187 Best Books on History
The Image
Daniel J. Boorstin
Discusses news gathering, celebrity, travel, prestige, and the American dreamWe're all just living in a world predicted by Boorstin, McLuhan, Debord, and Ong decades ago, who saw the first break from textual to visual and oral society. The only recent tweak is the acceleration due to ubiquitous networked computing. https://t.co/oHKfoK1COK
The Lessons of History
Will Durant
5 books to build big, worldwide perspective 1. Lessons of History (Durant) 2. Factfulness (Rosling) 3. Ten Global Trends (Bailey & Tupy) 4. How the World Really Works (Smil) 5. Against the Gods (Bernstein) Bonus. The Prize (Yergin) What else?
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
William L. Shirer
Chronicles the Nazi's rise to power, conquest of Europe, and dramatic defeat at the hands of the Allies.@thesamparr The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson is one of my favorite books of all time.
Life in the English Country House
Mark Girouard
Based on the author's Slade lectures given at Oxford University in 1975-76.@KucheraRobert @anammostarac This is the best book about English country houses: https://t.co/MMD5TRwGwR
Rubicon
Tom Holland
Book 23 Lesson: Taboos around the use of power eventually become lines for the ambitious to cross to achieve glory https://t.co/GdRHgBkmsy
The Ones We've Been Waiting For
Charlotte Alter
There are now 26 millennials in congress - a fivefold increase gained in the last midterms. They're governing over Midwestern cities and college towns, sitting on city councils and running for state legislatures. Some of them have been in office for a few years; one of them is running for president. In The Ones We've been Waiting For, TIME correspondent Charlotte Alter defines the class of young leaders who are remaking the nation, and what America will look like when they're in charge.@CharlotteAlter I’ll link it so you don’t have to. 🤝 https://t.co/qaQ5pJWlaL
Imperial San Francisco
Gray Brechin
"A classic of urban history, environmental history, California history, and socially oriented architectural criticism, this work contains scholarship that is thrilling in its comprehensiveness. Never before have the inner dynamics of the regional civilization centered in San Francisco been so comprehensively integrated."--Dr. Kevin Starr, State Librarian of California, author of "Americans and the California Dream" ""Imperial San Francisco "is a great gift of a book, the product of extraordinary research, insight, and hard work that connects a lot of dots and gives me a reinvigorated focus and curiosity [about] what California culture was and what might become of it all."--Gary SnyderOr if you want to know who the names are behind the streets and museums, and how the city went from a hovel of brothels and docks to a real city: https://t.co/tU7vAUYXBE
The Barbary Coast
Herbert Asbury
The history of the Barbary Coast properly begins with the gold rush to California in 1849. If the precious yellow metal hadn't been discovered ... the development of San Francisco's underworld in all likelihood would have been indistinguishable from that of any other large American city. Instead, owing almost entirely to the influx of gold-seekers and the horde of gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians, and other felonious parasites who battened upon them, there arose a unique criminal district that for almost seventy years was the scene of more viciousness and depravity, but which at the same time possessed more glamour, than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent. The Barbary Coast is Herbert Asbury's classic chronicle of the birth of San Francisco—a violent explosion from which the infant city emerged full-grown and raging wild. From all over the world practitioners of every vice stampeded for the blood and money of the gold fields. Gambling dens ran all day including Sundays. From noon to noon houses of prostitution offered girls of every age and race. (In the 1850s, San Francisco was home to only one woman for every thirty men. It was not until 1910 that the sexes achieved anything close to parity in their populations.) This is the story of the banditry, opium bouts, tong wars, and corruption, from the eureka at Sutter's Mill until the last bagnio closed its doors seventy years later.I've always thought the longer history of SF to be more interesting: the Barbary Coast days, the Gold Rush, the mad dash into becoming a Western metropolis. https://t.co/LuYGVppphz
The Lessons of History
Will Durant
Billions of human lifetimes have passed. You have only one. You can try to figure it out all for yourself in your limited time. Or you can gain some leverage from the lessons of history. https://t.co/PgtQiU2Gkt
O Jerusalem!
Larry Collins
The epic drama of 1948, in which the Arabs and the Jews, heirs to generations of bitter conflict in a land sacred to them both, fought each other for the city of Jerusalem and for the hopes of fulfillment it represented to each. Here, for the first time is an account of that struggle which encompasses the full spectrum of its participants.@MonalisaJai One of my favorite books!
O Jerusalem!
Larry Collins
The epic drama of 1948, in which the Arabs and the Jews, heirs to generations of bitter conflict in a land sacred to them both, fought each other for the city of Jerusalem and for the hopes of fulfillment it represented to each. Here, for the first time is an account of that struggle which encompasses the full spectrum of its participants.@tommycollison O Jerusalem was one of my favorite pandemic books!
Generations
Neil Howe
Hailed by national leaders as politically diverse as former Vice President Al Gore and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Generations has been heralded by reviewers as a brilliant, if somewhat unsettling, reassessment of where America is heading. William Strauss and Neil Howe posit the history of America as a succession of generational biographies, beginning in 1584 and encompassing every-one through the children of today. Their bold theory is that each generation belongs to one of four types, and that these types repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern. The vision of Generations allows us to plot a recurring cycle in American history -- a cycle of spiritual awakenings and secular crises -- from the founding colonists through the present day and well into this millenium. Generations is at once a refreshing historical narrative and a thrilling intuitive leap that reorders not only our history books but also our expectations for the twenty-first century.@dereksfoster99 @waitbutwhy @antoniogm this is one of my favorite books
The Image
Daniel J. Boorstin
Discusses news gathering, celebrity, travel, prestige, and the American dreamA 'pseudo-event' is made-for-consumption media event, usually involving celebrities: entities known for their well-known-ness. These now seem natural, but were once odd: life once consisted of real people and events. Boorstin's book is outstanding. https://t.co/dMnZFl1P0F
A History of the Twentieth Century
Martin Gilbert
The world was still reeling from the ravages of the century's first Great War when a dramatic and inexorable chain of events set it afire once again. In the Second World War, forty-six million people would lost their lives, and deep and lasting upheavals would cast the world's social and political life into turmoil for decades to come. Martin Gilbert's three-volume history of the century continues with an enthralling narrative that documents the attempts to preserve human values, to maintain the rule of law, and to uphold the rights and dignity of the individual. Gilbert shows how the conflicts of nations and the aspirations of their rulers served both to threaten humankind through war and civil war, in many regions of the globe, and to create a fairer and more fulfilling life for hundreds, even thousands, of millions of people. For more than four decades, the United States and the Soviet Union -- joint victors in the struggle against Germany and Japan--struggled to establish the primacy of their respective systems, while the specter of nuclear war threatened to become a terrible reality. The world was still reeling from the ravages of the century's first Great War when a dramatic and inexorable chain of events set it afire once again. In the Second World War, forty-six million people would lost their lives, and deep and lasting upheavals would cast the world's social and political life into turmoil for decades to come. Martin Gilbert's three-volume history of the century continues with an enthralling narrative that documents the attempts to preserve human values, to maintain the rule of law, and to uphold the rights and dignity of the individual. Gilbert shows how the conflicts of nations and the aspirations of their rulers served both to threaten humankind through war and civil war, in many regions of the globe, and to create a fairer and more fulfilling life for hundreds, even thousands, of millions of people. For more than four decades, the United States and the Soviet Union--joint victors in the struggle against Germany and Japan--struggled to establish the primacy of their respective systems, while the specter of nuclear war threatened to become a terrible reality.@SuperMugatu https://t.co/nbxLCfhNlo
The 1619 Project
Nikole Hannah-Jones
A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present. In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. This is a book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation’s founding and construction—and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life. Featuring contributions from: Leslie Alexander • Michelle Alexander • Carol Anderson • Joshua Bennett • Reginald Dwayne Betts • Jamelle Bouie • Anthea Butler • Matthew Desmond • Rita Dove • Camille T. Dungy • Cornelius Eady • Eve L. Ewing • Nikky Finney • Vievee Francis • Yaa Gyasi • Forrest Hamer • Terrance Hayes • Kimberly Annece Henderson • Jeneen Interlandi • Honorée Fanonne Jeffers • Barry Jenkins • Tyehimba Jess • Martha S. Jones • Robert Jones, Jr. • A. Van Jordan • Ibram X. Kendi • Eddie Kendricks • Yusef Komunyakaa • Kevin M. Kruse • Kiese Laymon • Trymaine Lee • Jasmine Mans • Terry McMillan • Tiya Miles • Wesley Morris • Khalil Gibran Muhammad • Lynn Nottage • ZZ Packer • Gregory Pardlo • Darryl Pinckney • Claudia Rankine • Jason Reynolds • Dorothy Roberts • Sonia Sanchez • Tim Seibles • Evie Shockley • Clint Smith • Danez Smith • Patricia Smith • Tracy K. Smith • Bryan Stevenson • Nafissa Thompson-Spires • Natasha Trethewey • Linda Villarosa • Jesmyn WardThis week’s reading @The1619Project by @nhannahjones #BlackHistoryMonth https://t.co/GWJ3hOl6nX
The Art of War
Sun Tzu
The Art of War is composed of only about 6,000 Chinese characters, it is considered by many to be the greatest book on strategy and strategic thinking ever written. . 350F PROFESSIONAL READING LIST.Don’t attack an opponent head on unless you have an overwhelming force. Your goal should be to maneuver the situation such that you’ve won before the battle begins. Not a business book but I’ve included it since the business as war metaphor is popular. https://t.co/OfJA7oXqAw
The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy
Lara Freidenfelds
When a couple plans for a child today, every moment seems precious and unique. Home pregnancy tests promise good news just days after conception, and prospective parents can track the progress of their pregnancy day by day with apps that deliver a stream of embryonic portraits. On-line due date calculators trigger a direct-marketing barrage of baby-name lists and diaper coupons. Ultrasounds as early as eight weeks offer a first photo for the baby book. Yet, all too often, even the best-strategized childbearing plans go awry. About twenty percent of confirmed pregnancies miscarry, mostly in the first months of gestation. Statistically, early pregnancy losses are a normal part of childbearing for healthy women. Drawing on sources ranging from advice books and corporate marketing plans to diary entries and blog posts, Lara Freidenfelds offers a deep perspective on how this common and natural phenomenon has been experienced. As she shows, historically, miscarriages were generally taken in stride so long as a woman eventually had the children she desired. This has changed in recent decades, and an early pregnancy loss is often heartbreaking and can be as devastating to couples as losing a child. Freidenfelds traces how innovations in scientific medicine, consumer culture, cultural attitudes toward women and families, and fundamental convictions about human agency have reshaped the childbearing landscape. While the benefits of an increased emphasis on parental affection, careful pregnancy planning, attentive medical care, and specialized baby gear are real, they have also created unrealistic and potentially damaging expectations about a couple's ability to control reproduction and achieve perfect experiences. The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy provides a reassuring perspective on early pregnancy loss and suggests ways for miscarriage to more effectively be acknowledged by women, their families, their healthcare providers, and the maternity care industry.@isadwatson The book itself is fantastic! The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy.
Red Star Over the Pacific, Second Edition
Toshi Yoshihara
"This is an assessment of how the rise of Chinese seapower will affect U.S. maritimes strategy in Asia."--Required reading in our household. https://t.co/ljzYvXMzo2
Spies of No Country
Matti Friedman
“Wondrous . . . Compelling . . . Piercing.” —The New York Times Book Review Award-winning writer Matti Friedman’s tale of Israel’s first spies has all the tropes of an espionage novel, including duplicity, betrayal, disguise, clandestine meetings, the bluff, and the double bluff—but it’s all true. Journalist and award-winning author Matti Friedman’s tale of Israel’s first spies reads like an espionage novel--but it’s all true. The four agents at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage operations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel’s existence hanging in the balance, these men went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a newsstand, collecting intelligence and sending messages back to Israel via a radio whose antenna was disguised as a clothesline. Of the dozen spies in the Arab Section at the war’s outbreak, five were caught and executed. But in the end, the Arab Section would emerge as the nucleus of the Mossad, Israel’s vaunted intelligence agency. Spies of No Country is about the slippery identities of these young spies, but it’s also about the complicated identity of Israel, a country that presents itself as Western but in fact has more citizens with Middle Eastern roots and traditions, like the spies of this narrative. Meticulously researched and masterfully told, Spies of No Country is an eye-opening look at the paradoxes of the Middle East.@noahmp Fabulous book. Spies of No Country is similarly good.
Stalin's War
Sean McMeekin
A major new history of the Second World War by a prize-winning historian We remember World War II as a struggle between good and evil, with Hitler propelling events and the Allied powers saving the day. But Hitler's armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit the spoils of war. That role belonged to Joseph Stalin. Hitler's genocidal ambition may have unleashed Armageddon, but as celebrated historian Sean McMeekin shows, the conflicts that emerged were the result of Stalin's maneuverings, orchestrated to unleash a war between capitalist powers in Europe and between Japan and the Anglo-American forces in the Pacific. Meanwhile, the United States and Britain's self-defeating strategy of supporting Stalin and his armies at all costs allowed the Soviets to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism. A groundbreaking reassessment, Stalin's War is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the roots of the current world order.Sean McMeekin's latest tour-de-force makes a strong case that Stalin should be thought of as the main actor in WW2 — not Hitler or the US. https://t.co/tyhSD8jUaz https://t.co/8IQ2cPmGnq
Tomorrow, the World
Stephen Wertheim
A new history explains how and why, as it prepared to enter World War II, the United States decided to lead the postwar world. For most of its history, the United States avoided making political and military commitments that would entangle it in European-style power politics. Then, suddenly, it conceived a new role for itself as the world’s armed superpower—and never looked back. In Tomorrow, the World, Stephen Wertheim traces America’s transformation to the crucible of World War II, especially in the months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. As the Nazis conquered France, the architects of the nation’s new foreign policy came to believe that the United States ought to achieve primacy in international affairs forevermore. Scholars have struggled to explain the decision to pursue global supremacy. Some deny that American elites made a willing choice, casting the United States as a reluctant power that sloughed off “isolationism” only after all potential competitors lay in ruins. Others contend that the United States had always coveted global dominance and realized its ambition at the first opportunity. Both views are wrong. As late as 1940, the small coterie of officials and experts who composed the U.S. foreign policy class either wanted British preeminence in global affairs to continue or hoped that no power would dominate. The war, however, swept away their assumptions, leading them to conclude that the United States should extend its form of law and order across the globe and back it at gunpoint. Wertheim argues that no one favored “isolationism”—a term introduced by advocates of armed supremacy in order to turn their own cause into the definition of a new “internationalism.” We now live, Wertheim warns, in the world that these men created. A sophisticated and impassioned narrative that questions the wisdom of U.S. supremacy, Tomorrow, the World reveals the intellectual path that brought us to today’s global entanglements and endless wars.@JackNaneek You don’t achieve world domination by accident. Nothing inexorable about it. Read this interesting account of the foreign policy hands who (successfully!) turned the US into a global empire. https://t.co/07ToIhIweB
Africa
John Reader
A panoramic, illustrated history of Africa from the dawn of human history to the end of apartheid charts the rise and fall of its civilizations, its complex history of slavery, its struggle with colonialism, and its great diversity. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.@AlexanderELundy Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, The Ocean of Churn and Africa by John Reader are examples of books I've loved.
