Book Reviews

** Camping Trip from Hell ** Real warfare is boring. Guerrilla warfare is also boring, just more uncomfortable. The Bolivian diary describes the petty squabbles and minor victories of camping and hiking around the outskirts of civilization in what seems to have been a hopeless struggle at the end of Che’s short life. Think boy-scouts with more starvation and an occasional ambush. The Diary is not lyrical, nor does it contain much in the way of the overall mission that Che was trying to achieve. Monthly summaries contained the same lack of progress, hope for future progress, and expectation of success. Most entries included the elevation that he camped at. Even right near the end, the most pessimism Che can muster was * The peasants are not helping us with anything, and are now becoming informers. * It’s a short read, but a quick and bitter dose of reality to remember what the selective use of force entails. ...

** Barbarous Statistics ** I don’t follow baseball, but I can’t escape statistics. Whether making hiring decisions, investment calls, or building experimental design, statistics haunt every day. In Moneyball, Lewis has found an all-star protagonist and crowd-pleasing backdrop to spin a yarn worth listening to. Lewis’ lesson is not that one should use statistics over gut instinct. Instead it is that statistics are only as useful as the totality of their methodology. A mistake in any level that started by translating the real world into quantized data, then aggregated it to actionable insights, invalidates the entire process. ...

First Durant history that I’ve been able to compare to similar books elsewhere, and #11 doesn’t come out well in the comparison. Covers Europe from 1789-1814, and essentially focuses on Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars. Biographical focus is too tight - the affairs and dalliances of the great man in charge rather than the context of a given court or culture. Yet by combining biography and history, ends up a cursory sketch. Gives paragraph level details of battles, but nothing that imparts wisdom beyond facts. ...

Amazing that I like this series so much but am not a fan of Bujold’s other series. I enjoyed the main character, the different setting, and the reason-based mechanics of magic in this world. Will read more from this author.

**History’s Dictionary ** History is an excellent teacher, with few pupils. * After finishing this book I can understand why. 10 volumes into the Story of Civilization, the Durants have struggled to find narrative thread in the haystack of personalities and surviving documentation. While this book begins and ends with Rousseau, it is not a biography, and it certainly does little to tell about the epoch defining French Revolution, analysis left for book 11. Yet is also not a history of civilization nor even a history of Europe. It overlaps with volume 9 in timeline, and only vaguely splits the political and economic history of the times. Instead, the fundamental building block of this book is short biographies proto-wikipedia style entries of the great thinkers, politicians and artists of the time. ...

**2022 in Books ** If I had hoped that 2022 would be a return to a new normal, I was wrong. My wife and I went from 2:1 parenting to 1:1 parenting, moved houses, closed a record of real estate deals, and changed jobs four times. Yet through late-night Chinese dictionary pulls and pre-dawn audiobooks, reading continued, even more than last year. The year started off finishing out last year’s project of big history with the somewhat disappointing tomes of Durant in Age of Napoleon and Ruosseau and Revolution. Feeling at least comfortable with the wide arc of history, I was more prepared to enjoy bites of history and put them in context, such as Roger Crowley’s discovery-era naval history and long overdue biographies such as Malcom X, Nelson Mandela, and Che Guevara. ...

So far my son has learned to ask for three books by name, and this is one of them. To be precise, he doesn’t know the title, and instead asks for the tractor book (拖拉机书) Despite owning at least 10 ‘point and name’ books, this one garners by far the most interest due to the variety of namable vehicles, high production value, and enough every day words to keep him engaged. We are reading mostly in translation, and while I have no idea how to figure out what to call a knuckle-boom loader, I am amused when he learns words enthusiastically that even my wife doesn’t know. (i.e. excavator 挖掘机) ...

Turns out that when combined with strep throat induced insomnia, even this book can give you nightmares. That aside appreciated the small tidbits of advice on how to combine mindfulness with action. there were many things I would like to include in my practice.

Snackable ‘misfits in space’ book with a more modern take on gender and sex but the rest of sci-fi tropes intact. I’ve just read this story one too many times to get too excited.

This is your dads sci-fi. Best read paired with forever war, links to enders game are clear. An only slightly post-fascist fascist work. Not painful like Stranger in a Strange Land. I’m glad I was exposed to Enders game and the movie first but how did this ever get made into a movie in the first place?