How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower
despite its boring cover, HOW ROME FELL is a very tightly-written, evocative account of the fall of the first 'superpower' as Goldworthy subtitles his work. starting with Marcus Aurelius giving way to his disappointing and gladiatorial-games obsessed son, Commodus, a subject matter the topic of the famous Russell Crowe movie GLADIATOR, we plunge straight into the crisis of the Third Century, where the Praetorian Guard auctioned the throne and at times three or more emperors vied for legitimacy. then fourth century begins a period of some renewed stability... and more I won't write for hesitancy over the spoiler.Goldsworthy's prose is lucid, gripping, tight, and professional. in comparison to some non-fiction writers who enjoy dramatizing (I'll be reviewing a strong example of this shortly), it's clear the good doctor knows his stuff and his talent at writing is only matched by the clear research that went into his work.
topping a number of Goodreads lists in terms of number of ratings, this is a lucid and recommended work. I feel far more educated about the topic and I look forward to reading other Goldsworthy works.
Now since the question has been asked, "is the united states going to fall?", the answer of course is yes. But it's not going to collapse for at least thirty years. You see, nuclear weapons exist now, so no matter what happens, the physical territory of the US will be free from enemy armies for some time. What we will see is the widespread use of Ritalin to control people, (possibly mandatory), surveillance drones over the cities as policing steps up, possibly some cutbacks to aircraft carriers (11 is a lot), and definitely more invasive control before the collapse. As these things haven't been proposed yet, we're still good for twenty years.
The collapse of the American system will see:
1- possibly a security forces attempt to establish a dictatorship (probably not)
2 - more and more agitation in people, more crack, more methamphetamine
3 - probably a nuke or two goes off somewhere (not the us) as us dominance recedes
However the sun is still shining! Girls are still smiling! Life goes on!
Mass Casualties: A Young Medic's True Story of Death, Deception, and Dishonor in Iraq
decent rather than gripping, Specialist Michael Anthony was a Combat Support Medic for a year in Iraq, and if the true military memoir reader is looking for combat, combat, combat, to that degree we have no dramatic-clearing of insurgent-held city blocks, we have no Willie Peet dripped on a particularly troublesome compound, we have little or no tank/helicopter action, just casualty casualty casualty, rear-echelon messup rear-echlon messup rear-echelon messupI can't recommend this to the hard-core military history reader. however, the work is not valueless. it contains a lot of content about how poor relationships and a poor morale group suffering from tremendous problems/drama play out-- perhaps in the same vein as that Joaquin River movie about soldiers in Germany in the 80s, everybody strung out, nothing working, problems with natives.
if you're a hard-core Iraq War reader, call this a 3/5 competent work. if you're not interested in war, the rating probably drops to 2/5. I wish the author had researched some after leaving Iraq, so we could learn some of the stories of the people he treated; instead, we have a personal memoir about growing drug addiction.
Looking for Class: Days and Nights at Oxford and Cambridge
Bruce Feiler did an unimpressive, even boring take on teaching JHS in Japan, but then spent a year with a traveling circus. In between, he finished a master's in international relations at Cambridge. In short, three memoirs of one or two years each. And three bestsellers, according to the cover, but minimal support here on GR.This work, Looking for Class, delivers what is promised, an american's look at Cambridge where privilege and dating and punts on the Cam and a dress ball. The tiniest note of defensiveness enter Feiler's voice but otherwise his actual life and analysis of relations combine for a picture of privilege.
(NB author went on to do Christian works and possibly something on cancer)
Under the Big Top: A Season with the Circus
Bruce Feiler spent two years in Japan and came out with [b:Learning to Bow|260944|Learning to Bow Inside the Heart of Japan|Bruce Feiler|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348650685s/260944.jpg|2536303], where paradoxically his attempts to gain dignity unknowingly made a fool of himself. The reader can figure out when Feiler is being scorned, but it's not entirely clear he knows it, then or at time of writing. Contradictorily, Feiler sets out in this book to be a clown but ends up capturing some surprising dignity of the circus life, which is a cultural phenom on the decline but still maintaining a hold on American culture.Feiler is in some ways a thinking man's, slightly shambled Simon Winchester. He writes about seemingly unrelated topics across subject fields, and he comes off as submissive and junior in his relationships with others, which if course in the end makes for a better range of access and stories. He recently held an unsuccessful "meet the author" web event he on GR where unfortunately two dozen people showed up, but seen as a totality, of course he is a professional writer and creative. 4/5 evocative description of traveling circus life and subculture
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
It's said in art you are better off charmingly put-together, whatever your flaws, than brilliantly analytical and totally referenced. This seems to be the case for this 150,000 ratings non-fiction, particularly in comparison to Howard Zinn's People's History of the US which I picked up with this work. Both are leftists, both are driving an agenda, but Schlosser is mixing together disgust and sentiment and straight narration. He's created a blockbuster.Now of course this work is simply the 2001 Upton Sinclair. But Schlosser does a good job combining news stories with his own visits to slaughterhouses, and the work is very smooth and polished.4/5 Eminently readable. Schlosser whales on republicans and analyzes the chemical content of mcnuggets and French fries.