The Genius of China
Robert Temple
Revised, full-color illustrated edition of the multi-award-winning, international bestseller that charts the unparalleled and astounding achievement of ancient China • Brings to life one hundred Chinese “firsts” in the fields of agriculture, astronomy, engineering, mathematics, medicine, music, technology, and warfare • Based on the definitive work of the world’s most famous Sinologist, Joseph Needham (1900-1995), author of Science and Civilisation in China • Organized by field, invention, and discovery for ease of reference Undisputed masters of invention and discovery for 3,000 years, the ancient Chinese were the first to discover the solar wind and the circulation of the blood and even to isolate sex hormones. From the suspension bridge and the seismograph to deep drilling for natural gas, the iron plough, and the parachute, ancient China’s contributions in the fields of engineering, medicine, technology, mathematics, science, transportation, warfare, and music helped inspire the European agricultural and industrial revolutions. Since its original publication, The Genius of China has won five literary awards in America and been translated into 43 languages. Its Chinese edition, The Spirit of Chinese Invention, was approved by the Chinese Ministry of Education for use in connection with the national secondary curriculum in China. Based on the immense, authoritative scholarship of the late Joseph Needham, the world’s foremost scholar of Chinese science, and including a foreword by him, this revised full-color illustrated edition brings to life the spirit and excitement of the unparalleled achievements of ancient China.@jasoncrawford Depending what aspect of Needham's China you are interested in, I found this one-volume summary by a co-author to be useful. Genius of China https://t.co/AlK1bkf9cu
The Arsenal of Democracy
A. J. Baime
Chronicles Detroit's dramatic transition from an automobile manufacturing center to a highly efficient producer of World War II airplanes, citing the essential role of Edsel Ford's rebellion against his father, Henry Ford. 35,000 first printing.@rallyhudson But also Arsenal of democracy is another book on this
Military Art of People's War
Vo Nguyen Giap
This collection includes the major writings of General Giap, who, on the evidence of his record as well as his theoretical work, has long been recognized as one of the military geniuses of modern times. The book includes writings from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s.This is a great book https://t.co/JspXMM9qje
Doom
Niall Ferguson
"Setting the great crisis of 2020 in broad historical perspective, Niall Ferguson challenges the conventional wisdom that our failure to cope better with disaster was solely a crisis of political leadership, as opposed to a more profound systemic problem. Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of a number of developed countries, including the United States, to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? The facile answer is to blame poor leadership. While populist leaders have certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, more profound problems have been exposed by COVID-19. Only when we understand the central challenge posed by disaster in history can we see that this was also a failure of an administrative state and economic elites that had grown myopic over much longer than just a few years. Why were so many Cassandras for so long ignored? Why did only some countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? Why do appeals to "the science" often turn out to be magical thinking? Drawing from multiple disciplines, including history, economics, public health, and network science, Doom is a global postmortem for a plague year. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson has studied the pathologies that afflict modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online schism. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn--if we want to avoid the doom of irreversible decline"--Doom by @nfergus is a super interesting book. going to ask Niall about it on an upcoming World of DaaS https://t.co/13fsJYwFwU
The Fighters
C. J. Chivers
“A classic of war reporting...The author’s stories give heart-rending meaning to the lives and deaths of these men and women, even if policymakers generally have not.” —The New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner C.J. Chivers’s unvarnished account of modern combat, told through the eyes of the fighters who have waged America’s longest wars. More than 2.7 million Americans have served in Afghanistan or Iraq since September 11, 2001. C.J. Chivers reported from both wars from their beginnings. The Fighters vividly conveys the physical and emotional experience of war as lived by six combatants: a fighter pilot, a corpsman, a scout helicopter pilot, a grunt, an infantry officer, and a Special Forces sergeant. Chivers captures their courage, commitment, sense of purpose, and ultimately their suffering, frustration, and moral confusion as new enemies arise and invasions give way to counterinsurgency duties for which American forces were often not prepared. The Fighters is a tour de force, a portrait of modern warfare that parts from slogans to do for American troops what Stephen Ambrose did for the G.I.s of World War II and Michael Herr for the grunts in Vietnam. Told with the empathy and understanding of an author who is himself an infantry veteran, The Fighters presents the long arc of two wars.Reading @cjchivers' excellent 'The Fighters', which is just spectacular war reporting on the 'forever wars'. Such sacrifice for such an undeserving and confused leadership class. https://t.co/ehHRvgIdXH
Skunk Works
Ben R. Rich
This classic history of America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies is "a gripping technothriller in which the technology is real" (New York Times Book Review). From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, Skunk Works is the true story of America's most secret and successful aerospace operation. As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of cold war confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement against fantastic odds. Here are up-close portraits of the maverick band of scientists and engineers who made the Skunk Works so renowned. Filled with telling personal anecdotes and high adventure, with narratives from the CIA and from Air Force pilots who flew the many classified, risky missions, this book is a riveting portrait of the most spectacular aviation triumphs of the twentieth century. "Thoroughly engrossing." --Los Angeles Times Book Review@dassicity Absolutely loved it. Read it more than 20 years ago, at the very strong recommendation of an ex-girlfriend who worked for Lockheed-Martin. There's rarely a week I don't think of it.
Reign of Terror
Spencer Ackerman
Introduction: Neither peace nor victory -- Prologue : the worst terrorist attack in American history -- 9/11 And the security state -- 9/11 And the right -- Liberal complicity in the war on terror -- Obama, the security state, and the "sustainable" war on terror -- The right vs. Obama's war on terror -- The left vs. Obama's war on terror -- The decadent phase of the war on terror, the security state, and the rise of Trump -- Making the war on terror great again -- The invisible enemy.The @attackerman book is very good. Unusually for books of this sort it has a justified emotional pitch that brings home the tragedy of it all. https://t.co/YHF7Db2w9Y
The Party
Richard McGregor
In this provocative and illuminating account, Richard McGregor offers a captivating portrait of China’s Communist Party, its grip on power and control over China, and its future. China’s political and economic growth in the past three decades has been one of astonishing, epochal dimensions. The most remarkable part of this transformation, however, has been left largely untold—the central role of the Chinese Communist Party. In The Party, Richard McGregor delves deeply into China’s inner sanctum for the first time, showing how the Communist Party controls the government, courts, media, and military and keeps all corruption accusations against its members in-house. The Party’s decisions have a global impact, yet the CCP remains a deeply secretive body, hostile to the law and unaccountable to anyone or anything other than its own internal tribunals. It is the world’s only geopolitical rival of the United States, and is primed to think the worst of the West.China Signals Regulatory Crackdown Will Deepen in Long Push https://t.co/VWeIzI03xm // if this is an interesting topic for you I'd recommend "The Party" by Richard McGregor as a backgrounder for why this is not "new" and entirely in line with expectations. https://t.co/SekUolyE2D
Voices from Chernobyl (Lannan Selection)
Svetlana Alexievich
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature A journalist by trade, who now suffers from an immune deficiency developed while researching this book, presents personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus after the nuclear reactor accident in 1986, and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they still live with. On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown---from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster---and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."@tparekh Nonfiction: Empire of Pain, Voices From Chernobyl, Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, all of the movie and filmmaker related books.
- skilled in geometry, ingenious devices (!lival), music and astronomy. According to Ibn al-Nad!m and Ibn Khallikän their weakest subject was astronamy, but this seems to conflict with the opinions of Ibn Yunus and al-BIrun!, hoth good judges, who spoke highly of the accuracy of the Banu Musa's astronomical observations. Mul)ammad, who was the most influential of the brothers, specialised in gcomctry and astronomy, and excellcd Al)mad in all the sciences except in the construction of ingenious devices. AI-l:Iasan was a brilliant geometrician with aretenlive memoryand great powers of deduction. A rival onee tried to discredit him in front of al-Ma'mun hy saying that al l:Iasan had read only six of the thirteen books of Euclid's Elements. AI-l:Iasan replied by saying that it was unnecessary for him to read the remainder because he could arrive at the answers to any of Euclid's problem s by deduction. AI-Ma'mun acknowledged al-l:Iasan 's skill, but did not excuse him, saying: "laziness has prevented you from 2 reading the whole ofit-it is to geometry as the Ictters a, b, t, 111 are to speech and writing. " (H. 264). AI-l:Iasan is rarely mentioned by name elsewhere in the sources and may have preferred to devote his time to scholarship, whereas his brothers were involved in a variety of undertakings. At the time of their entry into the House of Wisdom the Banu Musil were paar and needy (H.
Today’s reading. https://t.co/00Nv0D1kAc
Ten Days in Harlem
Simon Hall
Rising star Simon Hall captures the spirit of the 1960s in ten days that revolutionised the Cold War: Fidel Castro's visit to New York. Hall has captured this catalytic moment like no one before. Anyone interested in the "Global Sixties" must read Ten Days in Harlem. Van E. Gosse, Professor of History, Franklin & Marshall College. New York City, September 1960. Fidel Castro - champion of the oppressed, scourge of colonialism, and leftist revolutionary - arrives for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. His visit to the UN represents a golden opportunity to make his mark on the world stage. Fidel's shock arrival in Harlem is met with a rapturous reception from the local African American community. He holds court from the iconic Hotel Theresa as a succession of world leaders, black freedom fighters and counter-cultural luminaries - everyone from Nikita Khrushchev to Gamal Abdel Nasser, Malcolm X to Allen Ginsberg - come calling. Then, during his landmark address to the UN General Assembly - one of the longest speeches in the organisation's history - he promotes the politics of anti-imperialism with a fervour, and an audacity, that makes him an icon of the 1960s. In this unforgettable slice of modern history, Simon Hall reveals how these ten days were a foundational moment in the trajectory of the Cold War, a turning point in the history of anti-colonial struggle, and a launching pad for the social, cultural and political tumult of the decade that followed.Hundred Years' War on Palestine
Rashid Khalidi
A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.A Little Devil in America
Hanif Abdurraqib
Race, history, culture, and entertainment collide in this bracing and personal examination of black performance and the complicated, ongoing legacy of blackface and minstrel shows--from the New York Times bestselling author of Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest Author and poet Hanif Abdurraqib became fascinated by clips of black minstrel entertainers like William Henry Lane, better known as Master Juba. Wondering if there was something more complicated and deepseated in the outdated minstrel tradition, Abdurraqib found questions and tensions that remain startlingly relevant to black entertainers across popular culture today. They Don't Dance No Mo' is an urgent project, unraveling all modes and methods of black performance in this moment, when black performers in all different levels of the spotlight are coming to terms with their value, reception, and their immense impact on America. This is a personal exploration of the history of black performance in the United States, beginning with black minstrels like Master Juba and tracing that seed of minstrelsy through current types of performance such as acting, sports, writing, comedy, and music.The Cruelty Is the Point
Adam Serwer
"Taking joy in suffering is more human than we'd like to admit. The cruelty of the Trump administration's policies and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets are intimately connected. Shared cruelty and the delight it brings are critical moments of connection for white supremacists, a fact that is not new. Adam Serwer has been chronicling our political landscape for the last decade. He is one of the most resonant voices of our time, relentless in his pursuit of fact, unsentimental in his storytelling, yet deeply humane in his perspective. At The Atlantic, he has written about the Supreme Court's role in Jim Crow; the history of "white genocide" conspiracy theory; hoaxes; racism; inequality; and of course, Trump. But this collection isn't just about Trump--it's an investigation across centuries interrogating both this moment and its antecedents to reveal the deep roots that have given rise to Trumpism. New material includes four, audience-building essays that expand upon the collection's themes, and unearth more approaches to nationalism and pluralism. Like the polarizing effect Trump's administration has had on American Jews; tracing the emergence of police unions; and making the historical case for abolishing billionaires to preserve American democracy. Additionally, new introductions will provide context and insight into the impact of previously published pieces, why they garnered so much attention amongst media figures, politicians, and social platforms"--Adam is such an incredible writer. Congrats on his new book out today! https://t.co/Q1h1GwZAg6
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" is considered by many to be a masterpiece of political analysis and a compelling rationale against the French Revolution. Originally written as a letter in response to a young Parisian and later expanded upon and published in book format in January 1790, the work has greatly influenced conservative and classic liberal intellectuals and stands as a powerful argument against violent revolutions, lawlessness, and unrest. Prior to 1790, Burke was a well-known member of the British House of Commons and a vocal supporter of the American Revolution. His condemnation of the French Revolution shocked many of his peers and supporters. Burke viewed the French Revolution as a violent and chaotic war without any guiding ideology or respect for the rule of law and feared it would lead to a situation that was both dangerous and corrupt. Many of Burke's predictions came true as the Revolution devolved into bloodshed and anarchy with the Reign of Terror beginning in 1793 and then leading to the eventual military dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. Burke's work stands as an enduring statement in support of tradition, hereditary power, property rights, duty, and the monarchy. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.First #GreatBook by an Irish author! 🇮🇪 https://t.co/mmmToa8KPc
The Perfectionists
Simon Winchester
The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement—precision—in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future. The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools—machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses, and cameras—and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips, and the Hadron Collider. Simon Winchester takes us back to origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. It was Thomas Jefferson who later exported their discoveries to the fledgling United States, setting the nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Winchester moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia. As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?@staringispolite you have to read the book ☺️
The Age of Gold
H. W. Brands
A history of the people and commercial imperatives that contributed to the California gold rush discusses the massive influx of hundreds of thousands of people to the area, which became a state in record time, in a volume set against the political climate and national issues of the period. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.@generativist How about this from the same author? https://t.co/ffxGpgmE0V
- Examines the religious strife and scientific progress made from 1558 to 1650 in Europe
Was recommended 1 chapter in a Will Durant book by @typesfast who told me to just read about Richelieu Have read entire book to get to this chapter. And omg it was all worth it. Rest of book great. But Richelieu! Always great when friend calibrated enough to make such great rec https://t.co/Dxh3E0SenD
From Dawn to Decadence
Jacques Barzun
Highly regarded here and abroad for some thirty works of cultural history and criticism, master historian Jacques Barzun has now set down in one continuous narrative the sum of his discoveries and conclusions about the whole of Western culture since 1500. In this account, Barzun describes what Western Man wrought from the Renaisance and Reformation down to the present in the double light of its own time and our pressing concerns. He introduces characters and incidents with his unusual literary style and grace, bringing to the fore those that have "Puritans as Democrats," "The Monarch's Revolution," "The Artist Prophet and Jester" -- show the recurrent role of great themes throughout the eras. The triumphs and defeats of five hundred years form an inspiring saga that modifies the current impression of one long tale of oppression by white European males. Women and their deeds are prominent, and freedom (even in sexual matters) is not an invention of the last decades. And when Barzun rates the present not as a culmination but a decline, he is in no way a prophet of doom. Instead, he shows decadence as the creative novelty that will burst forth -- tomorrow or the next day. Only after a lifetime of separate studies covering a broad territory could a writer create with such ease the synthesis displayed in this magnificent volume.The book is, by the way, tremendous fun to read. I didn't read it all the way through - rather, for some months I would just pick it up, open to a random page, and read. And it was nearly always interesting.
The World According to Physics
Jim Al-Khalili
"This book frames the nature and importance of modern physics in an accessible, compelling, succinct way, showing lay readers that physics is crucial to our modern understanding of the world-and indeed the world as we currently know and experience it. Through the narrative, the book naturally describes essential facets of what physics is and why it has become such a (some might say, the) fundamental science. In addition, the reader will gain a sense of the grand scope and sweep of science and the collective, self-correcting nature of how science is done. For some, the book may serve as an invitation to physics. To others, it may serve to clarify the role of physics and describe a shared, global, centuries-long quest for fundamental knowledge"--This is a beautiful book. Over the last one year, I’ve been using 2 sources of book recommendations. 1. @bhalomanush (whose book on Covid-19 is a brilliant read) and 2. Speakers on @amitvarma’s TSATU podcast https://t.co/NboKH2HuDx
The Places In Between
Rory Stewart
Traces the author's 2002 journey by foot across Afghanistan, during which he survived the harsh elements through the kindness of tribal elders, teen soldiers, Taliban commanders, and foreign-aid workers whose stories he collected along his way. By the author of The Prince of the Marshes. Original. 20,000 first printing.@charlesjkenny @RoryStewartUK I should include this when I rewrite this https://t.co/8MCLDRJ4c7 Have you read his book about his walk through Afghanistan? I liked that one a lot.
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (New Approaches to Economic and Social History)
Robert C. Allen
Why did the industrial revolution take place in eighteenth-century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? In this convincing new account Robert Allen argues that the British industrial revolution was a successful response to the global economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows that in Britain wages were high and capital and energy cheap in comparison to other countries in Europe and Asia. As a result, the breakthrough technologies of the industrial revolution - the steam engine, the cotton mill, and the substitution of coal for wood in metal production - were uniquely profitable to invent and use in Britain. The high wage economy of pre-industrial Britain also fostered industrial development since more people could afford schooling and apprenticeships. It was only when British engineers made these new technologies more cost-effective during the nineteenth century that the industrial revolution would spread around the world.Since it's World Book Day, here are some of the best books I've read recently: I Want to be a Mathematician, by Paul Halmos Barbarian Days, by William Finnegan From Galileo to Newton, by Rupert Hall The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen
Squaddies
John Hockey
British military training is given a human aspect in this fascinating study of life in the barracks at the common solider level.@PatrickBury Thanks, yea, it's in my library, though I didn't draw on it directly for this piece. An excellent book indeed!
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
William L. Shirer
Chronicles the Nazi's rise to power, conquest of Europe, and dramatic defeat at the hands of the Allies.@ericbahn Fantastic book!
