signed first edition?
The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies
Heard this was a hot book on the reactionary right and while looking at it on Amazon I accidently bought it . Kind of sucked because I have so many books on my wish list that I usually just wait until a book goes on sale to buy it, but I ended up paying full price.
In any case, itâs not that original or really that good. Thereâs a section of about 5 pages of just dissecting the Churchill quote
âdemocracy is the worst form of government â except for all the others that have been tried.â
No really. Just pages of âChurchill admits that democracy has flaws, but he is saying that others are more flawed than othersâ etc. I was like sure, but why would I even care about a Churchill quote?
The book isnât just an attack on democracy, but specifically on liberal democracy. The critiques of liberalism arenât anything new. Liberalism claims to be open minded but it actually takes a stance, itâs not purely open minded, etc.
What I found interesting is how not foreign the critiques where. Other than a section talking about the European Union, which Iâm going to assume does have a lot of the flaws mentioned, you would be perfectly fine reading this from an American point of view.
In fact, Iâd venture a guess and say the attacks on democracy flowed from America to Europe. The attack he talks about is basically the vulgar public choice theory that Republicans like to use. You know, America was about doing whatâs best for the people until interest groups (read minorities, Muslim instead of African American in his case, feminists and homosexuals in both cases) started asking for things and politicians started pandering to them and now democracy is just about satisfying the demands of various interest groups (again read minorities).
Being Eastern European homosexuality and feminism come in for a lot of the attacks as well. As usual the critiques are never turned on themselves. Liberalism gets a complaint about destroying community but itâs never asked what if some subsection of the community doesnât have the same interests as the community. Whoâs leading and making the decisions for the community? Isnât the idea that democracy was about doing whatâs good for the community privileging certain interest groups over others? Those questions are never answered.
The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America by Bradford Pearson
The story of the high school football team in the Heart Mountain Wyoming concentration camp for Japanese Americans. 3/4ths of the story is the history of xenophobia leading up to WWII, the decision to evict Japanese Americans from the west coast and how life was like in the camps. The story of the football team is the through line that ties it all together. What does make this book stand out, other than the great historical information, is that the high school games are covered like a sports reporter would and the dissonance between a historical book describing the terrible events of the Japanese American internment and then cutting to a play by play of a high school sports game really drove home the mixture of innocent high school kids just trying to be kids in the middle of some terrible stuff
Columbine
by Dave Cullen
The story of the Columbine shooting. The book is different than over tragic/ war event books Iâve read in that the majority of the actual events of the shooting are covered in the first 80 pages of a 500 page book. The rest of the book discusses the lead up and aftermath of the tragedy.
Though itâs pretty common knowledge now the book shows how almost all the narratives that sprung up after Columbine were false. The killers were not nerds or goths who got picked on and shot the school up in revenge. They were actually pretty well liked in school, or at least were not on the bottom of the totem pole. There was a trench coat mafia, but the killers werenât a part of it. They only really wore trench coats during the killing because it made tactical sense. The killers didnât have terrible upbringings. They had upper middle class upbringings in pretty much loving homes.
What the book does go into detail is that Eric Harris was pretty much a psychopath. His journals and writings years leading up to the killings were obsessed with killing and murder. He enjoyed lying to everyone and he steadily lead up to more and more violent activity before the killings. Because he had no compunction about lying he constantly fooled everyone around him. He kept immense lists of everyone he thought had wronged him. Dylan Kleboldâs motivations seemed more murky.
Also the local police come off as the absolute worst. The higher ups kept saying incorrect stuff long after it had been disproven and their assistants had to beg them to stop saying stuff. The police tried to bury the killerâs journal and their tapes because they were âtoo disturbingâ but the tapes and journals would have clearly shown that the killers were psychopathsâ and not victims or influenced by Marilyn Manson, etc. They then tried to cover up that one of the killersâ friends had repeatedly warned the police that the killers were threatening him and had done various threatening pranks to him, but the police had never followed up on it.
The book goes into the victims of the massacres and the survivors and their stories. Not touched on much but there in the story is that there is no day of reckoning for the survivors. Time goes on. Less and less people show up the the anniversaries of the killings. Survivors donât want to talk about it much, but for those who it did affect it changed their lives drastically while everyone else moved on.
