Two books that stood out this year: Madeline Miller's "Song of Achilles" was a fun bit of historical fiction, and Michael Brooks' "Against the Web." I enjoyed Brooks' book because he points out how the right uses the same arguments against progress and reform at different points in history. I was devastated when he passed, and never knew a podcaster could be so impactful.
His Dark Materials hasn't been getting enough attention. It's a great show, and a much better adaptation than the Golden Compass movie that came out a few years ago.
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Eric H. Kline, Princeton University Press (234 pages)
When you’re staring down what feels like the end of history, it’s only natural to wonder if we’ve been here before, and what lessons those times of trouble hold for us now.
This slender, but massively weighty volume, by George Washington University classicist Eric H. Cline, takes up one of the great mysteries of human history. In 1177 B.C., after centuries of brilliance, the civilizations of the late Bronze Age Mediterranean came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Over the space of a generation or so, the Mycenaeans, the Minoans, the Hittites, and the Babylonians, slid into irreversible decline, vanishing from history, as the region slid into a centuries-long dark age that didn’t end until the emergence of what we now know as the classical era around 750 B.C.
Historians are still trying to unravel the interconnected calamities, which ranged from incursions by seaborne groups of marauders collectively known as the “Sea Peoples” and internal unrest, to the severing of sophisticated regional trade routes, that hastened the end of the Late Bronze Age. While it’s a very foreign world in a lot of ways, it’s also one that is recognizably our own, reminding us that civilization is a delicate thing that needs to be tended to and nurtured if it is to survive.
“Folklore,” Taylor Swift
For all the ink that’s been spilled about the death of the monoculture, July’s surprise release of Taylor Swift’s ninth record was a throwback to those seemingly bygone years where we were all listening to, and dissecting, the same records at the same time.
The minimalist, folk-imbued electronica that Swift crafted in lockdown with The National’s Aaron Dessner, and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff of Bleachers, was just the sort of quiet escapism that we were all looking for as we came blinking into the sun of what ended up being a short-lived, post-lockdown world.
If there was any doubt about Swift’s skills as a songwriter, this record should have silenced even the most vocal of skeptics. Stripped of stadium frippery and the big choruses that have marked her last couple of recorded outings, Swift plays to her strengths here. She boasts a novelist’s eye for detail, as evidenced by the acerbic tale of 20th-century socialite Rebekah Harkness on “The Last Great American Dynasty.” And her capacity for searingly personal song-craft remains intact with “Epiphany,” which deals with a person’s final moments. And while not specific to the pandemic, its lines about “Someone’s daughter, someone’s mother [holding] your hand through plastic now,” could not help but resonate with those of us who said goodbye to someone we loved who was taken from us by the virus.
Sometimes the right record comes along at the right moment. Swift, ever adept at choosing her moments, found hers with “Folklore.”
“The Mandalorian,” Disney+ (Streaming)
After a concluding Skywalker trilogy that felt as overstuffed as often as it felt half-baked, writer/director Jon Favreau’s space western marked a welcome return to smaller-scale storytelling that managed to evoke the pulpy best of the original film series, while forging a ground that was uniquely its own. Pedro Pascal’s laconic bounty hunter Din Djarin, the Mandalorian of the title, channeled fan nostalgia for the bounty hunter Boba Fett of the original series, even as he established himself as a new and serious player in the sprawling mythos.
Warning: Spoilers ahead:
Fan service abounded throughout the series, with such favorites as Jedi Knight Ahsoka Tano being brought to vivid life by Rosario Dawson (who’s getting her own series). The resurrection of Boba Fett was another welcome (if slightly expected moment). And, of course, the surprise return of a certain legendary Jedi Knight in the Season Two finale (I’m not going to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it) was one of those heart-stopping moments that the franchise excels at when at it’s at its best.
But there’s no doubt that the emotional center of the series, its entire reason for being, was the emerging father/child relationship between Mando and Grogu (don’t call him Baby Yoda anymore).
Some of the series’ sweetest moments came when Pascal’s bounty hunter let down his guard and allowed this impossibly adorable creature into his scarred heart. That journey into fatherhood — a theme across the franchise — is what keeps the Mandalorian from devolving into just another big-budget, Hollywood shoot-em-up.