If Then
Jill Lepore
The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge--decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine that it has no past, but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and direct human behavior, deploying their "People Machine" from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy's presidential campaign, the New York Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defense. Jill Lepore, distinguished Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, unearthed from archives the almost unbelievable story of this long-vanished corporation, and of the women hidden behind it. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lepore argues, Simulmatics invented the future by building the machine in which the world now finds itself trapped and tormented, algorithm by algorithm.The 8 Best Books About Artificial Intelligence to Read Now https://t.co/LZPsFOVvpn #ai #artificialintelligence #machinelearning #deeplearning #books https://t.co/zgiofRtm5U
American Moonshot
Douglas Brinkley
As the fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing approaches, the award winning historian and perennial New York Times bestselling author takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy’s inspiring challenge, and America’s race to the moon. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.”—President John F. Kennedy On May 25, 1961, JFK made an astonishing announcement: his goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. In this engrossing, fast-paced epic, Douglas Brinkley returns to the 1960s to recreate one of the most exciting and ambitious achievements in the history of humankind. American Moonshot brings together the extraordinary political, cultural, and scientific factors that fueled the birth and development of NASA and the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects, which shot the United States to victory in the space race against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Drawing on new primary source material and major interviews with many of the surviving figures who were key to America’s success, Brinkley brings this fascinating history to life as never before. American Moonshot is a portrait of the brilliant men and women who made this giant leap possible, the technology that enabled us to propel men beyond earth’s orbit to the moon and return them safely, and the geopolitical tensions that spurred Kennedy to commit himself fully to this audacious dream. Brinkley’s ensemble cast of New Frontier characters include rocketeer Wernher von Braun, astronaut John Glenn and space booster Lyndon Johnson. A vivid and enthralling chronicle of one of the most thrilling, hopeful, and turbulent eras in the nation’s history, American Moonshot is an homage to scientific ingenuity, human curiosity, and the boundless American spirit.This book on the space race was very good. Putting a man on the moon seemed so implausible in the early 1960s that the only equivalent today is probably achieving something like time travel. https://t.co/tZclAEmLxB
The Darkening Age
Catherine Nixey
A bold new history of the rise of Christianity, showing how its radical followers helped to annihilate Greek and Roman civilizationI recently finished @CatherineNixey's excellent (though polemical) 'A Darkening Age', about early Christian zealots and how they dismantled the Classical world piece by piece. Toppling of statues has always been kind of popular in these moments. https://t.co/l66LvDjSyH
The Lessons of History
Will Durant
This is my book Hall of Fame https://t.co/l0qtMU2U3W
These Truths
Jill Lepore
The challenge of retelling five hundred years of American history in a single volume has been so daunting that hardly any historian has attempted it in decades. When Jill Lepore's New York Times best-selling These Truths appeared in 2018, critics quickly hailed it as a classic--appealing not only to academics, but to thousands of astonished general readers. Picking up the book out of a feeling of civic duty, they opened its pages to discover a different kind of writing, and what the Washington Post called "an honest reckoning with America's past"--a story filled with women and men and people of every color and religion, one that wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. With These Truths, Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.@hrabk @seanphughes99 @WoodardColin Reading These Truths on and off! Actually a very underrated US history book - astonishingly written - is Hugh Brogan's, in case you're looking for something unobvious
The Body of Il Duce
Sergio Luzzatto
An exploration of the history and legacy of Italian fascism as reflected by the body of Benito Mussolini discusses how the dictator's brutal execution, the graphic display of his corpse, and his body's subsequent burial, exhuming, theft, concealment, and eventual enshrinement reflected the nation's struggle to become a republic. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.@sbisson @tadethompson @Hugo_Book_Club So many. These among them. https://t.co/YvpdmhPnWe
The Decline of the West; Volume I
Oswald Spengler
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.One example is Oswald Spengler who wrote more than 100 years ago. He was an average teacher in an average school, but his book “Decline of the West” was a bestseller in Europe throughout the 1920s. He presents a theory of history unlike anything I’ve read. (h/t @jeremygiffon) https://t.co/5MWWm96s21
These Truths
Jill Lepore
New York Times Bestseller In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history. Written in elegiac prose, Lepore’s groundbreaking investigation places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—"these truths," Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Lepore argues, because self-government depends on it. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio to twenty-first-century Internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook News. Along the way, Lepore’s sovereign chronicle is filled with arresting sketches of both well-known and lesser-known Americans, from a parade of presidents and a rogues’ gallery of political mischief makers to the intrepid leaders of protest movements, including Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist orator; William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate and ultimately tragic populist; Pauli Murray, the visionary civil rights strategist; and Phyllis Schlafly, the uncredited architect of modern conservatism. Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. "A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history," Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. "The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden," These Truths observes. "It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.""To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind." - Love Jill Lepore's These Truths so much. What a book. How rare to find a book like this.
Can't Even
Anne Helen Petersen
An incendiary examination of burnout in millennials--the cultural shifts that got us here, the pressures that sustain it, and the need for drastic change Do you feel like your life is an endless to-do list? Do you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through Instagram because you're too exhausted to pick up a book? Are you mired in debt, or feel like you work all the time, or feel pressure to take whatever gives you joy and turn it into a monetizable hustle? Welcome to burnout culture. While burnout may seem like the default setting for the modern era, in Can't Even, BuzzFeed culture writer and former academic Anne Helen Petersen argues that burnout is a definitional condition for the millennial generation, born out of distrust in the institutions that have failed us, the unrealistic expectations of the modern workplace, and a sharp uptick in anxiety and hopelessness exacerbated by the constant pressure to "perform" our lives online. The genesis for the book is Petersen's viral BuzzFeed article on the topic, which has amassed over eight million reads since its publication in January 2019. Can't Even goes beyond the original article, as Petersen examines how millennials have arrived at this point of burnout (think: unchecked capitalism and changing labor laws) and examines the phenomenon through a variety of lenses--including how burnout affects the way we work, parent, and socialize--describing its resonance in alarming familiarity. Utilizing a combination of sociohistorical framework, original interviews, and detailed analysis, Can't Even offers a galvanizing, intimate, and ultimately redemptive look at the lives of this much-maligned generation, and will be required reading for both millennials and the parents and employers trying to understand them.Unsurprisingly, @annehelen’s book has throughly fucked me up in a good way. Any person who’s ever (intentionally or not) competed in a stay-at-work Olympics or felt self-satisfied & also terrible for being ~so busy~ needs to read it. https://t.co/GoISJ47oXb
A Place Apart
Dervla Murphy
At the height of The Troubles, Dervla Murphy bicycled to Northern Ireland to try to understand the situation by speaking to people on either side of the divide. Despite her own family connections to the IRA, she travelled north largely unfettered by sectarian loyalties. Armed instead with an indefatigable curiosity, a fine ear for anecdote, an ability to stand her own at the bar, and a penetrating intelligence, she navigated her way through horrifying situations, and sometimes found herself among people stiff with hate and grief. But equally, she discovered an unquenchable thirst for life and peace, a spirit that refused to die.From a book I’m reading about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. (It’s a very interesting book, esp for someone who knows next to nothing about the conflict.) https://t.co/bwkBmVM7mM
These Truths
Jill Lepore
The challenge of retelling five hundred years of American history in a single volume has been so daunting that hardly any historian has attempted it in decades. When Jill Lepore's New York Times best-selling These Truths appeared in 2018, critics quickly hailed it as a classic--appealing not only to academics, but to thousands of astonished general readers. Picking up the book out of a feeling of civic duty, they opened its pages to discover a different kind of writing, and what the Washington Post called "an honest reckoning with America's past"--a story filled with women and men and people of every color and religion, one that wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. With These Truths, Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.@derek_brower best book I've read in a long time
The Lessons of History
Will Durant
Is this the highest wisdom-per-word book ever? If it's not, what is? https://t.co/R1G1X2qNDX
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X was intended to be a true autobiography, with the name of Alex Haley appearing not at all or as a ghost writer or as a mere contributor or assistant. However, with the assassination of Malcolm X having occurred in Harlem in New York City on February 21, 1965 just before this book could be published, it became necessary to reveal the important role of Alex Haley in creating this book.The Apocalypse Factory
Steve Olson
A thrilling narrative of scientific triumph, decades of secrecy, and the unimaginable destruction wrought by the creation of the atomic bomb.From coal to nukes, I’ve moved on to this really interesting book. I thought I knew all about Hanford, but there’s so much more to the story and the role it played in our nuclear history. Recommend. https://t.co/DyjPUzv7xz
The lessons of history
Will Durant
2 distinguished historians express their evaluation of the nature of the human experience and what may be learned from itWill and Ariel Durant spent their lives studying civilization. To summarize what they learned, they wrote a 100–page book called “The Lessons of History.” This is my favorite paragraph. https://t.co/BLS7rKyFZ2
These Truths
Jill Lepore
The challenge of retelling five hundred years of American history in a single volume has been so daunting that hardly any historian has attempted it in decades. When Jill Lepore's New York Times best-selling These Truths appeared in 2018, critics quickly hailed it as a classic--appealing not only to academics, but to thousands of astonished general readers. Picking up the book out of a feeling of civic duty, they opened its pages to discover a different kind of writing, and what the Washington Post called "an honest reckoning with America's past"--a story filled with women and men and people of every color and religion, one that wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. With These Truths, Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.Loved, and recommend, this book on U.S. history by Jill Lepore: These Truths: A History of the United States https://t.co/STNYXwmrcg
Stamped from the Beginning
Ibram X. Kendi
Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America--more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading pro-slavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America. Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them--and in the process, gives us reason to hope.I struggle with how to discuss and reconcile with the inbuilt racial prejudice of America but I found this book to be thought provoking and insightful. 📘
The Map of Knowledge
Violet Moller
'A lovely debut from a gifted young author. Violet Moller brings to life the ways in which knowledge reached us from antiquity to the present day in a book that is as delightful as it is readable.' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads In The Map of Knowledge Violet Moller traces the journey taken by the ideas of three of the greatest scientists of antiquity – Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy – through seven cities and over a thousand years. In it, we follow them from sixth-century Alexandria to ninth-century Baghdad, from Muslim Cordoba to Catholic Toledo, from Salerno’s medieval medical school to Palermo, capital of Sicily’s vibrant mix of cultures, and – finally – to Venice, where that great merchant city’s printing presses would enable Euclid’s geometry, Ptolemy’s system of the stars and Galen’s vast body of writings on medicine to spread even more widely. In tracing these fragile strands of knowledge from century to century, from east to west and north to south, Moller also reveals the web of connections between the Islamic world and Christendom, connections that would both preserve and transform astronomy, mathematics and medicine from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Vividly told and with a dazzling cast of characters, The Map of Knowledge is an evocative, nuanced and vibrant account of our common intellectual heritage. 'An endlessly fascinating book, rich in detail, capacious and humane in vision.' Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern@memba4wentworth i quite liked it. it's not as riveting as a fiction book but pretty good for history and i learned a lot about things i'd never even thought about before
Voices of the Soviet Space Program
S. Gerovitch
In this remarkable oral history, Slava Gerovitch presents interviews with the men and women who witnessed Soviet space efforts firsthand. Rather than comprising a "master narrative," these fascinating and varied accounts bring to light the often divergent perspectives, experiences, and institutional cultures that defined the Soviet space program.@nickarner @_ArnaudS_ @GeffenAvraham This book https://t.co/a940FKW36L
The Party
Richard McGregor
In this provocative and illuminating account, Richard McGregor offers a captivating portrait of China’s Communist Party, its grip on power and control over China, and its future. China’s political and economic growth in the past three decades has been one of astonishing, epochal dimensions. The most remarkable part of this transformation, however, has been left largely untold—the central role of the Chinese Communist Party. In The Party, Richard McGregor delves deeply into China’s inner sanctum for the first time, showing how the Communist Party controls the government, courts, media, and military and keeps all corruption accusations against its members in-house. The Party’s decisions have a global impact, yet the CCP remains a deeply secretive body, hostile to the law and unaccountable to anyone or anything other than its own internal tribunals. It is the world’s only geopolitical rival of the United States, and is primed to think the worst of the West.Here's a book recommendation for folks interested in learning more about the CCP. Highly recommend for folks in tech https://t.co/E2m4f0D2Fk
The British Are Coming
Rick Atkinson
The paperback edition of the New York Times bestseller that the Wall Street Journal said was “chock full of momentous events and larger-than-life characters.” Rick Atkinson, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning An Army at Dawn and two other superb books about World War II, has long been admired for his deeply researched, stunningly vivid narrative histories. Now he turns his attention to a new war, and in the initial volume of the Revolution Trilogy he recounts the first twenty-one months of America’s violent war for independence. From the battles at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775 to those at Trenton and Princeton in winter 1777, American militiamen and then the ragged Continental Army take on the world’s most formidable fighting force. It is a gripping saga alive with astonishing characters: Henry Knox, the former bookseller with an uncanny understanding of artillery; Nathanael Greene, the blue-eyed bumpkin who becomes a brilliant battle captain; Benjamin Franklin, the self-made man who proves to be the wiliest of diplomats; George Washington, the commander in chief who learns the difficult art of leadership when the war seems all but lost. The story is also told from the British perspective, making the mortal conflict between the redcoats and the rebels all the more compelling. Full of riveting details and untold stories, The British Are Coming is a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Rick Atkinson has given stirring new life to the first act of our country’s creation drama.@BullandBaird @billsweet I think Rick Atkinson is the best military historian: https://t.co/oGZE2nfg0R
The Plaza
Julie Satow
Journalist Julie Satow's thrilling, unforgettable history of how one illustrious hotel has defined our understanding of money and glamour, from the Gilded Age to the Go-Go Eighties to today's Billionaire Row. From the moment in 1907 when New York millionaire Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt strode through the Plaza Hotel's revolving doors to become its first guest, to the afternoon in 2007 when a mysterious Russian oligarch paid a record price for the hotel's largest penthouse, the eighteen-story white marble edifice at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street has radiated wealth and luxury. For some, the hotel evokes images of F. Scott Fitzgerald frolicking in the Pulitzer Fountain, or Eloise, the impish young guest who pours water down the mail chute. But the true stories captured in THE PLAZA also include dark, hidden secrets: the cold-blooded murder perpetrated by the construction workers in charge of building the hotel, how Donald J. Trump came to be the only owner to ever bankrupt the Plaza, and the tale of the disgraced Indian tycoon who ran the hotel from a maximum-security prison cell, 7,000 miles away in Delhi. In this definitive history, award-winning journalist Julie Satow not only pulls back the curtain on Truman Capote's Black and White Ball and The Beatles' first stateside visit-she also follows the money trail. THE PLAZA reveals how a handful of rich, dowager widows were the financial lifeline that saved the hotel during the Great Depression, and how, today, foreign money and anonymous shell companies have transformed iconic guest rooms into condominiums that shield ill-gotten gains-hollowing out parts of the hotel as well as the city around it. THE PLAZA is the account of one vaunted New York City address that has become synonymous with wealth and scandal, opportunity and tragedy. With glamour on the surface and strife behind the scenes, it is the story of how one hotel became a mirror reflecting New York's place at the center of the country's cultural narrative for over a century.I’m reading @JulieSatow’s INCREDIBLE book about the Plaza and it makes me miss New York so much
The Body of Il Duce
Sergio Luzzatto
An exploration of the history and legacy of Italian fascism as reflected by the body of Benito Mussolini discusses how the dictator's brutal execution, the graphic display of his corpse, and his body's subsequent burial, exhuming, theft, concealment, and eventual enshrinement reflected the nation's struggle to become a republic. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.Good book. https://t.co/LbB06TmiLH
Stamped from the Beginning
Ibram X. Kendi
Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America--more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois to legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading pro-slavery and pro-civil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America. Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. And while racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them--and in the process, gives us reason to hope.@peterseibel yeah I learned about that from this book too! there's so much in here that I didn't know
The Lessons of History
Will Durant
