My wife's been out of town most of this past month (helping her mother recover from cataract surgery), so I've been leaning on books (and friends!) more to keep me sane company.

As ever, I've listed the books in reverse order, with the one I read most recently listed first.

The Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan

Not what I expected at all. I'd hoped for a thorough, wide-ranging, history of Central Asia. What I got instead was a history of Europe, told from the perspective of how events in Central and East Asia impacted Europeans.

So...not the kind of thing you can really use as research material for a novel set in the Central Asian steppes, as I'd wanted 😬

But once I got over my expectations, I settled in for what turned out to be a very enjoyable, very readable history. It's lopsided, in that he spends only about 1/3 of the book on the vast majority of human history (everything before 1800, that is), and spends a lot of time in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Even so, it's a good corrective to our usual look at the past six hundred years. Especially when it comes to the "rise" of Europe, Frankopan deftly illustrates how the real story was the theft of vast sums from the Americas and Africa to Europe, which was then funneled to Asia to obtain spices, silk, paper, etc etc. The "normal" situation for the world is for money to flow East, and the development of China and the various former Soviet Republics in Central Asia is less a revolution than a return to history's status quo.

Oh, one last thing: This book does a much better job of laying out the perfidy and fickleness of the United States in its dealings with the rest of the world than the next book in my list. Leave the history to the historians, I suppose?

American Rule, by Jared Yates Sexton

I wanted to like this one. I really did. I wholeheartedly support Sexton's goal here, which is to pierce the myths that we're frequently taught as American "history."

The trouble is -- and the reason I couldn't actually finish the book -- in order for that kind of argument to be effective, you really have to get your own history right. And Sexton, um, doesn't.

Here's a sample paragraph (from page 10):

...England's monarchy had long been held as unquestionable. This perception of the divine right of kings was forged in the centuries following the fall of Rome as civilization in Western Europe languished in apocalyptic ruin and struggled through the so-called Dark Ages. In this time, the one uniting tether of humanity was religion...

There's...so much...wrong with that paragraph.

The absolute monarchy he's talking about was something invented in the early modern period, not the Middle Ages ("Dark Ages", as any historian worth their salt will tell you, is an offensively wrong term for the period). And the doctrine of absolute monarchy had nothing to do with the fall of Rome (itself a disputed event), and everything to do with the centralizing projects European monarchs embarked on after centuries of conquest and consolidation.

Far from civilization "languishing" in Western Europe for hundreds of years, the Middle Ages saw rapid urbanization, expansion of trade, and the foundation of Europe's first universities.

And religion being the one unifier? As opposed to any, oh, government? That's...fuck, that's just laughable

These are not small mistakes. They're massive mis-representations of the period and the trends within it. And Sexton makes mistakes like this on every page (nearly every paragraph)!

I couldn't take it. So I noped out.

The Eyes of the Dragon, by Stephen King

My second of two (see below) King books this month that don't read like King books. This is told like a fairy tale, with the same sort of remove and third-person omniscience you'd have in a fairy tale. It's the same voice King sometimes used in the latter part of the Dark Tower series.

And as far as I know, this is King's one and only full-blown medieval fantasy book: kings and wizards, magic and dragons. I picked it up because of the connections to his other books -- the king's name is Roland, you see, and the (evil) wizard's name is Flagg -- not expecting too much.

I should have known better. Even in this mode, King is a master storyteller, weaving a tale of family and betrayal and escape that captivated me all the way to the end.

The Running Man, by Stephen King

Ok, technically this is a Richard Bachman book, since that's the name King released it under originally. But they made a friggin' Swarzenegger movie out of it, so I've got to include it in my reading list, right?

Interestingly enough, I can see why King published this one under a pen name. Because it doesn't read like a King book at all. There's no slow build up of tension, no deep dive into the lives of multiple characters before everything goes to hell. It just dives right into the plot, explaining just the bare minimum about the world needed to keep up with what's going on.

And this thing moves. Each chapter is incredibly short, maybe 3 pages maximum. It's the "potato chip" technique (keep chapters so small that folks think "I can do one more"), and it works here; I read the entire thing in a single day.

On the downside, it's incredibly violent, and racist, and sexist, all at once. Granted, the world he's portraying is very much that, all the way through, but it's bigoted in a very...old-fashioned way, from the slurs they use, especially. Like 1960s racism ramped up to 11 and then set in the future.

Here's the kicker, though: King absolutely nailed how misinformation, spread through the media, can keep the people at the bottom of the economy apart, keep them hating each other, when they should be attacking the wealthy. And he portrays our current "meritocratic" caste system perfectly, illustrating how inequality can get so locked in that the only way out for some people is to offer to die on national television. That's the horrific part of the book, for me, the part the lingered after closing the book.

The White Album, Joan Didion

Didion's essays covering the Seventies (and part of the later Sixties). I could definitely feel a cynicism creeping in, something present in the first book of hers i read and becoming stronger with each essay here.

But she continues to draw moments in time in vivid colors, and is brutally frank about her experiences with mental health issues during this period. Just...compellingly readable, all the way through.

I'd like to say I wish I could write like her, but then I'm not sure how I would even begin to learn or adopt her techniques. Intimidatingly good.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion

Wasn't sure what to expect with this one. The title is...a bit pretentious, at least to my ears.

But the essays are as unpretentious as they come. Didion, for the most part, refuses to generalize or judge, choosing instead to capture the moment, or series of moments, that she experienced with and around certain people, at certain times.

The result is a bit like a time capsule of the Sixties, or at least, the parts of the Sixties that she experienced in California.

Her writing is a bit hypnotic, in that way. In how she brings you into a moment, even if that moment itself is a composite of other moments, showing you what it felt like, if not what actually occurred. Makes her essays a bit addictive, tbh, each one a hit of experience from another place and time.

The one downside? Because she's writing so close to her own experience, her version of the Sixties is very...white. And middle class. To the point where, when she talks about the farming communities she grew up in, she doesn't talk about the actual workers on those farms, who were organizing throughout the Sixties to advocate for better working conditions for the majority-immigrant workforce. Nor does she mention the Civil Rights movements, or the Black Panthers, or...I could go on and on. Suffice to say that her viewpoint is very well detailed, but is very much myopic.

Fewer books read this month. Between turning 42 and getting both doses of the vaccine, I've been reading less (but writing more?). I'd hoped to have a fourth book done before the end of the month, but that's going to have to wait :(

Anyway, here are brief, non-spoilers reviews of the three books I did get through, again in reverse chronological order (so the most recently read book is first).

Carrie, by Stephen King

At this point I should just confess that I've decided to read all of the classic King books. Everything I missed growing up (parents!): Carrie, Cujo, Christine, Needful Things, etc.

This was King's first book, and it's amazing how much his writing improved between it and his second (Salem's Lot). Carrie is a lot faster paced than the other book, but as a result I didn't feel like I really got to know (or care about) a lot of the characters.

Even so, it's a gut-punch of a book. Would recommend.

Trade in Classical Antiquity, by Neville Morley

A non-fiction palate-cleanser between horror novels. Recommended by the author of acoup.blog, whose insightful and detailed critiques of the "medieval" world represented in the Games of Thrones TV series drew me in.

It's a short book, more of an extended scholarly essay than anything else. Morley's goal here seems to be to poke holes in two of the leading schools of thought about trade in the classical Mediterranean: one that holds trade couldn't possibly have been worth noting because of subsistence farming, and another that basically says globalization arrived thousands of years earlier than we thought.