As always, thank you for your newsletter. I just wanted to let you know that I picked up Boin’s book as soon as I listened to your interview with him - and I did not regret it. Such a wonderfully-written book. As a Romanian-born immigrant, the stuff about Dacia and the peregrinations and exploits of those “barbarians” at the junction of what is today Bulgaria on the Danube - as well as the underlying unifying theme of Boin’s argument which is masterfully delineated in the introduction - resonated with me in profound ways. I even made my parents read the book and they were delighted as well but, mostly, they were surprised since it demolished so many wrong assumptions they received through their education in the former communist country, mainly vis-a-vis the negative connotations regarding the place of “barbarians” in Romanian historiography.
I also wanted to mention that I picked up all the books you recommended last time and while I am still not done with it, Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands is magnificent and would recommend it to anyone, student or general reader with an interest in (some of the darkest moments of) American history.
For my part, pleasure readings related to history include the recently-discovered work of Diarmaid MacCulloch; I am slogging my way through his biography of Thomas Cromwell as well as peeking here and there at his History Of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Don’t even know when and how he found the time to write these books…
Looking forward to your book and podcasts in 2021 and I hope it’s already turning into a better year for you and your family and friends.
"Alaric the Goth" was pretty mind-bending, and your interview with Douglas Boin was great fun, so thanks for that!
Early last spring, I finished "Assembling California", which was the last book-within-a-book in "Annals of the Former World" by John McPhee. An earlier part of that (long, dense, beautifully and poetically written) book, "In Suspect Terrain", was a really fascinating look at a time when the consensus about plate tectonics had not, so to speak, completely solidified.
A couple of months ago, I came across a delightful new-this-year history podcast called Thin End of the Wedge. The host, Jon Taylor, interviews specialists working on the ancient Near East. The range of topics is quite diverse: Mesopotamian mathematics, terra cotta figurines, mythology, the training of scribes, ... and the interviews are aimed at non-specialists. My favorite episode so far is about long-distance trade networks whose existence can be inferred from records preserved on clay tablets in a burned city in Anatolia.
I am so excited that you are going to interview Eric Cline this year! He did a Long Now Foundation talk in 2016, soon after "1177 B.C." came out, that is very worth watching.
I'm currently reading _Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition_, by Ralph Whitney Mathisen, as well as _From Roman to Merovingian Gaul: A Reader_. I bought them several years ago, but I'm finally getting around to reading them.
My favorite books that I've read this year (though neither are new either) are James Hannam's _God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science_ about science and the church in Medieval Europe, and Emmaneul Le Roy Ladurie's _Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error_, a detailed look at one Cathar village derived from Inquisition records. Both are wonderful
I'm on my second three week borrowing of The Price of Peace from the Free Library of Philadelphia. After listening to the interview, I put it on hold, but did not get all the way through the first time. It's in high demand so it's been a wait each time to borrow it. I should be able to finish it over the holidays.
As for a podcast, it's hard to pick just one from various genres I enjoy, but for something not too long and not too heavy, I've been a recent but regular listener to the Kottke Ride Home, a daily fifteen-minute dose of interesting but perhaps under-the-radar news and interesting information.
The first three volumes of Caro's magisterial LBJ series, an indelible portrait of 20th century life and politics. The Kingdom and the Power, Gay Talese's late 1960s portrait of the New York Times, which throws the current failures of the Times into sharp relief. And Edmund Morris' Colonel Roosevelt, a fitting coda to his three-volume biography of TR, which offers some clarity on the complexity of the fourth party system.
Browsing through my list for the year, I finished Boomtown by Sam Anderson on January 4, so it barely qualifies. It was fascinating to read the the history of OKC through the lenses of it's settlement, the weather, the NBA, and The Flaming Lips. Also, as someone who lives in a city of 100,000 and grew up in one of 1,600, it was nice to see that level of attention taken to a "lesser" American city.
Well past Alaric, but I've wondered about the role of Goth's and Vandal's Arianism as a factor in ultimate instability of there kingdoms in Provence, Italy and North Africa.
I'm just catching up on the "back catalog" of the podcast.
My favorite book of last year was Virginia Postrel's The Fabric of Civilization. It's all about thread ->> fabric >> textile good making through the ages. Lots of stories of the extreme effort pre-industrial people went to in the search for clothing and other textiles. Women tended to spend more time spinning thread and making cloth than on their kids or feeding the family and lots of other insights on how creating fabrics is a part of our history.
Runner-up was Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 by Elizabeth A. Fenn. A terrible smallpox epidemic hit the colonies about the time of the revolution. Written all the way back in 2002 it seemed like a great time to read it in 2020
My favorite reads this year were The Republic for Which it Stands (on your recommendation!), Black Spartacus (about Toussaint Louverture) in the history department. For fiction, I loved Drew Magary's Point B and The Hike - just really fun, easy reads. I also really enjoyed The Broken Earth trilogy and will be reading a lot of Jemisin moving forward.
