LRH-recommended books

[Little Bear Victor]

I don't know quite where this idea came to mind, but there are a whole lot of books that LRH recommended for staff to read for various purposes and I thought it might be worthwhile (or worthless) to list them all somewhere.

The ones I can think off the top of my head are (There are tons more):

OSA Legal/PR use:

The Art or War -- Sun Tzu
On War -- Carl von Clausewitz
Effective Public Relations -- (Don't recall original author. LRH had made notes in his copy so a special edition with LRH notes on it was made of this for Church staff use)

Marketing, Registrars:

Big League Sales Closing Techniques -- Les Danes

Cine:

The Five C's of Cinematography -- Joseph V. Mascelli
New York Institute of Photography Course
Landscape Architecture -- John Ormsbee Simonds (This is where the "mood lines" in the Art book come from)

[Oops -- looks like I posted this in the wrong section. Emma, help!]

[Rene Descartes]

I apologize but I have to say that I am quite biased against LRH and if he recommended a book I probably would not even borrow it let alone read it. And if he said not to read a book I would probably jump on it. The newspaper for one thing I would gladly read and he expounded on the worthlessness of the Merchants of Chaos.

However I do read LRH, not so much because I love his tech - I don't. However reading it opens my eyes to better "cognitions" than I could possibly have if I were to just accept everything he writes as coming from SOURCE.

I did love the book(s) Mission Earth, a most spectacular dekology. Battlefield Earth was fine up through the drone that JBT was on, after that it fizzled out.

One of the most racuous phrases I think that LRH ever wrote is - It is a high crime to publicly depart Scientology.

I feel deeply sorry for anyone who places high importance in that phrase.

Rd00

[Thalkirst]

LBV,

Effective Public Relations was written by Scott M. Cutlip and Allen H. Center.

My additions:

PR:
Ries - Geltzer: Positioning in PR (reissued as an HCO PL)

Marketing, Registrars:
Les Dane: Strike-it-rich Sales Prospecting
Ries - Trout: The Positioning Era (reissued as an HCO PL)

Recommended by current management:

Sergio Zyman: The End of Marketing As We Know It - was part of a special Dissem hatting checksheet in 2005.

Jerold Panas: Asking: A 59-Minute Guide to Everything Board Members, Volunteers, and Staff Must Know to Secure the Gift - this was part of hatting for Ideal Org fundraising terminals. An excellent book, by the way.

[MarkWI]

Alfred Korzybski - Writings on General Semantics


http://www.nysgs.org/images/korzybski.jpg


"It is all very well to say one equals one, hut till ye ask, 'One what?' It's very nice to have an...have an abstract datum, 'One', and this abstract datum is a symbol that will represent another 'One', and that is the symbol which represents but...let's say one what? And we say one apple. And if we say one apple equals one apple - oh no. One apple does not even equal itself. I give you Korzybski on all of that. He's done good work on that, and we needn't labor it any further."
LRH, 1952, PDC 20 - Definition of Logic

[Emma]

Adele Davis for all things children & nutrition.

[Veda]

Alfred Korzybski - Writings on General Semantics


http://www.nysgs.org/images/korzybski.jpg

From L. Ron Hubbard's 'Data Series 1', 26 April 1970:

"As Alfred Korzybski studied under psychiatry and amongst the insane (his mentor was William Alanson White at Saint Elizabeth Insane Asylum in Wash. D.C.) one can regard him mainly as the father of confusion."

[Thalkirst]

And let's not forget good old Uncle Elbert....

Elbert Hubbard: A Message to Garcia

A must for a good Ideal Org fundraising team reality adjustment briefing...

[MarkWI]

From L. Ron Hubbard's 'Data Series 1', 26 April 1970:

"As Alfred Korzybski studied under psychiatry and amongst the insane (his mentor was William Alanson White at Saint Elizabeth Insane Asylum in Wash. D.C.) one can regard him mainly as the father of confusion."

That's an U-turn! He was praising that man in 1952. I guess he had to destroy others to be the sole Source of his little kingdom!
:grouch:

[Tanstaafl]

I think there's a list of about 7 books I read of that it is claimed those on Operation Snow White were supposed to read. I seem to recall "Gehlen: Master Spy" (or similar title), Art of War was one. There was another by Stewart Copeland's dad, Miles. A cursory google suggests the list may have gone.