I'm not familiar enough with those other schools to tell if that's a straw-person argument or not. But Morley lays out his own case well, arguing for a sort of middle approach, relying on archeological evidence that shows trade in certain goods was in fact massive, while admitting the large gaps in our understanding of the period. Certainly food for thought when designing a classical-like society, or writing a story set in the classical period.

The Dead Zone, by Stephen King

Published the year I was born! King's fifth book published under his own name.

Again I could see both the commonalities in the way he tells stories (newspaper clippings and interviews sprinkled throughout, a sharp focus on the minutiae of small-town life) and the leveling-up of his skills in the use of those techniques (and exploration of those themes).

Very much a horror-as-dread book, rather than blood-and-guts. Reminded me of his later book 11/22/63, not in the time travel aspect, but in the dilemma the protagonist faces towards the end (no spoilers, it's worth the read). King's rendition of the political mood of 1976 jibes with everything I've read about that election by recent historians, and his construction of a populist politician with evil in his heart and elections to win felt...let's say a little prescient, after 2016?

A Note on the Casual Racism in King's Earlier Books

While I'm reading through King's oeuvre, and enjoying it, for the most part, there's a few...problematic things that pop up again and again, like sour notes among an otherwise well-written symphony. And I feel the need to call them out, rather than skip over them.

Most striking, for me, in reading these now, is the way King drops at least one racist bit of imagery in each of the books I've read up to this point. Adjectives like "n*ardly", or describing a character's grossly misshapen and swollen lips as "African".

It jerks me out of the book each time, and makes me wonder why he (or the publisher) doesn't go back and remove it. This isn't in character dialog, it's narrative description, and it would be easy -- very easy -- to remove the short phrase that contains it without really altering the book at all. Why not change it?

More insidious is the way these books have basically no black people. In Needful Things, which I'm reading now, there's one (one!) black character, and he's only allowed to be a janitor, and his dialog is written...well, let's just say King tries to render what he feels is a Black manner of speech, and it comes across as a caricature. I know some of these books were written before I was born, but I swear there were Black people in America back then, even in Maine. Leaving them out altogether feels...strange. Less like oversight, and more like an authorial blindspot.

These elements might change in his later works (and I hope they do!). And I'm certainly not trying to say anything about King the person, especially given how much time has elapsed between when he wrote these books and today. I must hope that whoever he is now, it's a better version of himself than when he wrote these.

But these racist elements are in the books, and I feel must be called out as such.

Hope. It's a hard thing to come by, for me, when it comes to the federal government.

The election of 2016 was traumatic. My wife and I watched, horrified, as the candidate we thought not even Republicans were crazy enough to pick won first the primary, and then the general election.

Well, "won." He lost the popular vote by 3 million, and still walked away with the keys to the White House, because of our country's old, undemocratic way of electing Presidents.

It was so unnerving, when it happened, that we decided not to go home.

We were living in Arkansas at the time, having moved to nurse my wife's mother back to health after she suffered a cardiovascular incident. It was our first time living in my wife's home state in seven years, and in that time, the state we remembered as slightly behind the times but neighborly had curdled into a paranoid, xenophobic place.

Bad enough having to live there at all. Living there while their white nationalist leader commanded the federal government? While they crowed about his "achievements" dismantling the legacy of eight years of Obama's government? While they felt entitled to air out their racism and sexism with impunity, with pride, even, because their man was in the White House?

We couldn't do it.

So we lived on the East Coast that winter, crashing with friends -- amazing friends, to put up with us for so long -- and moved back to California, renting an apartment sight unseen. We drove cross-country, stopped in Arkansas just long enough to pack, and then moved on.

Now, after four years of Trump's chaos, his rage and his incompetence, we've another election looming. And that same fear is back, that he'll win again, and our country, which has never been innocent, but has at times fought against its darker impulses, will instead succumb to them.

So Lichtman's theory of presidential elections -- that the campaign doesn't matter, that the candidates themselves almost don't matter, only the past four years of governing do -- gives me hope. Because after four years in power, the GOP has lost seven (!) of his thirteen "keys" to the White House, and you only need to lose six to lose the election.

Which means I can ignore the polls. I can tune out -- to some extent -- the campaign itself. I can focus on voting, on helping others to vote, and preventing election fraud.

And I can hope.

Disappointingly, this is not the full original text. It's been trimmed down by almost half, and then padded out with other articles Houdini wrote.

Still, what's left behind is fascinating. Lots of great stories of scams and burglary, from using chewing gum to steal jewels to having a confederate hide in a checked trunk in order to steal from a "locked" luggage compartment. Many good story ideas buried in here.

You can see why Houdini was so fascinated by the techniques of thieves and con-men. So much of their work involved mis-direction and slight of hand, the same techniques he used as a magician.

You can also understand why he went after mediums and psychics so hard: They were using those same techniques of magic, but not presenting themselves as magicians.

Thus they were not only defrauding the public, but casting legitimate magicians like himself in a bad light. Because they were frauds, and so when they were discovered -- which they almost inevitably were -- they made reputable magicians like himself look like frauds, too. Better that he unmask them, to make the difference more distinct.

So, a good book, still, though far too short. I'll have to track down a complete version at some point.

This is the kind of American history I wish they'd taught me in school.

It's a story of intrigue, of diplomatic maneuvering between dozens of nations. Of military campaigns won and lost. Of peace betrayed and hope rekindled.

I would have eaten this stuff up. Did eat it up, when presented with the history of Europe in the Middle Ages or Japan's Edo Period or China's Warring States.

(Okay, so the latter two I only got exposed to via video games, not school, but still)

But teaching me this version of American history would have forced adults around me to acknowledge our part in this struggle. And most of the time, we were the villains.

We made treaties with Native American tribes, swearing to abide by some border line, and then promptly set about settling past that line. We struck deals with the leaders of individual villages and then insisted whole tribes adhere to them. And when those tribes refused to sign new treaties with us, establishing new boundary lines, we invaded, burned their villages to the ground, and slaughtered their people.

And Washington was at the heart of all of this.

As First President, he established the policy of buying Native American land when we could, and killing them all if they wouldn't sell. He also pushed them to become "civilized," which in his mind meant dropping their own culture -- including their sustainable agriculture, their religion, and their gender roles -- and adopting settler culture wholesale.

Why would he do this? Because he speculated in Native American land, buying up the "rights" to tracts that hadn't been formerly ceded by any tribe. He needed those boundary lines pushed back, that land cleared of Native Americans, and then settled by Europeans, if he was to recoup any profits.

This is the part of American history that has white squatters fighting both Native Americans and elites back east for their "right" to seize land.

The part that has our very first treaty under the Constitution negotiated with a Native American tribe.

The part that has Washington taking time out of the Revolutionary War to have three armies loot and pillage their way through Iroquios territory, destroying crops and peaceful towns as they went.

And its the part that shows the Native Americans as what they were: A free people, with their own politics and divisions, struggling to deal with the invasion of their lands. Some sought peace, some wanted to fight, and some moved rather than deal with the Europeans. But all of them thought of themselves as their own nations, with control over their own territory, and their own sovereign rights.

Something Washington never conceded to them, and he embedded that denial in our relationships with the tribes from the start.

