What I Just Read

Excruciatingly detailed biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, a 19th century naturalist who should be a household name.  Everyone knows about Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, yet almost nobody knows that Wallace scooped Darwin. Darwin of course had been working on the idea for years, but it was Wallace who published first. The two men were credited as co-discoverers, in what appears suspiciously like a 19th century version of participation trophies. But if Wallace was first, why is he barely known at all?  Now this question is extremely interesting, and it teaches us that it isn't just modern scientists who exclude and marginalize people for wrongthink and for failing to "support the current thing." Old school 19th century scientists did it too! Nobody knows who Wallace is today  because he didn't tow the line of the fashionable scientific narratives of his day. He was a dissident thinker, and the scientific establishment of the 1800s...

This book attempts to light a fire under a lost and broken generation, and teach that generation to reject all the soul-sucking vices, traps and prisons of modernity. It sends you down countless rabbit holes--Luis de Camoes, Anna Comnena, Anatoly Fomenko, Conradin, Herotodus, Charles Oman, and others--and thus pays intellectual dividends in ways you wouldn't expect.  However, I recommend this book only to readers who can give this author a lot of rope both for  how  he writes and  what  he writes. If you are easily offended or cannot handle ideas with which you disagree... stay away. You'll just break your e-reader. Think of the writing of Nietszche, with all its force, combined with the writing of a still mostly sane Philip K. Dick, both of whom look at the world a lot differently than you and I do. And keep in mind this author tends to write in walls of text, with typos, grammatical errors and, occasionally, with incoherence. One gets the impression that Engli...