@BooksChatterBot This is a cool idea! Please add all the books found at the following link. These are the best of the best - the top 5% of what is now over 600 books read and summarized https://t.co/SP0CSgfSzT
Coffeeland
Augustine Sedgewick
"The epic story of the rise of coffee in the Americas, and how it connected and divided the modern world. Sedgewick reveals how the growth of coffee production, trade, and consumption went hand in hand with the rise of the scientific idea of energy as a universal force, which transformed thinking about how the human body works as well as ideas about the relationship of one person's work to another's. In the process, both El Salvador and the United States earned the nickname "Coffeeland," though for radically different reasons, and with consequences that reach into the present. This history of how coffee came to be produced by the world's poorest people and consumed by its richest opens up a unique perspective on how the modern globalized world works, ultimately provoking a reconsideration of what it means to be connected to far-away people and places through the familiar things that make up our everyday lives"--@Ed_Crooks @shannonpareil @AimeePKeane @rkapkap @turi @aasseily @christianhern @matthewclifford @TheAnnaGat @chris_wigley @azeem @brettbivens @gonsanchezs @sowers @eporres @rahulpowar @cee @itsflamant @robertwrighter @KimGhattas @arusbridger @MazzucatoM @drissbb @jtepper2 @shumonbasar @zinkovigor @MatildeGiglio @h0d3r @emmavj @Zielina @hannahsarney @YuanfenYang @rasmus_kleis @mfilippino @ointhefield @lilahrap @Emiliyadotcom @CardiffGarcia @BobbyAllyn @EricGPlatt @SycoraxPine @elliottholt @annaknicolaou @ConorDougherty Evidently there’s a “6 books within reach and 6 tags” thing going around. Here’s latest I’ve read in lockdown @bermanjeff @neal_katyal @auren @dpatil @OSullivanMeghan @jahimes https://t.co/nB7C2gnaMM
Black Wave
Kim Ghattas
The bestselling author of The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power tells the gripping story of the real roots of the Middle East Sunni-Shia conflict in the 1979 Iran Revolution that changed the region forever. Black Wave is a paradigm-shifting recasting of the modern history of the Middle East, telling the largely unexplored story of the rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran—a rivalry born out of the sparks of the 1979 Iranian revolution—that has dramatically transformed the culture, identity, and collective memory of millions of Muslims over four decades. Like George Packer did in The Unwinding, Kim Ghattas follows everyday citizens whose lives have been affected by the geopolitical drama, making her account both immediate and intimate. Most Americans assume that extremism, Sunni-Shia antagonism, and anti-Americanism have always existed in the Middle East, but prior to 1979, Saudi Arabia and Iran were working allies. It was only after that year—a remarkable turning point—that Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia began to use religion as a tool in their competition for dominance in the region, igniting the culture wars that led to the 1991 American invasion of Iraq, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and the rise of ISIS. Ghattas shows how Saudi Arabia and Iran went from allies against the threat of communism from Russia, with major roles in the US anti-Soviet strategy, to mortal enemies that use religious conservatism to incite division and unrest from Egypt to Pakistan. Black Wave will significantly influence both perception of and conversation about the modern history of the Middle East.@Ed_Crooks @shannonpareil @AimeePKeane @rkapkap @turi @aasseily @christianhern @matthewclifford @TheAnnaGat @chris_wigley @azeem @brettbivens @gonsanchezs @sowers @eporres @rahulpowar @cee @itsflamant @robertwrighter @KimGhattas @arusbridger @MazzucatoM @drissbb @jtepper2 @shumonbasar @zinkovigor @MatildeGiglio @h0d3r @emmavj @Zielina @hannahsarney @YuanfenYang @rasmus_kleis @mfilippino @ointhefield @lilahrap @Emiliyadotcom @CardiffGarcia @BobbyAllyn @EricGPlatt @SycoraxPine @elliottholt @annaknicolaou @ConorDougherty Evidently there’s a “6 books within reach and 6 tags” thing going around. Here’s latest I’ve read in lockdown @bermanjeff @neal_katyal @auren @dpatil @OSullivanMeghan @jahimes https://t.co/nB7C2gnaMM
The History of the Hudson River Valley
Vernon Benjamin
Beautifully illustrated and extensively researched, this history of the Hudson River Valley, which, because of its unique geography and proximity to Canada, was the site of many battles, chronicles its discovery all the way to its rise as a center of culture and commerce that is still evident today.Oh ps: my two new books! https://t.co/HlzXCaWOP9
Rise and Kill First
Ronen Bergman
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The first definitive history of the Mossad, Shin Bet, and the IDF's targeted killing programs, hailed by The New York Times as "an exceptional work, a humane book about an incendiary subject." WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD IN HISTORY NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY JENNIFER SZALAI, THE NEW YORK TIMES NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Economist * The New York Times Book Review * BBC History Magazine * Mother Jones * Kirkus Reviews The Talmud says: "If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first." This instinct to take every measure, even the most aggressive, to defend the Jewish people is hardwired into Israel's DNA. From the very beginning of its statehood in 1948, protecting the nation from harm has been the responsibility of its intelligence community and armed services, and there is one weapon in their vast arsenal that they have relied upon to thwart the most serious threats: Targeted assassinations have been used countless times, on enemies large and small, sometimes in response to attacks against the Israeli people and sometimes preemptively. In this page-turning, eye-opening book, journalist and military analyst Ronen Bergman--praised by David Remnick as "arguably [Israel's] best investigative reporter"--offers a riveting inside account of the targeted killing programs: their successes, their failures, and the moral and political price exacted on the men and women who approved and carried out the missions. Bergman has gained the exceedingly rare cooperation of many current and former members of the Israeli government, including Prime Ministers Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as high-level figures in the country's military and intelligence services: the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), the Mossad (the world's most feared intelligence agency), Caesarea (a "Mossad within the Mossad" that carries out attacks on the highest-value targets), and the Shin Bet (an internal security service that implemented the largest targeted assassination campaign ever, in order to stop what had once appeared to be unstoppable: suicide terrorism). Including never-before-reported, behind-the-curtain accounts of key operations, and based on hundreds of on-the-record interviews and thousands of files to which Bergman has gotten exclusive access over his decades of reporting, Rise and Kill First brings us deep into the heart of Israel's most secret activities. Bergman traces, from statehood to the present, the gripping events and thorny ethical questions underlying Israel's targeted killing campaign, which has shaped the Israeli nation, the Middle East, and the entire world. "A remarkable feat of fearless and responsible reporting . . . important, timely, and informative."--John le Carré"If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first." -Babylonian Talmud I'm reading 'Rise and Kill First' by @ronenbergman. Please remind me to never piss off the Israeli state. https://t.co/j07Ff3Rv3D
The End Is Always Near
Dan Carlin
A journey back in time that explores what happened—and what could have happened—from creator of the wildly-popular podcast Hardcore History and 2019 winner of the iHeartRadio Best History Podcast Award. Dan Carlin has created a new way to think about the past. His mega-hit podcast, Hardcore History, is revered for its unique blend of high drama, enthralling narration, and Twilight Zone-style twists. Carlin humanizes the past, wondering about things that didn’t happen but might have, and compels his listeners to “walk a mile in that other guy’s historical moccasins.” A political commentator, Carlin approaches history like a magician, employing completely unorthodox and always entertaining ways of re-looking at what we think we know about wars, empires, and leaders across centuries and millennia. But what happens to the everyman caught in the gears of history? Carlin asks the questions, poses the arguments, and explores the facts to find out. Inspired by his podcast, Hardcore History challenges the way we look at the past and ourselves. In this absorbing compendium, Carlin embarks on a whole new set of stories and major cliffhangers that will keep readers enthralled. Idiosyncratic and erudite, offbeat yet profound, Hardcore History examines issues that are rarely presented, and makes the past immediately relevant to our very turbulent present.This Dan Carlin book on times when it felt like the world was coming to an end is *extremely* good. Was written last year but has a great chapter on pandemics. https://t.co/HqwjxpJ4VX
Nature's Metropolis
William Cronon
Argues that the American frontier and city developed together by focusing on Chicago and tracing its roots from Native American habitation to its transformation by white settlement and development@KonyCapitalism Great book! Love it's section on the grain exchanges and beginnings of chicago commodities!
The Fish That Ate the Whale
Rich Cohen
@antoniogm Fantastic book with possibly the worst title of all time :/ Also I might disagree about the SV take... while no physical feat, aggregating the attention of the entire world is impressive on a mental level that’s worth admiration
The 40s
The New Yorker Magazine
A cultural and political history of a watershed decade as reflected in the pages of New Yorker magazine covers such topics as the Nuremberg Trials, the statehood of Israel, and the bombing of Hiroshima.Loving these New Yorker decade collections. Here’s a little 40s one on Einstein ( didn’t know the bit on passports!) https://t.co/dqe4Yopam0
Skunk Works
Ben R. Rich
This classic history of America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies is "a gripping technothriller in which the technology is real" (New York Times Book Review). From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, Skunk Works is the true story of America's most secret and successful aerospace operation. As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of cold war confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement against fantastic odds. Here are up-close portraits of the maverick band of scientists and engineers who made the Skunk Works so renowned. Filled with telling personal anecdotes and high adventure, with narratives from the CIA and from Air Force pilots who flew the many classified, risky missions, this book is a riveting portrait of the most spectacular aviation triumphs of the twentieth century. "Thoroughly engrossing." --Los Angeles Times Book ReviewHighly recommend “Skunkworks”, one of my all time favorite books on organizational culture.
The Seventh Million
Tom Segev
A new history of Israel presents the Holocaust as the defining event of modern Jewish history and the most important impetus for the formation of the State of Israel. Reprint.Reading Tom Segev’s “The Seventh Million,” about the Holocaust survivors who came to Israel and who sometimes struggled to acclimatize. “Excuse me, gentlemen, but in my bus, I deliver the babies myself.” https://t.co/7mNEhLHpVo
Since Yesterday
Frederick L Allen
"Vividly and with great skills he marshals the men, the mountebanks, the measures, and the events of ten years of American life and causes them to march before us in orderly panathenaic procession."--Saturday Review@russmonk Unbeatable: https://t.co/VkFlILxgTJ https://t.co/VKD0CbcQ2D
After the Ice
Steven J. Mithen
Brings to life fifteen thousand years of human history in a study that follows an imaginary modern traveler who visits and observes prehistoric communities and landscapes that laid the foundations of the modern world.@maosbot After the Ice is excellent - covers a period of human history barely anyone knows about with tons of mysterious things (proto religions, settlements, etc). https://t.co/dyvJQO2DLM
The Devil In The White City
Erik Larson
The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and its amazing 'White City' was one of the wonders of the world. This is the incredible story of its realization, and of the two men whose fates it linked: one was an architect, the other a serial killer. The architect was Daniel H. Burnham, the driving force behind the White City, the massive, visionary landscape of white buildings set in a wonderland of canals and gardens. The killer was H. H. Holmes, a handsome doctor with striking blue eyes. He used the attraction of the great fair - and his own devilish charms - to lure scores of young women to their deaths. While Burnham overcame politics, infighting, personality clashes and Chicago's infamous weather to transform the swamps of Jackson Park into the greatest show on Earth, Holmes built his own edifice just west of the fairground. He called it the World's Fair Hotel. In reality it was a torture palace, a gas chamber, a crematorium. These two disparate but driven men together with a remarkable supporting cast of colourful characters, including as Buffalo Bill, George Ferris, Thomas Edison and some of the 27 million others who converged on the dazzling spectacle of the White City, are brought to life in this mesmerizing, murderous tale of the legendary Fair that transformed America and set it on course for the twentieth century.Great books to read during quarantine: • The Devil in the White City • Wolf Hall • The Hot Zone (if you want to freak yourself out) What else?
@idlebell @sebs_tweets @AdamSinger @david_perell @shl @holland_tom @BrianTHeligman @simonsarris @awilkinson @tutubuslatinus @vgr @kootlan @Oniropolis @luciensteil A little light reading.. https://t.co/rXRx874V7W
The Lessons of History
Will Durant
@NicholasNikolov https://t.co/NtnZTAUF8a
The Ones We've Been Waiting For
Charlotte Alter
There are now 26 millennials in congress - a fivefold increase gained in the last midterms. They're governing over Midwestern cities and college towns, sitting on city councils and running for state legislatures. Some of them have been in office for a few years; one of them is running for president. In The Ones We've been Waiting For, TIME correspondent Charlotte Alter defines the class of young leaders who are remaking the nation, and what America will look like when they're in charge.If you follow me, you probably love uplifting stories about young people running for office & leading. Good news: @CharlotteAlter’s amazing book is chock full of all that (+more!) and it’s available today. Get your copy. https://t.co/xgkRnNHhKt
Wasteland
W. Scott Poole
"The roots of modern horror are found in the First World War. It was the most devastating event to occur in the early 1900s, with 38 million dead and 17 million wounded in the most grotesque of ways, owing to the new machines brought to war. If Downton Abbey showed the ripple effect of this catastrophe above stairs, Wasteland reveals how it made its way into the darker corners of our psyche on the bloody battlefield, the screaming asylum, and desolated cities and villages. Historian W. Scott Poole chronicles the era's major figures and their influences--Freud, T.S. Eliot, H.P. Lovecraft, Wilfred Owen and Peter Lorre, David Cronenberg and Freddy Krueger--as well as cult favorites and the collective unconscious. Wasteland is a surprising--but wholly convincing--perspective on horror that also speaks to the audience for history, film, and popular culture. November 11th, 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that brought the First World War to a close, and a number of smart and well-received recent histories have helped us reevaluate this conflict. Now W. Scott Poole takes us behind the frontlines of battle to the dark places of the imagination where the legacy of the war to end all wars lives on" --@mcrate_s Yeah. I'm reading this right now: https://t.co/JYkIsIArBA
Philosophy in a Time of Terror
Giovanna Borradori
"In her introduction, Borradori contends that philosophy has an invaluable contribution to make to the understanding of terrorism. Just as the traumas produced by colonialism, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust wrote the history of the twentieth century, the history of the twenty-first century is already signed by global terrorism. Each dialogue here, accompanied by a critical essay, recognizes the magnitude of this upcoming challenge. Characteristically, Habermas's dialogue is dense, compact, and elegantly traditional. Derrida's, on the other hand, takes the reader on a long, winding, and unpredictable road. Yet unexpected agreements emerge between them: both have a deep suspicion of the concept of "terrorism" and both see the need for a transition from classical international law, premised on the model of nation-states, to a new cosmopolitan order based on continental alliances.".This, ultimately. https://t.co/yGl1gf1esb
The Anarchy
William Dalrymple
From the bestselling author of Return of a King, the story of how the East India Company took over large swaths of Asia, and the devastating results of the corporation running a country. In August 1765, the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and set up, in his place, a government run by English traders who collected taxes through means of a private army. The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional company and became something much more unusual: an international corporation transformed into an aggressive colonial power. Over the course of the next 47 years, the company's reach grew until almost all of India south of Delhi was effectively ruled from a boardroom in the city of London. The Anarchy tells one of history's most remarkable stories: how the Mughal Empire-which dominated world trade and manufacturing and possessed almost unlimited resources-fell apart and was replaced by a multinational corporation based thousands of miles overseas, and answerable to shareholders, most of whom had never even seen India and no idea about the country whose wealth was providing their dividends. Using previously untapped sources, Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before and provides a portrait of the devastating results from the abuse of corporate power.@apar1984 William Dalrymple's "The Anarchy" is really good!
The Complete Maus
Art Spiegelman
A son struggles to come to terms with the horrific story of his parents and their experiences during the Holocaust and in postwar America, in an omnibus edition of Spiegelman's two-part, Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller. 25,000 first printing.@Intentionaut @radicallyrach +1 Maus (a staggering, genre defining work) +1 Persepolis (and also a good movie adaptation) Watchmen is hugely influential (and is not literally the same story as the recent series) I *loved* the sad, desperate, violent, and touching "Sweet Tooth" by Jeff Lemire (I love him)
Talking Stone
Paul Goldsmith
"This book acts as a visual vehicle to see the rock art of the Coso Range. The Coso Range sits on the edge of the Mojave Desert, just east of the Sierra Nevada. It is located within the 1.2 million acres Naval Air Weapons Station (NAWS) China Lake and contains distinctive and spectacular displays of rock art. This rock art fills the lava gorges of Renegade Canyon, Big Petroglyph Canyon, and Sheep Canyon with images of bighorn sheep, anthropomorphs, abstract geometric figures and shield-like figures. These are pecked into the dark basalt and most appear to be between 1000 to 3000 years old, although some may be older and date to the earliest occupation of the region roughly 13,000 years ago. Both the text and photography are by Paul Goldsmith, an acclaimed cinematographer. This project is highly visual in nature and provides a photographic tour of the canyons and rock art for those that will never have a chance to visit them"--Provided by publisher.@BrianTHeligman @davidsuculum Ah!! Yes...! But have you read The Talking Stone? Such an underrated short story; it is so beautiful. I also tweeted a bunch about The Tragedy of the Moon! My favourite essay collection by Isaac. (Btw I will name all my children Isaac.)
The Art of War
Sun Tzu
The Art of War is composed of only about 6,000 Chinese characters, it is considered by many to be the greatest book on strategy and strategic thinking ever written. . 350F PROFESSIONAL READING LIST.Everything about human strategy can be learned by reading the 'art of war'. Example here of regurgitating very old wisdom: https://t.co/hvi2uxMdar
- Written 2,500 years ago by Chinese general Sun Tzu, The Art of War is a masterpiece of military strategy still in use in war colleges around the world. Yet its principles transcend warfare and have practical applications to all the conflicts and crises we face in our lives?in our workplaces, our families, even within ourselves. Thomas Huynh guides you through Sun Tzu?s masterwork, highlighting principles that encourage a perceptive and spiritual approach to conflict, enabling you to:Prevent conflicts before they arisePeacefully resolve conflicts when they do ariseAct with courage, intelligence and benevolence in adversarial situationsConvert potential enemies into friendsControl your emotions before they control you
@kane This week I read “A sense of where you are” and “the art of war” in a combined 6 hours. You got this dawg!