It did touch on how this was one of the first instances of marrying terrorism, that is the public display of violence, with workplace and school shootings. Before this is was more someone shot a teacher or a coworker and that was it. After this more and more people brought in how their violence would look publicly into their planning.
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The Terror: A Novel
by Dan Simmons
A fictionalized account of Franklinâs lost expedition searching for the Northwest Passage, but with some fantasy thrown in. Master and Commander meets The Thing. A good dense book. I had to use the dictionary a lot to look up a lot of the nautical terms as this book does not spoon feed you the naval life. Itâs also very dense at over 900 pages, with 2 or 3 pages of description for people walking up to a meeting. Because itâs so dense though it feels very lived in and I enjoyed it
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Have you seen the tv series? I thought it was great.
I havenât. I wanted to read the book before watching the series. I heard it was great
That Columbine book was great.
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Really interesting to know they werenât in the trench coat mafia or picked on. The media sucks so bad when it gets ahold of a narrative.
And it seems like these are almost always a psychopath and a weaker personality that they manipulate.
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the book does a good job of showing how the feedback loop worked. While in an interview a reporter would ask a seemingly normal question, âwere the guys ever picked or get in fights?â and of course they had been picked on by others (just like every other kid) and they get in fights (that they sometimes started), but like every other kid. The kids were glued to the TV like their parents, see the interview, and when they get asked was if the kids were picked on or involved in a lot of fights, they say âyeaâ like it was common knowledge then theyâd embellish the fights, on and on, until at the end of the day every interview mentioned them being the victims of sadistic bullies who did X or Y horrific thing to them.
Yes, it is one of my favorite books because it so clearly presents the failures of the US media when you have a sensationalism-for-profit motive driving the way that the general public commonly understands the world around them. 22 years later people STILL think hold their misconceptions about Columbine but even worse the Facebooks of the world have increased the misinformation problem by a few orders of magnitude and here we are.
Wanted a diversion from serious reading and a coworker recommended the Stormlight Archive epic fantasy series written by Brandon Sanderson. I just started the third book of four (heâs not finished with the series), and Iâm really enjoying it. Interesting characters and world building.
I liked the main Mistborn series as well
Read this after someone suggested checking it out in this thread after I read Hyperion Cantos. Was a hell of a ride. And led me to learn more about Franklins expedition which is some crazy shit. The Terror tv show does as good of a job as a miniseries can do. But they do have to change some shit.
Oh no he is not finished by far. But I am actually confident he finishes the series unlike cough cough. He is at least steadily getting a book out every three years unlike cough cough. Also he seems to be getting better writing every book.
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Howlâs Moving Castle is pretty good and a quick read.
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Evening in Paradise: More Stories
by Lucia Berlin
A series of short stories published posthumously. A problem with buying books when they go on sale and not in any order is sometimes you pick up the postscript before the script. Apparently Lucia Berlin had a crazy interesting life and her fiction is very semi autobiographical or at least riffs off of her life. As such themes from her life are the themes in the book. Wives supporting artistic types, marital infidelity, and travel.
Theyâre a bit unpolished and she didnât get the chance to fine polish the whole collection so they come across a bit disjoined and rough. Names and similar character appear but arenât the same person. Things that with an artist whoâs alive the edges would have been sanded off and the thing would have really followed together as a holistic collection
But sheâs a good writer and the stories are engaging, and small sentences hit those kinds of moments about life
Thatâs all we said, even though I sat there for a long time. Horrible time, one of those when you know you should speak, or listen, and the silence echoes.
Berlin, Lucia. Evening in Paradise (p. 78).
Missed moments. One word, one gesture, can change your entire life, can break everything or make it whole. But neither of them made it. He left, she lit another cigarette, I went to work.
Berlin, Lucia. Evening in Paradise (p. 80). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
I felt sad about Bruno and my parents. Not sad because I missed them, but because I really didnât. And when I died it would be the same. Dying is like shattering mercury. So soon it all just flows back together into the quivering mass of life. I told myself to lighten up, Iâd been alone too long. But still I sat there, looking back on my life, a life filled with beauty and love actually. It seemed I had passed through it as I had the Louvre, watching and invisible.