[grundy]

Not all books recommended by LRH are good. But some are.

The Art of War should be read by everyone. And that means I have to find a copy and read it.

[Dulloldfart]

Not all books recommended by LRH are good. But some are.

The Art of War should be read by everyone. And that means I have to find a copy and read it.

Agreed. But be careful which edition you get hold of. There is what Sun Tzu wrote, which is very valuable in my opinion, and there are commentaries about what he wrote, which water down and confuse his statements. The commentaries are vaguely contemporary with him, and so might be considered valid by some. Besides, it makes a thin book fatter.

Caveat emptor.

Paul

[Tanstaafl]

I wonder how Sun Tzu would have handled naughty transcriptionists? :)

My bet is he'd make anything DM could dish out look like a picnic.

[Dulloldfart]

I wonder how Sun Tzu would have handled naughty transcriptionists? :)

My bet is he'd make anything DM could dish out look like a picnic.

Probably like that giggly girl put (briefly) in charge of the harem army.

Paul

[Tanstaafl]

Probably like that giggly girl put (briefly) in charge of the harem army.

Paul

Yeah, that Sun Tzu could be a pain in the neck. :)

[Dulloldfart]

Yeah, that Sun Tzu could be a pain in the neck. :)

But not for long, though.

Paul

[Zinjifar]

But not for long, though.

Paul

Heads on pikes have no necks (practically speaking)

Sun liked the pike methodology :)

Zinj

[Peter Soderqvist]

From L. Ron Hubbard's 'Data Series 1', 26 April 1970:

"As Alfred Korzybski studied under psychiatry and amongst the insane (his mentor was William Alanson White at Saint Elizabeth Insane Asylum in Wash. D.C.) one can regard him mainly as the father of confusion."

Soderqvist1: Paul Tabaka is a scientologist and is from Poland just as Korzybski, and this is a pertinent quote from his writings



* Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (1911-1986).

"Know your general semantics ?"
L. Ron Hubbard, The Evolution of a Science, 1948, (Los Angeles, 1979, page 68).

On Korzybski's Work and on the Data Series
The first article of the Data Series (1970) contains a critique of Korzybski's work. After some "in-depth" research one concludes, there were some things the Ron Hubbard did not know.
Thad has been corruption of the term 'semantics' going on ; and it was quite deliberate, by certain authors. (Do not take my word for any of this, the reader, but pray make sure to examing the human records the 20th century, including but not limited to the items given below).

NOTABLY :

* Carnap, Rudolf, 1891-1970. Title(s) Introduction to semantics ... Cambridge, Mass, Harvard university press, 1946. 263 p. Series Studies in semantics ; v. 1 Bibliography: p. [253]-256.
* "What Is Semantics?" by Anatol Rapoport. An article in American Scientist, January 1952. (See more notes below).

* Schaff, Adam. Introduction to semantics. N. Y., Pergamon, c1962. 395 p. 23 cm. Includes bibliography.

There may also be some more to this story. Has the term 'semantics' been corrupted ; and, if so, who exactly had done something of the sort. The above titles, and a few other articles (please check this out on your own if you de not believe this, the reader), show that there had been an organized action of tampering with the terms.
Korzybski himself had pointed this out and complained against it on numerous occasions ; this can be found in the records of his writings.
Ron Hubbard's statements on the corruption of the term in question could be indeed a classic instance of a "third party" activity, by Ron Hubbard's definitions ; albeit he himself had not spotted this one.

WPT

Note I report strenuous "third party" activities ever since ca. 1945 — which went altogether unnoticed.