Where Good Ideas Come from
Steven Johnson
From a coral reef teeming with life to the instant success of YouTube, the author explores what kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas, identifying the seven key principles for generating great notions. By the author of Everything Bad Is Good for You.@scottjenson BTW, if you’ve never read Stephen Johnson’s book on the topic, I highly recommend it. I particularly like the notion of adjacent possibles to explain why multiple ideas arrive simultaneously. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation https://t.co/Gls2skSlE0
Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts
Christopher de Hamel
An extraordinary and beautifully illustrated exploration of the medieval world through twelve manuscripts, from one of the world's leading experts. Winner of The Wolfson History Prize and The Duff Cooper Prize. A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Book Gift Guide Pick! Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a captivating examination of twelve illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. Noted authority Christopher de Hamel invites the reader into intimate conversations with these texts to explore what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and about the modern world, too. In so doing, de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, and collectors. He traces the elaborate journeys that these exceptionally precious artifacts have made through time and shows us how they have been copied, how they have been embroiled in politics, how they have been regarded as objects of supreme beauty and as symbols of national identity, and who has owned them or lusted after them (and how we can tell). From the earliest book in medieval England to the incomparable Book of Kells to the oldest manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, these encounters tell a narrative of intellectual culture and art over the course of a millennium. Two of the manuscripts visited are now in libraries of North America, the Morgan Library in New York and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Part travel book, part detective story, part conversation with the reader, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts allows us to experience some of the greatest works of art in our culture to give us a different perspective on history and on how we come by knowledge.Spent last night in major book crush. I was reminded of all the cool accidental orthography revolutions caused by monks like the French -x plural, which happened because they were tired copying in the dark and overcrossed the -s at the bottom 🤗💛✨ Santa rocks! https://t.co/xlsAtwvgBS
These Truths
Jill Lepore
The challenge of retelling five hundred years of American history in a single volume has been so daunting that hardly any historian has attempted it in decades. When Jill Lepore's New York Times best-selling These Truths appeared in 2018, critics quickly hailed it as a classic--appealing not only to academics, but to thousands of astonished general readers. Picking up the book out of a feeling of civic duty, they opened its pages to discover a different kind of writing, and what the Washington Post called "an honest reckoning with America's past"--a story filled with women and men and people of every color and religion, one that wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. With These Truths, Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.I’ve read a lot of books about history over the years, and These Truths by Jill Lepore is the most honest and unflinching account of the American story I’ve ever seen. It’s also one of the most beautifully written. https://t.co/fYfIFLrmrq
These Truths
Jill Lepore
The challenge of retelling five hundred years of American history in a single volume has been so daunting that hardly any historian has attempted it in decades. When Jill Lepore's New York Times best-selling These Truths appeared in 2018, critics quickly hailed it as a classic--appealing not only to academics, but to thousands of astonished general readers. Picking up the book out of a feeling of civic duty, they opened its pages to discover a different kind of writing, and what the Washington Post called "an honest reckoning with America's past"--a story filled with women and men and people of every color and religion, one that wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. With These Truths, Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.First, four non-fiction books I couldn't put down, by @geneweingarten, @MonicaHesse, @LisaTaddeo and Jill Lepore https://t.co/kCwnsNcaEr
Three Women
Lisa Taddeo
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 INDIE NEXT PICK A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post * NPR * The Atlantic * New York Public Library * Vanity Fair * PBS * Time * Economist * Entertainment Weekly * Financial Times * Shelf Awareness * Guardian * Sunday Times * BBC * Esquire * Good Housekeeping * Elle * Real Simple “THIS IS THE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR. This is it. This is the one...It blew the top of my head off and I haven’t been able to stop thinking or talking about it since.” —Elizabeth Gilbert “Taddeo spent eight years reporting this groundbreaking book...Breathtaking...Staggeringly intimate.” —Entertainment Weekly “A breathtaking and important book…What a fine thing it is to be enthralled by another writer’s sentences. To be stunned by her intellect and heart.” —Cheryl Strayed A riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of reporting. Hailed as “a dazzling achievement” (Los Angeles Times) and “riveting page-turner that explores desire, heartbreak, and infatuation in all its messy, complicated nuance” (The Washington Post), Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women has captivated readers, booksellers, and critics—and topped bestseller lists—worldwide. In suburban Indiana we meet Lina, a homemaker and mother of two whose marriage, after a decade, has lost its passion. Starved for affection, Lina battles daily panic attacks and, after reconnecting with an old flame through social media, embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming. In North Dakota we meet Maggie, a seventeen-year-old high school student who allegedly has a clandestine physical relationship with her handsome, married English teacher; the ensuing criminal trial will turn their quiet community upside down. Finally, in an exclusive enclave of the Northeast, we meet Sloane—a gorgeous, successful, and refined restaurant owner—who is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women. Based on years of immersive reporting and told with astonishing frankness and immediacy, Three Women is both a feat of journalism and a triumph of storytelling, brimming with nuance and empathy. “A work of deep observation, long conversations, and a kind of journalistic alchemy” (Kate Tuttle, NPR), Three Women introduces us to three unforgettable women—and one remarkable writer—whose experiences remind us that we are not alone.First, four non-fiction books I couldn't put down, by @geneweingarten, @MonicaHesse, @LisaTaddeo and Jill Lepore https://t.co/kCwnsNcaEr
The Ones We've Been Waiting For
Charlotte Alter
There are now 26 millennials in congress - a fivefold increase gained in the last midterms. They're governing over Midwestern cities and college towns, sitting on city councils and running for state legislatures. Some of them have been in office for a few years; one of them is running for president. In The Ones We've been Waiting For, TIME correspondent Charlotte Alter defines the class of young leaders who are remaking the nation, and what America will look like when they're in charge."Millennials in politics" is my fave topic but even if it wasn't I'd still tell you to get @CharlotteAlter's book. She's an incredible writer & the folks she covers (@AOC! @SvanteMyrick! @HaleyLive! @LaurenUnderwood! @EricLesser & more) are so compelling. https://t.co/B8AqU8J9lz?
Nixonland
Rick Perlstein
Told with urgency and sharp political insight, Nixonland recaptures America's turbulent 1960s and early 1970s and reveals how Richard Nixon rose from the political grave to seize and hold the presidency. Perlstein's epic account begins in the blood and fire of the 1965 Watts riots, nine months after Lyndon Johnson's historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater appeared to herald a permanent liberal consensus in the United States. Yet the next year, scores of liberals were tossed out of Congress, America was more divided than ever, and a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard Nixon. Between 1965 and 1972, America experienced no less than a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know now was born. It was the era not only of Nixon, Johnson, Spiro Agnew, Hubert H. Humphrey, George McGovern, Richard J. Daley, and George Wallace but Abbie Hoffman, Ronald Reagan, Angela Davis, Ted Kennedy, Charles Manson, John Lindsay, and Jane Fonda. There are tantalizing glimpses of Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Jesse Jackson, John Kerry, and even of two ambitious young men named Karl Rove and William Clinton -- and a not so ambitious young man named George W. Bush. Cataclysms tell the story of Nixonland: -Angry blacks burning down their neighborhoods in cities across the land as white suburbanites defend home and hearth with shotguns -The student insurgency over the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention -The fissuring of the Democratic Party into warring factions manipulated by the “dirty tricks” of Nixon and his Committee to Re-Elect the President -Richard Nixon pledging a new dawn of national unity, governing more divisively than any president before him, then directing a criminal conspiracy, the Watergate cover-up, from the Oval Office Then, in November 1972, Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and resentment born of America's turmoil, was reelected in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's 1964 victory, not only setting the stage for his dramatic 1974 resignation but defining the terms of the ideological divide that characterizes America today. Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful narrative, Rick Perlstein's magisterial account of how America divided confirms his place as one of our country's most celebrated historians.@andrewchen Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
Gordon S. Wood
Examines colonial society and the transformations in colonial life that resulted from the republican tendencies brought to the surface by the RevolutionI’ve found myself recommending this book a lot recently: the radicalism of the American revolution https://t.co/xAZFB1ty5P The revolution changed how we see: Aristocracy vs merchant class Old money vs new money Educated vs laborer (The same themes and attitudes exist today.)
Skunk Works
Ben R. Rich
This classic history of America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies is "a gripping technothriller in which the technology is real" (New York Times Book Review). From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, Skunk Works is the true story of America's most secret and successful aerospace operation. As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of cold war confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement against fantastic odds. Here are up-close portraits of the maverick band of scientists and engineers who made the Skunk Works so renowned. Filled with telling personal anecdotes and high adventure, with narratives from the CIA and from Air Force pilots who flew the many classified, risky missions, this book is a riveting portrait of the most spectacular aviation triumphs of the twentieth century. "Thoroughly engrossing." --Los Angeles Times Book Review@yourMTLbroker @morganhousel Creativity Inc, Only the Paranoid Survive, Skunk Works.
Leadership
Doris Kearns Goodwin
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “After five decades of magisterial output, Doris Kearns Goodwin leads the league of presidential historians. Insight is her imprint.”—USA TODAY “A book like Leadership should help us raise our expectations of our national leaders, our country and ourselves.”—The Washington Post “We can only hope that a few of Goodwin’s many readers will find in her subjects’ examples a margin of inspiration and a resolve to steer the country to a better place.”—The New York Times Book Review In this culmination of five decades of acclaimed studies in presidential history, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin offers an illuminating exploration of the early development, growth, and exercise of leadership. Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader? In Leadership, Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)—to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entries into public life, we encounter them at a time when their paths were filled with confusion, fear, and hope. Leadership tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to shatter forever their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times. No common pattern describes the trajectory of leadership. Although set apart in background, abilities, and temperament, these men shared a fierce ambition and a deep-seated resilience that enabled them to surmount uncommon hardships. At their best, all four were guided by a sense of moral purpose. At moments of great challenge, they were able to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others. This seminal work provides an accessible and essential road map for aspiring and established leaders in every field. In today’s polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in times of apprehension and fracture take on a singular urgency.@sunnyrjuneja Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Fish That Ate the Whale
Rich Cohen
@jgruch006489 @RitholtzWealth nice! Hard to choose but I'd recommend either Creativity Inc or The Fish That Ate the Whale.
The End Is Always Near
Dan Carlin
A journey back in time that explores what happened—and what could have happened—from creator of the wildly-popular podcast Hardcore History and 2019 winner of the iHeartRadio Best History Podcast Award. Dan Carlin has created a new way to think about the past. His mega-hit podcast, Hardcore History, is revered for its unique blend of high drama, enthralling narration, and Twilight Zone-style twists. Carlin humanizes the past, wondering about things that didn’t happen but might have, and compels his listeners to “walk a mile in that other guy’s historical moccasins.” A political commentator, Carlin approaches history like a magician, employing completely unorthodox and always entertaining ways of re-looking at what we think we know about wars, empires, and leaders across centuries and millennia. But what happens to the everyman caught in the gears of history? Carlin asks the questions, poses the arguments, and explores the facts to find out. Inspired by his podcast, Hardcore History challenges the way we look at the past and ourselves. In this absorbing compendium, Carlin embarks on a whole new set of stories and major cliffhangers that will keep readers enthralled. Idiosyncratic and erudite, offbeat yet profound, Hardcore History examines issues that are rarely presented, and makes the past immediately relevant to our very turbulent present.Quite enjoying Dan Carlin's new book "The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses" https://t.co/lVy9eIzUpu , and ofc also a big fan of his Hardcore History podcasts. Has a real passion and talent for making history come alive.
- skilled in geometry, ingenious devices (!lival), music and astronomy. According to Ibn al-Nad!m and Ibn Khallikän their weakest subject was astronamy, but this seems to conflict with the opinions of Ibn Yunus and al-BIrun!, hoth good judges, who spoke highly of the accuracy of the Banu Musa's astronomical observations. Mul)ammad, who was the most influential of the brothers, specialised in gcomctry and astronomy, and excellcd Al)mad in all the sciences except in the construction of ingenious devices. AI-l: Iasan was a brilliant geometrician with aretenlive memoryand great powers of deduction. A rival onee tried to discredit him in front of al-Ma'mun hy saying that al- l: Iasan had read only six of the thirteen books of Euclid's Elements. AI-l: Iasan replied by saying that it was unnecessary for him to read the remainder because he could arrive at the answers to any of Euclid's problem s by deduction. AI-Ma'mun acknowledged al-l: Iasan 's skill, but did not excuse him, saying: "laziness has prevented you from 2 reading the whole ofit-it is to geometry as the Ictters a, b, t, 111 are to speech and writing. " (H. 264). AI-l: Iasan is rarely mentioned by name elsewhere in the sources and may have preferred to devote his time to scholarship, whereas his brothers were involved in a variety of undertakings. At the time of their entry into the House of Wisdom the Banu Musil were paar and needy (H.
@ukkahamty @n2cjn And remember also the Banū Mūsā brothers, and their magnificent work, The Book of Ingenious Devices from around 800 AD. https://t.co/o85fMCT4JG
Generations
Neil Howe
Hailed by national leaders as politically diverse as former Vice President Al Gore and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Generations has been heralded by reviewers as a brilliant, if somewhat unsettling, reassessment of where America is heading. William Strauss and Neil Howe posit the history of America as a succession of generational biographies, beginning in 1584 and encompassing every-one through the children of today. Their bold theory is that each generation belongs to one of four types, and that these types repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern. The vision of Generations allows us to plot a recurring cycle in American history -- a cycle of spiritual awakenings and secular crises -- from the founding colonists through the present day and well into this millenium. Generations is at once a refreshing historical narrative and a thrilling intuitive leap that reorders not only our history books but also our expectations for the twenty-first century.@mcrate_s @PavelASamsonov @peterme I do highly recommend the book GENERATIONS. It's pretty interesting about the cycles (and resulting characteristics) of the repeating four types. https://t.co/qqyZzllKcO
My Brother Ron
Clayton E. Cramer
America started a grand experiment in the 1960s: deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. The consequences were very destructive: homelessness; a degradation of urban life; increases in violent crime rates; increasing death rates for the mentally ill. My Brother Ron tells the story of deinstitutionalization from two points of view: what happened to the author's older brother, part of the first generation of those who became mentally ill after deinstitutionalization, and a detailed history of how and why America went down this path. My Brother Ron examines the multiple strands that came together to create the perfect storm that was deinstitutionalization: a well-meaning concern about the poor conditions of many state mental hospitals; a giddy optimism by the psychiatric profession in the ability of new drugs to cure the mentally ill; a rigid ideological approach to due process that ignored that the beneficiaries would end up starving to death or dying of exposure.@rezendi https://t.co/sZXbB5Emf7 https://t.co/tDr5Y6gK0Y
Coromandel
Charles Allen
COROMANDEL. A name which has been long applied by Europeans to the Northern Tamil Country, or (more comprehensively) to the eastern coast of the Peninsula of India. This is the India highly acclaimed historian Charles Allen visits in this fascinating book. Coromandel journeys south, exploring the less well known, often neglected and very different history and identity of the pre-Aryan Dravidian south. During Allen's exploration of the Indian south he meets local historians, gurus and politicians and with their help uncovers some extraordinary stories about the past. His sweeping narrative takes in the archaeology, religion, linguistics and anthropology of the region - and how these have influenced contemporary politics. Known for his vivid storytelling, for decades Allen has travelled the length and breadth of India, revealing the spirit of the sub-continent through its history and people. In Coromandel, he moves through modern-day India, discovering as much about the present as he does about the past.@PhadkeTai Coromandel by Charles Allen
How History Gets Things Wrong
Alex Rosenberg
"This trade book takes on the widely-shared belief that learning the history of something always contributes to understanding it, is often the best way to do so, and sometimes is the only way. The aim is to explain away these three beliefs, to show why historical narrative is always, always wrong, not just incomplete or inaccurate or unfounded, but mistaken the way Ptolemaic astronomy or Phlogiston chemistry is wrong. The resources employed to do this are those of evolutionary anthropology, cognitive science, and most of all neuroscience. Much of the book reports Nobel Prize winning advances in neuroscience in ways that are accessible to the non-specialist and reveals their relevance for our fatal attraction to stories. Although framed as a searching critique of historical narrative as path to understanding and knowledge, the book also provides a report of the current state of play of research in cognitive social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and the study of the brain at the level of neural detail"--@morganhousel You ever read this book? It claims there have been 40k books written about Lincoln https://t.co/87nFe2Ambs
The Man Who Invented Fidel
Anthony DePalma
In 1957, Herbert L.Matthews of the New York Times, then considered one of the premiere foreign correspondents of his time, tracked down Fidel Castro in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains and returned with what was considered the scoop of the century. His heroic portrayal of Castro, who was then believed dead, had a powerful effect on American perceptions of Cuba, both in and out of the government, and profoundly influenced the fall of the Batista regime. When Castro emerged as a Soviet-backed dictator, Matthews became a scapegoat; his paper turned on him, his career foundered, and he was accused of betraying his country. In this fascinating book, New York Times reporter DePalma investigates the Matthews case to reveal how it contains the story not just of one newspaperman but of an age, not just how Castro came to power but how America determines who its enemies are. He re-creates the atmosphere of revolutionary Cuba and Cold War America, and clarifies the facts of Castro's ascension and political evolution from the many myths that have sprung up around them. Through a dramatic, ironic, in ways tragic story, The Man Who Invented Fidel offers provocative insights into Cuban politics, the Cuban-American relationship, and the many difficult balancing acts of responsible journalism.“[NYT reporter Herbert Matthews’] heroic portrayal of Castro, who was then believed dead, had a powerful effect on American perceptions of Cuba, both in and out of the government, and profoundly influenced the fall of the Batista regime.” https://t.co/0tE8pe8FWL
The Lessons of History
Will Durant
What is one book that is a quick and easy read, but contains a tremendous amount of wisdom? A few examples: - The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant - Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - Manual for Living by Epictetus - A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy What else?