Love the newsletter and the podcast. In fact, I recently culled a lot of podcasts I'm tired of and finally grabbed The Fall of Rome, which I'm a few episodes into. I hope you have a great 2021! Looking forward to the book.
I too didn't read as much for pleasure in 2020 as I usually do. But I enjoyed Part 1 of "The Story of the Jews" by Simon Schama, which was a very different take on Jewish history, and "Secondhand" by Adam Minter. You'll never look at a Goodwill store the same way again.
Started in 2020 but not yet completed is David Abulafia's "The Boundless Sea", essentially a history of the world from the perspective of seafaring. Really interesting, but really long (1000+ pages). I'll get there eventually.
Love these posts and getting book recommendations Patrick, coincidentally I just did a relisten to Dan Carlin's Thor's Angels yesterday so Alaric is top of mind right now.
My reading falls into a couple different categories and I sometimes have 2/3 books I'm reading at any given time. At the time of the first Book Club post I had just started Tom Rick's book 'Fiasco' on the Iraq War, and would thoroughly recommend that. Staying on the topic of the Iraq War I started Jeremy Scahill's 'Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Largest Mercenary Army' the other day and can't put it down. I actually bought it years ago but with Trump's recent pardon of some Blackwater mercs I decided now is as good a time as ever to finally read it. It not only covers Blackwater's rise but also the outsourcing of the defense industry to the private sector over the last couple of decades and is alarming when I think about Eisenhower's parting words about the Military Industrial Complex. (FYI I'm not American so looking at it from an outsider's POV)
I also recently finished Guns, Germs and Steel and have 'Sapiens' and 'Why Nations Fail' as a sort of follow on to that. I know Diamond gets a hard time in academic circles but I thought Guns, Germs and Steel was brilliant.
For 'fun' reading in 2020 I blazed through Conn Iggulden's Wars of the Roses series. I think these 4 books are the quickest I've ever read anything, I enjoyed them so much. It's historical fiction but Iggulden stays somewhat true to events and has a write up of the historical inaccuracies at the end of every book, which I really appreciate. It gave me a new appreciation for Richard Neville 'The Kingmaker' and Margaret of Anjou. In this historical fiction category I want to give Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom a go, have heard great things and enjoyed the first few episodes of the Netflix series but stopped so that I could read the books instead.
One thing I'm trying to deepen my understanding of is totalitarianism and humanity's capacity for evil. In that vein I read The Gulag Archipelago and Ordinary Men. As the name implies, Gulag is about the Soviet concentration camp system. Ordinary Men was written by an American historian called Christopher Browning and is based on interviews with a Nazi Reserve Police Battalion and their participation in the Holocaust. Again, the name is a giveaway in that it is trying to answer the question of how/why did otherwise ordinary men become ruthless mass murderers under the Nazis.
Other miscellaneous reads since last Book Club post have been 12 Rules for Life (Jordan Peterson), the Madness of Crowds (Douglas Murray), Prisoners of Geography (Tim Marshall) and Waking Up by Sam Harris.
The best book I've read this year is titled "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollen on the history and science of Psychedelics. A fascinating read. I've burned through a ton of podcasts including these favourites: History Extra Podcast, The Ancients, History of Egypt Podcast, Emperors of Rome and Au coeur de l'histoire. I truly enjoy yours. Couldn't quite motivate myself to read many books this year yet I have built up a nice reading list. Next on my list is "Fifth Sun: A New History of Aztecs" by Camilla Townsend. A history of the Aztecs based on the texts written by the indigenous people themselves. Looking forward to this one. Also watched “Barbarians” on Netflix and spent a sizeable amount of time checking for historical accuracy and reading up on the event and the archaeology.
Two books that stood out this year: Madeline Miller's "Song of Achilles" was a fun bit of historical fiction, and Michael Brooks' "Against the Web." I enjoyed Brooks' book because he points out how the right uses the same arguments against progress and reform at different points in history. I was devastated when he passed, and never knew a podcaster could be so impactful.
His Dark Materials hasn't been getting enough attention. It's a great show, and a much better adaptation than the Golden Compass movie that came out a few years ago.
