they've already bought his stuff.
You buy an okay artist like Richard Prince, then you start bidding like crazy on his paintings, make him very valuable.
Then you sell all your old stock, and then you sort of just dump him, and all of a sudden his stock crashes and he's back to zero again.
They do that all the time.
So many bizarre crimes.
I think I talked about this earlier, Nickel and Dined by Barbara Ehrenreich.
Great book.
She becomes working class.
She just dumps herself in the middle of nowhere.
I actually did a TV show based on it called America on Zero Dollars a Day.
She neglects to mention illegal aliens.
So that's a major flaw with that book.
Classic lefties.
A.J. Jacobs is a big A.J. Jacobs fan.
He's quite chuffed with himself.
But he noticed that he's very smart.
So he read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica from A to Z. The know-it-all, one man's humble quest to become the smartest person in the world.
If you can get over how smug he is as a liberal, it's a really good book, and he's a great writer.
Speaking of smug liberals, Aziz Ansari, Modern Romance.
This is a wonderful book about dating in the 21st century.
His politics are brutal, but they don't permeate this book, so you might get over it.
Look at this.
I have shaving cream everywhere because the kids make slime out of it.
What do we got here?
Oh, yeah.
Growing up Mafia by Frank DeMatteo.
This is about a guy in South Brooklyn who grew up what's called Red Hook Now, and it's not the best written book in the world because it's by a guy who was an old wise guy.
You know, he was surrounded by wise guys his whole life.
But it is an amazing book.
And you know what's fun about this book is you're reading about a place where the mob ruled, and you're reading about 1940s, 50s New York, and you go, I think that was the greatest childhood of all time.
Even though you'd see the dead body, just like the streets full of kids with no curfew, well, they had curfews, but no rules.
And if someone saw a kid hitting another kid, the mom would get involved and slap him around.
I mean, I honestly believe if you could go from the beginning of time to now, the greatest sense of community America ever had was 1950s Italian New York.
Maybe that's why the movies were so obsessed with Greece and all this Saturday Night Fever and everything.
This is a must-have for parents.
Lenore Skinese, Free Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children Without Going Nuts with Worry.
Now, she's the one who let her kid find his way home from Manhattan back to Brooklyn or vice versa using the trains when he was eight years old.
And she got in a lot of crap for it.
She was called the worst mom in America.
But she has all these revolutionary ideas.
Like, it's illegal, I believe, for an eight-year-old and a four-year-old to walk back alone from the park.
And she goes, do it.
Let's get a rest.
They can't arrest us all.
And she has, lead the kids at the park day, where we all fight back to get back to this notion of a 70s childhood where you just hop on your bike and go over to Darren Alberti's house.
Whatever happened to that?
These books you got to take with a pinch of salt.
London is Stan by Melanie Phillips.
And I don't mean a pinch of salt that they're not true.
I mean, I'm trying to show you fun books to enjoy the holiday with, and I get real depressed when I hear about the Islamification of Britain.
My dad and I were talking about that the other day.
Here's a book I edited.
Knockout, Emmanuel for Success, My Million Dollar Shift.
He was about $300,000 in debt, and then he was $500,000 or $700,000 up by the time he wrote this book.
And it's just about getting organized, getting in shape, clean your room, stop watching TV, stop masturbating.
It's a self-help book, but it's really good, and no one's ever heard of it.
Mike Kennedy is his name.
What else do we got here?
Oh, here's a great book.
Popular Economics by John Tamney.
He uses what the Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey, and LeBron James can teach you about economics.
So it's just a fun book that teaches economics in a pop culture-y way using pop culture references.
And he says fascinating stuff like the death tax.
We don't need the death tax.
He said, it's good that someone has a huge chunk of money.
Don't tax billionaires.
Let them pass on a fortune to their son.
And he talks about ESPN who couldn't afford their $40,000 a month bill for accruing all the sports in America.
And some rich kid goes, I'll invest in your company through, I don't know, $500 million down.
And it's a bad time to be talking about ESPN because Colin Kaepernick has ruined sports.
But they have moved on to be, I don't know what they are, a $3 billion company.
I forget the exact number of employees, but it's in the thousands.
And it's all because some rich kid didn't have his inheritance taxed to death.
That's the kind of stuff you find in there.
What else do we got here?
Oh, this book is one of my favorites.
So Peter Bagg, my favorite cartoonist, he works for Reason Mag, and he goes and does cartoon reporting, where he goes and he checks out people who grow pot, or he goes to these various political conventions, or he talks to, you know, poor people in the hood and rich people on the Upper East Side, and then he documents it all in cartoon form.