This sort of history is complicated, and Calloway does an fantastic job sorting through it. Amazingly, he condemns Washington's mistakes without finger-wagging.

It's enough to relate them truthfully. The First President condemns himself.

We don't really talk about the dangers of monopoly in the United States anymore.

We praise it, if we're VCs investing in start-ups.

We acknowledge a history of it, safely confined to a long-gone Gilded Age.

But we don't discuss how much it dominates our current economy, or how much damage it does.

Which is strange, because fighting monopoly should be one thing the Right and the Left can agree on.

The Right should fight monopoly because it leads to giant corporations that centralize control of the economy. And centralized control -- whether in the form of an unelected Politburo, or an unelected Board of Directors -- should be one of the Right's worst fears.

The Left should fight monopoly because it concentrates power in the hands of owners and financial gamblers at the expense of workers. When the company you're trying to unionize against doesn't have any competitors, and controls billions of dollars of assets, it can afford to wait out any strike, or hire enough scabs to stay in business. And it's harder to organize across not just multiple states, but multiple countries, to ensure a strike even gets off the ground.

Notice I didn't say anything about consumers. It turns out our obsession with consumer rights (and low prices) has crippled our ability to talk about the rights of producers, of the workers and small-businesspeople that should rightfully be the backbone of our economy. It's left us defenseless against the new monopolies in our midst, that charge less not because of some "economy of scale" but because they have access to enough capital to underbid everyone else.

Think of Amazon, and how it spent decades without turning any kind of profit, all while its stock rose and rose. Would any normal business have been allowed to do that? Any sane business? No. Amazon was allowed to pursue its monopoly, and won it.

But I didn't see any of this until after reading Matt Stoller's book.

I felt some of it, sure. In the way Silicon Valley companies chased advertising dollars instead of solving real problems. In how Uber and Amazon set their prices artificially low, specifically to drive their competitors out of the market, and got praised for it.

And in the way I've come to look at running my own business as some kind of crazy dream, instead of the normal out-growth of a career spent in engineering.

Stoller's given me a framework, and a history, to understand all of this. How we used to enforce anti-trust laws that would have stopped Facebook from buying out all of its competition, or Amazon from driving local bookstores out of business. How the financial markets used to exist to enable small businesses to get off the ground, not pour money into multinational behemoths that crushed them.

And how it all funnels money and power up the food chain, leading to today's rampant inequality and distorted economy.

If you have any interest in economic justice, whether as a devoted capitalist or a socialist or just a plain liberal, I'd recommend reading Goliath. Stoller's book restores the lost history of American anti-trust, placing us back in a historical context of the long fight between centralized control and distributed power.

It's the one book I've read about recent events that's given me hope.

Because we cut down the Goliaths once. We can do so again.

News

And to a professional, SFWA-qualifying market, no less!

More details as they shake out, but I’m over-the-moon pumped. The story’s one I’ve been working on for three years (!), revising, polishing, and submitting.

Many thanks to my friends that suffered through reading all those drafts, and offered me the feedback I needed to make the story shine!

Reviews

Persian Fire, by Tom Holland

And it illuminated aspects of ancient Persia and Greece that I didn’t appreciate before. Like how Sparta trumpeted equality for everyone except for those living in the cities they conquered (who were turned into slaves, one and all). Or how democratic Athens regularly held an ostracism, so they could kick out a citizen who was getting too powerful (or causing too much resentment among other citizens). Or that the King of Persia considered all his subjects his slaves, and yet left them to worship their own gods, and mostly govern themselves, so long as they paid tribute.

I wish it’d gone more into a subject it teases in the Preface: How would Greece have fared if Xerxes had conquered it? Given that the Persian Kings were considering letting the Ionians (subjects of the empire) govern themselves democratically, how much of Western history would have been different?

Holland does go into detail about the Persian empire (origins, revolutions, etc), which is a great corrective to the usual Greek-sided way of telling this story. But he leaves one of his most tantalizing questions unexplored, which is a tragedy.

Paper Girls, Vol 1, by Brian K Vaughn, Cliff Chiang, Matt Wilson, and Jared K Fletcher

And now I have yet another Image Comic (like Monstress, and Saga, and Wicked + Divine, and…) that I’ll pick up every chance I get.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that it’s set in 1988, it follows four pre-teens on their paper route one early morning, and that things rapidly get…weird. Like, time-travel and possible aliens and dinosaurs weird.

It’s fantastically well-done. Its creative team is firing on all cylinders: the story is strong, the drawing clear and easy-to-follow, the colors manage to invoke both the 80s (to me, anyway) and the various locations (early morning outside, dark basement, etc) and the lettering conveys everything from a radio’s static to a drunken warble.

Which reminds me, I need to go pick up Vol 2 :)

Masterful. Not only did I get a better sense of who Cicero was as a person, and why he was important, I also got a good feel for the politics of the late Roman Republic. More specifically, Everitt lays out the flaws inherent in the Roman system that – coupled with the stubborn refusal to change of most Senators – led to its downfall and the birth of the Empire.

I found this book easier going than Everitt’s biography of Augustus. They’re both good, don’t get me wrong, but I never felt lost in dates and events in Cicero, because Everitt constantly tied things back to the larger movements of the period. It gave me a better perspective, and also let me see how important Cicero really was.

For example, after watching the HBO series Rome (which is fantastic, highly recommend checking it out), I thought of Cicero as little more than a pompous windbag, unable to make up his mind or stand for anything.

On the contrary, while he could be long-winded, and tended to talk up his deeds too much, he was a capable administrator (he was only sent to govern provinces twice, but both times was very popular with the locals for being competent and incorruptible) and a rare thing in the late Republic: a Senator that sided with the wealthy (optimates) but wanted to change things just the same. Not to mention his original claim to fame as a great orator, which he won by ably defending clients in the courts.

He even, apparently, had some skill as an investigator. While on his second tour as a provincial governor, he uncovered a banking scandal that was being run by Marcus Brutus (the Brutus that later was one of Caesar’s assassins!).

In short: Highly recommended if you’re interested in Roman history, or even (like me) just curious to know more about the personalities glimpsed through series like Rome.

Recently finished reading Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism.

It’s hard for me to talk about, because the book is filled with such piercing, clear-eyed insight, that if I tried to summarize it properly, I’d end up reproducing it.

I could say that I think the book should be required reading for any citizen of any country, in any age, because I do. And not because of any simplistic need to show that “Nazis are bad,” which (while true) doesn’t need an entire book to demonstrate. The testimony of even one concentration camp survivor should be enough for that.

I think everyone should read The Origins of Totalitarianism because it shows how the logic of totalitarian governments grows out of capitalism itself. Not that capitalism must always lead to totalitarianism, but that it always can. Just as racism and nationalism don’t always lead to a Final Solution, but without racism and nationalism, without some ideology claiming to override our humanity, a Final Solution is not even conceivable.

And yes, I think there are passages of the book, describing the methods of the Nazis and the communists (for Stalin’s government was also a totalitarian one) that are too close to our current administration for my comfort. I can’t read about the Nazis contempt for reality, or the way people in totalitarian movements will both believe the lies told by their leaders and praise them for their cleverness when the lies are revealed, without thinking of how right-wing nationalists in my own country treat the current President. But even if these things were not happening in the United States, it would be a book worth reading.

