Non_fiction

Summary The US grid has been referred to as the world’s most complicated machine, and Bakke thinks this machine is at risk of breaking down. Bakke starts by describing the way that power moves through the grid into our homes and businesses. Once the basics are established, she gives a brief history of electricity’s early commercial use and the first versions of the grid that emerged as a result. The first grids were largely makeshift affairs, made to service single houses or a few blocks at a time. The technology was so new that there wasn’t a standard way of doing things. This created a lot of headaches and made electricity expensive and fragile. It was the monopolist Samuel Insull who would bring order to the chaos in the industry. By buying up hundreds of these independent electricity producers, he turned electricity into a standardized product that the masses could afford. This was the beginning of the modern grid as we know it. ...

Summary Notes of a Native Son is a collection of ten essays by the legendary writer and critic James Baldwin. Born in poverty in 1924, Baldwin would escape into books and writing. He was raised by a preacher and started writing quite young; his early experiences in church left an indelible mark on his writing style for the rest of his life. The contents of the essays vary widely. Some are extended thoughts on a book or a movie, while others recount an event experienced personally. They are complex and emotional. ...

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. ...