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1aulsmith
It's not so much that I'm interested in the world as it is that the world is essential for understanding so much else.
I suppose my biggest interests long term are China and Japan and I have a general interest in the histories of the world that were left out of my cold war inspired social studies in high school.
Here's what I've read in the last couple of years that I thought was interesting.
John Toland's The Rising Sun. I only got through the first section which is basically Japanese political history from 1936 to the eve of Pearl Harbor, which was a mess and widely misunderstood in the West. Toland is sympathetic to the Japanese and critical of the West for diplomatic and intelligence failures, but it also clearly shows the problems of trying to deal with a government that isn't under any kind of central control. Fascinating and frightening.
I guess I should give a warning here that I rarely read non-fiction books all the way through.
Isabel Allende's My Invented Country. I don't read much about Latin America. As a USian it just makes me feel helpless and guilty. As things about Latin America go this was fairly light. The author was involved in politics but at a far enough remove that nothing seriously bad happened to her. It was very good on cultural aspects of Chile and why Pinochet was an attractive leader to many Chileans.
I'm currently in the middle of Michael Korda's Hero : the life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia which combines two current interests: archaeology and military intelligence. It is slow going as it involve many side trips to the encyclopedia and the atlas. (The sum total of my formal schooling on the Ottoman empire was that it was "the sick man of Europe" and it was overthrown by the "young Turks," which is not enough to get through this excellent book on the previous Middle East crisis.)
I suppose my biggest interests long term are China and Japan and I have a general interest in the histories of the world that were left out of my cold war inspired social studies in high school.
Here's what I've read in the last couple of years that I thought was interesting.
John Toland's The Rising Sun. I only got through the first section which is basically Japanese political history from 1936 to the eve of Pearl Harbor, which was a mess and widely misunderstood in the West. Toland is sympathetic to the Japanese and critical of the West for diplomatic and intelligence failures, but it also clearly shows the problems of trying to deal with a government that isn't under any kind of central control. Fascinating and frightening.
I guess I should give a warning here that I rarely read non-fiction books all the way through.
Isabel Allende's My Invented Country. I don't read much about Latin America. As a USian it just makes me feel helpless and guilty. As things about Latin America go this was fairly light. The author was involved in politics but at a far enough remove that nothing seriously bad happened to her. It was very good on cultural aspects of Chile and why Pinochet was an attractive leader to many Chileans.
I'm currently in the middle of Michael Korda's Hero : the life and legend of Lawrence of Arabia which combines two current interests: archaeology and military intelligence. It is slow going as it involve many side trips to the encyclopedia and the atlas. (The sum total of my formal schooling on the Ottoman empire was that it was "the sick man of Europe" and it was overthrown by the "young Turks," which is not enough to get through this excellent book on the previous Middle East crisis.)
2lorax
Welcome! I'm ashamed to admit I haven't read anything on Chile myself, even though my wife travels there for work on a regular basis. (I have a book about Easter Island on my TBR shelf, but that's only Chilean by historical accident and I don't think it really counts.)
3aulsmith
My non-fiction world travels have been sadly re-miss (except for the newspaper where I am currently learning more than I ever wanted to know about Ukraine, Western Africa and the Levant.)
I finally finished Korda's Hero in the spring. The section on Lawrence's military campaigns was excellent, and does help understand some of ISIL/ISIS/whatever-the-Western-name-de-jour-is aspirations.
The only other global non-fiction I've read lately is Alfred Metraux's Voodoo in Haiti. I was reading it to get a better understanding of the pantheon, and found out why that's not a reasonable question to ask, so, as usual, I didn't read the whole book. But the beginning sections give a good idea of the religious ideas that came from Africa that got incorporated into Voodoo. This is an excellent, scholarly book for anyone who wants to know a lot about the subject.
I finally finished Korda's Hero in the spring. The section on Lawrence's military campaigns was excellent, and does help understand some of ISIL/ISIS/whatever-the-Western-name-de-jour-is aspirations.
The only other global non-fiction I've read lately is Alfred Metraux's Voodoo in Haiti. I was reading it to get a better understanding of the pantheon, and found out why that's not a reasonable question to ask, so, as usual, I didn't read the whole book. But the beginning sections give a good idea of the religious ideas that came from Africa that got incorporated into Voodoo. This is an excellent, scholarly book for anyone who wants to know a lot about the subject.
4aulsmith
Forgot I even had this journal. Mostly I've been reading folklore and poetry from around the world, rather than non-fiction. Also, I've picked up a number of very uninteresting books that I didn't read enough of to be worth mentioning. But here is one more from last year:
The Trial of Socrates by I. F. Stone. This is more a meditation on what kind of people you need to make a democracy work, but there were some interesting explanations of how Ancient Athens functioned.
The Trial of Socrates by I. F. Stone. This is more a meditation on what kind of people you need to make a democracy work, but there were some interesting explanations of how Ancient Athens functioned.