It is, in short, rightly called a classic. A long one, and a hard one, if we take its insights to heart as readers (passages calling out the middle classes for abandoning their civic duties for isolated home life strike close to home for me; I feel I’ve worked hard for what I have, and want to cling to it, but how many others am I leaving behind, by doing so?).

And yet it is that wondrous thing: a book hailed as a classic work, that is worth all the time and study we can give it. If you haven’t read it, please do.

We’re counting on you.

Ever read a book that makes you feel both better and worse about the times you live in?

That’s what Fantasyland did for me.

Better, because Andersen shows how the current fad for conspiracy theories and disregard for facts (on the conservative side of politics, this time) is just the latest iteration of a series of such fads, going all the way back to the first Northern European settlers of the Americas.

For example: the first colonists in Virginia were lured by rumors of gold that had been completely made up by speculators. They starved and died while hunting for gold and silver, until by chance they started cultivating America’s first addictive drug export, tobacco.

But I also feel worse, in that it makes me think there’s no real escape from the fanaticism and illusions that lie in the heart of the American experiment. They’ve allowed the burning of witches, the enslavement of entire nations, and the genocide of those who were here first. And now they’re pushing even my own family to condone the caging of immigrant children, the silencing of women, and the persecution of Muslims.

It’s disheartening, to say the least.

I take hope in the other side of the cycle that Andersen exposes. When reason pushes back against mysticism, and we re-fight the battles of the Enlightenment. We banned snake-oil and established the FDA. We drove quacks underground and wrote licensing laws. We won the Civil War. We passed Civil Rights legislation.

Granted, Andersen himself doesn’t seem to think there’s light at the end of our present tunnel. At the end of the book, he falls into what I think is a trap: believing the United States to be completely unique, and the current era to be uniquely terrible.

I think the first is countered with any glance at the news from the rest of the world. From Brexit to the rise of the populist right in Poland and Hungary, to Venezuala’s deluded leadership and China’s reality-scrubbed media, there’s plenty of other countries with their own fantasylands. While we in the U.S. often tell ourselves we’re not like anyone else, it turns out we are.

And I think his own book is a firm counter to the second trap. Every era thinks itself both the pinnacle of human achievement and the lowest depth to which humanity can fall. But pushing back against unreason – by refusing to give them a platform, by taking their threat seriously but not their claims, by not falling for the trap of treating every belief as equally valid – has worked in the past. It can work now.

Not what I expected. I’d always thought the Meditations was a set of philosophical aphorisms. Instead, it’s something between a diary and a daily “deep thought”, a recording of a conversation an Emperor of Rome was having with himself.

As such, it’s repetitive and very personal, and yet somehow still relevant, hundreds of years after it was written.

Three things I found useful:

• Try to learn from everyone, even (especially) the ones you disagree with.
• If you know someone’s a jerk, don’t expect them to treat you fairly. And definitely don’t get angry with them for it, since you knew who they were from the start.
• Success and failure happen to everyone, over and over again. So there shouldn’t be pride in the former, or shame in the latter.

Not what I expected. Written in plain language, as if he wanted to sound trustworthy, so the reader wouldn’t notice the (non-glorious) things he skips over.

Fascinating to read now, after I know more about both what happened to Caesar afterwards and the Gauls he attacked.

Three things I learned:

• Caesar’s mercy started during the Gaul campaign, when he’d often pardon former enemies that were willing to bend the knee.
• Caesar justified his attacks on the rest of Gaul and Germany on a domino theory: if the Germans prospered in Gaul, he said, they’d eventually march on Rome itself.
• The Pullo and Vorenus from HBO’s Rome were based on real people, that Caesar wrote about by name (!)

Illuminating. Everitt makes Augustus a sympathetic figure, but without hiding any of his flaws: his hypocritical championing of family values, his slaughtering of competing Roman families, his unforgiving behavior towards his own family and friends. And he shows how Augustus' life was often a series of serious mistakes followed by lucky victories, not a steady calculated rise to power.

Three things I learned:

• The idea of having two "co-emperors" of Rome goes back to Augustus. He often had at least one trusted friend or family member invested with equal power and sent to rule different regions of the empire.
• Augustus' first official post was religious: his great-uncle Caesar, got him appointed to the College of Pontiffs, who were in charge of performing public sacrifices
• Augustus was called "Princeps", not Emperor. He was careful to keep his powers legal, renewed periodically via legislation, and to act humble while in Rome

A cracking good read. Illuminates the relationship between Gen X and Gen Y, something that’s always felt a little slippery to me (as someone born in 1979, often thrown in with the Millennials but identifying with Gen X).

Filled with moments that made me nod along (the movie list for Gen X), and others that showed me a corner of the 90s I didn’t know existed (Sassy magazine). The book was clearly a work of love for both Eve and Leonora, and it shows.

Three things I learned:

• Titanic was a huge movie for Gen Y. What I remember as just solid Oscar-bait was apparently perfectly tuned to imprint on young Gen Y brains.
• Clueless can be read as not just a great adaption of Emma, but also as a love story between Gen Y (Cher) and Gen X (Josh), reflecting the complicated relationship between the two generations.
• Complaining about the current tech-driven dating scene is common to Gen Y, though none of them would want to go back to the way things were before.

Stunning. I had no idea of the magnitude of what was lost in Eastern and Central Europe after the War, due to Soviet coercion and control.

By focusing on just the first decade or so after V-E day, and restricting her story to mainly Poland, East Germany, and Hungary, Applebaum is able to go in deep on how the Soviets – and their local communist allies – were able to subvert their newly conquered satellite states, and impose a foreign totalitarian system on them.

Three things I learned:

• Poland, Hungary, Germany, Finland: their borders were radically remade after the Soviet conquest. The Baltic countries vanished altogether, absorbed into the Soviet Union. Germany lost much eastern territory to Poland, who in turn lost its eastern reaches to the Soviet Union. The Ukraine was gone.
• Poland lost 20% of its population in the war. In comparison, France lost 1.5%
• The first step for most of the communist parties was to form a "national front" with other leftist parties, sometimes by force, usually with some amount of arm-twisting. Once that was established, communists would take over the mechanisms of state power (Interior, Secret Police, etc) while leaving the most visible positions in the hands of others, so it looked like a pluralistic government from outside.

Revelatory, especially when paired with Year Zero. Sebestyen shows how the Cold War began, so soon after the Allies won. Cracks between the Big Three (US, Britain, Soviet Union) that had been papered over for the sake of the war quickly grew into major rifts.

Three of the countless things I learned:

• The Soviet Union didn't steal the entire atomic bomb. Their stolen intelligence helped them move faster, by perhaps two years, but their scientists did the majority of the work themselves.
• Mao financed his armies and kept his population fed during the Chinese Civil War by growing and selling opium (!)
• Japan had been bombed far worse than Germany. Many millions lost their homes. 80% of its merchant shipping fleet was gone. Half of its agricultural land was waste. In the months after the war, Allied survey teams discovered Japan could not have carried on much longer than it did.

Illuminating. Filled a gap in my understanding of the war, of the year between the Allied victory and the rebuilding that followed.

Thankfully, Buruma doesn’t just cover what happened in Europe. He looks everywhere, from the Netherlands to Indonesia to Japan and China. A true history of the fallout from the last world war.