Berlin, Lucia. Evening in Paradise (p. 218). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
When you travel you step back from your own days, from the fragmented imperfect linearity of your time. As when reading a novel, the events and people become allegorical and eternal.
Berlin, Lucia. Evening in Paradise (p. 232). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
A book about Amazon from about 2013 or so on. Basically since the Amazon echos were created. This is the second book and again with buying books on sale, I havenât read the first one, which I probably need to do as this book starts when Amazon has been already established and the basic pattern of Amazon has been established. This is the endgame.
Itâs written from a generalist perspective so while you get the overall narrative it doesnât dig into the details. Like how AWS becomes so dominate. It explains itâs rise and its basic market position, but doesnât go into so much detail. What specific features made it so dominate, how did it outcompete established firms, etc. As such I found it interesting but not as informative as informative as say a business journal article on Amazon.
It does cover up to Bezoâs retirement from CEO and his personal life controversy, but again, not adding too much from what youâd already know.
The value add in the book comes from the interviews with people involved in the events. He doesnât get super indepth interviews with major players so you really hear more from the mid level managers and a lot more from the disgruntled employees who are more likely to say yes to an interview than people still on the inside.
Here are some interesting tidbits. Some of which are already known
He was a ravenous reader, leading senior executives in discussion of books like Clayton Christensenâs The Innovatorâs Dilemma, and he had an utter aversion to doing anything conventionally. Employees were instructed to model his fourteen leadership principles, such as customer obsession, high bar for talent, and frugality, and they were trained to consider them daily when making decisions about things like new hires, promotions, and even trivial changes to products.
PowerPoint presentations, with their litany of bullet points and incomplete thoughts, were banned inside the company despite being popular in the rest of corporate America. Instead, all meetings started with almost meditative readings of data-rich, six-page documents, called ânarratives.â The act of business building at Amazon was an editorial process, with papers subject to numerous revisions, debate over the meaning of individual words, and meticulous consideration by company leaders, most of all from Bezos himself. Meanwhile, working groups inside Amazon were broken into small versatile units, called two-pizza teams (because they were small enough to be fed with two pizzas), and were ordered to move quickly, often in competition with one another. This unusual and decentralized corporate culture hammered into employees that there was no trade-off between speed and accuracy. They were supposed to move fast and never break things.
Stone, Brad. Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (p. 10).
As with several other projects at Amazon, the origins of Project D can be traced back to discussions between Bezos and his âtechnical advisorâ or TA, the promising executive handpicked to shadow the CEO. Among the TAâs duties were to take notes in meetings, write the first draft of the annual shareholder letter, and learn by interacting with the master closely for more than a year.
Stone, Brad. Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (pp. 23-24). Simon & Schuster.
Amazon Go remained a money loser. But Bezos was still looking at it as a bet on computer vision and artificial intelligence, the kind of long-term, high-stakes experiment that was necessary to produce meaningful outcomes for large companies. As he wrote in his 2015 shareholder letter: We all know that if you swing for the fences, youâre going to strike out a lot, but youâre also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why itâs important to be bold.
Stone, Brad. Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (p. 68).
âAverages are bad measures. I want to see actuals, highs, lows and whyânot an average. An average is just lazy.â
Stone, Brad. Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (p. 167). Simon & Schuster.
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Staggering through Neil Stephensonâs latest, why do I do this to myself
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Wanderers by Chuck Wendig
A dystopian, apocalyptic novel that comfortably occupies a space between horror and science fiction, Wanderers is full of social commentary that digs into everything from global warming to racial tension, while never preaching or bogging down the action-packed story.
Shana wakes up one day to find that her sister, Nessie, is acting weird; sheâs walking barefoot along the road outside their house and refusing to acknowledge Shana, or anyone else. The young girl seems to be sleepwalking, and every attempt to stop her or wake her up is unsuccessful. Soon others in a similar state join up with her, and this is how the wanderers start. No one knows whatâs wrong with them, or where theyâre going, and attempts to physically restrain them lead to violent shaking, a rising temperature, and, if theyâre not released, an explosion.
I very much enjoyed the book and flew through it, but it definitely added to my stress levels. Thereâs a Trumpian presidential candidate revving up white nationalists and preachers / podcast hosts during a pandemic, so it may hit too close to home. Published in 2019, it feels like itâs ripped from todayâs headlines.
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