Content tagged with "history"

An interesting book, but also not what the title would suggest – the subtitle anyway. This was not an all-encompassing history of money and finance. The book starts with Jewish moneylenders in Venice, and then goes on to discuss the bond market, the stock market, real estate, etc. It’s basically a…

This is a book about a place. Not the Badlands of South Dakota , but the “bad land” of Eastern Montana. It’s the story of immigrants who settled there and claimed homesteads on the promise of dry farming techniques and decent weather. But the weather was bad, and dry farming didn’t work nearly as…

Fantastic, detailed history of the Cold War. covers all the bases, from World War I on, including quite a bit of coverage of India and Africa, outside of the big players – the U.S., Soviet Union, and China. Really, well done. 800 pages, but never got bogged down in it.

There are “epic” novels, and then there’s this. It’s the history of South Africa, starting in 14,000 BC and ending in 1978. There are 14 chapters, and each chapter handles a different time period. We start about 10,000 years back with cave dwellers wandering the southern part of the continent,…

The Cult of the Dead Cow was an early hacker group, formed in the 1980s. This book tells its story over the years and where everyone ended up. It’s…scattered. There are a lot of people, and the scope is large. The book is essentially trying to follow a fractured group of people over 40-some-odd…

This is compelling book in a weird format. It’s about two things: the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and a serial killer at work in the city during that time. The two stories are weirdly separate. The killer visits the fair, but doesn’t commit any murders there, so the connection is…

Fascinating story of Huguette Clark, the youngest daughter of mining baron WA Clark. She was fabulously wealthy, but reclusive and eccentric. She maintained “empty mansions” that she never lived in, and even spent the last 20-ish years of her life contentedly living in a hospital room. The early…

This is the inside story of The Plame Affair – the revelation that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative, allegedly initiated by the Bush White House because Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, had been critical of the administration’s reasoning for starting the Iraq War. The most obvious part of this book is…

This is a “historical novel.” It’s sort of fiction, but sort of not. It’s a narrative of history, but apparently quite accurate. The book mainly follows two men: Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla , during the period of 110 - 100BC in Ancient Rome and its related battlefields. The two major…

It is what it claims to be – a detailed history of WWI. Actually, I understand that this is the short version. The author is apparently one of the most renowned WWI scholars in the world, and has a three-volume history in the works, but he decided to make an easier-to-digest version. He approaches…

This is a magisterial history of The Great War. Nothing is left out. The book proceeds down a strict timeline, battle by battle, event by event, mutiny by mutiny. It starts just before, and ends just after. The numbers are staggering – all the numbers. The dead, the wounded, the costs, the number of…

This is an odd book. It’s…neat, but I don’t understand why on Earth anyone published it. It’s a series of interviews about people who are still doing interesting things with floppy disks. They’re using them to distribute “diskmags,” or using them in artwork, or hoarding them, or doing something else…

Thrilling story of a cholera outbreak in London in the 1850s, and the physician who tracked down the source. At the time, illness was thought to come from “bad air,” but a physician named John Snow mapped the illnesses and determined that they were clustered around a water pump in Broad Street. No…

What’s interesting about this book is that there’s just very little information about the actual process of creating the King James Bible. Not much of the historical record of the actual translation process remains. So, what the book does is concentrate on the societal, political, and religious…

This is a role-playing game rulebook. I love to read these, I think because I love to put rules around domains of information, and there’s nothing as amorphous as life itself. The setting is Florence, Italy of the Italian Renaissance – the late 1400s and early 1500s. The time of Leonardo Da Vinci ….

This is the almost-definitive history of Hurricane Katrina. I say “almost,” because it was written about a year after the 2005 hurricane, which means there’s probably some history since then that’s been missed. This is 700 pages of misery, basically. New Orleans didn’t stand a chance under the best…

I love the subject but just couldn’t connect with the writing style. I found it confusing. Not an entirely bad book – it presents Gutenberg as a businessman , and covers all the religious and political conflict in Mainz, Germany that helped the printing revolution along. After Gutenberg’s death, he…

A fun book about six beverages that have figured heavily in world history: Beer Wine Spirits Coffee Tea Soft drinks Each of these have influenced the world enormously in different ways. The world grew up around these drinks – People wanted access to them Congregating over them was a key societal…

Fantastic book about the history of American colonialism, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico , to dozens of islands . There are untold stories here about how the US never quite figured out what to do with some countries , and by the time they had been taken, colonialism in general was nearing its…

The astonishing story of one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. Absolutely harrowing writing, and good background on the Vietnam War itself – how and why we got to where we were.