The statements by LRH in the early 1950's about the initial research round 1945 on Dianetics (trademark owned by Religious Technology Center) are unequivocal. The jump was from Spencer to Breuer to Korzybski to Dianetics. The apparent trend consisted, among other articles, in :

a) The psycho-analytic approach ; more particularly the early 'cathartic method' by Josef Breuer — see the reports on the case of Bertha Pappenheim ("Anna O.") ; cf. the "Preliminary Communication" by Breuer and Freud (1893).
Korzybski had merely pointed this out (as the way to go so to speak) : "make the 'unconscious' 'conscious'" (Science and Sanity, 1933, page 492 etc ; though K only mentions Freud) ; Hubbard (1945 etc.) had developed the techniques which he called auditing.
b) Non-identification (Korzybski had 'non-identity', primarily on the foundations of mathematics — co-terminous with the foundations of any language). It seems that 'non-identification' can be substituted for 'non-identity' in any non-mathematical usage.
c) The 'engineering attitude' (A.K.), or, the 'engineering approach' (LRH) ; this also ties with the works of many an other engineer (e.g. B. Fuller).
d) The postulational method (see also C. J. Keyser, R. D. Carmichael, etc.) ; see the Axioms of Dianetics and the Axioms of Scientology on one hand and Postulates on the Know to Mystery Scale on the other hand.
e) The non-animalistic concept of Man, pivotal with Korzybski (see Manhood of Humanity, 1921, etc.), also clearly stipulated by Hubbard within his framework.

f) Sanity a question of degree (Korzybski) — and not of 'kind'. Please note that the Tone Scale is "also a scale of sanity".
g) The multi-ordinal terms (for example, 'the book of books', 'the lord or lords', 'the history of history', etc.) ; not necessarily just quibbles, were systematically approached by Korzybski. I have never seen Hubbard mention the 'multi-ordinal' terms but confer 'the awareness of awareness unit', the 'knowing how to know', etc.
h) Non-elementalism (Korzybski) — or, no artificial verbal splitting. Confer "Mind and body." . . "Who said they were separate?" (Hubbard, The Evolution of a Science, 1948, Los Angeles, 1979, pages 37-8).
These definitions, albeit technical, can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The problems of elementalism (artificial verbal splitting which has no bases in the facts) have been and are present in practically every issue today. Korzybski had left a good deal of treatment to these ; Hubbard had not used the given labels ('elementalistm' and 'non-elementalism') — at least I have never seen them within his writ — but he had a fundamental understanding of the type of problem and there can be tens (if not hundreds) examples found within his writings, instances of such verbal difficulties mentioned and most often resolved in some fashion.

Comment : to propose that landing Man on the Moon is possible and actually to land one there might be widely remote stages of attainment. Such a compariston may very well apply to some of the propositions by Korzybski (the notable 'make the unconscious conscious' has been a sort of constant within many authors of the psycho-analytic bent).

As the world went forward, the one thing which has changed little during the progress from Korzybski to Hubbard has been the modus operandi. Derived from the physical sciences, the idea of a method has been known during the most of Man's recorded history, the particular developments having been the domain of each individual researcher one sees invariances between them.

On Dianetics and Scientology

The spiritual side has rather to do with Scientology — which was evolved from the earlier study called Dianetics. This earlier work by Hubbard is of more mechanistic character. On the spiritual side, Korzybski was not much of a soulist, usually (S & S) rather far from it (but a few remarks by him in Manhood of Humanity, etc., do align). A statement somewhere on the possible influence of one's "engineering friends" could perhaps elucidate these stories.

Caveat Emptor

Please safeguard very carefully (or try to obtain) any early, including the earliest, editions of the works by L. Ron Hubbard — such as would likely be authentic. Even if you should seem to disagree with the author.

Before you can either reject or accept any such work, the reader, you must make sure that you are evaluating authentic statements by its author — and not some fabrications by some third parties.

(Incidentally, this would apply to any author at all, anyway).

* Thomas Stephen Szasz (b. 1920).

The historic development seems to have been more or less so :
In one of his earliest papers Korzybski credits Whitehead, Russell, Einstein, Keyser. That was followed by :
A. Korzybski, Time-Binding : the General Theory, two papers of ca. 1923 and ca. 1924, followed by :
A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism, its meaning and effect (1927) which contains apparent allusions to A.K.'s formulations. (See also Whitehead's Memorandum on the logical work by Sheffer ; see also any works by Whitehead of the later period.) This was followed by :
The work of Susanne K. Langer, a student of Whitehead. Her "Philosophy in the New Key" credits most of all Whitehead, almost so much so E. Cassirer ; does mention "The Tyranny of Words" by S. Chase. That was followed by :
Pain and Pleasure by Szasz (1957) : “I have been influenced by two different—yet in many ways convergent—approaches. One is psychoanalysis, the other those branches of modern philosophy concerned with symbolism and semantics in particular and empiricism in general. Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key is a representative example of this school of philosophy.?( New York : Basic Books, 1957, p. 11). Mentioned in the text are also Whitehead, Max Black (note connection with Leon Chwistek's semantic esseys), etc.
Such an approximate line of development can be seen :


Whitehead —> Korzybski (1922-4) —> Whitehead (1927) — (S. Chase) —> S. Langer —> T. S. Szasz.

