Tuesday, August 25, 2009

A Seavey Bibliography I Never Made

I should have mentioned when I plugged The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging a few months ago that I’m quoted in it as calling “I don’t know” the three most important words in the language.  (And they are, you know.)

But in the interests of full disclosure, here is the list of all the books in which I am cited or at least thanked, per Amazon’s search function (seventeen books in all).

By no means are all the citations positive, I should note.  In the case of the ever so slightly negative-sounding Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy, I am apparently described as part of “the Wise Use group in the United States,” perhaps a specific organization I’ve never heard of or, since it’s from a passage about tobacco, maybe a catch-all term for people who wish taxes and fines taken from tobacco companies were put to health-enhancing uses, which is not exactly my mission either, but whatever.  Maybe it just means I think smokeless tobacco is safer than smoked tobacco, which is a perfect statement of fact (and a very important one, for public health purposes, as we often note at ACSH) but is nonetheless scandalous heresy for a surprising number of ostensibly intelligent public health types.

Without further ado, I give you Todd Seavey:

The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging by The editors of the Huffington Post and Arianna Huffington (Paperback – Dec 2, 2008)

Woodstock: An Encyclopedia of the Music and Art Fair (American History Through Music) by James E. Perone (Hardcover – Jan 30, 2005)

The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex & Sin in New York City by Kat Long (Paperback – Mar 1, 2009)

Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York by L.B. Deyo and David Leibowitz (Paperback – Jul 22, 2003)

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto by Mark R. Levin (Hardcover – Mar 24, 2009)

The I Hate Corporate America Reader: How Big Companies from McDonald’s to Microsoft Are Destroying Our Way of Life (The “I Hate” Series) by Clint Willis and Nate Hardcastle (Paperback – Dec 19, 2004)

What to Do When You Don’t Want to Call the Cops: or A Non-Adversarial Approach to Sexual Harassment (A Cato Institute book) by Joan Taylor (Hardcover – Oct 1, 1999)

Made in America: The Most Dominant Champion in UFC History by Matt Hughes and Michael Malice (Hardcover – Jan 1, 2008)

The End of Food by Paul Roberts (Hardcover – Jun 4, 2008)

Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media… by John Stossel (Hardcover – Jan 20, 2004)

Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement by Brian Doherty (Hardcover – Feb 12, 2007)

Selling the Dream: Why Advertising Is Good Business by John M. Hood (Paperback – Sep 29, 2008)

Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy by William Dinan and David Miller (Paperback – Jun 20, 2007)

Overheard in New York UPDATED: Conversations from the Streets, Stores, and Subways by S. Morgan Friedman and Michael Malice (Paperback – Feb 5, 2008)

Digital Culture: Understanding New Media by Glen Creeber and Royston Martin (Paperback – Dec 1, 2008)

State of the World 2003 by Worldwatch Institute and The Worldwatch Institute (Hardcover – Jan 2003)

Hong Kong at the Handover by Bruce Herschensohn (Textbook Binding – April 26, 2000)

Collect them all.  Let us hope I can at least continue my rate of approximately one book mention per year of my post-college life.

6 comments:

Jake said...

what’s the state of your own book?

Todd Seavey said...

I keep being distracted by smaller-scale but sure-thing projects. It will _probably_ still happen — possibly even taking the form of a proposal within a few months — but I no longer make any promises. For a while, I also feared the zeitgeist kept mutating farther away from the core topics it’d deal with, but it may be mutating back.

Jacob T. Levy said...

“I’m quoted in it as calling “I don’t know” the three most important words in the language. (And they are, you know.)”

No, I don’t.

Jacob T. Levy said...

Ego-searching is fun!

Ali Kokmen said...

I certainly understand–and agree with–the sentiment that says that “I don’t know” are the three important word. But lest we leave the impression that we are making a statement of acquiescence to ignorance, perhaps we could agree that the words “I don’t know” are only important when followed by, for example, the four words “But I’ll find out” or the five “but I want to learn.”

Which is less clean a sound bite, certainly…

Todd Seavey said...

On the contrary, my point is precisely that people rarely accept or even recognize their intellectual limitations and the unlikelihood of acquiring accurate data on certain topics, thus feeling obliged (especially in a democratic era when “everyone’s opinion” ostensibly matters and “ought” to be heard) to grasp at some makeshift rubric or heuristic for coming up with half-assed answers when, more often than not, they ought to remain silent. Thus “I don’t know” period. People find that very difficult to accept — and the anxiety produces groundless religious claims, catchy but false folk wisdom, over-extrapolated statistics, sweeping ethnic generalizations, sweeping anti-racist generalizations, and rules of thumb of no more use than as a nice-sounding rhyme. Stop bullshitting, humanity.