I know cartoons can be a hard sell to people, but if you are interested in libertarian politics and comics at the same time, Everybody is Stupid Except for Me and other astute observations is one of the funnest books I've ever read, one of the best graphic novels ever written.
It's a great bathroom book, too.
All right, what do we got here?
We got my hallway.
Oh, David Sederis is the funniest writer in the world.
There's very few writers where I laugh out loud.
Confederacy of Dunces, which I think I got over there, is another example of that.
But this is laugh out loud, funny.
Every book by David Sedaris is equally good.
If you want to start with one, I would get Me Talk Pretty one Day.
Here's a good graphic novel, Fun Home by Allison Bechdell.
She has another one, Are You My Mother?
This one blows.
Don't get it.
But this is about, it's a graphic novel about growing up in a funeral home, as she did.
Her dad, I think, killed himself.
He was a closeted gay.
And it's a fascinating book.
This, by the way, I spoke about earlier, Guy DeLeo Pyongyang, A Journey in North Korea.
You will not see a more conclusive expose on North Korea than Guy DeLeo's book.
But here is a really fascinating one.
The Lost City, A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.
And it's about this guy in the 20s.
What the hell was his name?
Fawcett.
PJ Fawcett or something?
And this guy went into the Amazon to find the lot.
Like poisonous blow darts that you'll get in the neck.
And people go insane trying to find this lost city.
I won't ruin it and tell you whether they find it or not.
But the amount of doom and gloom and scariness that goes on.
And when you're reading it, you're trying to find, because it talks about all the people after Fawcett who went to find his party and went to try to continue his mission.
And as you're reading it, it's like you're on the journey in the lost city of Z. My grandfather painted that.
He was an artist.
He never really sold his art, though.
He just kept it under his couch.
Weird guy.
This is sort of the kids' area, but I found some of my own books here.
Doug Williams from Cop to Crusader.
This book could be written better, but it is a fascinating story about a guy who was the top polygraph dude, worked in the White House, and then realized these things don't work.
They're a lie.
He just got out of two years in prison for making that truth public.
This is the funniest book ever written.
I think it's the only nonfiction we'll be looking at today, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
It is an absolute masterpiece.
They've been trying to make a movie of it forever.
I think Jack Black was going to be Ignatius P. Riley.
But if you're going to read one piece of nonfiction, it should be the funniest book ever made.
Like this book, The Botany of Desire.
Michael Pollen is a writer.
He actually helped me stop being a vegetarian.
I was a vegetarian for 15 years.
And in this book, the reason I stopped being a vegetarian is he talked about ethical meat and how if you buy like organic beef, it's really better for a cow than even a cow being out in the wild.
It wouldn't even last.
So anyway, that is called An Animal's Place, that article.
You can look it up.
But this book, The Botany of Desire, isn't about that.
It's about, do we control the plants or do the plants control us?
A plant's eye view of the world.
And it's an interesting concept, like with apple trees, for example.
Apples used to taste gross.
They used to taste like potatoes, but we bred them to be sugary, and now they taste like candy.
And the apples, Paulin argues, sort of evolutionarily notice that they get planted more when they're sweet, so they start producing more sugar.
So are we making apples sweeter, or are sweet apples duping us into propagating their species?
I'm not doing his argument justice, but it's a fascinating book to read.
One of the best books ever, The Gangs of New York.
This is what inspired Scorsese to do the movie, and it's got all these funny references.
Bill the Butcher's in here.
We learn all about him and his feud with priest.
That was all true.
The Gangs of New York, half the stuff you see there, even that woman, the cat lady with the weird claw fingers, she existed.
It was a really bizarre time.
I think it was linked to the Industrial Revolution just sort of stirring up the dirt on the entire world and everyone coming to New York because it was too chaotic back where they were from.
Lenny Bruce, the story of his life.
Ladies and gentlemen, Lenny Bruce by Albert Goldman from the Journalism of Lawrence Schiller.
Fascinating book that goes from his young days as a Jewish kid in New York to ODing on, I think it was mescaline or something, some weird drug he OD'd on.
But that's a really interesting story to read about, especially as a free speech advocate and to see what one of the first people to push the boundaries of free speech, what he had to endure.
I mean, he was arrested for his jokes.
This is a great book, Gig.
Americans Talk About Their Jobs, edited by John Bo, Marissa Bo.
I ended up meeting her.
And it's just, this is a good one to start with, too.