The Collaboration
Ben Urwand
Explores "how Hollywood and especially the big studios went along with German demands to censor movies not only before but especially after the Nazi seizure of power"--Back of dust jacket."American companies cannot afford to lose the German market, no matter the inconvenience of personnel shifts."—Variety in May 1933, as the Nazi govt demanded Hollywood studios remove Jews from their German offices Censorship, too. Read Urwand's book, "The Collaboration."
Wittgenstein's Vienna
Allan Janik
This is a remarkable book about a man (perhaps the most important and original philosopher of our age), a society (the corrupt Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of dissolution), and a city (Vienna, with its fin-de siecle gaiety and corrosive melancholy). The central figure in this study of a crumbling society that gave birth to the modern world is Wittgenstein, the brilliant and gifted young thinker. With others, including Freud, Viktor Adler, and Arnold Schoenberg, he forged his ideas in a classical revolt against the stuffy, doomed, and moralistic lives of the old regime. As a portrait of Wittgenstein, the book is superbly realized; it is even better as a portrait of the age, with dazzling and unusual parallels to our own confused society. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have acted on a striking premise: an understanding of prewar Vienna, Wittgenstein s native city, will make it easier to comprehend both his work and our own problems .This is an independent work containing much that is challenging, new, and useful. New York Times Book Review."Despite being a fan of Mokyr, only now getting to https://t.co/zYRZ3cyKeo, and it's very good. Sorta related, have also been enjoying https://t.co/h0kDbN68dh. Both do a nice job as biographies of particularly fertile places/times.
Polio
David M. Oshinsky
A history of the 1950s polio epidemic that caused panic in the United States examines the competition between Salk and Sabin to find the first vaccine and its implications for such issues as government testing of new drugs and manufacturers' liability.Stories about how successful FDR was at keeping his paralysis out of public view are wild. This could never happen today with any politician. https://t.co/VldlHsWOzQ https://t.co/OtLn6ZVD8N
Season of the Witch
David Talbot
Salon founder David Talbot chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher from backwater city to thriving metropolis.@jacobkostecki Read Season of the Witch
A History of the Twentieth Century
Martin Gilbert
Martin Gilbert, author of the multivolume biography of Winston Churchill and other brilliant works of history, chronicles world events year by year, from the dawn of aviation to the flourishing technology age, taking us through World War I to the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt as president of the United States and Hider as chancellor of Germany. He continues on to document wars in South Africa, China, Ethiopia, Spain, Korea, Vietnam, and Bosnia, as well as apartheid, the arms race, the moon landing, and the beginnings of the computer age, while interspersing the influence of art, literature, music, and religion throughout this vivid work. A rich, textured look at war, celebration, suffering, life, death, and renewal in the century gone by, this volume is nothing less than extraordinary.@a_ray88 This is probably the most complete telling. https://t.co/blhQ0tWTPU
Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated
Robert D. Putnam
Updated to include a new chapter about the influence of social media and the Internet—the 20th anniversary edition of Bowling Alone remains a seminal work of social analysis, and its examination of what happened to our sense of community remains more relevant than ever in today’s fractured America. Twenty years, ago, Robert D. Putnam made a seemingly simple observation: once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolized a significant social change that became the basis of the acclaimed bestseller, Bowling Alone, which The Washington Post called “a very important book” and Putnam, “the de Tocqueville of our generation.” Bowling Alone surveyed in detail Americans’ changing behavior over the decades, showing how we had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether it’s with the PTA, church, clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. In the revised edition of his classic work, Putnam shows how our shrinking access to the “social capital” that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing still poses a serious threat to our civic and personal health, and how these consequences have a new resonance for our divided country today. He includes critical new material on the pervasive influence of social media and the internet, which has introduced previously unthinkable opportunities for social connection—as well as unprecedented levels of alienation and isolation. At the time of its publication, Putnam’s then-groundbreaking work showed how social bonds are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction, and how the loss of social capital is felt in critical ways, acting as a strong predictor of crime rates and other measures of neighborhood quality of life, and affecting our health in other ways. While the ways in which we connect, or become disconnected, have changed over the decades, his central argument remains as powerful and urgent as ever: mending our frayed social capital is key to preserving the very fabric of our society.@SirRawlins Read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. One of my favorite books
Women of the Klan
Kathleen M. Blee
Ignorant. Brutal. Male. One of these stereotypes of the Ku Klux Klan offers a misleading picture. In Women of the Klan, sociologist Kathleen M. Blee dismantles the popular notion that politically involved women are always inspired by pacifism, equality, and justice. In her new preface, Blee reflects on how recent scholarship on gender and right-wing extremism suggests new ways to understand women's place in the 1920s Klan's crusade for white and Christian supremacy.@Noahpinion @DKThomp I don't think we have a canonical study of the new white supremacists, yet, but historical studies show a lot of wanting to maintain supremacy for reasons of their own interests (as opposed to just fanatics with personal voids). Classic on this: https://t.co/pZtqPFc2T4
The Art of War
Sun Tzu
The Art of War is composed of only about 6,000 Chinese characters, it is considered by many to be the greatest book on strategy and strategic thinking ever written. . 350F PROFESSIONAL READING LIST.There are very few modern books I'd classify as works of genius, as being on par with Machiavelli's 'The Prince' or Sun Tzu's 'Art of War'. But Eric Hoffer's 'The True Believer' is one. And now supremely timely. Written by a lifelong tramp and longshoreman, no less. https://t.co/lIIuMfze46
The Forgotten Man
Amity Shlaes
It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression. Only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand how the nation endured. These are the people at the heart of Amity Shlaes's insightful and inspiring history of one of the most crucial events of the twentieth century. In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, one of the nation's most respected economic commentators, offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. Rejecting the old emphasis on the New Deal, she turns to the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans, and shows how through brave leadership they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation. Some of those figures were well known, at least in their day—Andrew Mellon, the Greenspan of the era; Sam Insull of Chicago, hounded as a scapegoat. But there were also unknowns: the Schechters, a family of butchers in Brooklyn who dealt a stunning blow to the New Deal; Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous in the name of showing that small communities could help themselves; and Father Divine, a black charismatic who steered his thousands of followers through the Depression by preaching a Gospel of Plenty. Shlaes also traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers themselves as they discovered their errors. She shows how both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt failed to understand the prosperity of the 1920s and heaped massive burdens on the country that more than offset the benefit of New Deal programs. The real question about the Depression, she argues, is not whether Roosevelt ended it with World War II. It is why the Depression lasted so long. From 1929 to 1940, federal intervention helped to make the Depression great—in part by forgetting the men and women who sought to help one another. Authoritative, original, and utterly engrossing, The Forgotten Man offers an entirely new look at one of the most important periods in our history. Only when we know this history can we understand the strength of American character today.@fmbutt I agree that those pressures were present. I find books like this useful as an alternate perspective on the era: https://t.co/6ZW8w2HHsI
Trick Mirror
Jia Tolentino
A breakout writer at The New Yorker examines the fractures at the center of contemporary culture with verve, deftness, and intellectual ferocity--for readers who've wondered what Susan Sontag would have been like if she had brain damage from the internet. "A whip-smart, challenging book."--Zadie Smith Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling collection of nine entirely original essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating an unparalleled stylistic potency and critical dexterity. Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine's journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino's sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet. Advance praise for Trick Mirror "Jia Tolentino is the best young essayist at work in the United States, one I've consistently admired and learned from, and I was exhilarated to get a whole lot of her at once in Trick Mirror. In these nine essays, she rethinks troubling ingredients of modern life, from the internet to mind-altering drugs to wedding culture. All through the book, single sentences flash like lightning to show something familiar in a startling way, but she also builds extended arguments with her usual, unusual blend of lyricism and skepticism. In the end, we have a picture of America that was as missing as it was needed."--Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to MeTrick Mirror is one of those books that is so good you are jealous you didn’t write it. @jiatolentino https://t.co/ETZesyqSWG
Reclaiming Patriotism
Amitai Etzioni
Amitai Etzioni has made his reputation by transcending unwieldy, and even dangerous, binaries such as left/right or globalism/nativism. In his new book, Etzioni calls for nothing less than a social transformation--led by a new social movement--to save our world's democracies, currently under threat in today's volatile and profoundly divided political environments. The United States, along with scores of other nations, has seen disturbing challenges to the norms and institutions of our democratic society, particularly in the rise of exclusive forms of nationalism and populism. Focusing on nations as the core elements of global communities, Etzioni envisions here a patriotic movement that rebuilds rather than splits communities and nations. Beginning with moral dialogues that seek to find common ground in our values and policies, Etzioni sets out a path toward cultivating a "good" form of nationalism based on this shared understanding of the common good. Working to broaden civic awareness and participation, this approach seeks to suppress neither identity politics nor special interests in its efforts to lead us to work productively with others. Reclaiming Patriotism offers a hopeful and pragmatic solution to our current crisis in democracy--a patriotic movement that could have a transformative, positive impact on our foreign policy, the world order, and the future of capitalism.Reclaiming Patriotism, Important new book by Amitai Etzioni https://t.co/wBZDYb2QQj free on Kindle, and the hardcover is on Amazon
Gratitude
William Frank Buckley
The conservative columnist renews his call for a year of voluntary national service for young people eighteen and over, in areas such as health, day care, and the environment, to strengthen their feeling and appreciation for their nation@argyris You know who wrote an entire book about that idea? William F. Buckley. https://t.co/9YT5Cz6pdI
The Fish That Ate the Whale
Rich Cohen
@Tay_Murph The Fish That Ate The Whale
One-dimensional Man
Herbert Marcuse
The influential political theorist attacks the uncritical and conformist acceptance of existing social structures and behaviors, arguing that members of Western societies must reassert their individuality and personal freedom against the oppression of the status quo.@cheriehu42 Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man
Ducks
William Cook
This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.@DRMacIver Bhatia's "Matrix Analysis" and Cooks' "Ducks: And How to Make Them Pay" seem like a promising combo.
Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate
Alexandra Minna Stern
For better or worse, every time I read "Proud Boys" I think of "Special Boys" from #PerpetualGraceLtd
The Triumph of Christianity
Bart D. Ehrman
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the bestselling authority on early Christianity, the story of how Christianity grew from a religion of twenty or so peasants in rural Galilee to the dominant religion in the West in less than four hundred years. Christianity didn't have to become the dominant religion in the West. It easily could have remained a sect of Judaism fated to have the historical importance of the Sadducees or the Essenes. In The Triumph of Christianity, Bart Ehrman, a master explainer of Christian history, texts, and traditions, shows how a religion whose first believers were twenty or so illiterate day laborers in a remote part of the empire became the official religion of Rome, converting some thirty million people in just four centuries. The Triumph of Christianity combines deep knowledge and meticulous research in an eye-opening, immensely readable narrative that upends the way we think about the single most important cultural transformation our world has ever seen--one that revolutionized art, music, literature, philosophy, ethics, economics, and law.@GlennGalen It’s discussed in https://t.co/9k2BuemLyq
The Fish That Ate the Whale
Rich Cohen
Highly recommend The Fish That Ate The Whale. https://t.co/QNhoBrh2QQ Recommended to me by @BrentBeshore. An absolutely wild book spanning biography + history + geopolitics + business + light horticulture.
The Emperor of All Maladies
Siddhartha Mukherjee
An assessment of cancer addresses both the courageous battles against the disease and the misperceptions and hubris that have compromised modern understandings, providing coverage of such topics as ancient-world surgeries and the development of present-day treatments. Reprint. Best-selling winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Includes reading-group guide.Midnight in Chernobyl
Adam Higginbotham
A New York Times Best Book of the Year A Time Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Finalist One of NPR’s Best Books of 2019 Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s definitive, years-in-the-making account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster—and a powerful investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the twentieth century’s greatest disasters. Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham has written a harrowing and compelling narrative which brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a masterful nonfiction thriller, and the definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth. Midnight in Chernobyl is an indelible portrait of one of the great disasters of the twentieth century, of human resilience and ingenuity, and the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will—lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.Outstanding. Terrifying. Extremely detailed and technical. It’s changed my mind about many things. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster https://t.co/vMPsugiNKh
The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin
All the grief, grit, and unassailable dignity of the civil rights movement are evoked in this illustrated edition of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, with photographs by Steve Schapiro. Together, Baldwin's frank account of the black experience and Schapiro's vital images offer poetic and potent testimony to one of the most important...@hellenomwando That whole piece is incorporated into The Fire Next Time. It’s brilliant.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe
Describes the escapades of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, a drug-saturated group of hippies who get in and out of trouble with the law.@argyris And then 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' to understand NorCal hippie culture.
The High Cost of Good Intentions
John F. Cogan
This book traces the evolution of U.S. federal entitlement programs from the Revolutionary War to modern times to identify and understand the common economic and political forces that have caused their nearly continuous growth.@rogerdickey Have you read https://t.co/fGQvXKHmom? @rfradin recommended it to me a while ago
The Age of Gold
H. W. Brands
A history of the people and commercial imperatives that contributed to the California gold rush discusses the massive influx of hundreds of thousands of people to the area, which became a state in record time, in a volume set against the political climate and national issues of the period. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.Others along these lines: George Lucas: A Life https://t.co/y93cYaDLiG The Age of Gold https://t.co/ffxGpgEeSt And I'm excited to get to Selling Sounds https://t.co/b1ErnB551j
The Image
Daniel Joseph Boorstin
For more on our pseudo-event culture, Boorstin's 'The Image' is a brilliant exploration of how that culture started with TV. https://t.co/N7Pe3ajkIy
Angel in the Whirlwind
Benson Bobrick
Angel in the Whirlwind is the epic tale of the American Revolution, from its roots among tax-weary colonists to the triumphant Declaration of Independence and eventual victory and liberty, recounted by Benson Bobrick, lauded by The New York Times as “perhaps the most interesting historian writing in America today.” Overwhelmed with debt following its victory in the French and Indian Wars, England began imposing harsh new tariffs and taxes on its colonists in the 1760s. Rebellion against these measures soon erupted into war. Bobrick thrillingly describes all the major battles, from Lexington and Concord to the dramatic siege of Yorktown, when the British flag was finally lowered before patriot guns. At the same time he weaves together social and political history along with the military history, bringing to life not only the charismatic leaders of the independence movement, but also their lesser-known compatriots, both patriot and loyalist, English and American, whose voices vividly convey the urgency of war. Illuminated by fresh insight, Angel in the Whirlwind is a dramatic narrative of our nation’s birth, in all its passion and glory.Reminder that the American Revolution was no sure thing. In fact it was a longshot that almost collapsed multiple times. ANGEL IN THE WHIRLWIND is the best book I ever read on the War of Independence. Gripping read. #July4th https://t.co/IUoB87ofXF
The Transparent Society
David Brin
Argues that the privacy of individuals actually hampers accountability, which is the foundation of any civilized society and that openness is far more liberating than secrecy@juliagalef @dgkimpton David Brin's book "The Transparent Society" accepts that logic and explores the consequences of a society without privacy. It's old - mid-90s - but I enjoyed the exploration.
