What I Just Read

When we study history, we often see clear analogies from one era to another. This book is such an exercise in analogy: it is an analysis of the post-Napoleonic world order used as a specific study tool to grapple with the post-World War I world order. Today's readers can use this book as analogy too, to better understand events in our day. It's excruciatingly obvious that the leadership throughout the entire West is profoundly ignorant of history. And if it's true that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, then those of us who do know our history--and can see various analogies and parallels to the past--may well figure out what's going to happen well before they do. I'll explore a few of these analogies in this essay. One immediately visible example is the various interlocking suzerainty/vassalage arrangements in place in any given geopolitical landscape, and how rapidly they can shift when there's a disruption among the dominant states. ...

A below-average novel, more notable for its various defects than for its story and characters. This novel feels off, it has a wide range of structural and technical flaws, it is poorly unified, the characters are not psychologically believable, and (as we'll see in the next paragraph) the author's own voice lacks credibility as he speaks on the book's core subject. The story does not feel organic, in fact it doesn't really feel much like a story at all. I'll start with the book's most blatant flaw: if you want to write a novel about a surfer, you simply cannot know next to nothing about surfing.  The author makes basic errors, making it painfully obvious that neither he nor his editors has ever surfed. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no ext...