I had once seen some remarks by Dr. Szasz, highly critical of Korzybski, in the main of some psychiatric associations, and some other. This seems due in the main to a "third party" activity (such as reported at the bottom of this page).
The fundamental issue was (and is) the theory of sanity. It seems that in spite of an apparent scission the fundamentals by Korzybski and by Szasz were largely equivalent. 'Sanity' is a matter of degree and not of 'kind' (Korzybski) ; 'insanity' a misconception (Szasz ; "in my own words" — this perhaps can be made more exact).
http://www.geocities.com/paultabaka/korzybski/etc.html

[Peter Soderqvist]

Soderqvist1: L. Ron Hubbard has recommended one book by Clara Thompson, namely; Psychoanalysis; Evolution and Development, in Operational Bulletin 17 No. 2 14 Feb 1956 Processing Results. Then is it possible to establish a link between Clara Thompson and Scientology? Yes an indirect link can be established!


Clara Thompson
Thompson came to Johns Hopkins in 1916, but it was in her second year that she met Lucille Dooley who offered her an introduction to psychoanalytic concepts (Green, 1964). Due to Thompson 's great enthusiasm Dooley invited her to work over the summer at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. It was during her summer at the hospital that she met William Alanson White, Edward Kempf, and Dr. Joseph Thompson all of whom helped her along her path towards becoming a psychoanalyst.
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/thompson.html


The Psychoanalytic Roots of Scientology by Ann-Louise S. Silver, M .D.
At the same time she began psychoanalytic treatment with Dr. Joseph C. Thompson. Her classmates, who had always known her as rather bitterly unhappy and alone, were impressed with the great rapport that she had with her analyst. The two of them were frequently seen dining together or, walking arm in arm, talking animatedly. For Clara, this must have been a precious relief from the burdens of her loneliness and unhappiness." (P. 353)
http://aapdp.org/forum/forum43_1.html#4312

Clara Thompson Wikipedia
Clara Mabel Thompson was born in Providence on October 3, 1893. Thompson studied medicine on the Johns Hopkins University and in her last year she was introduced to psychoanalysis. In the future years she developed as a psychoanalyst working with people like William Alanson White, Adolf Meyer, Harry Stack Sullivan, Joseph Cressman Thompson, and Sandor Ferenczi. In the early 1940's Thompson founded the William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation in New York together with Erich Fromm, Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, David Rioch and Janet Rioch. She worked there until her death on December 20, 1958
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Thompson

Is it all based on one man’s work?
Although Dianetics and Scientology were discovered by L. Ron Hubbard, he wrote: “Acknowledgment is made to fifty thousand years of thinking men without whose speculations and observations the creation and construction of Dianetics would not have been possible. Credit in particular is due to:
“Anaxagoras, Thomas Paine, Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, Socrates, René Descartes, Plato, James Clerk Maxwell, Euclid, Charcot, Lucretius, Herbert Spencer, Roger Bacon, William James, Francis Bacon, Sigmund Freud , Isaac Newton, van Leeuwenhoek, Cmdr. Joseph Thompson (MC) USN, William A. White , Voltaire, Will Durant, Count Alfred Korzybski , and my instructors in atomic and molecular phenomena, mathematics and the humanities at George Washington University and at Princeton.”
http://www.whatisscientology.org/html/Part12/Chp36/pg0636-a.html

The jump is from Spencer to Breuer to Korzybski to Dianetics Research and Discovery, vol.1, p.440-441

[Peter Soderqvist]

Soderqvist1: does Dr Walter Freeman fit Scientologist’s description of psychiatry?