How History Gets Things Wrong
Alex Rosenberg
"This trade book takes on the widely-shared belief that learning the history of something always contributes to understanding it, is often the best way to do so, and sometimes is the only way. The aim is to explain away these three beliefs, to show why historical narrative is always, always wrong, not just incomplete or inaccurate or unfounded, but mistaken the way Ptolemaic astronomy or Phlogiston chemistry is wrong. The resources employed to do this are those of evolutionary anthropology, cognitive science, and most of all neuroscience. Much of the book reports Nobel Prize winning advances in neuroscience in ways that are accessible to the non-specialist and reveals their relevance for our fatal attraction to stories. Although framed as a searching critique of historical narrative as path to understanding and knowledge, the book also provides a report of the current state of play of research in cognitive social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and the study of the brain at the level of neural detail"--Star Spangled Scandal
Chris DeRose
A HISTORY BOOK CLUB BESTSELLER "True crime fans will relish this thoughtful look at a murder and its aftermath that riveted a nation." — Publisher's Weekly book review "There may be no two more addicting topics to people right now than politics and true crime. Star Spangled Scandal delves into both of these—with a heavy dose of sex added in." — NPR book review “… and sir I do assure you he has as much the use of your wife as you have.” — From an anonymous note delivered to Congressman Daniel Sickles on February 24, 1859 It is two years before the Civil War, and Congressman Daniel Sickles and his lovely wife Teresa are popular fixtures in Washington, D.C. society. Their house sits on Lafayette Square across from White House grounds, and the president himself is godfather to the Sickles’ six-year-old daughter. Because Congressman Sickles is frequently out of town, he trusts his friend, U.S. Attorney Philip Barton Key—son of Francis Scott Key—to escort the beautiful Mrs. Sickles to parties in his absence. Revelers in D.C. are accustomed to the sight of the congressman’s wife with the tall, Apollo-like Philip Barton Key, who is considered “the handsomest man in all Washington society… foremost among the popular men of the capital.” Then one day an anonymous note sets into motion a tragic course of events that culminates in a shocking murder in broad daylight in Lafayette Square. This is the riveting true story of the murder and trial that sparked a national debate on madness, male honor, female virtue, fidelity, and the rule of law. Bestselling author Chris DeRose (The Presidents’ War) uses diary entries, letters, newspaper accounts, and eyewitness testimonies to bring the characters to thrilling life in this antebellum true crime history.A timely jaunt through history on a picture perfect Sunday accompanying New York Times bestselling author and friend @chrisderose to Gettysburg to discuss his new book 'Star Spangled Scandal' on @cspan BookTV. https://t.co/BL2KCbABJp
The Age of Gold
H. W. Brands
A history of the people and commercial imperatives that contributed to the California gold rush discusses the massive influx of hundreds of thousands of people to the area, which became a state in record time, in a volume set against the political climate and national issues of the period. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.@DevRelCallum A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance https://t.co/FYHa78VJ9r The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream https://t.co/HTxsDGKG6c
The Culture of Narcissism
Christopher Lasch
When The Culture of Narcissism was first published in 1979, Christopher Lasch was hailed as a "biblical prophet" (Time). Lasch's identification of narcissism as not only an individual ailment but also a burgeoning social epidemic was groundbreaking. His diagnosis of American culture is even more relevant today, predicting the limitless expansion of the anxious and grasping narcissistic self into every part of American life. The Culture of Narcissism offers an astute and urgent analysis of what we need to know in these troubled times.Here's my soundcloud... Actually, fuck that. Go read Christopher Lasch's 'The Culture of Narcissism' instead. He called our current insanity in the 80s/90s, in tight, evocative prose. 'Revolt of the Elites' also called our current political moment. https://t.co/FgBPesNddg
The Cultural Revolution
Frank Dikötter
The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The Cultural Revolution's goal was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.Great summary of “The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History” Book by Frank Dikötter Review by @gwern HT @sonyaellenmann https://t.co/gzQkhBaxKE https://t.co/8fXVxKT3x2
The Fish That Ate the Whale
Rich Cohen
@SteveBissen Recently finished: Dark Matter by Crouch (first fiction in awhile) The Fish That Ate the Whale by Cohen The Outsiders by Thorndike Currently: Range by @DavidEpstein (comes out this month) Favs: https://t.co/kEcPoKYUiC
Life in the English Country House
Mark Girouard
Based on the author's Slade lectures given at Oxford University in 1975-76.@mckaywrigley White's Medieval Technology and Social Change, Fletcher's Moorish Spain, Johnson's Wing Leader, Girouard's Life in the English Country House, Liddell Hart's The German Generals Talk.
German Generals Talk
Basil H. Hart
The German Generals who survived Hitler's Reich talk over World War II with Capt. Liddell Hart, noted British miltary strategist and writer. They speak as professional soldiers to a man they know and respect. For the first time, answers are revealed to many questions raised during the war. Was Hitler the genius of strategy he seemed to be at first? Why did his Generals never overthrow him? Why did Hitler allow the Dunkirk evacuation? Current interest, of course, focuses on the German Generals' opinion of the Red Army as a fighting force. What did the Russians look like from the German side? How did we look? And what are the advantages and disadvantages under which dictator-controlled armies fight? In vivid, non-technical language, Capt. Liddell Hart reports these interviews and evaluates the vital military lessons of World War II.@mckaywrigley White's Medieval Technology and Social Change, Fletcher's Moorish Spain, Johnson's Wing Leader, Girouard's Life in the English Country House, Liddell Hart's The German Generals Talk.
Wing Leader
Johnnie Johnson
The thrilling story of the top scoring Allied fighter pilot of World War II 'Johnnie' Johnson, who served with Fighter Command squadrons throughout the war, scoring his 38th and final victory in September 1944. From the moment the author joins his first operational Spitfire squadron in August 1940, the reader is taken on an epic journey through the great aerial fighter actions of the war including the Battle of Britain, sweeps across the Channel and over France, Dieppe and Normandy; and finally, operations across the Rhine and into Germany itself.@mckaywrigley White's Medieval Technology and Social Change, Fletcher's Moorish Spain, Johnson's Wing Leader, Girouard's Life in the English Country House, Liddell Hart's The German Generals Talk.
Only Yesterday
Frederick L. Allen
Only Yesterday deals with that delightful decade from the Armistice in November 1918 to the panic and depression of 1929-30. Here is the story of Woodrow Wilson's defeat, the Harding scandals, the Coolidge prosperity, the revolution in manners and morals, the bull market and its smash-up. Allen's lively narrative brings back an endless variety of half-forgotten events, fashions, crazes, and absurdities. Deftly written, with a humorous touch, Only Yesterday traces, beneath the excitements of day-to-day life in the 20s, those currents in national life and thought which are the essence of true history.@willgriffith16 https://t.co/pHt2MyoDnc
The Fish That Ate the Whale
Rich Cohen
@dhaber That’s a top 5 business book for sure. Maybe top 3.
The Age of Gold
H. W. Brands
A history of the people and commercial imperatives that contributed to the California gold rush discusses the massive influx of hundreds of thousands of people to the area, which became a state in record time, in a volume set against the political climate and national issues of the period. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.Book 15 Lesson: California is forever in a Gold Rush: persistently cheerful, energetic, courageous, and teachable, but also careless, hasty, trusting in luck, and blind to our social duties. https://t.co/PJKUUTb9Bi
All the Single Ladies
Rebecca Traister
"Today, only twenty percent of Americans are wed by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960. The Population Reference Bureau calls it a 'dramatic reversal.' [This book presents a] portrait of contemporary American life and how we got here, through the lens of the single American woman, covering class, race, [and] sexual orientation, and filled with ... anecdotes from ... contemporary and historical figures"--bahaha sf, nailed it https://t.co/d1g5VekKRZ
Now It Can Be Told
General Leslie R. Groves
General Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer were the two men chiefly responsible for the building of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, code name "The Manhattan Project." As the ranking military officer in charge of marshalling men and material for what was to be the most ambitious, expensive engineering feat in history, it was General Groves who hired Oppenheimer (with knowledge of his left-wing past), planned facilities that would extract the necessary enriched uranium, and saw to it that nothing interfered with the accelerated research and swift assembly of the weapon.This is his story of the political, logistical, and personal problems of this enormous undertaking which involved foreign governments, sensitive issues of press censorship, the construction of huge plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge, and a race to build the bomb before the Nazis got wind of it. The role of groves in the Manhattan Project has always been controversial. In his new introduction the noted physicist Edward Teller, who was there at Los Alamos, candidly assesses the general's contributions-and Oppenheimer's-while reflecting on the awesome legacy of their work.(2) "Now It Can Be Told: The Story Of The Manhattan Project" - similar read but on the Manhattan Project. I thought I knew the basic outlines but this was a fascinating read.
The Lessons of History
Will Durant
@_TamaraWinter Great question! Impro, The Lessons of History, The Tao of Philosophy, and Class by Fussell It’s not that they’re my very favorite books (although they’re all up there), but also that they’re mercifully short, so as not to be a burden on people.
Bowling Alone
Robert D. Putnam
Shows how changes in work, family structure, women's roles, and other factors have caused people to become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and democratic structures--and how they may reconnect.Just finished reading @RobertDPutnam's Bowling Alone on the collapse and revival of American communities. A lot of interesting history on the creation of groups like PTA. Feels like many tactics can be replicated to build online communities today. https://t.co/4HkdpesBgP
Fiber
Susan Crawford
An illuminating vision of the next information revolution, centered on a fiber-optic infrastructureAt my second book event of the evening, for my friend @scrawford's new book, Fiber, which is about how the US is missing out on one more of the next big tech revolutions. https://t.co/QaPxXX5zNm
From Satori to Silicon Valley
Theodore Roszak
@modernserf a nice chaser to "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" is Theodore Roszak's "From Satori to Silicon Valley" https://t.co/prlLkmjjr5
Man and Technics
Oswald Spengler
In this new and revised edition of Oswald Spengler’s classic, Man and Technics, Spengler makes a number of predictions that today, more than eighty years after the book was first published, have turned out to be remarkably accurate. Spengler predicted that industrialisation would lead to serious environmental problems and that countless species would become extinct. He also predicted that labour from Third World countries would increasingly outcompete Western workers by doing the same work for much lower wages, and that industrial production would therefore move to other parts of the world, such as East Asia, India, and South America. According to Spengler, technology has not only made it possible for man to harness the forces of nature; it has also alienated him from nature. Modern technology now dominates our culture instead of that which is natural and organic. After having made himself the master of nature, man has himself become technology’s slave. ‘The victor, crashed, is dragged to death by the team’, Spengler summarises. Finally, Spengler foresaw that Western man would eventually grow weary of his increasingly artificial lifestyle and begin to hate the civilisation he himself created. There is no way out of this conundrum as the unrelenting progress of technological development cannot be halted. The current high-tech culture of the West is therefore doomed, destined to be consumed from within and destroyed. A time will come, Spengler writes, when our giant cities and skyscrapers have fallen in ruins and lie forgotten ‘just like the palaces of old Memphis and Babylon’. It remains to be seen if this last, and most dire, of Spengler’s prophecies will also come true.Book 8 Lesson: All great discoveries and inventions are expressions of personality by strong minds, not of the utilitarian thinking of the masses. https://t.co/ei2SCVzFuC
Shadow Divers
Robert Kurson
Recounts the 1991 discovery of a sunken German U-boat by two recreational scuba divers, tracing how they devoted the following six years to researching the identities of the submarine and its crew, correcting historical texts, and breaking new grounds in the world of diving along the way. Reprint. 200,000 first printing.@lpolovets Probably the book I’ve recommended more than any other
The Great Upheaval
Jay Winik
It is an era that redefined history. As the 1790s began, a fragile America teetered on the brink of oblivion, Russia towered as a vast imperial power, and France plunged into revolution. But in contrast to the way conventional histories tell it, none of these remarkable events occurred in isolation. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian Jay Winik masterfully illuminates how their fates combined in one extraordinary moment to change the course of civilization. A sweeping, magisterial drama featuring the richest cast of characters ever to walk upon the world stage, including Washington, Jefferson, Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Catherine the Great, The Great Upheaval is a gripping, epic portrait of this tumultuous decade that will forever transform the way we see America's beginnings and our worldI just finished the last of Jay Winik's three books, and he is probably the best U.S. historian I've read. Amazing storyteller. Highly recommended. https://t.co/WyZ9R2AhRG https://t.co/zH2BkhXOjw https://t.co/nLNCpv2Znq
April 1865
Jay Winik
One month in 1865 witnessed the frenzied fall of Richmond, a daring last-ditch Southern plan for guerrilla warfare, Lee's harrowing retreat, and then, Appomattox. It saw Lincoln's assassination just five days later and a near-successful plot to decapitate the Union government, followed by chaos and coup fears in the North, collapsed negotiations and continued bloodshed in the South, and finally, the start of national reconciliation. In the end, April 1865 emerged as not just the tale of the war's denouement, but the story of the making of our nation. Jay Winik offers a brilliant new look at the Civil War's final days that will forever change the way we see the war's end and the nation's new beginning. Uniquely set within the larger sweep of history and filled with rich profiles of outsize figures, fresh iconoclastic scholarship, and a gripping narrative, this is a masterful account of the thirty most pivotal days in the life of the United States.I just finished the last of Jay Winik's three books, and he is probably the best U.S. historian I've read. Amazing storyteller. Highly recommended. https://t.co/WyZ9R2AhRG https://t.co/zH2BkhXOjw https://t.co/nLNCpv2Znq
The Gene
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Prologue: Families -- "The missing science of heredity" 1865-1935 -- "In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts" 1930-1970 -- "The dreams of geneticists" 1970-2001 -- "The proper study of mankind is man" 1970-2005 -- Through the looking glass 2001-2015 -- Post-genome 2015- ... -- Epilogue: Bheda, AbhedaGene editing might be the most important public debate we’re not having right now. Read up on it whenever you have a chance. Even better, read @DrSidMukherjee’s “The Gene.” https://t.co/4qM8faMGkp
The Jasons
Ann Finkbeiner
The Jasons are a well-guarded group of world-class scientists, briefly outed in the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, who have been meeting every summer since 1960 to tackle classified problems that the Defense Department cannot solve. Among many stunning innovations, they helped invent our electronic battlefield and Star Wars missile defense technology, and are now looking into ways to improve our intelligence gathering. Recounting the unknown story of these brilliant, stubbornly independent thinkers, Ann Finkbeiner takes advantage of her unprecedented access to this elite group to explore the uncertain bargains between science and politics. It is a story older than Faust and as timely as tomorrow’s headlines."The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite" - another @patrickc recommendation. Fascinating story of a secretive scientific/military alliance that exists to this day. https://t.co/7JYt7VDPuD
Fantasyland
Kurt Andersen
A razor-sharp thinker offers a new understanding of our post-truth world and explains the American instinct to believe in make-believe, from the Pilgrims to P. T. Barnum to Disneyland to zealots of every stripe . . . to Donald Trump. In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen demonstrates that what's happening in our country today--this strange, post-factual, "fake news" moment we're all living through--is not something entirely new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character and path. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by impresarios and their audiences, by hucksters and their suckers. Believe-whatever-you-want fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries--from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials--our peculiar love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies--every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. Little by little, and then more quickly in the last several decades, the American invent-your-own-reality legacy of the Enlightenment superseded its more sober, rational, and empirical parts. We gave ourselves over to all manner of crackpot ideas and make-believe lifestyles designed to console or thrill or terrify us. In Fantasyland, Andersen brilliantly connects the dots that define this condition, portrays its scale and scope, and offers a fresh, bracing explanation of how our American journey has deposited us here. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand the politics and culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book. "This is an important book--the indispensable book--for understanding America in the age of Trump. It's an eye-opening history filled with brilliant insights, a saga of how we were always susceptible to fantasy, from the Puritan fanatics to the talk-radio and Internet wackos who mix show business, hucksterism, and conspiracy theories."--Walter IsaacsonBest books I read this year: 1944 https://t.co/ApigFBQxxR Rocket Men https://t.co/FtSLdWpzbr Seinfeldia https://t.co/hiM1exhMMI Born Standing Up https://t.co/dMvs2CDocd Fantasyland https://t.co/sn7JhTry8L
Skunk Works
Ben R. Rich
This classic history of America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies is "a gripping technothriller in which the technology is real" (New York Times Book Review). From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, Skunk Works is the true story of America's most secret and successful aerospace operation. As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of cold war confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement against fantastic odds. Here are up-close portraits of the maverick band of scientists and engineers who made the Skunk Works so renowned. Filled with telling personal anecdotes and high adventure, with narratives from the CIA and from Air Force pilots who flew the many classified, risky missions, this book is a riveting portrait of the most spectacular aviation triumphs of the twentieth century. "Thoroughly engrossing." --Los Angeles Times Book Review.@michaelbatnick gave me this book a while ago and I just got around to reading it. Highly recommended. It's a fascinating story of how we built some of the most secretive and advanced military airplanes. https://t.co/pzqLv3iLnz
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond
"Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding human history."—Bill Gates In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.@mattknox @starsandrobots I suspect if you'd read Guns, Sails, and Empires and Plagues and Peoples, little in Guns, Germs, and Steel would surprise you.
