Summary At 900pages in length the book not only covers the civil war but starts at a bird’s eye view of the birth of the United States zooming in closer and closer as we near the Civil War. Going fairly in depth on the US’ economic industry and its evolutions McPherson paints a picture of sprawling plantations and Yankee ingenuity. But in these developments cracks in the “United” States started to appear. The North and South started to develop in different directions. The North barreled forward (or downward? backward? depends on who you ask) into industrialized capitalism while the South who were largely agricultural stood firm in their conservative values and therefore abhorred the urbanization, automatization, that created crowded crime laden huge cities in the North. As an aside, you can get some of this sentiment playing Red Dead Redemption 2, ironically an explicitly anti-confederate game where the main characters act and view the world through a similar lens as the folks who created the Confederacy. Yet having this stance put you squarely against the march of “progress”, as such a widening gap between specialists in North and South started to appear. As such the South became more and more dependent on products from the North, whereas the North maintained only its dependence on the South’s cotton. The gap wasn’t just economic but also in ideas, most of the books, newspapers, inventors, and scientists came from the North. It was fairly common for rich Southerners to pay for their kids to go to school up north. This caused friction as the South began to feel inferiority or distrust towards the North. But even with these things, the central issue was slavery. There was a growing vocal movement of radical abolitionists, next to them was a less radical Free-Soil party who opposed the idea of expanding slavery into the new states of the west. This made southern slave owners uneasy, because for a quite some time slave owners were overrepresented in the government, but several new states with anti-slavery legislation had been added to the Union. This was starting to tip the scale of power away from the once dominant slave owners. This among other things, put these two competing ideologies on a collision course. McPherson then does a fantastic job of describing different factions and their mindsets. Just like any time in history, there was a lot going on and the stories we’re told often greatly oversimplify. He makes it very clear that you could be anti-slavery and racist at the same time. The North in general was anti-slavery but most did not view blacks as their equals. All this and the Civil War hasn’t even started. ...

When a superior man hears of the Tao, he immediately begins to embody it. When an average man hears of the Tao, he half believes it, half doubts it. When a foolish man hears of the Tao, he laughs out loud. If he didn’t laugh it wouldn’t be the Tao. -41 Summary For my first read through (assuming there might be more) without much research I picked up Stephen Mitchell’s version. Two things of note, one Stephen Mitchell was also the one who authored my version of Gilgamesh which was fantastic. Second, he makes clear that this is an English “version” and not straight translation of the Tao Te Ching. This book came with his own commentary at the end, as well as a transcript of an interview about the process of translation. I read once all the way through, and then re-read referencing his notes. The Tao Te Ching itself is similar to the Old Testament in that its actual authors are lost to history. It appears to have been put together from various text around 250BC. The assumed author Laozi or Lao Tzu is a person we know next to nothing about, in fact he may not even exist. His name adds to this mystery by being translated as “old teacher”. That being said there are now over 250 translations of the text and its 81 short chapters. ...

Summary This book looks into what is known as the Bronze Age collapse. There was an interim between the Bronze and Iron ages where highly connected systems of trade and communication went dark. Cline tries to investigate various theories as to why this happened. Long story short, it was a lot of things. There was a mega drought, or more likely two mega droughts which together spanned 150 years. This was no doubt part of the reason why certain tribes had to migrate escalating tensions. There is some evidence of earthquake storms happening around the same time, which are caused by two tectonic plates who won’t stop dancing. There were signs of internal rebellion, no doubt exacerbated by the famine. All single things that on their own could be survived, combined into a perfect storm causing a complete collapse of the interconnected Mediterranean world. The date picked to represent the culmination of this collapse is 1177, but this is just a neat handle, much like the term Bronze Age. The actual collapse probably took over 50 years. ...

