What I Just Read

Recommended only to readers deeply interested in the French and Indian War. Otherwise an interesting and competent historical fiction best-seller from 1937, which in its day was the second best-selling book behind Gone With the Wind , which came out just the year before. See also the 1940 film with Spencer Tracy starring as Major Rogers, a near-godlike leader of men in the North American bush, but a deeply flawed and narcissistically grandiose failure everywhere else in his life. Note/quotes: * "Never tell people what you really think, if it's at all different from what they think, because it sets 'em against you on general principles." * "He ain't educated at all! He don't even know why Indians cry when they're drunk!" McNott mocking the ivory tower educated Langdon Towne.  * Interesting (or depressing) to see Wikipedia criticize the author for insufficient wokeism: alleging anti-semitism, not anti-racist enough, etc. Depending on your taste yo...

Long on words, short on insight and solutions. This book should have been significantly tightened; it reads like a magazine article puffed out to book length, and readers will save time by finding any online article about this book rather than reading the book itself--you'll capture the key ideas at a lower time cost.  This book was written in the years following 9/11, but it's directly relevant to today's COVID era. Both eras feature the same social control mechanisms, the same fear-mongering, the same authoritarianism. I was disappointed with this book's lack of focus, although here and there it did contain certain nuggets of insight.  The ideas the author scratches at here (and the solutions she never actually gets to) are much more competently explained by professor Mattias Desmet in his various videos on mass formation .  Notes:   * A few pronounced examples of how the author pads the book:  1) the author doesn't arrive at the central metaphor of her book ...

Colorful and readable biography of the famous 14th century Central Asian marauder. In the same style as Lamb's bio of Hannibal: it gives you a really good feel for a romantic and intriguing era not well known to moderns. Notes:  * "Tamerlane" as misnomer: his name is actually Timur, and he was called Timur-i-laing, which means Timur the limper/the one who limps. This was corrupted in English to Tamerlane.  * Timur operated across a tremendous region of the world that is much more accustomed to instability than we are, peopled by cultures who accept death with far more equanimity than modern soy-culture: "It was the hour and the place appointed for Hussayn and no man may escape his fate."  * Tamerlane defeats his rivals and unifies the Tatars in 1369, 140 years after the death of Genghis Khan. His empire rose (and fell) rapidly, at its peak stretching from Turkey all the way to northern India, surrounding much of the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Red Sea.  *...

Readable, enjoyable and useful general history of the 20th Century, but be warned: it's 800 pages.  It is of supreme value to know history well if you wish to understand what's going on right now. Most things run in cycles, and while history rarely repeats, it typically "rhymes" from era to era. Thus you can map events today to analogous events in the past, and often predict with surprising accuracy what's going to happen. I came away from this book with a far better mental matrix for the century. [Warning: the notes here are appallingly long, and the reading list at the bottom of this post is so long I got discouraged halfway through just from formatting the titles. Do not read!] Ch 1: A Relativistic World * The 1919 solar eclipse reveals Mercury to be in a slightly different location than Newtonian physics predicts, supporting Einstein's special theory of relativity. Reconfirmed during the 1922 eclipse, later further supported by the red shift test. Also hea...