Three things I learned:

• The Soviets stripped their territories, both European and Asian, of industry. Whole factories were broken down and shipped into the Soviet Union, from Poland to Japanese-occupied Manchuria.
• Jews in Poland were not safe after the war. Those who managed to find a home to come back to still faced discrimination and pogroms. Over a thousand Jews were murdered in Poland in the year after liberation.
• British military was complicit in the deaths of thousands, as it sent captured anti-communists back to the Soviet Union to be slaughtered (men, women, and children).

Revelatory. Mann’s 1491 opened my eyes to the many civilizations that existed in the Americas before Columbus landed. 1493 has shown me just how much of our current world was created in the aftermath of his voyages.

Three of the many, many things I learned:

• The lynchpin of the global trade of American silver for Chinese porcelain and silks was the Philippines. That's where Spanish traders first ran into Chinese junks, in the early sixteenth century.
• One theory for the causes of the Little Ice Age: the sudden reforestation of the Americas from the millions of native inhabitants that died out from European diseases.
• China is the world's largest producer of sweet potatoes, and the second-largest producer of maize. Both crops are native to the Americas.

A nice, quick intro to the physical infrastructure of the internet. Doesn’t really go into how all those pieces work – there’s no discourse on the technology behind a router – but does build a mental image of the boxes, buildings, and people that keep the world connected.

Three things I learned:

• ARPAnet's first Internet Message Processing machine was installed at UCLA in 1969. The machines were manufactured on the East Coast, but only West Coast universities were open to the idea of the network at the time.
• In 1998, The Netherlands passed two laws to pave the way for fiber everywhere. One law required landowners to give up right of way for holes to be dug, second law required any company digging a hole to lay fiber to also let other companies lay their own cable in the same hole and share the costs. The one-two punch made it cheaper and easier to lay fiber, and also blocked anyone getting a monopoly.
• The busiest route in the world is between London and New York, with more internet traffic than any other line.

A cornucopia of female scientists and engineers that got left out of the history I learned in school.

It’s amazing how much these women accomplished considering how much was stacked against them. Time after time, in these biographies, I read how a brilliant scientist would be forced to work for free, because the university didn’t hire women. Often, they’d find employment in a German university, only to be kicked out once the Nazis took power and started firing Jewish scientists.

That kind of treatment would make me rebellious, want to stop my work completely and find something less important to do.

But these women persisted.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Grace Hopper was the first woman to graduate with a PhD in math from Yale. She invented the compiler, set the foundations for COBOL, and was considered so valuable to the Navy that she was called back from retirement to work another 19 years (!)
• When Einstein needed tutoring in the higher math he needed to pursue his theory of General Relativity, he turned to Emmy Noether, the inventor of abstract algebra. Through the course of teaching Einstein, she invented the equations needed to set General Relativity on a solid mathematical footing.
• Marie Tharp mapped 70% of the ocean floor, and discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. She insisted that it was confirmation of continental drift for years (and was fired for it!) before theory became accepted.

Fascinating. Examines both what we know about Anne Boleyn (very little), and the stories that have been told about her (very much).

Turns out most of what I thought was accepted history is in fact based on gossip spread by her enemies.

Three things I learned:

• Execution of Anne was the first time a queen had been executed in English history
• Anne spent a good deal of her childhood on the continent, under the tutelage of Marguerite de Navarre (sister of Francis I of France) who ran the most philosophically glittering salon in Europe
• The intelligent, pro-reform Anne of the second season of The Tudors is due mainly to Natalie Dormer, who wanted to portray an Anne closer to the historical one than had been done before

Amazing. I had no idea Wonder Woman was so directly connected to the history of American feminism. Lepore’s account shows how Wonder Woman joins the feminism and suffragist movements of 1910-1920 to the second wave of the 1970s.

Weaves together family histories, feminist politics, and all the messy complications of love without pulling punches or demonizing any of the participants. An incredible book.

Three things I learned:

• Feminists (word arises around 1910) distinguished themselves from 19th century reformers by saying women and men were equal in all ways, that neither sex was superior to the other in any way, and that women therefore deserved equal rights.
• Not only did the Harvard of 1910s not admit women, they weren't even allowed to speak on campus. When the Harvard Men's League for Woman Suffrage invited British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst to speak, they had to book Brattle Hall, in nearby Cambridge, because she was not allowed on campus.
• Margaret Sanger and Ethyl Byrne (sisters), both trained nurses, opened a birth control clinic in New York in 1916. Women lined up for blocks to get in, till the two were arrested: it was illegal to even talk about contraception in New York (!)

Riveting. Perlstein’s book is long, but moves at a fast clip; I stayed up late three nights in a row to finish the last half of the book.

He doesn’t explicitly draw any analogies with our last few elections, but the parallels are there: disillusioned voters; party elites that ignored insurgencies until it was too late to stop them; division of the world into good people and bad people, with any tactics that stopped the bad people allowed.

Not exactly comforting, but it did make me feel better to know that these problems are not new, and they can be overcome.

Three of the many, many things I learned:

• Republican Party of 1976 was much more liberal: party platform that year supported the Equal Rights Amendment, like it had every year since 1940.
• The idea that there are still hundreds of POWs in Vietnam is based on a lie: Nixon inflated the number of POWs from 587 to 1,600 so North Vietnam looked worse. Once the real POWs came home, he didn't reveal the truth.
• New York City almost declared bankruptcy in 1975. When the city asked President Ford's government to bail them out, Ford (and Reagan, and Rumsfeld, and Cheney) not only said no, they were glad to see the great city brought low.

Fascinating. Covers the first Roman millennium, from ~750 BCE to 212 CE, but with the specific goal of highlighting where our common conceptions of ancient Rome are wrong, and how many of our current political and cultural debates go back to the days of the Republic.

This means the chapters aren’t strictly chronological, and sometimes double-back on the same period to illuminate a different side of it. Each is written well, though, and offers interesting facts of its own.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Many of the things that make us squeamish about the Romans (gladiator fights, Caesar's brutality during the wars in Gaul) were criticized at the time by the Romans themselves
• Unlike most ancient empires, Rome was welcoming to immigrants and former slaves (in fact, their system of manumission was the first of its kind)
• Ancient Romans were clean-shaven, going back as far as 300 BCE

Eye-opening. Brings two hundred years of Central Asian history to life through a series of vignettes, describing individual lives spent among the cities and caravans of the Silk Road. That technique lets the author pack of a lot of detail into a slim book.

Three of the many things I learned:

• 9th century Buddhist monks would setup stalls in the monastery, offering spells for healing or insight into the future or advice for what to do
• Chinese histories of the time portray surrounding empires as vassal states, when in truth China often paid tribute to those empires to stave off war.
• Even in the eighth century, you could come across ruins and abandoned towns in the Tarim Basin. People had been living there for 2,000 years, and with water so precarious, often had to pick up and move as the climate shifted

More a series of biographies than a proper narrative history. Still well-written and interesting, though.

Holmes' use of language and choice of examples illustrates the Romantic belief that science and poetry were not opposed, but complementary disciplines, both seeking to understand and explain the world around them.

Three things I learned:

• Caroline Herschel, William Herschel's sister, was a great astronomer in her own right, discovering numerous comets and nebulae, as well as compiling the most comprehensive star catalogues of the 19th century.
• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written in 1816, can be considered the first science fiction novel, as it took curent theories of biology and chemistry and extrapolated them into the future, then constructed a narrative around the consequences.
• William Herschel was originally an organist in Bath; astronomy was a hobby he indulged in on the side. It just so happened that his homemade telescopes were more powerful than anything any one else had constructed before (!)