Wikipedia Walter Jackson Freeman II
Freeman performed nearly 3500 lobotomies in 23 states, mostly based on scanty and flimsy evidence for its scientific basis, but more significantly he popularized the lobotomy as a legitimate form of psychosurgery. Freeman embarked on a national campaign in his van which he called his "lobotomobile" to demonstrate the procedure to doctors working at state-run institutions; Freeman would show off by icepicking both of a patient's eyesockets at one time - one with each hand. The “ice pick lobotomy” was, according to Ole Enersen, performed by Freeman “with a recklessness bordering on lunacy, touring the country like a travelling evangelist. In most cases,” Enersen continued, “this procedure was nothing more than a gross and unwarranted mutilation carried out by a self righteous zealot. Freeman's most notorious operation was on the ill-fated Rosemary Kennedy, who was permanently incapacitated by a lobotomy at age 23.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Freeman

Dr Walter Freeman The Lobotomist
Page3, Officials at state mental hospitals and veterans hospitals across the country also found the trade-offs acceptable.
(An exception was William Alanson White , superintendent of Freeman's own St. Elizabeths, who never allowed lobotomies in the hospital during his tenure.) Lobotomy arrived on the scene at a time when these institutions overflowed with patients, many of them servicemen who developed mental illnesses during World War II, with no reliable courses of treatment ahead of them. Mental health practitioners desperately needed new therapies.
http://www.geocities.com/themistyone/freeman01.htm

A Word on Rediscovering of The Human Soul
the “very famous psychiatrist” who reviews Ron’s calculations on human memory capacity was none other than William Alanson White, then superintendent of Washington, DC’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and still celebrated for his outspoken opposition to psychosurgery.
http://www.ronthephilosopher.org/phlspher/page26.htm

[Peter Soderqvist]

THE OCCULT BY COLIN WILSON

Chapter 3 The Poet as Occultist
Page 129; In The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain made the disturbing assertion that God got tired of being in a lonely, empty universe, and created the whole shadow show of life, in which, he is the only real person – the others being robots, made to seem alive. The founder of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard teaches that men are gods who invented the world as a game, into which they descended, and then became victims of their own amnesia, so they became trapped in their game. It is unnecessary to point out that all the great religions hold to the view that the essence of man and the essence of God are one and the same.

A History of Magic
Page 164: we are considering the most important law of human nature. Man is at his best when he has a strong sense of purpose. When my consciousness is doing its proper work – grasping some of the immense complexity of the universe, and calculating how to increase its control and power – its energy flows into the subconscious, and arouses all the forces of the subconscious mind. When conscious purpose fails everything else slowly breaks down.

Page 168: In modern civilisation most people are involved in boring routine jobs that seldom stir the will, and certainly not the imagination. The result is inevitable. We are like four-engine aeroplanes running only on one engine. And our psychic powers are ‘damped’ almost to extinction. Place a man in a completely black and silent room, and within a few days he will go insane, or at least suffer extreme mental strain. Why? For the same reason that that Rhine’s PK results fell off so radically after the first test; the will crashes into collapse when it is blinded, and the collapse is out of all proportion to its cause. A little boredom causes total demoralisation.

Page 170: It might be said that the essential difference between a man of genius and an ‘ordinary man’ is that the man of genius has a greater power to focus steadily upon his values, while the ordinary man is always losing his sight of his aims and objectives, changing from hour to hour, almost minute to minute. A criminal is man whom this process of ‘devaluation’ has slipped further.
Page 171: And this recognition leads to a formulation of central importance: ‘occultism’ is not an attempt to draw aside the veil of the unknown, but simply the veil of banality that we call the present.

Adepts and Initiates
Page 231: true will – the union of conscious and unconscious will, which is the basis of ‘magical’ powers
Page 239: Positive consciousness is a happy, open state of mind. A man in love has a positive consciousness – especially if he has just discovered that the girl returning his feelings. It is a sense of the marvellous interestingness of the world. We still use the word ‘magic’ in this sense – talking about ‘the magic of summer nights’ ‘magic moments’ and so on. This is not misuse of language; that is what real magic is about.

Wikipedia Colin Wilson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wilson

Wikipedia Joseph Banks Rhine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks_Rhine

Soderqvist1: pretty much the Tone-Scale I would say!
Have you ever been on purpose in your life and felt the stops and counter survival intention in you unconscious mind has been converted (read keyed-out) into something, which supports you, in your life, and everything works just like magic?