Well, there's no doubt on my favorite podcast. You're still my first must-listen of the week, Patrick. As far as picks go, the below is taken from the column I wrote for my publication, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star (https://www.penncapital-star.com/commentary/from-folklore-to-the-bronze-age-collapse-3-things-that-kept-me-sane-in-2020-john-l-micek/) a little earlier this month:
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Eric H. Kline, Princeton University Press (234 pages)
When you’re staring down what feels like the end of history, it’s only natural to wonder if we’ve been here before, and what lessons those times of trouble hold for us now.
This slender, but massively weighty volume, by George Washington University classicist Eric H. Cline, takes up one of the great mysteries of human history. In 1177 B.C., after centuries of brilliance, the civilizations of the late Bronze Age Mediterranean came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Over the space of a generation or so, the Mycenaeans, the Minoans, the Hittites, and the Babylonians, slid into irreversible decline, vanishing from history, as the region slid into a centuries-long dark age that didn’t end until the emergence of what we now know as the classical era around 750 B.C.
Historians are still trying to unravel the interconnected calamities, which ranged from incursions by seaborne groups of marauders collectively known as the “Sea Peoples” and internal unrest, to the severing of sophisticated regional trade routes, that hastened the end of the Late Bronze Age. While it’s a very foreign world in a lot of ways, it’s also one that is recognizably our own, reminding us that civilization is a delicate thing that needs to be tended to and nurtured if it is to survive.
“Folklore,” Taylor Swift
For all the ink that’s been spilled about the death of the monoculture, July’s surprise release of Taylor Swift’s ninth record was a throwback to those seemingly bygone years where we were all listening to, and dissecting, the same records at the same time.
The minimalist, folk-imbued electronica that Swift crafted in lockdown with The National’s Aaron Dessner, and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff of Bleachers, was just the sort of quiet escapism that we were all looking for as we came blinking into the sun of what ended up being a short-lived, post-lockdown world.
If there was any doubt about Swift’s skills as a songwriter, this record should have silenced even the most vocal of skeptics. Stripped of stadium frippery and the big choruses that have marked her last couple of recorded outings, Swift plays to her strengths here. She boasts a novelist’s eye for detail, as evidenced by the acerbic tale of 20th-century socialite Rebekah Harkness on “The Last Great American Dynasty.” And her capacity for searingly personal song-craft remains intact with “Epiphany,” which deals with a person’s final moments. And while not specific to the pandemic, its lines about “Someone’s daughter, someone’s mother [holding] your hand through plastic now,” could not help but resonate with those of us who said goodbye to someone we loved who was taken from us by the virus.
Sometimes the right record comes along at the right moment. Swift, ever adept at choosing her moments, found hers with “Folklore.”
“The Mandalorian,” Disney+ (Streaming)
After a concluding Skywalker trilogy that felt as overstuffed as often as it felt half-baked, writer/director Jon Favreau’s space western marked a welcome return to smaller-scale storytelling that managed to evoke the pulpy best of the original film series, while forging a ground that was uniquely its own. Pedro Pascal’s laconic bounty hunter Din Djarin, the Mandalorian of the title, channeled fan nostalgia for the bounty hunter Boba Fett of the original series, even as he established himself as a new and serious player in the sprawling mythos.
Warning: Spoilers ahead:
Fan service abounded throughout the series, with such favorites as Jedi Knight Ahsoka Tano being brought to vivid life by Rosario Dawson (who’s getting her own series). The resurrection of Boba Fett was another welcome (if slightly expected moment). And, of course, the surprise return of a certain legendary Jedi Knight in the Season Two finale (I’m not going to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it) was one of those heart-stopping moments that the franchise excels at when at it’s at its best.
But there’s no doubt that the emotional center of the series, its entire reason for being, was the emerging father/child relationship between Mando and Grogu (don’t call him Baby Yoda anymore).
Some of the series’ sweetest moments came when Pascal’s bounty hunter let down his guard and allowed this impossibly adorable creature into his scarred heart. That journey into fatherhood — a theme across the franchise — is what keeps the Mandalorian from devolving into just another big-budget, Hollywood shoot-em-up.
Dear Patrick,
As always, thank you for your newsletter. I just wanted to let you know that I picked up Boin’s book as soon as I listened to your interview with him - and I did not regret it. Such a wonderfully-written book. As a Romanian-born immigrant, the stuff about Dacia and the peregrinations and exploits of those “barbarians” at the junction of what is today Bulgaria on the Danube - as well as the underlying unifying theme of Boin’s argument which is masterfully delineated in the introduction - resonated with me in profound ways. I even made my parents read the book and they were delighted as well but, mostly, they were surprised since it demolished so many wrong assumptions they received through their education in the former communist country, mainly vis-a-vis the negative connotations regarding the place of “barbarians” in Romanian historiography.