Sidewise in Time
Murray Leinster's 1934 novella classic "Sidewise in Time" has apparently more or less disappeared from the earth (7 GR ratings). Maybe that's ironically appropriate, as the work takes as it's start point a "time quake", in so many words, where different pieces of alternate earths end up parked next to each other--- thus, roman legions attack a early dodge at one point, and Vikings in north america might meet Chinese berry pickers in another. The result is obviously lots of cinematic like scenes, and a lot of Sci-fi writers pay homage to this work.This work is apparently off copyright now, so the Internet should have a copy. SF classic, soon to be 80 years old
Foundation's Edge (Foundation Novels)
A person writes a famous trilogy, launches a celebrated literary and non-fiction career, and then thirty years later, when he is in his sixties, adds a fourth volume, reopening the spigot to yet another sequel and then a pair of prequels. Has this ever happened before? The closest example I can think of Lord of the Rings with Similarillon tho' I don't know of any multi decade hiatus. Maybe Dune spread out over years?Anyway the long and the shot of it was that of course this could have been very weak. But, surprise, it wasn't. Asimov apparently kept up his writing skills in the intervening decades, and his return to scifi and in particular his magnum opus is a fitting and proportionate addition to the pantheon. The result is a 150000 word epic covering two plot threads: bureaucratic infighting by top minds and a quest by researchers for mankind's forgotten home planet.
The result is not quite space opera and not quite buck Rogers. There is definitely the element of the camp in this and the other foundation works, but Asimov also provides plausible development of some of the key forces animating his earlier trilogy, and one almost assumes "he was writing this in his subconscious for thirty years". We also pick up a little of Asimov's experiences as a tenured professor; deep structure might very well include 'campus novel' among other threads.
Foundation's Edge is for hard-core Found. Fans, fans of "hard" sci-fi, fans of the Golden Age. Since it is also the series both Asimov and posterity called Asimov's best, it is also the best entry for generalist readers. 4/5 some camp sequences, and work develops rather than revolutionizes earlier trilogy
Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938
In September 1938, a hurricane began forming in the Atlantic and then suddenly accelerated up the Eastern Seaboard to hit New England. 700 people died and thousands of homes were destroyed, but today, almost nobody remembers it because WW2 intervened. Perhaps the most vivid and poignant scene are the teenage girls in bobby socks and skirts giggling as the wind takes hold of their skirts, completely unaware that the 90s teenager will be listening to Eminem and sleeping with half a dozen boys before graduation.Well, you know, "those we the days...." lol
4/5 evocative, descriptive, even gripping
The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . and Where We're Going
STRATFOR is a political think tank that gained prominence after Anonymous hacked its servers and spewed out its exceedingly boring dossiers onto the uncaring public. Its director, George Friedman, also wrote a book called THE NEXT 100 YEARS which contained such fantastic prediction as that in the year 2060, Japanese schoolgirl ninjas and Polish Space Marines would build a giant moon laser and sunburn half of the USA. One tends to wonder a bit how these scenarios get created, although it's probably all clever disinformation. Yeah, actually maybe STRATFOR really does run the world (as the tin foil crowd believes), they're just feigning absurdity.Apparently Friedman does a little better with ten years of predictions rather than the full hundred. This work comes out of the school of foreign policy that says, hey, we're an empire, let's deal with it (not all FP professionals agree). The result is a outlook that relies extensively on the Westphalian model of states and alliances. Niall Ferguson does a better job of noticing things like the Protestantization of Latin America and growing Christianity of China. Other writers are a bit more subtle in dissecting racial politics and civilizational models. Friedman sees national states as inevitable and then subsequently conflict. On the other hand, other geopolitical thinkers find multiethnic empires the norm. Who knows? (who cares?) I predict fusion power will always be 20 years away and bioengineered superflu will kill off a tenth of humanity. But fine, yeah, it's possible humanity will settle Mars. by that time, VR will be so good Perky Pat will knock all our socks off
If you read this far, I want to say, man, it wasn't that I didn't know enough. It was that I knew too much
Private Parts
Radio shock jock Howard Stern tends to divide opinion--people either rave or hate. But I am part of the rare percentage of middle-grounders. No part of this book made me laugh out loud, but I rarely fully lost interest. Similarly, although I am not agog with hero-worship at the perhaps five minutes total I've heard/seen of his clips, at the same time I understand it takes intelligence and talent to produce five hours of talk radio a day. 4/5 not for the easily offended. Shock humor.