Amazing. Desan pulls back the myths about money’s origins, demonstrating in the process how boom and bust cycles are built into our financial system.

Feels weird to call a financial history a page-turner, but this one was compelling reading.

Three of the many things I learned:

• In medieval England, you had to pay (!) for money. Merchants would bring silver bullion to the mint, and the government would convert it to coins, keeping some of the coins generated for themselves as a fee.
• Bank of England notes were used as currency for over a hundred years before they were legal tender (first issued late 17th century, made legal currency only in 1833).
• Metal coins are often used for money, not because of the metal's intrinsic value, but because of how well it fulfills money's needs: the tokens used for money need to be non-perishable, portable, and hard to fake.

Lucid, detailed, and engrossing, much like its predecessor, The Plantagenets. Jones has a gift for converting a parade of names and dates into personalities and dramatic clashes.

Unlike the previous book, I could see many more parallels with events in Game of Thrones in this one. There’s a usurper claiming the rightful king is a child of adultery, there are minor houses parleying marriage to the royal house into more influence and power, there’s even a warrior king that becomes fat and indolent in old age.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Entire Tudor dynasty descends from Owen Tudor, a minor noble that Catherine of Valois (princess of France) married after King Henry V died.
• Wars of the Roses were less family feud and more power struggle between multiple great families due to the collapse of kingly power under Henry VI.
• The man who became Richard III was, until Edward IV's early death, one of the most loyal and honorable nobles in the kingdom.

Reads more like a series of essays first published in a paper or blog than a book with a single through-line. Probably a relic of its beginnings as a TV series.

Still, the writing was clear and concise, allowing me to learn the following:

• The lightbulb took 40 years to develop. Edison was just the last researcher to work out the kinks. Even his formula -- carbon filament in a vacuum -- was first used in 1841, 38 years before his success.
• Chicago's sewer system was installed by raising the entire city -- buildings and all -- ten feet.
• The artisans that made Venice famous for its glass were Turkish refugees that settled in the city after the sack of Constantinople in 1204.

Blatantly partisan, and frustrating more than informative. Was hoping for a survey history of Latin America, with a view towards US interference. Instead I got an overview of US elites' ideology as applied to Latin America, which was not nearly as illuminating.

The book skips around between years and places constantly, making it hard to form a coherent picture of what was happening at each phase. It also doesn’t quote many primary sources, or do more than mention a speech or paper only to summarize and condemn it.

Despite its many attempts to convince with rhetoric rather than facts, I did manage to learn a few things:

• The US military developed many of its air combat tactics fighting Nicaraguan rebels in the 1920s
• Reagan's administration established a policy office whose job was not just to present their "positive" side of the Contras but also to get citizen's groups to organize campaigns to lobby Congress, which is illegal
• US withdrew from the International Court of Justice because it ordered us to pay reparations to Nicaragua for mining its ports and conducting clandestine operations there

An odd book. The author’s main thesis – that the Celts knew enough about geometry and astronomy to align their cities with the path of the sun – is convincing, once his evidence is laid out. But along the way he falls into claims that sound more like an “aliens built the pyramids” book, such as when he says all Celtic art was based on complex geometric designs.

It’s hard to fault him too much, though; the central idea is inspiring, and his excitement at getting to share it bleeds through.

Just a few of the things I learned from this book:

• The Druids -- and the Celts in general -- were not illiterate, though writing down druidic knowledge was taboo. Most of their writing was done using the Greek alphabet.
• There were several large Celtic migrations in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, that were apparently well-planned (Caesar relates one that was planned two years ahead of time). Many of these ended up in northern Italy; both Bologna and Milan were founded by migrating Gauls.
• The Roman conception of Gaul's geography was terrible. Tacitus thought Ireland was just off the coast of Spain (!). Caesar had to rely completely on local knowledge to navigate the terrain. In contrast, a Gaul from Marseille (Pytheas) circumnavigated Europe in the 320s BCE (Mediterranean to Atlantic Coast to Britain to Baltic to Black Sea back to Mediterranean), taking accurate latitude readings the whole way.

A rambling, overly-long book. Spends so much time digressing from his core topic – dipping into cognitive theory, the history of Standard Oil, and Greek mythology, among others – that he doesn’t find time (in 700+ pages!) to tie anything together.

The final section is the biggest offender, becoming just a parade of names and quotes with no background, no context, and no focus.

The one point he hammers on constantly is that any attempt to resolve conflicts by playing up the common interests of the parties involved is an “anti-strategy,” as he labels it. This quirky obsession puts him in some odd positions, like when he spends some time talking about the amazing Jane Addams, only to disparage her thinking on conflict by slapping the “anti-strategic” label on it. Many of the women he discusses end up dismissed in a similar fashion, making his attempts to undermine their thinking seem motivated by something other than rational thought.

Even though I felt like putting it down multiple times, I did learn a few things:

• Chimps not only compete politically, they use coalition building within the group, and engage in raids and genocidal warfare outside the group.
• Clausewitz is more famous today, but the most popular writer on military strategy in the 19th century was Jomini.
• Martin Luther King wasn't originally committed to non-violence. Only once some of Gandhi's followers joined his organization -- and after Rosa Parks' successful boycott of buses -- did he commit to nonviolence as a strategy

Incredibly long, but eye-opening. So much more of the news makes sense to me now, like I’ve been given a set of mental footnotes for each story that mentions anything related to energy.

The book could’ve used some serious editing, though. I found numerous typos, misspellings, repeated phrases, even whole paragraphs that echo each other.

In addition, the book starts out at a good pace, but begins to feel like a slog somewhere around Part 4 (where he discusses renewable energy, then spends Part 5 going into more detail about renewables). Had to push myself to finish this one.

That said, I learned an incredible amount, including:

• In 2011, the US was 78% self sufficient in overall energy: natural gas, oil, coal, nuclear, renewables, etc
• Cap-and-Trade as a solution to carbon pollution was pioneered by the lead permits issued to refineries in the 80s to eliminate lead from gasoline
• In 2009, newly discovered reserves equalled the amount of oil produced over the entire lifetime of the industry

An excellent antidote to the normal narratives of invention and progress.

But Edgerton isn’t a Luddite, or a cynic that doesn’t believe in progress. Instead, he sets out to fill in the stories that normally get glossed over in normal histories: the importance of horsepower to the modern armies of World War II, the communities in West Africa that have grown up specifically to maintain the cars and trucks they inherit from the developed world using local materials, the resurgence in whaling in the 1920s and 1930s driven by demand for whale oil to be used in margarine. It’s fascinating, incredibly readable, and it changed the way I read stories of technical progress and achievement.

Three facts in particular stood out to me:

• India and Taiwan produce more bicycles each year than the entire world did in 1950.
• In 2003, the largest R&D spenders weren't in biotech or the internet; they were car companies: Ford, Daimler Chrysler, Toyota, etc.
• The rickshaw, which I always assumed was an old tech lingering in the modern world, was in fact only invented in 1870, in Japan.

Wonderfully written re-discovery of the world of 1913 via a tour of its major cities. Manages to give a feel for each without dwelling too long on any one city.

Ends on a haunting note, with the assurances and questions of 1913 obliterated by the war of 1914. 1913 comes to seem an extension of the 19th century, rather than the beginning of the 20th, a different world that had a different future, once. Final chapter quotes a German intellectual returning home after the war to see everything preserved as if 1913 had been frozen in time: the British books, the Persian cigars from French friends, the Russian plays, all transformed, all changed now that the internationalism of 1913 had been dismantled by four years of war.