I also wanted to mention that I picked up all the books you recommended last time and while I am still not done with it, Richard White’s The Republic for Which It Stands is magnificent and would recommend it to anyone, student or general reader with an interest in (some of the darkest moments of) American history.
For my part, pleasure readings related to history include the recently-discovered work of Diarmaid MacCulloch; I am slogging my way through his biography of Thomas Cromwell as well as peeking here and there at his History Of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Don’t even know when and how he found the time to write these books…
Looking forward to your book and podcasts in 2021 and I hope it’s already turning into a better year for you and your family and friends.
"Alaric the Goth" was pretty mind-bending, and your interview with Douglas Boin was great fun, so thanks for that!
Early last spring, I finished "Assembling California", which was the last book-within-a-book in "Annals of the Former World" by John McPhee. An earlier part of that (long, dense, beautifully and poetically written) book, "In Suspect Terrain", was a really fascinating look at a time when the consensus about plate tectonics had not, so to speak, completely solidified.
A couple of months ago, I came across a delightful new-this-year history podcast called Thin End of the Wedge. The host, Jon Taylor, interviews specialists working on the ancient Near East. The range of topics is quite diverse: Mesopotamian mathematics, terra cotta figurines, mythology, the training of scribes, ... and the interviews are aimed at non-specialists. My favorite episode so far is about long-distance trade networks whose existence can be inferred from records preserved on clay tablets in a burned city in Anatolia.
I am so excited that you are going to interview Eric Cline this year! He did a Long Now Foundation talk in 2016, soon after "1177 B.C." came out, that is very worth watching.
I'm currently reading _Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition_, by Ralph Whitney Mathisen, as well as _From Roman to Merovingian Gaul: A Reader_. I bought them several years ago, but I'm finally getting around to reading them.
My favorite books that I've read this year (though neither are new either) are James Hannam's _God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science_ about science and the church in Medieval Europe, and Emmaneul Le Roy Ladurie's _Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error_, a detailed look at one Cathar village derived from Inquisition records. Both are wonderful
I'm on my second three week borrowing of The Price of Peace from the Free Library of Philadelphia. After listening to the interview, I put it on hold, but did not get all the way through the first time. It's in high demand so it's been a wait each time to borrow it. I should be able to finish it over the holidays.
I recently read Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth after hearing her interviewed on the Hanselminutes podcast (https://www.hanselminutes.com/748/a-brief-history-of-the-deficit-myth-with-dr-stephanie-kelton). It dovetails the Price of Peace quite well.
As for a podcast, it's hard to pick just one from various genres I enjoy, but for something not too long and not too heavy, I've been a recent but regular listener to the Kottke Ride Home, a daily fifteen-minute dose of interesting but perhaps under-the-radar news and interesting information.
Happy New Year!
The first three volumes of Caro's magisterial LBJ series, an indelible portrait of 20th century life and politics. The Kingdom and the Power, Gay Talese's late 1960s portrait of the New York Times, which throws the current failures of the Times into sharp relief. And Edmund Morris' Colonel Roosevelt, a fitting coda to his three-volume biography of TR, which offers some clarity on the complexity of the fourth party system.
Browsing through my list for the year, I finished Boomtown by Sam Anderson on January 4, so it barely qualifies. It was fascinating to read the the history of OKC through the lenses of it's settlement, the weather, the NBA, and The Flaming Lips. Also, as someone who lives in a city of 100,000 and grew up in one of 1,600, it was nice to see that level of attention taken to a "lesser" American city.
Well past Alaric, but I've wondered about the role of Goth's and Vandal's Arianism as a factor in ultimate instability of there kingdoms in Provence, Italy and North Africa.
I'm just catching up on the "back catalog" of the podcast.
My favorite book of last year was Virginia Postrel's The Fabric of Civilization. It's all about thread ->> fabric >> textile good making through the ages. Lots of stories of the extreme effort pre-industrial people went to in the search for clothing and other textiles. Women tended to spend more time spinning thread and making cloth than on their kids or feeding the family and lots of other insights on how creating fabrics is a part of our history.
