Content tagged with "history"

1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War
Book Review
March 25, 2022
224

An interesting look at the world in 1913, before the Great War. The book doesn’t mention the looming war, and that’s kind of the point. It goes city-by-city, discussing what was happening in each, on the eve of World War 1. The result is…interesting. The book paints the picture of the world as a…

Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal
Book Review
June 24, 2017
34

Wonderfully well-told tale of WWII espionage. Fast moving and thrilling.

Alexander Hamilton
Deane’s Library
Book
7
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
Deane’s Library
Book Review
August 7, 2021
165

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…

Bad Land: An American Romance
Deane’s Library
Book Review
November 26, 2015
385

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…

The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled into the Spotlight and Made History
Deane’s Library
Book Review
September 10, 2024
665

In microcosm, this is the story of a single event – a fashion show outside Paris in 1973 that was over in about three hours. But if you take a longer view, it’s a story of the history of fashion to that point, and its intersection with race in America. The Palace of Versailles is where the last…

Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles
Deane’s Library
Book Review
July 25, 2024
450

This is a lovely history of New York City, focused down to a single street. It follows Broadway north from the southern tip of Manhattan, mile by mile, and talks about the history of the city as the street moved northward. Along the way, it has random vignettes of things that happened on the street….

The Cold War: A World History
Deane’s Library
Book Review
October 6, 2017
70

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.

The Covenant
Deane’s Library
Book Review
May 23, 2022
422

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,…

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
Deane’s Library
Book Review
July 26, 2021
315

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…

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
Deane’s Library
Book Review
September 20, 2019
233

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…

Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
Deane’s Library
Book Review
June 13, 2021
307

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…

Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House
Deane’s Library
Book Review
May 11, 2023
1028

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…

The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty
Deane’s Library
Book Review
September 19, 2024
927

This is a long look into the Bush family dynasty. Turns out that before George H.W. and George W. , there is a long history of powerful people in the Bush clan. The book starts back with Samuel Prescott Bush, in the 1800s. He was a powerful and wealthy industrialist. It spends a bit of time on him,…

The First Man in Rome
Deane’s Library
Book Review
June 14, 2022
568

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…

The First World War
Deane’s Library
Book Review
July 11, 2021
255

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…

The First World War: A Complete History
Deane’s Library
Book Review
November 6, 2021
310

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…

Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 16, 2024
186

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…

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Deane’s Library
Book Review
November 11, 2019
154

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…

God’s Secretaries : The Making of the King James Bible
Deane’s Library
Book Review
January 12, 2019
322

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…

Gran Meccanismo: Clockpunk Roleplaying in Da Vinci’s Florence
Deane’s Library
Book Review
February 23, 2023
408

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 ….

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
Deane’s Library
Book Review
June 30, 2021
525

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…

The Gutenberg Revolution
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 30, 2017
87

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 History of the World in 6 Glasses
Deane’s Library
Book Review
February 23, 2021
171

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…

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 27, 2020
231

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…

Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam
Deane’s Library
Book Review
July 24, 2017
58

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.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 8, 2015
67

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.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Deane’s Library
Book Review
November 1, 2014
203

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…

The Jesuits: A History
Deane’s Library
Book
9
Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 21, 2023
169

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…

The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 31, 2023
353

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…

Legion versus Phalanx
Deane’s Library
Book Review
February 14, 2019
227

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,…

The LEGO Story: How a Little Toy Sparked the World’s Imagination
Deane’s Library
Book Review
May 21, 2023
663

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…

The Library Book
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 30, 2019
166

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…

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
Deane’s Library
Book Review
August 5, 2023
604

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…

The Medici
Deane’s Library
Book
7
Night
Deane’s Library
Book
6
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci: Selected Extracts from the Writings of the Renaissance Genius
Deane’s Library
Book Review
October 1, 2023
457

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….

On Intelligence: The History of Espionage and the Secret World
Deane’s Library
Book Review
March 7, 2018
101

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…

Origins of a Journey: History’s Greatest Adventures Marked by Ambition, Necessity, and Madness
Deane’s Library
Book Review
October 16, 2021
141

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…

A People’s History of the United States
Deane’s Library
Book Review
November 17, 2015
343

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…

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
Deane’s Library
Book Review
August 30, 2021
262

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…

Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age
Deane’s Library
Book Review
August 28, 2024
613

This is a history of the “Luddite revolution,” when textile laborers in central English destroyed machinery that was very rapidly taking their jobs. It’s where the general term “luddite” came from, meaning someone who refuses to adopt new technology. I was surprised to find out that this all took…

Roman Empire
Deane’s Library
Book
7
Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers
Deane’s Library
Book Review
November 8, 2020
295

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…

Secret Treasure of Oak Island: The Amazing True Story of a Centuries-Old Treasure Hunt
Deane’s Library
Book Review
September 6, 2024
640

This book is both fascinating and inadvertently funny. I found myself laughing with happiness at some parts of it, contemplating what just might be an amazing prank that’s played out over hundreds of years. Way, way back in 1795, three Canadian teenagers found a depressed area of ground on a small…

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence
Deane’s Library
Book Review
March 30, 2019
254

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…

Shogun
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 1, 2024
740

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…

The Shortest History of India
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 26, 2023
321

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…

Silent Night: The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 18, 2021
141

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…

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 30, 2018
65

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.

Soldiers Of Reason: The RAND Corporation And The Rise Of The American Empire
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 24, 2022
263

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…

The Somme
Deane’s Library
Book Review
July 4, 2022
248

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…

The Soul of a New Machine
Deane’s Library
Book Review
October 5, 2019
98

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…

Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books
Deane’s Library
Book Review
January 17, 2024
20
Sugar: A Bittersweet History
Deane’s Library
Book Review
January 9, 2019
235

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…

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Deane’s Library
Book Review
June 1, 2023
580

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…

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Deane’s Library
Book Review
June 16, 2023
1221

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,…

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War that Changed American History
Deane’s Library
Book Review
October 16, 2021
416

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…

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 31, 2017
166

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…

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis – and Themselves
Deane’s Library
Book Review
August 22, 2022
376

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…

Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity
Deane’s Library
Book Review
November 28, 2014
143

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…

Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 20, 2022
883

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…

The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History
Deane’s Library
Book Review
May 10, 2019
89

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,…

Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 24, 2022
365

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…

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 12, 2019
96

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…

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
Deane’s Library
Book Review
July 6, 2015
161

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…

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
Deane’s Library
Book Review
June 1, 2014
93

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…