- Featuring a foreword by the father of Big History, David Christian, and produced in association with the Big History Institute, Big History provides a comprehensive understanding of the major events that have changed the nature and course of life on the planet we call home. This first fully integrated visual reference on Big History for general readers places humans in the context of our universe, from the Big Bang to virtual reality. Why does the universe work the way it does? Why are stars so big? Why are humans so small? What does it mean to be human? Big History blends geology, biology, physics, anthropology, sociology, and so much more to tell one coherent story, taking us right back to our origins and exploring how a unique series of events led to and then impacted human existence: how everything came to be, where we fit in, and even where we are going. Graphics, artworks, timelines, and at-a-glance overviews make the causes and effects of pivotal events and major thresholds in Big History instantly accessible, and evidence features explain how we know what we know. An additional 64-page reference section provides a more conventional account of events in human history. Placing humans in the context of our universe and revealing how and why we got to where we are today, Big History covers 13.8 billion years of history, from the formation of the universe and the dawn of time to the present day.
@Humphreylol If you like origin of wealth you'll love Big History and Complexity
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Yuval Noah Harari
Just arrived! https://t.co/kYqTwatRp1
A History of Modern Iran
Ervand Abrahamian
In a radical reappraisal of Iran's modern history, Ervand Abrahamian traces the country's traumatic journey from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, through the discovery of oil, imperial interventions, the rule of the Pahlavis, and the birth of the Islamic Republic. The first edition was named the Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2009. This second edition brings the narrative up to date, with the Green uprisings of 2009, the second Ahmadinejad administration, the election of Rouhani, and the Iran nuclear deal. Ervand Abrahamian, who is one of the most distinguished historians writing on Iran today, is a compassionate expositor, and at the heart of the book is the people of Iran, who have endured and survived a century of war and revolution.@BenedictEvans A History of Modern Iran, by Ervand Abrahamian, is good at putting it in the wider context.
Madison and Jefferson
Andrew Burstein
A provocative analysis of the historically pivotal friendship between the third and fourth presidents offers insight into their complex characters while presenting a sobering assessment of how politics were conducted in the country's early years.@TR401 Sooo good. I'm also halfway through Madison & Jefferson, a book the author of White Trash cowrote as a dual biography with another historian.
Rocket Men
Robert Kurson
Shares the inside story of the dangerous Apollo 8 mission, focusing on the lives of astronaut heroes Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, while illuminating the political factors that prompted the decision to risk lives to save the Apollo program and define the space race.Latest reading. https://t.co/nYCVVeU4vP
Blood Moon
John Sedgwick
An astonishing untold story from the nineteenth century—a “riveting…engrossing…‘American Epic’” (The Wall Street Journal) and necessary work of history that reads like Gone with the Wind for the Cherokee. “A vigorous, well-written book that distills a complex history to a clash between two men without oversimplifying” (Kirkus Reviews), Blood Moon is the story of the feud between two rival Cherokee chiefs from the early years of the United States through the infamous Trail of Tears and into the Civil War. Their enmity would lead to war, forced removal from their homeland, and the devastation of a once-proud nation. One of the men, known as The Ridge—short for He Who Walks on Mountaintops—is a fearsome warrior who speaks no English, but whose exploits on the battlefield are legendary. The other, John Ross, is descended from Scottish traders and looks like one: a pale, unimposing half-pint who wears modern clothes and speaks not a word of Cherokee. At first, the two men are friends and allies who negotiate with almost every American president from George Washington through Abraham Lincoln. But as the threat to their land and their people grows more dire, they break with each other on the subject of removal. In Blood Moon, John Sedgwick restores the Cherokee to their rightful place in American history in a dramatic saga that informs much of the country’s mythic past today. Fueled by meticulous research in contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts—and Sedgwick’s own extensive travels within Cherokee lands from the Southeast to Oklahoma—it is “a wild ride of a book—fascinating, chilling, and enlightening—that explains the removal of the Cherokee as one of the central dramas of our country” (Ian Frazier). Populated with heroes and scoundrels of all varieties, this is a richly evocative portrait of the Cherokee that is destined to become the defining book on this extraordinary people.It seems to be a good book. Strange that the white people are not better after having it so long." Cherokee chief Drowning Bear on The Book of Matthew, not long before the Trail of Tears. From the wonderful Blood Moon, by John Sedgewick. https://t.co/QNI9UnUDPm
The futurists
Alvin Toffler
@sknthla I really enjoyed this a few years ago. https://t.co/ed5s0PKmX2
The Square and the Tower
Niall Ferguson
The instant New York Times bestseller. A brilliant recasting of the turning points in world history, including the one we're living through, as a collision between old power hierarchies and new social networks. "Captivating and compelling." --The New York Times "Niall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book...In 400 pages you will have restocked your mind. Do it." --The Wall Street Journal "The Square and the Tower, in addition to being provocative history, may prove to be a bellwether work of the Internet Age." --Christian Science Monitor Most history is hierarchical: it's about emperors, presidents, prime ministers and field marshals. It's about states, armies and corporations. It's about orders from on high. Even history "from below" is often about trade unions and workers' parties. But what if that's simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change? The 21st century has been hailed as the Age of Networks. However, in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks have always been with us, from the structure of the brain to the food chain, from the family tree to freemasonry. Throughout history, hierarchies housed in high towers have claimed to rule, but often real power has resided in the networks in the town square below. For it is networks that tend to innovate. And it is through networks that revolutionary ideas can contagiously spread. Just because conspiracy theorists like to fantasize about such networks doesn't mean they are not real. From the cults of ancient Rome to the dynasties of the Renaissance, from the founding fathers to Facebook, The Square and the Tower tells the story of the rise, fall and rise of networks, and shows how network theory--concepts such as clustering, degrees of separation, weak ties, contagions and phase transitions--can transform our understanding of both the past and the present. Just as The Ascent of Money put Wall Street into historical perspective, so The Square and the Tower does the same for Silicon Valley. And it offers a bold prediction about which hierarchies will withstand this latest wave of network disruption--and which will be toppled.New reading material just arrived. https://t.co/SUjVtVOwvT
D-Day
Stephen E. Ambrose
Chronicles the events, politics, and personalities of this pivotal day in World War II, shedding light on the strategies of commanders on both sides and the ramifications of the battle@natsturner Loved D Day by Stephen Ambrose https://t.co/mGDCrfY1pY
Machines of Loving Grace
John Markoff
As robots are increasingly integrated into modern society—on the battlefield and the road, in business, education, and health—Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times science writer John Markoff searches for an answer to one of the most important questions of our age: will these machines help us, or will they replace us? In the past decade alone, Google introduced us to driverless cars, Apple debuted a personal assistant that we keep in our pockets, and an Internet of Things connected the smaller tasks of everyday life to the farthest reaches of the internet. There is little doubt that robots are now an integral part of society, and cheap sensors and powerful computers will ensure that, in the coming years, these robots will soon act on their own. This new era offers the promise of immense computing power, but it also reframes a question first raised more than half a century ago, at the birth of the intelligent machine: Will we control these systems, or will they control us? In Machines of Loving Grace, New York Times reporter John Markoff, the first reporter to cover the World Wide Web, offers a sweeping history of the complicated and evolving relationship between humans and computers. Over the recent years, the pace of technological change has accelerated dramatically, reintroducing this difficult ethical quandary with newer and far weightier consequences. As Markoff chronicles the history of automation, from the birth of the artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation communities in the 1950s, to the modern day brain trusts at Google and Apple in Silicon Valley, and on to the expanding tech corridor between Boston and New York, he traces the different ways developers have addressed this fundamental problem and urges them to carefully consider the consequences of their work. We are on the verge of a technological revolution, Markoff argues, and robots will profoundly transform the way our lives are organized. Developers must now draw a bright line between what is human and what is machine, or risk upsetting the delicate balance between them.@TomLisankie AI = Artificial Intelligence. IA = Intelligence Augmentation. See John Markoff's wonderful book "Markoff, J. (2015). Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots. New York: Ecco/HarperCollins.
Troublemakers
Leslie Berlin
Acclaimed historian Leslie Berlin’s “deeply researched and dramatic narrative of Silicon Valley’s early years…is a meticulously told…compelling history” (The New York Times) of the men and women who chased innovation, and ended up changing the world. Troublemakers is the gripping tale of seven exceptional men and women, pioneers of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and early 1980s. Together, they worked across generations, industries, and companies to bring technology from Pentagon offices and university laboratories to the rest of us. In doing so, they changed the world. “In this vigorous account…a sturdy, skillfully constructed work” (Kirkus Reviews), historian Leslie Berlin introduces the people and stories behind the birth of the Internet and the microprocessor, as well as Apple, Atari, Genentech, Xerox PARC, ROLM, ASK, and the iconic venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In the space of only seven years, five major industries—personal computing, video games, biotechnology, modern venture capital, and advanced semiconductor logic—were born. “There is much to learn from Berlin’s account, particularly that Silicon Valley has long provided the backdrop where technology, elite education, institutional capital, and entrepreneurship collide with incredible force” (The Christian Science Monitor). Featured among well-known Silicon Valley innovators are Mike Markkula, the underappreciated chairman of Apple who owned one-third of the company; Bob Taylor, who masterminded the personal computer; software entrepreneur Sandra Kurtzig, the first woman to take a technology company public; Bob Swanson, the cofounder of Genentech; Al Alcorn, the Atari engineer behind the first successful video game; Fawn Alvarez, who rose from the factory line to the executive suite; and Niels Reimers, the Stanford administrator who changed how university innovations reach the public. Together, these troublemakers rewrote the rules and invented the future.Excited to start reading this today. Via @patrickc recommendation, Mike Moritz FT review. https://t.co/k366ELOjxm
- An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. This remarkable debut book chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech--largely by machete--it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Philip Gourevitch his title. With keen dramatic intensity, Gourevitch frames the genesis and horror of Rwanda's "genocidal logic" in the anguish of its aftermath: the mass displacements, the temptations of revenge and the quest for justice, the impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through intimate portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival and on how the new leaders of postcolonial Africa went to war in the Congo when resurgent genocidal forces threatened to overrun central Africa. Can a country composed largely of perpetrators and victims create a cohesive national society? This moving contribution to the literature of witness tells us much about the struggle everywhere to forge sane, habitable political orders, and about the stubbornness of the human spirit in a world of extremity. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
@patrickc In no particular order: The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, The View from the Cheap Seats, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, & The Upside of Stress.
Summary of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
SpeedReader Summaries
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari: Your Quick and Simple Summary and Analysis Inside this SpeedReader Summary, you’ll find: • An introduction to the main concepts of Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari • Time-saving chapter summaries • Analysis and Commentary • A guide to additional resources, including helpful articles, books, podcasts, and videos About Sapiens by Yuval Harari Did you know that, a hundred thousand years ago, there were at least six separate species of human beings on Earth? Today, there is only one—homo sapiens. Sapiens by Yuval Harari provides an expansive look at the modern world’s view of the ways human beings have evolved and the catalysts behind the species and cultures we’ve become, all the way from the beginning of mankind to the present day and beyond. Harari combines history and science to provide a unique perspective to the traditional narratives of human development and examines what happened to the other five species of humans and what may ultimately happen to us. Please note that this summary is NOT the original book and is meant to be read as a supplement to the original. About SpeedReader Summaries Thanks so much for your interest in SpeedReader Summaries! We strive to save what is your most precious and limited resource—time. Do you ever feel like you just want your favorite non-fiction books to get to the point? Are you tired of wasting time weeding through fluff and anecdotes to get to the meat of the material? SpeedReader Summaries carefully distill and analyze the key points of your favorite books and provide additional commentary and resources to supplement your understanding of the material. Inside every SpeedReader summary, you’ll find a thirty-second overall summary of the book, brief summaries of the key points of each chapter, a custom analysis, and additional resources like discussion questions, relevant articles, other books, and even quizzes. At SpeedReader Summaries, bringing you maximum benefit in minimum time is our main objective! Tags: harari sapiens a brief history of humankind, homo sapiens a brief history, sapiens a brief history of humankind, sapiens brief history of humankind, sapiens by Harari, sapiens by yuval noah Harari, sapiens history of humankind, sapiens noah Harari, sapiens summary, sapiens the book, sapiens the history, sapiens a brief history of humankind, sapiens a brief history of humankind review, sapiens a brief history of humankind summary, sapiens book review, sapiens book summary, sapiens chapter summary, sapiens chaptersBook Lovers: @ScottHYoung and I sat down to discuss the mind-bending bestseller, Sapiens by Yuval Harari. Our convo: https://t.co/I5FBR0kOmo
What the Dormouse Said
John Markoff
Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. John Markoff’s landmark book is about the culture and consciousness behind the first PCs—the culture being counter– and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It’s a brilliant evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and ’70s, where a group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for freeing minds and information. In these pages one encounters Ken Kesey and the phone hacker Cap’n Crunch, est and LSD, The Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Lab. What the Dormouse Said is a poignant, funny, and inspiring book by one of the smartest technology writers around.@om Add @markoff 's What the Doormouse Said.
The lessons of history
Will Durant
2 distinguished historians express their evaluation of the nature of the human experience and what may be learned from itWEEKLY BOOK SUMMARY: The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant Read all of my notes on the book here: https://t.co/eVjAdmPbK9 https://t.co/yVfGo8FTvQ
The Fatal Shore
Robert Hughes
In this bestselling account of the colonization of Australia, Robert Hughes explores how the convict transportation system created the country we know today. Digging deep into the dark history of England's infamous efforts to move 160,000 men and women thousands of miles to the other side of the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hughes has crafted a groundbreaking, definitive account of the settling of Australia. Tracing the European presence in Australia from early explorations through the rise and fall of the penal colonies, and featuring 16 pages of illustrations and 3 maps, The Fatal Shore brings to life the incredible true history of a country we thought we knew.@bfeld By far, Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore is the best history book on Australia for you.
- A story of grim comedy amid the apocalypse and a celebration of the sheer indestructibility of the human spirit in a nation run riot: Michela Wrong’s vision of Congo/Zaire during the Mobutu years is incisive, ironic and revelatory.
@michael_nielsen Yes; great. On Congo, both "In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz" & "Dancing in the Glory of Monsters" are exceptional.
Canoe Country
Roy MacGregor
One of our favourite chroniclers of all things Canadian presents a rollicking, personal, photo-filled history of the relationship between a country and its canoes. From the earliest explorers on the Columbia River in BC or the Mattawa in Ontario to a doomed expedition of voyageurs up the Nile to rescue Khartoum; from the author's family roots deep in the Algonquin wilderness to modern families who have canoed across the country (kids and dogs included): Canoe Country is Roy MacGregor's celebration of the essential and enduring love affair Canadians have with our first and still favourite means of getting around. Famous paddlers have been so enchanted with the canoe that one swore God made Canada as the perfect country in which to paddle it. Drawing on MacGregor's own decades spent whenever possible with a paddle in his hand, this is a story of high adventure on white water and the sweetest peace in nature's quietest corners, from the author best able (and most eager) to tell it.Nice line from @RoyMacG : "Once used to explore the land, the canoe is now used to explore ourselves." https://t.co/2BNXVYCnkP
Edo Culture
Matsunosuke Nishiyama
Edo Culture is a thoroughly original and sensitive reading of a vast range of source materials, written and otherwise. Japan historians and others interested in Edo popular culture, urban history, literature, and art will welcome this consistently insightful work by one of Japan's most influential historians of the early modern period.The very slim upside of being phone-less waiting for jury duty selection is that I’m going to get some reading in! http://t.co/fuse1eGgUh
A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Tom Standage
An offbeat history of the world traces the story of humankind from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century from the perspective of six different drinks--beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola--describing their pervasive influence during pivotal eras of world history, from humankind's adoption of agriculture to the advent of globalization. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.I always love getting some reading done on the plane. Compliments of @ShaneBattier. #bookoftheweek #books http://t.co/osTU0m2Y5R