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I checked this out based on the title alone. Who wouldn’t want to read a book titled “The Golden Ass”? Summary The main character Lucius is obsessed with magic. Through a series of events he ends up accidentally being transformed into an ass. Evidently, this is the only entire novel that has survived from ancient Rome. The style is that of a main story with many short stories injected by various devices such as someone retelling a rumor, campfire stories etc. ...

Summary Dawkins argues that the fundamental unit of natural selection is at a gene level. He then continues to build the world from single genes into what we see today, explaining why many different behaviors that are confusing at first, when examined from the “gene’s eye view” they start to make sense. If you have heard of Darwin, then odds are you’ve heard the phrase “survival of the fittest”, but the question that this statement raises is, survival of what? The fittest claw? The fittest lion? The fittest pride? The fittest species? Dawkins makes the case that what is surviving is the gene and for this to work he defines gene slightly different than a geneticist would. He says a gene is the smallest single or collection of chromosomal material that lasts enough generations to act as a unit of natural selection. An easily understandable example would be the gene for blue eyes. On the face of it this definition seems circular, by definition he can’t be wrong. Genes — segments of chromosomal material — are the smallest trait-carrying units we know of, so if natural selection exists, it must start there. One might be tempted to ask why he didn’t define genes as a group or single quark that exists together long enough to be a unit of natural selection, but he spends a fair bit of time expanding this definition into less of a tautology and more of a theory. One interesting question the comes up is if natural selection is at the gene level and logically therefore all genes are acting selfishly (anthropomorphizing to help us think about the situation), then why would they band together with competing genes to form flesh suits, or elm trees? To answer this he brings in the concepts of replicators and vehicles. Another term he uses throughout the book was survival machines, this was a clever choice as it applies to anything that is alive, plants, animals, etc. Dawkins says that genes are the replicators and survival machines are their vehicles. So since we are already anthropomorphizing, I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to picture a chromosome behind the wheel of a car on a speeding highway trying not to die, the car in this case would anything from single celled amoeba, to a giraffe. When we come back to reality of course this does not work in this way, as a single gene has next to no control over where a bat is going, or over the next word I type. But Dawkins chooses to zoom in on the “next to nothing” influence, because if you put enough next to nothings together, you just might have something! ...

Summary Follows the back-and-forth progress of “civilization” in the wild west, with an emphasis on the role Comanches played in that drama. Thoughts The strength of this book lies in the larger-than-life characters that this little bit of history provides. You have the tough as nails Mackenzie, who tenaciously chases the Comanches as they manage to outmaneuver every force the US government sends their way. You have Cythia Ann Parker, who was kidnapped by the Comanches and raised as one of their own and of course her son, Quanah, who is depicted as a fearless military genius. These characters will stay with me for a while. I am too illiterate to make comments about the historical voracity of the authors claims, but to a layman it seemed like he was even handed in his treatment of both sides. In our current cultural moment, he might have been too even handed. There are of course many things that struck me while going through this experience. One of the craziest things to me was the apparent mutation of Comanche culture when introduced to the horse. It was as if they had this latent superpower that was waiting around to be unlocked. From what Gwynne describes it sounds like their skills in horsemanship were only rivaled by the renowned riders of the Steppe. This book also made me realize that hidden in the “ugly duckling” troupe is a lie, and a somewhat insidious one at that. So you have a character that is somehow different from the group. Due to these differences that character gets mercilessly mocked and ostracized. A moment of transformation happens, not to the ugly duckling but to the ones viewing the ugly duckling. They realize that the ugly duckling is actually a swan, and as swan, in some senses their superior. The moral of the story of course is that differences are beautiful and should be embraced. Live your truth and others will eventually follow. Everyone has something that makes them special etc. etc. What I never realized is that there is a slight of hand in these stories that undercuts the moral. The real message of these stories is that group values are sacrosanct, immutable. The ugly duckling is now accepted, not because of some group realization, but from a re-categorization, that is to say that he was actually a beautiful swan the whole time. But what of the real ugly duckling? The ugly Betty that can’t take off her glasses. Herein lies the truth, to the group there is no rebirth, no accommodation. This was tragically played out in the life of Cythia Ann Parker; she is the true ugly duckling. Adopted by the same Comanches who orphaned her, she transforms into a Comanche, but when forcibly “rescued” by whites she cannot or will not transition back. As such she continues to her dying day to be a true oddity. Her son on the other hand, makes the transition into the whites’ expected vision of him. He is accepted inasmuch as he can manage to become white. This book was a really interesting read and has my recommendation.

