History

Summary On September 30, 1965, a group of officers and soldiers of uncertain provenance executed six of Indonesia’s top military generals and one lieutenant, throwing the country into chaos. Parts of what became Indonesia had been under European colonial pressure since the early 16th century, but for a brief moment after WW2 ended, Indonesia was left without a master. Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta stepped up and issued a proclamation of independence. The Netherlands, their previous colonial rulers, were none too pleased and attempted to restore their control over the country. They ultimately failed, facing local resistance and strong pressure from the United Nations and the United States. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

History as moral narrative versus natural fractal systems—humanity as pattern, not protagonist.