The Iraq War
John Keegan probably wants to repudiate this book, written in 2004, and filled with a muscular and enthusiastic defense of the Iraq War. keegan stops just short of calling the French cheese-eating surrender monkeys and he chastises the BBC for its nervousness about invasion. All in all, we have a near period piece of 2004 attitudes and expectations, but of course, this is all still written by a skilled and distinguished military historian and thus highly readable. 4/5 for writing, 3/5 for accuracyThe Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan
Falling between the war memoir and the special forces history, THE ONLY THING WORTH DYING FOR covers the infiltration of Hamid Karzai and eleven US Army Special Forces operatives into Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the work suffers from the same handicap as the mission: as everything is political, the soldiers can't engage without an OK from Washington, and much time is spent drinking tea with Kazakhs rather than fighting. And while escorting Karzai is a decent and worthy mission, there's just far less contact in mountainous Afghanistan than urbanized Iraq. Even some of the Kosovo memoirs seem more intense3/5. Of interest to historians and Afghan experts but does not offer the full scale battles of, say, ONE BULLET AWAY or GUNS UP! Read only if you are "need to know" about Karzai. And the are a few pinzgauers
The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45
A creation of a crack marketing team, Stephen Ambrose is one of those rare authors whose name appears in larger font than the book in question. Unfortunately, the snowball has accumulated far too much mass to be stopped: this relatively weak work, which appears to be 80% a homage to George McGovern, fails to capture ordinary rankers' experiences, and drops short of truly evocativeness and descriptivesness. The entire work, in other words, is about one senior politician's ww2 exploits, probably largely fictionalized, and IT IS NOT Band of Brothers in the sky3/5 a WW2 "greatest generation" wannabe, and production company commodity. No need to read.
Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War
GOODBYE, DARKNESS deserves its legendary reputation of WW2Pacific memoirs. Its tall, ectomorphic New England scion narrator turns down OCS and battles as a Marine across the Pacific. His is a narrative filled with sexual kinks but also stern unflinching reality. The action is intense and searing, and the level of detail that of a personal observer.This book is criticized because it falls between history and memoir; the author implies he was present at more engagements than he really was. However, good points include frame story of the now elderly narrator visiting the old battle sites, and the same "sexual kinks" revealed also lend an air of authenticity and personalization.
Follow Manchester through the Pacific all the way to VJ day, under the voice of a seventy year old man's now reflective self-analysis. Solid 4/5 and the full score for war buffs.
Around the World in 80 Days
"Around the world in 80 days," was written in the 1870s. Wow. I am floored. A year of life is so long, it's almost beyond a human brain to think of 140 years of the passage of time. So much of 19th century fic, moreover, is full of intensely ornate, highly agglutinized sentences. The people, finally, tend to be stiff, neurasthenic, and boring. And yet, this adventure book is perfectly readable. The story is tightly written and includes Tintin like adventures in exotic settings. Maybe the most fun part is to read the wikipedia page on Verne and learn that the French consider him a part of the national heritage. Yes, maybe Verne is truly global heritage level. I can buy that--adventure thrillers are also hard to write
Quickly moving and yet seemingly authentic. Fascinating run through of world in the 1870, including attitudes and beliefs of the time. 4/5 although if we take into account the age of the work, would be the full 5.
Guns Up!
Recommended as "one of the top Vietnam War memoirs" (I think actually by a UK newspaper, possibly by a UK war writer), GUNS UP! is a sort of full-blooded, full-throated war memoir that follows a Marine ranker and his best friend, Andrew Chan, a Chinese-American, who are both machine gun operators and summoned by the call "Guns up!" when their platoon makes contact.It's an odd feeling, dealing with war classics. You know on the one hand that posterity has declared this to be a memoir classic, but the enormity of 60,000 US dead and 3 million Vietnamese just seems so tragic. Would PH and Thailand have gone red had the US not fought in Nam? So declare some military writers. But I'm not sure.
Well, putting aside politics, this is a full-blooded war memoir. Filled with combat, filled with the buddy relationship, and packed with period detail. Oh and Chan is a devout Christian, so there's plenty of biblical quotation too.