Reviews

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end. Summary A recently released prisoner named Shadow is on a return flight home when there is a mix up and his seat gets upgraded to first class. Waiting for him is a mysterious stranger with a job offer. Thoughts Unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed this book. A book that almost lives up to the hype, but would have been slightly better to have stumbled on without knowing anything about it. Neil Gaiman draws out scenes and situations so vividly that they became almost scars in my memory. In the age of pictures, it is difficult to make people see with just words. That is not a problem in this book, you will see what is happening, even if sometimes you didn’t want to. ...

In this book David Stannard sets out to explain how the conquest of the Americas was the worst genocide in history. This book tells the story of pre-America in a much different light than how our history book explained it. Full of new information and insights overturning old, preconceived notions. For example, many thought that the population of both north and south America was around 20ish million pre-Columbus. New figures put that number at closer to 100 million. In addition, the common theory is that homo sapiens crossed into America via a now submerged land bridge that connects Asia and Alaska. Initially thinking was that this would put people in the Americas around 12,000BC, but newer evidence dates some artifacts in Mexico to 20,000 years prior to that. Which means there were already civilizations in place prior to the agricultural revolution. This and many more interesting facts are found in this overall depressing book. I will say the author is high atop his horse as he lays out all the atrocities committed by the conquistadors and early American settlers. Overall seeming to show a complete lack of understanding of human nature in a given context. This led to the writing style being unnecessarily preachy at times. The overall value and interest of the book made up for this though so I would still recommend it. It is easy to judge the past instead of learning from it. ...

Summary A history of the United States entering WW2 in North Africa. This 700 page book is the first of a trilogy about WW2 in Europe. It covers a single year of the conflict starting with the US landing in Northern Africa and ending with the capture of Tunisia. Thoughts A fantastic history, reading this book really gives you the feeling of living through the events. Not in a first-person sense, but more as a near omniscient deity who is really interested in America’s military. What feels like every skirmish, battle, air raid, and flat tire has been listed. Every shell casing counted, and temperature noted. All this is done in a way that manages to stay compelling throughout. -The Allies I never realized just how tense the relationship was between the Brits and the Yankees. There was quite a bit of animosity and distrust between the old power and the new power that was coming of age in this war. British folks thought of the Americans as inexperienced bumbling idiots who would only be useful as a support role in WW2. The Americans had their own reservations, one of my favorite quotes that sums up this new relationship was from Harold Macmillan: ...

Summary Adam Smith lays out one of the first exhaustive accounts of how a complex, developed economy functions. Published in 1776 during some “difficulties” in the relationship between Britain and one of its colonies, Smith makes the case for fundamental economic concepts like free markets and the division of labor. The first book, by far my favorite, presents the fundamentals of Smith’s concepts of value, wages, and labor. One of his key observations concerns the transport of goods. He argues that without the capacity of water to transport heavy items easily, civilization itself would have been greatly hampered. This insight helps explain why civilizations emerged near bodies of water that were easily navigable, most notably in the Mediterranean. It is always fascinating to observe how the limitations imposed by an environment affect the systems that find ways to thrive within those given constraints. ...

This book has been on my list for a long time. A very entertaining short story written by the same guy who wrote 1984. The story takes place on a farm where a pig, shortly before his death, prophesied about a day when the animals would unite and overthrow their human farmer overlords and run the farm themselves. This prophecy comes to pass a couple years after the prophet’s death. The story then follows the conditions and developments that take place at the newly “freed” farm. The story on the whole is very well written and carries a similar sense of despair as 1984 did. Written shortly after WW2 it was Orwell’s unpopular (at the time) critique of the Bolshevik revolution and the new USSR. I feel like this book as well as 1984 gets taken out of context and applied to all types of movements to greater and lesser degrees of accuracy. While this book was written critiquing communists, I don’t think the point was a critique of communism per se, but more a critique of censorship and ideologies. Overall great/ easy read.

Summary Written in 1975, this book is considered one of the fundamental texts that started the animal rights movement, which is only gaining in momentum. Singer popularized the term speciesism, which plays a central role in his argument. He likens speciesism to all the other nasty “isms” sexism, racism etc. His main points to support this are that humans are animals as well, and there is no significant difference innate in humans that sets us apart from the natural world. An often-used metric of difference between animals and humans is intelligence. To this he would reply that there are plenty of babies, and mentally handicapped patients that show less signs of intelligence than some animals, yet no one would find it morally justifiable to eat them or conduct cruel tests on them. He challenges anyone to justify speciesism, and if not, then they must deal with the consequences. From there he does an overview of testing conducted on animals and factory farming, the two most egregious forms of mass animal cruelty. From there he feels the only justifiable choice is to remove meat from your meals. He provides arguments in support of this as well as providing practical information for those interested in making the switch from a meat-based diet. He ends the book with a brief discussion on western man’s relationship with animals. He breaks up the history into Jewish, Greek, Christian, and Enlightenment eras with his major claim being that any justification of speciesism is either metaphysical or untenable. He quotes Bentham “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” ...

I enjoyed the book, although I was looking for something a little more Zee Frank, with more interesting anecdotes. Apparently, the fact that wasps can recognize faces just isn’t cool enough for me. The book’s central push is to challenge the assumptions we make about intelligence. We often assume that intelligence has to look like “human intelligence.” This would have been quite controversial fifty years ago, but it seems to be almost common knowledge now. My biggest complaint about this book is that it picks an interesting subject—animal intelligence, or intelligence in general—yet fails to say much meaningful about it. There is a common trope throughout history where someone will say something like “play is what makes humans different from animals,” only for science to eventually realize that animals play too, and therefore “play” isn’t the thing that makes humans different from animals. [a: Frans de Waal|112082|Frans de Waal|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1222704792p2/112082.jpg] dismantles many more of these potential differences between humans and animals to drive home the point that humans aren’t different from animals—which seems both right and wrong to me. Of course, when looking at the evolutionary tree, there isn’t a special branch from which humans came. But this then makes the question around the success of humans even more interesting. If animals engage in all the behaviors that were thought to be exclusive to the human domain, why haven’t they dominated the environment in a way remotely similar to humans?

This is a cursory look at the countries that have been arbitrarily grouped together since before WW1. He focuses mainly on Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and what used to be Yugoslavia. Even though the grouping of “The Balkans” is largely one of convention, Kaplan argues that the suffering and tragic histories act as a glue that makes their stories inseparable from each other. Instead of writing a full review, I’ll relate a story that I found illustrative of the complexities of the region. ...

Most of us are necessarily ignorant of many complex fields, from botany to brain surgery. As a result, we simply do not attempt to operate in, or comment on, those fields. However, every voter and every politician that they vote for affects economic policies. We cannot opt out of economic issues and decisions. Our only options are to be informed, uninformed, or misinformed… Summary Economics touches everyone’s life, often before we even realize it. Most opinions on economic issues emerge from personal experiences rather than formal theory. For instance, you notice higher tomato prices long before contemplating global vegetable markets or thin-inventory economies. Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics provides an insightful primer on economic principles, helping readers understand the broader context behind everyday economic experiences. ...

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. ...