The butter battle book
by Dr. Seuss · first published 1984
56% recommend44% neutral
Why HN recommends it
A satirical children's picture book about an arms race and nuclear brinkmanship. It is funny and poignant at once, offering a sharp way to explain escalation and the absurdity of wartime fervor.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Engaged in a long-running battle, the Yooks and the Zooks develop more and more sophisticated weaponry as they attempt to outdo each other.
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…by Joseph Heller - The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman - Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges - 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Pharmakon by Dale Pendell - The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss - Greek Mythology by Edith Hamilton - The Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual by Gary Gygax et al - Introduction to Algorithms by Charles E. Leiserson, Clifford…
on “Ask HN: What books fundamentally changed the way you think about the world?” ↗I think The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss covers this topic pretty well, as well as the one-sentence street book "never bring a knife to a gun fight".
on “Ask HN: Is there a book about how a technological advantage wins wars?” ↗…subscribed to - he had been an active participant in it. http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dswenttowar/ - Writing a funny and poignant children's book about nuclear war is a hell of a challenge. The Butter Battle Book is a masterpiece.
on “Dr. Seuss’ arms race allegory” ↗The Butter Battle Book
on “Ask HN: What are good books/blogs to read for a first time CTO?” ↗…be trolling in an attempt to derail the topic of the book. I like to keep track of functional equivalencies in cases like this. So if for whatever reason someone doesn't want to discuss the fantastic Butter Battle Book, we could just as easily discuss H. Bruce Franklin's non-fiction War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination. He traces weapons dev from Robert Fulton hawking one of the first submarines all…
on “Dr. Seuss’ satirical lesson on nuclear armament and the absurdity of war (2016)” ↗…personally find baseball really stupid and annoying. But I wouldn't refer to people who enjoy baseball as trolls. Dr. Seuss' butter battle is the perfect illustration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butter_Battle_Book
on “How We Built r/Place (2017)” ↗…the future imagined by scifi authors, the USA and the USSR were side-by-side in the conquest of space; and that much of the anti-communist sentiment, and the Cold War itself, was more of the Dr. Seuss "Butter Battle Book" argument over which side of the toast should be buttered, or pointing out specific leaders of the USSR (like Stalin) as being aberrations, rather than an indication of problems with the system of governance.…
on “Meeting Ayn Rand on the Las Vegas Strip” ↗…early book that honestly doesn’t deserve the attention of the later masterful works. I would think the right wing politicians would be more upset about “Horton Hears a Who”, “Yertle the Turtle” and the “Butter Battle Book”.
on “Banned Seuss” ↗Yeah, my wife is 5 years younger than me, and that's the biggest cultural divide. I remember at one point she said, in all serious, "What's an ICBM?" when the topic came up. I found a copy of the Butter Battle Book, and the concept of feeling like you're living one step away from MAD was just foreign to her.
on “I’m an Anti-Braker” ↗