And if it be objected that we belong to a time of crude force our answer is : We stood with our feet in mud and blood, yet our faces were turned to things of exalted worth. And not one of that countless number who fell in our attacks fell for nothing. Summary Storm of Steel is the firsthand account of the German officer Ernst’s Junger’s time in the trenches during WW1. ...

Summary Sally Adee, a well-published science and technology journalist, writes her first book about a major shift she has been witnessing in biology, and it all has to do with electricity. She opens the book with a brief history of what we know about electricity and how we discovered what we do know. Spoiler alert: it includes a lot of frogs. The main thing she wanted to highlight was that during the beginning of research into electrical phenomena, the field quickly branched into two directions. One branch focused on what was called animal electricity, while the other focused more on non-animal electricity. At this early stage of research, neither branch had reliable tools to conduct empirical science. There was a high degree of speculation in both fields, but with the breakthrough of the first battery, this quickly changed, at least for non-animal electricity. Suddenly, there was a reliable way to create, measure, and distribute this mysterious energy. When it came to animal electricity, there were no such tools to reliably create results, yet the claims held an intuitive weight and were picked up by many scientists and many more quacks. Eventually, there were so many scandals involving wild, unsubstantiated claims that the whole field of animal electricity was dismissed as pseudoscience. Technology kept improving, and eventually, measurement tools got precise enough to handle the tiny charges created by biological organisms, vindicating much of the early animal electricity scientists. However, their theories about how electricity actually worked in the body were correct only in the broadest sense. Much of the theories had to be thrown out or reworked in the one step forward, two steps back investigation of science. So what does this promising approach to biology offer us? Quite a bit. Scientists have utilized it for a while to stimulate hearts with pacemakers or calm down brains with epilepsy. Beyond this, being able to manipulate our electrome (as Adee calls it) holds tantalizing promises of faster wound healing, limb regeneration, reversing cancer, and slowing aging. The catch is that the system is much more complicated and interconnected than any of man-made electronics. Adee explains that instead of simple positive-negative wires exchanging electricity in our body, we utilize charge differentials in chemicals themselves. Each cell in your body acts like a little battery with the capacity to become more negatively or positively charged than its surroundings. Each cell also has ion channels that allow specific molecules in or out, depending on the state of the overall system. The takeaway here is we have only relatively recently begun to realize the role that electrical charges play in the nervous system. Now, we are discovering that this same mechanism for communication extends through every cell in your body. At this point, we don’t know enough to manipulate these distributed electrical systems precisely, but being able to do so looks like the biggest hurdle between us and a medical revolution. ...

I’ve been reading this a lot recently, for my own pleasure of course, and I can’t help but picture a dark clear night in the deserted streets of Moscow. A homeless Ivan leans back emptying the contents of a clear glass bottle into his bottomless stomach. He trips over a curb and falls, landing on his back. His head cracks against something sharp and solid. Tasting metal in his mouth, he feels something warm start to trickle down his back. Unable to move he stares into the dark sky. He can only see the brightest of stars, the rest, like so many potential futures left unrealized, are hidden by light pollution. In the distance he can hear a train’s lonely call, the walls of the sleeping city echo back their ghostly replies. While nearby, giant smokestacks exhale their black life into this last night of nights. Completely alone, his voice barely above a whisper he says ...

Long-form notes on Lecky’s moral history—the same piece as under Reviews, listed here as an essay.