A solid history of Bell Labs. Interesting, but a bit tedious. It’s astonishing how much stuff was invented there – it puts Xerox PARC to shame, really. The transistor? Wow. Meticulously researched, but tends to bog down under its own weight in places.

Amazingly wonderful book on the history of the digital age, all the way from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage through to Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Wonderfully written, always engrossing. It begins with a long discussion of Lovelace, Babbage, and Turing’s thoughts on whether a machine could ever be…

I eventually abandoned this book, but I read quite a bit of it. What I came to appreciate is that history of the Middle East and history of the British Empire are wildly intertwined. The British were all over that region, and when they left, they made some attempts to split it up, but then left…

Here’s my problem with this book – it wasn’t a history, it was more of a personal memoir. I was expecting the detailed story of the Kurdish people, but instead I got a story about the author and how he interacted with the Kurds over the course of several decades. The author had some history with…

I struggled with this book. The author admits that it’s about almost everything except a direct comparison of the legion and the phalanx. After a short introduction to ancient military tactics, it pretty quickly launches into a long history of ancient warfare and battles. About halfway through this,…

This is an authorized history of the LEGO company. Emphasis there because this is less about LEGO the toy. It’s largely a history of the business of LEGO. And it’s very authorized. Throughout the book are sidebars from Kjeld Kristiansen, who until recently was the head of the company. He is the son…

I thought this was a novel. It’s not. But it’s wonderful. It’s the story of: The 1986 fire at the Los Angeles library and its subsequent investigation and aftermath The larger Los Angeles library system and its history The future of libraries in general The three topics interweave throughout the…

This is the story of several things, simultaneously. Most prominently, it’s the story of Percy Fawcett, an explorer from England who ventured into the Amazon twenty-some-odd times. He was utterly convinced there was a lost civilization somewhere therein, which he called “Z” It’s also the story of…

This is really a coffee table book. I think I got it at Costco, but it’s beautifully bound with a cloth cover. I endeavored to read this, even though it’s not that readable – or even designed/intended to be read at all. I set my timer to one hour, and sat in a chair with nothing but the book….

Wonderfully interesting overview of intelligence, from human spies to spy satellites to computer espionage. Peppered throughout are small case studies of actual historical situations . Very enjoyable. My only gripe is that the author injects personal opinions a bit too much. This is not a…

This is a fun book. It’s not gonna change your life or anything, but you’ll probably enjoy it if you accept it for what it is. It’s basically a series of short chapters – blog posts, essentially – describing some adventurer, from Charles Lindbergh to Christopher Columbus to Harriet Tubman to Genghis…

the author of this book makes a good point in the afterword: all facts promote or minimize a viewpoint, merely by their selection. So, choosing to retell or convey a fact promotes some point-of-view because that fact tells a story. And conveying that fact means you want to tell that story, and not…

This is the definitive history of oil, from the first discovery in the 1850s through the first Gulf War of of the 1990s. It’s a lot – 900-some-odd pages. Not for the faint of heart. I actually brought back in college in the mid-90s, and never finished it. I promised myself I’d get back to it, and…

This is a story of a bunch of hacks, which the author has strung together. The claim is that NotPetya, WannaCry, the Korean Olympic hack, etc. were all the work of the same organization – a Russian GRU hacking group nicknamed “Sandworm” . I enjoyed the book, but there’s a lot there. The single…

This book is exactly what it claims – a magisterial history of intelligence and espionage. But, it left me a bit frustrated. The book is a series of anecdotes, with no framework for understanding the larger issues of intelligence. It’s episodic – a series of vignettes, basically. One could say…

Oh, goodness, I didn’t like this book. And I feel terrible about that fact, because it’s a classic, but I just didn’t. This is a long, long book. I’ve read comparably long books like The Covenant and The Pillars of the Earth, but this is both long and very, very boring. It’s set in 1600. John…

This book lived up to its title – it was a short, competent history of India. That said, it suffers from a problem of any book dealing with ancient history – it can be hard to transition between time periods and know what’s factual and what’s legend. Consider: When do you transition between these…

I loved the idea of this book, but the reality was a mess. The problem with documenting the Christmas Truce is that it’s told largely in legend. It was impromptu and distributed – it happened with no advance notice, and it happened all up and down the Ypres front. As a result, recollections of it…

A spectacular history of Asia. This is a book where I stopped tracking what page I was on, because I just wanted to keep reading it. Also a book that could have been boring, but the writing style is just effortless and wonderful.