[Zinjifar]

Love Colin Wilson! He's got some pretty serious non-fiction on the occult, as well as some very good and deep SF fiction. His book 'The Space Vampires' (hokey title is hokey) is very good and was made into the much less good, but still interesting movie 'Lifeforce'.

Zinj

[Div6]

LRH banned his The Mind Parasites (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind_Parasites). I guess it was too close too the "secret" he was going to lay on Mankind.....

[uniquemand]

That's an U-turn! He was praising that man in 1952. I guess he had to destroy others to be the sole Source of his little kingdom!
:grouch:

Korzybski's "Science and Sanity", IMO, reads like Dianetics, to me, except that it is the original, and doesn't contain the hyperbolic claims: in other words, Hubbard ripped him off. http://esgs.free.fr/uk/art/sands.htm (complete text online)

[Lermanet_com]

Hubbard said somewhere that "if you think DIAnetics is hypnosis then you should read George Estabrooks"

of course, I believe he was BLUFFING... because if you do... you will understand some of the techniques Hubbard used to make you a true believer...

Lermanet.com's band of merry volunteers, scanned and ocr's a couple of George Estabrooks' works... They are linked from the main hypnosis page HERE:
http://www.lermanet.com/exit/hypnosis-index.htm

There is another one that is scary reading (about military hypnosis, a novel.. )fiction of course, but George Estabrooks was a consulant to OSI in the 40's. OSI, The Office of Strategic Intelligence is now called CIA and DIA,(Defense Intelligence Agency) and I wish someone would scan and ocr his "fiction" title called "Death in the Mind"...

[Sindy]

In the Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures, he recommends that everyone read The Master Therion by Aleister Crowley which is also known as Magick in Theory and Practice.

[Emma]

In the Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures, he recommends that everyone read The Master Therion by Aleister Crowley which is also known as Magick in Theory and Practice.

He couldn't help but leave hints. I'm sure he thought it was all quite amusing.

[Veda]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oRKvpZ7PjE


'Alice in Wonderland' would qualify as an "LRH recommended book."

Here's a chronology of references to 'Alice':

1952: During the 'PDC' lectures, Hubbard speaks positively (a rarity) of a book that he calls 'The Master Therion'. The alternate title for this text is 'Magick in Theory and Practice'. In one section, Crowley presents a long list of books 'For serious study'. One of these is, 'Alice Through the Looking Glass'. It's described as being "Valuable to those who understand the Qabalah."

1955: The first reference to 'Alice in Wonderland' in Hubbard's writings appears in his ("Russian") 'Textbook on Psycho-Politics', a.k.a. the 'Brainwashing Manual' (which denounces Dianetics multiple times), originally written as a black propaganda vehicle for identifying his critics, including psychologists and psychiatrists, with Russian Communism, and then, later, used by him as a kind of blueprint for his Scientology operation. (And if Scientology is anything, it is a 'psychological-political operation', but I don't believe one initiated by any government.)

Says Hubbard - in the guise of an evil anti-Scientology Russian psychiatrist - "There are those who have foolishly embarked upon some spiritual Alice-in-Wonderland voyage into what they call the 'subconscious' or 'unconscious' mind... There is no strength in such an approach."

Next is a quote from the out-of-print compilation book from the 1970s, 'Dianetics Today', which is taken from a recorded lecture (from the late 1950s), where Hubbard says, "Why 'Alice in Wonderland'? Well, that's just because it is, no further significance."

So Hubbard, as usual, was hiding something.

[Petey C]

He also fell in love with David Ogilvy's book(s) on marketing and branding back in the 1980s when Hubbard magically became a master marketing expert. Actually, Ogilvy's books are pretty good though somewhat dated when seen from the 21st century perspective. His Memoirs of an Advertising Man (still available in some old fashioned libraries) are particularly good.

[This is NOT OK !!!!]

In a written interview with the Rocky Mountain News, LRH said one of his favorite non fiction books was "12 Against the Gods" by Boletho (sp?),

[Commander Birdsong]

in prefacing BE ron listed two or three dozen writers from the golden age of SF and recommended reading and rereading them