Runner-up was Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 by Elizabeth A. Fenn. A terrible smallpox epidemic hit the colonies about the time of the revolution. Written all the way back in 2002 it seemed like a great time to read it in 2020
My top books of the year are probably:
(Nonfiction)
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America by Vegas Tenold
(Memoir)
Know My Name by Chanel Miller
Spirit Run: A 6,000 mile marathon through North America's stolen land
(Fiction)
Journal of a Plague Year by Daniel Defoe (based on real reporting and personal experiences)
The Glass Motel by Emily St. John Mandel
Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron
Best Podcast:
In Strange Woods
American Elections: Wicked Games
My favorite reads this year were The Republic for Which it Stands (on your recommendation!), Black Spartacus (about Toussaint Louverture) in the history department. For fiction, I loved Drew Magary's Point B and The Hike - just really fun, easy reads. I also really enjoyed The Broken Earth trilogy and will be reading a lot of Jemisin moving forward.
Love the newsletter and the podcast. In fact, I recently culled a lot of podcasts I'm tired of and finally grabbed The Fall of Rome, which I'm a few episodes into. I hope you have a great 2021! Looking forward to the book.
I too didn't read as much for pleasure in 2020 as I usually do. But I enjoyed Part 1 of "The Story of the Jews" by Simon Schama, which was a very different take on Jewish history, and "Secondhand" by Adam Minter. You'll never look at a Goodwill store the same way again.
Started in 2020 but not yet completed is David Abulafia's "The Boundless Sea", essentially a history of the world from the perspective of seafaring. Really interesting, but really long (1000+ pages). I'll get there eventually.
Love these posts and getting book recommendations Patrick, coincidentally I just did a relisten to Dan Carlin's Thor's Angels yesterday so Alaric is top of mind right now.
My reading falls into a couple different categories and I sometimes have 2/3 books I'm reading at any given time. At the time of the first Book Club post I had just started Tom Rick's book 'Fiasco' on the Iraq War, and would thoroughly recommend that. Staying on the topic of the Iraq War I started Jeremy Scahill's 'Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Largest Mercenary Army' the other day and can't put it down. I actually bought it years ago but with Trump's recent pardon of some Blackwater mercs I decided now is as good a time as ever to finally read it. It not only covers Blackwater's rise but also the outsourcing of the defense industry to the private sector over the last couple of decades and is alarming when I think about Eisenhower's parting words about the Military Industrial Complex. (FYI I'm not American so looking at it from an outsider's POV)
I also recently finished Guns, Germs and Steel and have 'Sapiens' and 'Why Nations Fail' as a sort of follow on to that. I know Diamond gets a hard time in academic circles but I thought Guns, Germs and Steel was brilliant.
For 'fun' reading in 2020 I blazed through Conn Iggulden's Wars of the Roses series. I think these 4 books are the quickest I've ever read anything, I enjoyed them so much. It's historical fiction but Iggulden stays somewhat true to events and has a write up of the historical inaccuracies at the end of every book, which I really appreciate. It gave me a new appreciation for Richard Neville 'The Kingmaker' and Margaret of Anjou. In this historical fiction category I want to give Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom a go, have heard great things and enjoyed the first few episodes of the Netflix series but stopped so that I could read the books instead.
One thing I'm trying to deepen my understanding of is totalitarianism and humanity's capacity for evil. In that vein I read The Gulag Archipelago and Ordinary Men. As the name implies, Gulag is about the Soviet concentration camp system. Ordinary Men was written by an American historian called Christopher Browning and is based on interviews with a Nazi Reserve Police Battalion and their participation in the Holocaust. Again, the name is a giveaway in that it is trying to answer the question of how/why did otherwise ordinary men become ruthless mass murderers under the Nazis.
Other miscellaneous reads since last Book Club post have been 12 Rules for Life (Jordan Peterson), the Madness of Crowds (Douglas Murray), Prisoners of Geography (Tim Marshall) and Waking Up by Sam Harris.
The best book I've read this year is titled "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollen on the history and science of Psychedelics. A fascinating read. I've burned through a ton of podcasts including these favourites: History Extra Podcast, The Ancients, History of Egypt Podcast, Emperors of Rome and Au coeur de l'histoire. I truly enjoy yours. Couldn't quite motivate myself to read many books this year yet I have built up a nice reading list. Next on my list is "Fifth Sun: A New History of Aztecs" by Camilla Townsend. A history of the Aztecs based on the texts written by the indigenous people themselves. Looking forward to this one. Also watched “Barbarians” on Netflix and spent a sizeable amount of time checking for historical accuracy and reading up on the event and the archaeology.
Great picks—-thanks for sharing them!