What I Just Read

Instructive but uneven book that pairs well with The Fourth Turning Is Here [*] , as both books offer similar paradigms of wheels-within-wheels generational cycles turning inside longer-term civilizational cycles. Readers get a rapid and mostly overwhelming review of world history, as author Peter Turchin gives various examples of how his "meta-ethnic frontier theory" drives the rise ("imperiogenesis") and decline ("imperiopathosis") of empires. We start with a tour of medieval Russia's evolution into a unified state, and then proceed through more and more and more examples from history, each involving explanatory whirlwind tours of massive historical eras. This brings us to a problem with Turchin's attempt to "model" history. First, he has to explain his model, ideally using an interesting example: he does this successfully with medieval Russia. But before you can really prove that your model fits history, you have to discuss all the re...

A famous opera conductor with an awful secret is murdered, poisoned with cyanide, during intermission at the Venice opera. This is the first of the "Commissario Brunetti" series, and it's quite a competent mystery. The author has a knack for revealing aspects of her characters gradually and naturally over the course of the narrative, and readers get a fun mini-course in Italian cultural nuances as they read. It's good enough that you'll want to read the next. Finally, I'll mention one beautiful and mournful scene from this novel that stands out: Chapter 14, where Inspector Brunetti visits a dark, forgotten part of Venice to interview a very old, once-famous opera singer in her home. You can feel the loneliness right through the pages, it's so well done. Notes: * On what it's like living in a city like Venice that's slowly but surely evolving into a sort of outdoor museum for tourists and becoming less and less a place for actual Italians to live.  ...

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...