The book is what it claims to be: a comprehensive history of RAND. The problem is that it’s just not that interesting. RAND is a company created by the U.S. Air Force. During the Cold War, we were scared that the Russians were winning the military technology race, so the Air Force created RAND as a…

This book forced me to think about books about wars in general. I think I’ve identified four levels, in descending order of scope. Geopolitical: These books discuss the large-scale political reasons and ramifications of the war. Strategic: These books talk about large battles, and where the…

Honestly, I just didn’t get it. This book was described in near-mythical terms, but it seemed tedious to me. Maybe I’m just not used to hardware design, or I’m not an engineer anymore – I don’t know what, but the over-arching point of this was lost. There was some philosophy toward the end of…

This is a very good book, but the title is pretty unclear. It really covers the history of sugar from one angle: slavery, or perhaps labor exploitation in general. It’s fair to say that slavery is a big part of sugar, for sure. And this book covers it up, down, and sideways. And that’s pretty much…

This is a book about a poem. It follows a book-hunter in the 15th century named Poggio, while he manages to save the last remaining copy of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, which is an explanation of Epicurean philosophy. The poem makes lot of secular claims. In the middle of the book, they’re…

Much is made of the title and implied angle of this book, but – to be clear – this is a solid, comprehensive biography of Abraham Lincoln. The purported angle is this: once elected president, Abraham Lincoln appointed his main rivals for the office to important positions in his administration. Thus,…

This is a recounting of the First Barbary War. That event is important because it was the first overseas conflict the young United States ever fought in. The Barbary Coast is the Northern coast of Africa, against the Mediterranean. In the late 1700s, this area was teeming with pirates who would rob…

Wonderfully written biography. Makes me want to read more Chernow. JDR was a flawed man, certainly. While an upstanding citizen in his personal life, he was a ruthless business, who destroyed his competitors with glee. Provoked some wonder at the line between the personal and professional. Can…

This is the story of one week in 2008 – the week when Lehman Brothers was about to fail, and then almost everything went with it. It was the week that ended with TARP – the $700 billion Wall Street bailout package. And to be clear: this is 600 pages about that one week. It’s a nauseatingly detailed…

This book traces the history of Christianity by defining 12 “turning points,” which are pivotal moments in its development. These range from the Council of Niceo, to the Reformation , to the Edinburgh Mission conference in 1910. It was a good book, and certainly well-researched, but quite a bit of…

This is a novel from 1851 designed to reveal the horrors of slavery. And it worked – it caused outrage across the United States and pushed the country toward the Civil War. The author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, was prompted to write the novel by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which…

Truly, one of the most perfect books I have ever read. I wanted a comprehensive history of the NBA, and that’s what got, with style and beauty to go along with it. The history is organized well, the writing is superb and goes beneath superficial observations, and the artwork is just amazing – like,…

Enormously entertaining history of the Vanderbilt family by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who was a Vanderbilt on his mother’s side. Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt was a self-made man. He started ferrying people on a small boat around New York Harbor and ended up becoming the richest man the world had…

A wonderful history of the telegraph which proves that all of the “novel” problems the Internet brought about actually happened 150 years earlier. Standage pays social attention to the societal changes that the telegraph wrought, and the effect it had on the lives of the telegraph operators who went…

The title promised a discussion about how the 60s “shaped” the personal computer industry, but I just didn’t see it. The book is a history of technology and how the seminal figures of that period interacted with culture, but it didn’t show me how society “shaped” the industry, as much as the…

This book is good if you want a long, detailed history of the ARPANET, the direct predecessor to the Internet. For that, it’s fascinating. That said, it’s not a casual reader. I’m neck-deep in the Internet every day and am a fan of Internet history, and even I got bored in places. Still, if you ever…