111–120 of 256 posts
John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed. It's funny and makes me thankful to be a part of the world. It is not like his other books, it is a non-fiction work written in short essays. Highly recommend.
Project Hail Mary, a book about space for engineering nerds.
The Body and At Home. They're books by Bill Bryson. He geeks out about stuff and showers is with fascinating trivia. It's hard to put his books down.
The Right Stuff, a book about how they picked the first astronauts without knowing what the job would even entail. A fascinating look at the psychology of test pilots. Pairs well with the movie First Man.
As parents we wanted to be one of the better ones. A while back, we started with Bringing up Bébé , and since then learnt How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk ; we were even Prepared while Reviving Ophelia . This year , we realized, we want to just settle on being A Good Enough Parent . 1. https://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Up-Bébé-Discovers-Parenting/... 2. https://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-W…
wow, the book is only physical and it costs $60 to get it where I live... (without import taxes)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> someone with a ideological bone to pick Not really "someone", more like most anthropologists. E.g. David Wengrow and David Graeber's takedown in Dawn of Everything Or https://www.jstor.org/stable/27503687
Did you read that book? I did, and Graeber certainly doesn’t think GGS or Diamond is racist
However, I don't think there's anything in the book that suggests Graeber and Wengrow DON'T think Diamond is a racist. The few professional anthropologists I'm friends with hold such a view (obvy with more nuance) and I get the impression this type of criticism for Diamond is the norm not the exception in the field
Anyways now that I am explicitly supporting the accusation here's meat to add to the bone:
> Timothy Burke, who teaches African history at Swarthmore College, writing in Cliopatria, says that Diamond's problem is "that a term like 'race' can still serve some useful purpose in describing variations between human populations: I’m not going to make a definitive statement on that subject here. But just to give the example of the Africa chapter, Diamond clings to the term 'blacks' as racial category within which to place most pre-1500 sub-Saharan Africans except for Khoisan-speakers and “pygmies,” even as he explicitly acknowledges that it is an extremely poor categorical descriptor of the human groups he is placing in that category."
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/03/guns-germs-an...
> Arguments such as these have made him a darling of bourgeois intellectuals, who have grown tired of looking meanspirited and self-serving when they make their transparently desperate efforts to displace histories of imperialism back on its victims. They need a pseudointellectual explanation for inequality in order to sustain the bourgeois social order that guarantees their privilege. This they found in Guns, Germs and Steel.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10455752.2013.84...
> This approach distances Diamond’s analysis from much of the current literature on cultural interactions in modern history - indeed, his suggestions for further reading omit almost all of the standard literature on the history of imperialism and post-colonialism, world-systems, underdevelopment or socio-economic change over the last five hundred years. Thus the large debate that is currently going on over historical explanations of the wealth and poverty of nations in a global context is here reduced to a sub-set of the ultimate question about bronze tools and geographic connectedness - ‘technology may have developed most rapidly in regions with moderate connectedness [Europe], neither too high [China], nor too low [India]’ [p. 416].
https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/51
(this paper is called Fuck Jared Diamond lol)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Graeber misinterprets the history and ideas of mainstream economics Can you provide a well researched body of literature that counters Graeber’s thesis as opposed to just stating an opinion?
Brad De Long - a left leaning professor of economics has written extensive, quality take downs of Graeber. Search for him and Graeber. Here is one. https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Bradford_DeLong
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-...
Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond The Body - Bill Bryson The Way of Kings - Sanderson So Good They Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport
I really enjoyed The Body (and pretty much all Bill Bryson). He has my preferred blend of information and humor.
* Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage - If you enjoy books about persistence in the face of adversity, this has it in spades. When I was in my 20's I saw the movie "Touching the Void" and remember being in total awe at a human's ability to persevere in seemingly impossible situations. Shackleton and his crew bring this power of determination to another level.
* On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - Reading this gave me another level of respect for Stephen King. He also pointed me towards another excellent book "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life".
As parents we wanted to be one of the better ones. A while back, we started with Bringing up Bébé , and since then learnt How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk ; we were even Prepared while Reviving Ophelia . This year , we realized, we want to just settle on being A Good Enough Parent . 1. https://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Up-Bébé-Discovers-Parenting/... 2. https://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-W…
> https://goodenoughparenting.com/ wow, the book is only physical and it costs $60 to get it where I live... (without import taxes)
Checking it right now shows ₹1,388 (~$17) for the Paperback and ₹2,261 (~$28) for the Hardcover edition.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4tf95ulhkt4tn9g/screenshot%202022-...
How the World Really Works by Vaclac Smil is one of the best book I've read this year. It gives such a great perspective on how much energy and material we use. It's one of the most readable books by Smil and has gems like this : “Moreover, within a lifetime of people born just after the Second World War the rate had more than tripled, from about 10 to 34 GJ/capita between 1950 and 2020. Translating the last rate int…