Three of the many things I learned about the state of the world in 1913:

• The Ottoman Empire was still in the midst of the reforms and changes brought about by the Young Turks and the new parliamentary government they had brought back
• Woodrow Wilson originally ran on a platform of domestic reform, and hoped that his presidency would leave him free from foreign policy crises so he could focus on it.
• Non-European Algerians were french subjects, not citizens. They could become citizens only by renouncing Islam and applying for citizenship

Very readable history of how the rules of spelling and grammar in English have evolved over time, often despite the efforts of those who attempted to set those rules in stone. Makes a great companion book for Shady Characters.

Three things I learned:

• No one cared about English grammar or spelling until the 18th century. I'd always heard that Shakespeare was a bad speller, or a rebellious speller, but that wasn't it at all: no one in his era cared about spelling very much, so however he wrote the words down, so long as their meaning was clear, was fine.
• At least part of our spelling problems come from using a 23-sound alphabet (the Latin one) to write a 40-phoneme language. The original runic script for writing English had 33 letters, which made it much easier to distinguish the blended th in thing from the separated th of masthead.
• Many of the differences in spelling between American English and British English (e.g., color vs colour) come from Noah Webster, who, in a spate of linguistic patriotism, wanted to give the new country its own English.

Weaves together a history of the architecture, interior design, politics, and sociology of the office, from its rise in the countinghouses of the 19th century to the co-working spaces of the present. Made me want to re-watch Mad Men, this time to appreciate all the historical detail in the architecture and furniture that I missed before.

Out of the many things I learned from this book, three surprised me the most:

• Human Resources as a discipline was invented by Lillian Gilbreth, the wife of the couple Cheaper by the Dozen was based on. It's original name was Personnel Management, and it was based on the efficient workplace theories of Frederick Taylor.
• The Larkin Building in Buffalo, NY, one of the first office buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (in 1904), set all the precedents for Google's offices a hundred years later: rec areas, open floor plans, libraries, and outdoor spaces for employee relaxation.
• The cubicle farm came out of a 1968 design that was intended by its inventor (Robert Propst) to be a more flexible, individualized, office. In seeking to make something more human than the offices of the past, he inadvertently created the inhuman office of the future.

A remarkable book. Covers not just the development of Keynes' and Hayek’s positions, but also how they developed in opposition to each other, then moves on to how their followers (both politicians and economists) have continued the argument over the past 70 years.

I’m not sure how balanced the book is. After reading it, my opinion of Keynes is much higher than it was before, and my opinion of Hayek is lower.

Hayek’s economic ideas come across as an obscure version of classical economics, neither very original or very influential. Hayek’s politics, the idea that any government intervention in the economy inevitably leads to fascism, has the whole of recorded history against it, with the last 70 years as a comprehensive refutation.

Keynes, on the other hand, invented the Bretton Woods system, and laid the foundation for the IMF and World Bank. His criticisms of the Paris Treaty that ended World War I led to the US policy of rebuilding Germany and Japan after World War II instead of trying to hold them down. Despite politician’s rhetoric, his economic and political ideas are the dominant ones in Western society, and have been since his death.

However, this interpretation of mine could be a result of my natural tendency toward Keynesian thinking, and not a result of any bias in the book. After all, followers of classical economics have been looking at exactly the same world as the Keynesians and coming to different conclusions for decades; perhaps from a Hayekian perspective this book proves just how prophetic he was?

In any case, it did show me the massive gaps in my understanding of the history of both men:

• Keynes pioneered the now-conservative idea that decreasing taxes is the same as spending money to stimulate the economy. In the US, it was first proposed as policy by Kennedy in 1962 to overcome a mini-recession, and the economic data support Keynes.
• Keynes invented the discipline of macroeconomics, which is partly to blame for why he and Hayek disagreed so violently: they were really working in different disciplines.
• Milton Friedman, Hayek's biggest supporter, actually first adopted Keynesian economics, only rejecting them after his study of the causes of the Great Depression in the US. It was Hayek's politics, not his economics, that Friedman and the conservative establishment of the UK and US adopted.

Simply fantastic. Houston writes incredibly well and has done his research, teasing out the true history of a dozen different typographical marks out of a mess of false leads and myths.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Punctuation was invented by the Greeks as guide for how a text should be read aloud. Before that, they wrote everything as a single stream of capital letters.
• The asterisk and dagger marks got their start as part of literary criticism: either marking out questionable text or calling attention to something interesting in it
• The original typewriter keyboard did not have an exclamation point. You had to construct it manually using a period and an apostrophe.

Incredibly well-written. Covers nearly 600 years of European (and world) history without oversimplifying or tipping over into names-and-dates territory. Digs deep into the conflicts of those years to show how the Holy Roman Empire, and then Germany, was at the heart of most of them.

This was a serious corrective for me, since when I was growing up Germany meant Nazis and Nazis were the Last Great Bad Guys (the Soviets were more sympathetic when I was little) so Germany was the country we didn’t talk about much in history class, save to point out all the ways in which Germany had effed things up for the rest of the world.

But leaving Germany out meant a lot of European history and strategy didn’t make sense to me. Why would Britain want to defend Belgian neutrality in WWI? Why did Germany talk so much about encirclement? Why did anyone care that Charles V held both the crowns of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire?

Simms' book finally filled those gaps in my understanding, and also taught me:

• During World War I, sauerkraut was renamed "victory cabbage" in the U.S.
• Spain, as the last fascist power left in Europe at the end of WWII, was singled out as being banned from the UN until it had become a democracy, and was hated by both the US and the Soviets.
• The experiences of Germany and Poland with weak central governments were used as examples in the Federalist Papers for why the new United States needed a stronger central government.

An uneven but interesting short book about the history of ninjas. I like that he spends time dispelling most of the myths about ninjas and tries to get back to their real historical role in Japanese warfare. Towards the end, though, he stretches to try to attach the ninja ethos to the Japanese Intelligence officers of World War II, and ends up sounding like an apologist for actions that all too recently propped up a racist, genocidal regime.

Still, I did learn a few things:

• Ninjas were basically mercenaries, and they could be samurai or peasants.
• Ninjas were mostly used as scouts or spies (to find/count enemy troops, discover the weaknesses in a castle, etc) and occasionally hired as a strike force to sneak into a castle and raise hell (or the gate).
• When ninjas did fight regular troops, it was usually as locals defending their homes from marauding armies.

X happened, and then Y, so Z policy was effective is a common way for writers building a narrative to gloss over the fact that the two things linked may not actually have a causal relationship.

For example, X slew Y, becoming king is pretty clear: the killing of the old king allowed the new king to take his place. But consider “X brought peace to the realm by lowering taxes, negotiating with his barons, and concluding several alliances with his neighbors.”

It sounds straightforward. But can we be sure that the king’s policies were the direct cause of peace? Maybe the weather was good for several years, raising crop yields and giving everyone enough that they didn’t have to fight for resources. Maybe the king was lucky in getting a generation of barons who were more inclined to bend the knee than take control. Maybe the king’s neighbors were busy fighting civil wars, and too preoccupied with internal matters to seek outside enemies. Maybe all three things happened, and if any one of them had been missing, the kingdom would have been plunged into chaos.

