I was expecting this to be a collection of stories, but it was more about the actual mentality of survivors themselves. Overall, really entertaining read, but I wouldn’t rely too heavily on the advice inside it other than general rules of thumb. The one thing about survival stories is everyone is unique, and so advice that is good in one situation may get you killed in others.
Summary Rosenberg sets out to ‘prove’ through Neuroscience that the way we understand our past, present, and future might not be based on a misunderstanding. In what is sure to ruffle the feathers of academics of every stripe, Rosenberg uses various studies as a lever to overturn several common theories of mind. For the uninitiated, a theory of mind is an explanatory framework whose purpose is to explain the mind to itself. Most common theories of mind rely on the iconic duo of desire and action. Charles is crying because he can’t get an ice cream cone. In the previous sentence, we are met with Charles’ desire and the action that results from the desire, a cause and an effect. Rosenberg then uses this as a jumping-off point to argue that this core assumption that almost all theories of mind make is flawed. ...
Summary This book follows the careers of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, focusing on the second half of FDR’s administration from 1940 to 1945. By this time, Franklin had been the U.S. President for nearly two full terms. During those two terms, he had transformed the federal government to an almost unrecognizable extent, implementing many policies we now take for granted, like Social Security, the FDIC, the SEC, and the 40-hour workweek. These policies were part of a larger platform known as the “New Deal,” which was essentially a labor reform agenda that emerged during the Great Depression. ...
Summary The Federalist Papers are a collection of essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in support of the Constitution drafted in 1787, over a decade after the Declaration of Independence. With the benefit of hindsight, historical events and structures can often seem predetermined, obscuring the many decisions that had to be made along the way. The journey of the United States from independence to forming a federal government was not a straight path. The land won by the Revolutionary War consisted of 13 colonies, newly rebranded as “states.” Each state had adopted its own constitution shortly after rebelling against the British crown. These individual states were loosely united during the Revolutionary War under the Articles of Confederation, which defined a weak central government and functioned more like a treaty than a true organizing principle. This absence of centralized energy resulted in many inefficiencies during both war and peace. It may seem obvious now, but for the governors of these separate states, the idea of surrendering autonomy and assuming shared responsibility with neighboring states was far from intuitive. Thus, the framers faced an uphill battle in convincing all 13 states that it was in their best interest to form a federal government. This debate can be seen as an early manifestation of the enduring tension between “big government” and “small government.” Even though the federal government of that time was far more limited than it is today, it still represented a form of “big government” that had to contend with many of the same critiques leveled by libertarians today. The framers’ greatest inspiration was their nearly obsessive desire to construct a government that would, by its very design, prevent the rise of a dictator. “It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” – Alexander Hamilton One of the key principles was that it should be the structure of the government itself that prevents abuse of power, not merely the laws it creates. This is why so much of The Federalist Papers is devoted to discussing which responsibilities should fall to the legislative, judicial, or executive branches. It was also part of the rationale behind making the Constitution difficult to amend, as the framers hoped to limit the extent to which any bad actor could consolidate power. ...
Summary McCullough gives a fairly detailed account of the first year of the American Revolution against the British. Focusing largely on George Washington, this book is more interested in the military maneuvers of both sides without getting too bogged down in the political philosophy of the moment. The first year of America’s Revolution was a dark one, but by its end several close calls set the stage for surprise attack by Washington which reinvigorated a fledgling nation’s resistance and would be forever memorialized by the famous “Crossing the Delaware” painting. ...
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. ...
Marcus Aurelius, one of the greatest emperors Rome ever produced, wrote a series of notes to himself. It is believed that these notes were never meant to be published but were part of his personal practice of self-improvement and philosophical reflection. Scattered with exhortations to not bend beneath the pressures of life, the reader is presented with a picture of life as something to be endured: “Be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continually pounds.” ...
I try to review every book I read or listen to, but I have a hard time with these types of books because they are summary style. How would you rate a Wikipedia article? You may be able to, but odds are the rating would have more to do with the facticity of the article versus its writing. I have no knowledge on the topic, so I cannot review that aspect. What I can say is that this did a decent job introducing the Ottomans to a Western reader, although you would do well to get a mental picture of Eastern Europe and Western Asia as there are so many places mentioned. Your eyes will probably glaze over unless you can picture their locations in your head. The reader for this audiobook was not fantastic. I will definitely want to dig more into the Ottomans, but probably after getting a better picture of early European history.
Summary A concise account of one of America’s most popular presidents and his infamous assassination. Thoughts The authors’ intent with this book was to write history in a way that was “fun.” They largely succeeded; Killing Kennedy reads similarly to a tabloid, filled with murders, conspiracies, villainous Russian leaders, and, of course, lots of sex. In defense of Bill O’Reilly, if ever there was a presidency that lent itself to this lens of analysis, it was JFK’s. Serving from 1961 to 1963, JFK was at once the most powerful man in the world and nearly the youngest president in US history. In those three short years, America navigated through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, and the inception of the Vietnam War. This book is a quick and easy way to get some context surrounding America’s 35th president, as long as the writing style doesn’t grate too strongly against your sensibilities. ...
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?