It's just a list of hundreds of people describing their job, from a bartender who saw a skinheads fight to a brain surgeon to engineers, inventors, to garbage men.
You just hear what their typical day is like.
It's fascinating.
It's actually kind of an homage to a previous version of the same thing.
This is another amazing book.
Laura Hillenbrand.
I know I say women can't write, but when they write, they can write like hell.
Like I'm reading a book right now called Hero of the Empire about Winston Churchill, and it's done by Abroad.
And she writes sort of like this, like really thorough and engaging.
But this is about Louis Zamparini, the World War II vet.
I hope I didn't mention this in my debut episode.
And it's about him surviving in World War II and discovering God at the very end there.
Something Angelina Jolie left out of the movie for some reason.
Here's a liberal.
John Ronson.
So you've been publicly shamed.
And this is just about going viral, getting shamed, losing your job.
I mean, it really matches up right now with all this controversy with these sex scandals and how their careers are instantly ended.
Fascinating book, not just about being a meme who gets humiliated, but it's also about shame in general.
This book rules Chuck Zito, Street Justice, about him becoming a Hell's Angel.
It's kind of weird seeing his boobies on the cover, isn't it?
About him being a Hell's Angel.
He's still around.
He has his own restaurant, I think, in the Bronx.
But this is a really fun story.
And by the way, it also talks about how him hanging out with his biker buddies and being in a biker gang ultimately ruined his marriage and led to his marriage falling apart, which he feels terrible about.
So there's stuff in there for chicks, too.
This is a very similar book from the other side, Street Warrior, Ralph Friedman, the most decorated detective in all of New York.
He's got a show on Discovery where he goes through all these piece by piece.
There's actually, you could say that it's a movie version of this book because it's the same stories, but acted out.
It's really good.
This book is amazing.
Among the Thugs, Bill Buford.
Bill went undercover with soccer hooligans in England and lived with them, fought with them, drank with them, fell in love with them.
You know, not in a gay way.
No homo.
And that's a great look inside the violent street culture of England.
This book is also a total stunner.
The joke's over.
Ralph Steadman.
Now, Ralph Steadman, obviously, he did the cover.
It's a portrait of Hunter S. Thompson.
And this is the guy who did all the illustrations for Hunter Thompson's articles.
And it's about his life with Hunter, including Hunter's suicide.
And he can write really, really well.
It's really compelling going back over these stories.
He's almost as good as Hunter Thompson.
So I recommend this book to almost everyone I meet.
I've bought it a few times over.
It's a really, really fun read.
Speaking of fun reads, James O'Keefe has a new book coming out called American Pravda.
This is his previous book, Breakthrough.
And I think my write-up is on the front of the new print.
But it is a roller coaster ride about all the times he got arrested.
It starts with him in prison.
It's not just this sort of pedantic trope talking about the history of this controversy, and I've got a hidden camera here.
It's about getting the hidden cameras there and getting arrested and getting thrown in jail and chasing this guy and running from that guy.
It's a really wild ride.
This book is a history of punk.
If you haven't read this yet, I don't know what the hell is the matter with you.
If you want to read it, don't read it in public, okay?
Don't be seen reading this on the train.
It's like being seen reading Catcher in the Rye or Moby Dick or something.
This is a staple you should have already read.
And this is another great book, Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee.
You have to be really into free speech to enjoy this.
It's by Nate Hentoff, Nat Hentoff, sorry.
And how the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other.
This book, you have to really be into free speech.
It's really just a compendium of the major court cases, the major trials involving free speech throughout the years.
And what's interesting about it is you learn that when free speech cases make it to the Supreme Court, the court tends to err on the side of the First Amendment.
It's when they don't that people get pilloried because we have these kangaroo courts of social media now where we get people fired for saying something or for thinking something like Clivin Bundy was vilified for wondering something.
Larry Summers at Harvard was fired for posing a question.
So the government is actually better than the mob when it comes to free speech.
And that leaves one last book.
Hold on.
Last and least is this book, Death of Kool.
That's my book.
I wrote this book.
And it's disgusting.
It's mostly sex stories, lots of violence, lots of drugs.
It's about the party years.
At the end, I guess I say, oh, those years were fun, but marriage is important.
Having a family is what really matters.
Yeah, why did you devote two pages to that?
And the other 260 are all about partying.
This book is for liberals.
It's not what a conservative should be reading.
Don't get it.
But get all those other books and enjoy your Christmas vacation.
I think it's very important that we enjoy our families on this trip, but it's also a good time to sit back, relax, and enjoy a good book.