Book

Summary The year is 1979, and Brezhnev authorizes a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The USSR had been watching developments there uneasily for years. In 1973, Mohammed Daoud Khan ended the Afghan monarchy. Five years later, on April 27–28, 1978, the Marxist PDPA seized power in the Saur Revolution, launching radical reforms and internal purges that fractured Afghan politics. Moscow was unsettled by the PDPA’s sudden rise, but quickly threw its support behind the new regime. The PDPA’s rule proved unstable, dominated by a radical faction that tried to secularize society and overturn centuries of tradition—sparking a conservative Islamic backlash. This had broader implications for the USSR, which contained its own Muslim-majority regions. Moscow was unwilling to stand by and risk a conservative revolution spreading across its southern flank. ...

Summary America’s third president was a citizen of the world. An idealist in values, but ruthlessly pragmatic when in the seat of authority. Jefferson was in public service for about fifty years, with his influence lasting directly up to Jackson’s presidency, making him one of the most effective political operatives in American history. Meacham gives a full view of Jefferson’s life from early education to his end-of-life correspondence with Adams. Jefferson cuts one of the most romantic and contradictory figures in early America. To the rest of the world, he displayed a certain sophistication many thought impossible to emerge from the Americas, whereas to history his regressive stance on slavery taints his memory: he at once acknowledged its illegitimacy yet could not bring himself to reject the peculiar institution altogether. Jefferson was the most vocal of the founding fathers in his defense of the individual rights of man (though, of course, definitions of “men” varied), and this manifested in an expressed distrust of strong federal governments. The preference for small government formed the basis for his antagonism with America’s other premier intellect, Alexander Hamilton. This disagreement ended up forming the first political parties in the US, the Federalists (Hamilton’s party) and the Republicans (Jefferson’s party). The founding gets mythologized for obvious reasons, but it is truly remarkable that two such politically fertile minds as Jefferson and Hamilton would be selected to form this country’s first cabinet. It is also a testament to Washington’s leadership that such a cabinet could exist for as long as it did. Always sure that Washington was Hamilton’s puppet, Jefferson would eventually retire to Monticello in a semi-theatrical way. His avowed aim was to put the dirty work of politics behind him, but both Washington and Hamilton suspected that Jefferson was “protesting too much.” Their suspicions turned out to be correct, he would shortly be back in office, serving a single term under the acerbic John Adams as vice president. He would then deftly create the first single-term president in US history, ascending to the highest office in the land. Once in the driver’s seat, strong centralized authority seemed useful, and Jefferson did little to curtail the powers of the executive. In fact, when Napoleon offered Jefferson the Louisiana Purchase, he was worried that the purchase of lands was not within the scope of Federal authority and would require an amendment. He ended up deciding the amendment path would open the purchase up to an extended window of debate and deliberation when decisive and quick action was needed, and so he pushed the purchase straight to Congress. This is not to say that Jefferson’s values were inauthentically held; it was more a testament to his adaptability. After Jefferson served two terms, the presidential office went to his long-term friend and ideological ally Madison. He would keep in close contact with leaders of the Republican Party for the rest of his life. ...

Fantastic biography. Washington was absolutely instrumental to the birth of the US. It is hard to imagine the country having survived with any other leader at the helm. Although he was vain, insecure, and not the brightest in the pantheon of the founding fathers, his heroism and commitment to the ideals of liberty more than make up for any personal short comings.

Summary The story is told by Howard W. Campbell, a convicted Nazi propagandist, who is awaiting trial in an Israeli prison. He writes a type of memoir about his own life and experiences. Campbell grows up in Nazi Germany, becoming the “voice” of Goebbels’ Propaganda ministry. What the Nazis don’t know is that shortly before the war, Campbell had been contacted by an American spymaster. The speeches Campbell made were encoded with information for allied intelligence agencies. Thanks to this service, American intelligence agents allow him to escape Germany and live an anonymous life in New York. His past will continue to haunt him, and through a series of twists and coincidences, his will to live is crushed, which leads him to turn himself in to the Israeli authorities to stand trial for his crimes. ...

Summary Experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform itself. - Alexis de Tocqueville The year is 1789, and you are the King of France. You’d rather be tinkering around in your workshop, but instead you are stuck in this meeting of the three estates and no one seems to be very happy. You inherited the kingdom from your grandfather Louis XV at nineteen years of age. He died a deeply unpopular monarch and left you a kingdom with tremendous financial problems. Still, change is in the air. The Enlightenment has filled France with new ideas; the old world is dying and something new is being born, though it is hard to picture what it will be. There is a lot of criticism of the monarchy these days, and it is coming from both the nobility and the masses. You have often welcomed reform, but there is a right and natural way things are meant to be. Push too hard and something might break. This is why you’ve often retracted unpopular edicts. People call that indecisive, but you’ve always held that public opinion is never wrong. Now here you sit in the middle of the first Estates General in over one hundred and fifty years, listening to everyone air their grievances against the kingdom you rule. A flicker of intuition, a growing sense of doom, as a possibility begins to present itself. You might be the last link in a chain of kings that reaches back one thousand years. ...

I had written an extensive review that was erased. Here is a really good one from an expert in the field. https://drive.google.com/file/d/10W5lAhu_QmXTfCjzGwg6-3S_bi05NkGo/view The short version is ape alone weak, ape together strong! The secret our success is our ability to leverage the smarts of an entire society instead of relying on individual brilliance. As Henrich says: “We stand on the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits”. One way to drive this intuition home is to take a minute and try to imagine which objects around you, could you, if stripped of all experience re-invent. Looking around, I think the only thing that made it on my list was a cup, and that is probably being too generous.

A Year of Magical Thinking is a meditation on grief. Faced with the sudden loss of her husband and the uncertain health of her daughter, Joan Didion tries to hold the pieces of her world together. The book offers a voyeuristic glimpse into an upper-class introvert’s ideal life—Didion and her husband, also a well-known author, had built an insulated existence that, apropos of nothing, ended. Full of anecdotes and disarming vulnerability, the reader can’t help but participate in Didion’s loss.

Summary As was the fashion in 1759, Adam Smith endeavors to explain what we call right and wrong, as well as why we arrive at these conclusions. The cornerstone of his theory is based on the concept of sympathy. Smith posits that, just as humans are endowed with the sense of sight, they are also equipped with a sense of sympathy. The brief definition of sympathy is the ability for one human to “enter into” the experience of another. This “entering in” does not perfectly mirror the original experience, but critically, it is perceived through the lens of an impartial spectator. This impartiality forms the foundation of all morality. ...

Deserves its place in classic American literature. It also deserves to be read in high school as it walks the balance of respecting norms and traditions while maintaining a personal responsibility to rise above them when they fall short of our ideals. Thus, the reader is left neither a dupe nor Anarchist, but responsible for their own sphere as well as their ‘place’ in society.

Summary I remember coming across the Wikipedia summary for this book after Baudrillard did an analysis in his bewildering Simulacra and Simulation, which read: It follows a group of car-crash fetishists who, inspired by the famous crashes of celebrities, become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents. At the time, I thought it was a strange summary, maybe a typo or something—after all, it doesn’t make any sense! So I, in my naivete, tucked this away in the “read later” list. I’ve read the book and can confirm the above sentence is a valid summary. ...