Truth.
They are like the Reardan version of the Kennedys.
Or the Sopranos
There's a LOT of them.
OT - Read any good books lately?
- Thread starter TrumpCoug
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They are like the Reardan version of the Kennedys.
Or the Sopranos
There's a LOT of them.
Not to nitpick, but if you were in HS with Doug Wellsandt, it was significantly more than 20 years ago.
The book was written in 1993; the edition I am reading was released probably twenty years after Alexie graduated HS.
Just heard Zeihan discussing the book on a podcast recently; really made me rethink what I thought were the causes and prognoses of America's future in the next half-century to a century. Fascinating stuff.
Got it...and now re-reading your initial post, I see it wasn't 1st person. Oops.
Back to the original question, I finished "Blood and Thunder," and moved on to "The Secret History of Food." Some interesting little tidbits, sarcastic humor, and a reasonably well-supported argument in an early chapter describing how corn is destroying the world for almost no nutritional benefit.
I just heard about "The Gangster's Guide to Sobriety: My Life in 12 Steps" on the Adam Carolla podcast and plan to add it to my reading list.
I've watched hours of videos he produces and interviews/presentations he has made for YouTube.
He has some very strong statements about the upcoming collapse of China. I can't fault his logic in reaching this conclusion. I also like to listen closely to those who don't just follow the mob and that really think for themselves even if it controversial. George Friedman is fascinating too as another important voice in geopolitics. I've read a couple of his books and enjoy his wisdom.
Zeihan and Friedman are both optimistic on America's future. Sometimes it seems hard to fathom since we seem to be working hard to self-destruct.
Meh. My bookshelf primarily consists of all the Lee Child/Jack Reacher books (26 and counting), as well as much of the Harlan Coben series (Myron Bolitar mainly).
When I want non-fiction I just read CNN. For other fiction, Fox News.
That’s going on the list. And my library search for it turned up another one too:
Black+Snow: Curtis+Lemay, the Firebombing of Tokyo and the Road to the Atomic Bomb
Frank is a pretty good historian. Watched him give a talk on the subject on youtube and got the book. Haven't been disappointed. To me the most wrenching moment on the Pacific War that I've seen, simply because I hadn't known about it before then, was the segment about the firebombing of Tokyo in that McNamara doc, Fog of War. WW2 is one of my on-again-off-again hobbies. I highly recommend a channel on youtube called WW2 TV. It's hosted by a British D-Day historian, and he brings on historians that are experts in their own very specific element of the war to do an hour long presentation, and they're almost always great.
I’ve read a lot of WWII. Probably 60/40 Pacific theater at this point. Used to be 85% Pacific, but Saving Private Ryan & Band of Brothers got me into the ETO. My family rolls their eyes when a new documentary comes on Netflix (or any other service we get) because I’ll watch it within days of release.
Some of the docs on the firebombing are rough - Seeing/hearing old airmen talking about the smell even at 30,000 feet. I continue to be surprised that the revisionists continue to bemoan Hiroshima & Nagasaki, but are still mostly content to ignore the firebombing campaign. Even by standards of the time, that strategy was questionable at best.
WW2 was modern tech in the hands of race warriors all over the globe. WW1 had terrible grinding battlefield slaughter, but the sequel was when the belligerents just straight up tried to exterminate each other. The Nazis and Imperial Japan launched their wars at least partly with that goal overtly in mind, the Allies came to it more as brutal and vengeful strategy, but either way it was the darkest period of a dark century. I tend to gloss over that stuff in favor of tactics and logistics and industrial output and diplomatic maneuvering and new tech, because that's where the fun is, but the darkness looms in the background. It was the largest global mobilization of resources in human history, and once that machine got rolling, it developed it's own logic.
Just about every war from 1850 onward became a matter of tactics lagging behind technology, and the body count reflected that. WWII had an interesting simultaneous evolution and devolution of tactics, with a shocking number of times that strategy was developed based on “they did it first” - even when “it” would have been considered an unimaginable atrocity a year (or a week) earlier.