Especially when reading condensed histories, we have to be aware of the perspective of the author, and what sort of point they might be making, even unconsciously, with the way they frame the story.

A work of amazingly bad scholarship and poor critical thinking. Morris spends the better part of 400 pages trying to prove that war has been the primary engine of human advancement, and that war - not democracy, not the rule of law, not the cooperative instinct - has made us safer.

A weaker version of his thesis - that some wars make the world safer, or that war has acted as a natural selection pressure on human states, weeding out those that fail to ensure the greatest prosperity for their citizens - would be both interesting and justifiable. At every turn, though, Morris refuses to take a reasonable position, pushing his thesis far past the point at which it can be defended.

It doesn’t help that each chapter is full of historical inaccuracies. Sometimes he’s recasting historical events to suit his thesis, such as when he insists the Roman Empire “split in two” in 220, when in fact only the administration of the Empire was divided; the Empire itself was considered whole for hundreds of years after. Other times he skips over inconvenient facts, like when he insists that the years after 1100 were “centuries of decline” for Europe, despite the evidence that over that period wages rose, new inventions entered use (e.g. the water mill) and life for the common people (the majority) got better. Or when he waxes poetic about “prosperous plantations” founded by the Portuguese on Madeira and the Azores, leaving out the numerous slaves imported to work on those plantations.

Sometimes Morris makes up his own facts. In several places he compares rates of violent death across time periods, but these rates are mostly (his own) guesswork. And what a surprise, his guesses support his thesis that rates of violent death have declined as states have gotten larger.

At one point he actually admits that his numbers might be wrong, but then claims that it’s for future scholars to come up with better numbers and refute him, which is one of the most brazen admissions of copping-out I’ve ever read. Why add to the body of careful scholarship, when you can publish a controversial thesis without evidence to back it up?

Other places where Morris makes inexcusable mistakes:

• His take on the Muslim caliphates founded in the seventh century: "Hardly anybody took notice of them."
• On American Revolutionary soldiers, who nearly lost the War of Independence multiple times: "[they] ran rings around the rigid, ponderous professionals"
• He characterizes Communist China as a Soviet client prior to 1972, and that Nixon "broke them away" from the Russians. In reality, the Chinese Communists and Soviets had always been at loggerheads, and formally denounced each other in 1961. China invited Nixon to visit as part of its gradual opening up to world trade, a fact well documented in any modern book on Chinese history.

For example, he actually does have evidence that rates of violent death in private disputes dropped under the Roman Empire. His interpretation is that only fear of punishment by the Roman government kept people in line, so the Roman wars of conquest were justified. He ignores the fact that every society has means of adjudicating conflicts, some more violent than others, and that perhaps having access to something like the Roman courts was all that conquered peoples needed to put down their arms.

Also, Morris doesn’t address the possibility that the rate of violence stayed constant, but shifted to state violence instead of private violence. I might lose my hand because I was found guilty of theft by a magistrate, instead of having it cut off by a rival, but the hand is still gone.

Later he wants to distinguish between productive and unproductive wars. Productive wars are wars that create larger states - bigger is always better for Morris - and unproductive wars break up large empires into smaller ones. This leads him into contradictions when discussing the many wars fought by steppe nomads against settled peoples: he calls them unproductive wars because they broke up the empires formed in Europe and along the Mediterranean, even though they created some of the largest empires in the world (the Ottoman and Mongol both come to mind) that also stimulated trade by eliminating brigandage along the Silk Road, connecting China to the Mediterranean via overland routes.

The cycle of boom and bust (productive war followed by unproductive war followed by productive war) he wants us to believe in is easily interpreted as being proof that war is not productive, that expansion of government by violent means is intolerable and unsustainable. Trade expansion and good government become possible at the exact moment that rulers abandon war as the primary means of seeking prosperity and power.

I won’t even address the conclusion of his book, where he claims that the US needs to keep spending large sums on its military and playing global cop until the Singularity arrives and makes war obsolete. It’s such a sudden lurch off the rails of his narrative and over the cliffs of delusion that I have to believe it was inserted by the editor as a prank.

I did learn some things, though:

• If you're a British professor, you can get poorly-argued historically inaccurate books published, so long as they're also controversial
• There's a segment of the US and British elites that still want to believe colonialism was justified
• It's possible to write modern books on history without catching up on recent scholarship

Couldn’t finish it. The first two chapters can be summarized as: “We have no idea what it was like for peasants in Roman and early medieval times, but I bet it was terrible, because every cultural achievement was built on their sweaty, overworked backs. Now here’s a bunch of quickly summarized history to wash that down.”

What did I learn? Nothing, really. There are better books out there on everything he tackles here, from the waxing and waning of Imperial Rome (see Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire) to life in Spain during the Reconquista (see Kage Baker’s In the Garden of Iden).

Surprisingly good. Jones covers almost 300 years of history at a pace that feels perfect: not so fast that you miss out on interesting details, not so slow that you ever want to stop reading. Each chapter zooms in on just a few years, keeping them short and easily digestible but still giving him space to tell a dramatic story.

Three things I learned:

1. I always thought England went thousands of years without an invasion by a foreign power: from 1066 to the present. Turns out France invaded during the chaos at the end of the reign of King John (who you may remember as the villain in most Robin Hood movies).
2. In many ways, the early Plantagenet kings were really French lords that happened to have the throne of England. They spent most of their time in France, since that's where most of their wealth and power came from. John was the first king to spend the majority of his time in England, and the local barons got so sick of him they forced him to sign the Magna Carta.
3. I thought the Glorious Revolution was the first time parliament deposed and chose a king, but really it goes back into the Plantagenet era: both Edward II and Richard II were deposed via parliament - Edward in favor of his son, Edward III, and Richard in favor of Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV.

Highly recommended. Takes the interesting approach of covering China’s rise over the last 200 years by profiling a selection of leaders (intellectual and political) from each period. It’s missing a map of China, so you may want to read with Google Maps handy so you can get a sense of where things in the book are happening. Also seems slanted toward the position that China’s path to wealth and power has been a successful one, instead of a crooked road paved with the bodies of the dead (see Tombstone).

Three things I learned:

1. Sun Yat-Sen was not the “father of democracy” I thought he was. Rather, he was one more reformer vying for power in the period at the end of the Qing dynasty, and not a very successful one, either.

2. The feeling of humiliation for Chinese goes back to the nineteenth century. It’s not an invention of the communist party; the Chinese intellectuals of the time saw their treatment at the hands of the Western powers as humiliation, not simple defeat.

3. The Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 was done at the orders of Deng Xiaoping, the same leader that started China on the path to a more market-based economic system.

Well worth the 400 pages. Graeber humanizes the history of debt, bringing anthropological insight to our understanding of the history of money.

Unfortunately, his multiple objectives - to overturn the common story of the origins of money, to critique capitalism as a system, and to give a comprehensive history of debt, among others - pull the book in different directions. They’re all interesting, but prevent the book from gelling into a coherent whole.

Three things I learned:

1. The interest for credit cards in the US used to be capped at 7% (!).
2. There were large periods of human history where things were bought on personal credit, not with coins. Only strangers used currency.
3. We can distinguish between capitalism, or the belief that money should always make money (interest), and free markets, or the belief that people should be free to start and run their own businesses. Being in favor of free-markets does not automatically make you a capitalist.