Too concerned with the question of whether or not anti-interventionists were, in a technical sense, isolationists. Not enough concerned with whether or not they were in the right. Came away from the book less convinced of its thesis than I did going in.

The postwar planners had valid motivations from the standpoint of American self-interest. German hegemony of Europe would have created an economic block that could surpass America in trade power and devastate American exports. Would this have actually happened? In retrospect it seems unlikely, but the planners had no way of knowing this.

The only historian to look past Long's flamboyance and see the unparalleled genius who singlehandedly destroyed the best-entrenched political establishment in America and built a machine that outlasted his death by decades. Unafraid to grapple with the tough questions a figure like Long raises. Is the corruption of an alleged demagogue different in kind or degree from the corruption he seeks to uproot? Is there such a thing as a demagogue at all in American politics, or is its utterance the last refuge of a beaten incumbent? Does an earnest, heartfelt desire to help people justify cutthroat political praxis? Can a sufficiently strong political will overcome all barriers before it?

Harris not only has the guts to proffer his own answers to these questions but he boldly refuses to accept as a mystery the notion embraced by other historians that Long must remain forever an ideological and methodological enigma. He does not defy categorization, classification, and analysis. He was an American politician, only moreso. He had his own notions of things like the constitution, limits on government (which led him to oppose the NRA), and states' rights (which led him to oppose the manner in which the New Deal was being administered), although historians and contemporaries refused to take his ideas on these things seriously. Was a government run by Huey Long closer to or further from the intent of the founders than the modern two-party system? I wouldn't venture to guess. I think show more Harris would.

Harris backs down in his defenses of Long only once, in the matter which Harris must know best - university operations and academic freedom, when he seems to side with the Reveille staffers who resigned in protest over censorship more stridently than he ever did the Old Regulars or any other political operators who moved in arenas with which he was less familiar. That isn't the best indicator of his own consistency in applying judgment, but that doesn't mean he was wrong in the majority of his assessments either.

Worth re-reading. show less

Biographical sketches degenerate into essays and the book becomes much better when they do. Al Sharpton as the launching pad for transactional vs. transformational politics with revisionist history on political machines and racial integration was particularly insightful.

Despite her insistence that she found something to like in all of the individuals profiled Andrews clearly has nothing but antipathy for Sotomayor. Paglia, Jobs, and to a lesser degree Sorkin are all tragic in that their admirable qualities were perverted by their circumstance - their birth at the wrong time in the wrong country.

At times she undermines her own contention that the boomer disaster was avoidable. Pornography - nobody wanted it but nobody fought against it. School prayer - its staunch advocates within months decided it was unimportant, or actually good, that it was gone. Could pornography and the rollback of Christianity been stopped if the boomers' parents had been more alert to the danger? The true disaster is that we'll never know.

"If you've never belonged to something, you've never had to defend something, so you can hate everything."

"Teaching religion is like teaching a language - learn one language and you can learn another. Learn no language and you're a feral wolf boy forever."

Better-written than Heppenheimer's shuttle history but lighter on technical details. Creates a persuasive profile of Nixon's thinking (or lack thereof) on the space program. For Heppenheimer, Nixon was a peripheral player. For Lodgson, Nixon Absconditus is ever-present,

Lodgson rules that the shuttle can be viewed as a success if the goal was a space program stripped of all ambition to push the envelope as the NASA of Kennedy and Johnson had done.

Excellent retrospective on the attitudes and culture which prevailed in the 1950s - a time of techno-optimism which made even Apollo seem tame. Not particularly well-organized, but it's fairly forgiving if you want to skip through boring sections.

Dyson is quite adept at teasing the audience with tidbits of secret info - both regarding Orion's capabilities (attentive readers will note that he provides all the necessary information to calculate the still-classified standoff distance) and hints of other spinoff projects which may or may not continue to this day.

While the anecdotes surrounding the fascinating cast of researchers who worked on the project sustain the work throughout, the highlights are without a doubt the imagined voyages of the Orion spacecraft. Was a hundred-man expedition to Saturn in the 1970s within America's reach? It certainly was not for the risibly lowballed cost estimates being thrown around in La Jolla.

The conceit of the scientists - not all, by any means, particularly not by the ones who lived through the war in Europe - who believed that simply placing Soviets and Americans together on the same spacecraft would make the public decide that global competition doesn't matter and usher in a new era of world peace. The dream of the techno-optimists was fundamentally an internationalist one, born by the New Atlantis's conquest of the Old World in 1945, the one moment in time when even a materialist might have been forgiven for believing that history show more might have come to an end. show less

I wanted to dislike Thompson, and I succeeded. That said, his chapter about trolling the Muskie campaign by giving his press pass to a drunken "boohoo" is the funniest thing I've read in years.

Why does he hate Hubert Humphrey on such a visceral level? He doesn't feel a need to explain. It was presumed to be obvious why any liberal would despise the man who did more to advance the cause of civil rights within the Democrats and in congress than any other. It wasn't merely that he hadn't advocated for an immediate halt to bombing and withdrawal from Vietnam in 1968 - it was worse than that. It was that Hubert Humphrey hadn't run a guerrilla campaign staffed by amateurs and nuts.

The protest movement His bald head was there, sticking out like a sore thumb, a sign in the Very High Frequency heavens that this was not the end of the age.

For the New Deal and The Great Society to be lumped together as they typically are masks the distinctions in their popular reception. LBJ's campaign tantalized voters with the prospect that the end of poverty and racism was within reach, and on Christmas 1964 claimed it was the most hopeful time since the babe lay in Bethlehem. Yet providence ordained that the great society would be stillborn, at least as a popular platform. That didn't stop Democrats from concluding that it merely hadn't gone far enough (at least, not until 1972). Daniel Patrick Moynihan, long lionized

George Whitefield and Henry Beecher were never so daft as to put their show more revivals up for a vote. Methodism must have seemed a permanent fixture upon the American landscape. But there are no such things in human institutions. It had entered the back end of a 300-year slow burn, and the failure of its 1972 revival should have been a sign that the flame which had consumed America in the 1860s was beginning to die out. show less

The author finds the actual 1980 dem nomination fight to be so uninteresting that it takes up less than half of the book's 400 page length. He had access to enough Kennedy and Carter aides (as well as Carter himself) to craft an engrossing narrative if one existed. One apparently did not, which is why his climax, the botched final night of the convention, is presented as a dry recap of what was on the live ABC news broadcast.

The rest is padded out with irrelevant biographical data and Kennedy hagiography.

Short and readable, mostly effective as motivational text. Well-reasoned encouragement to care less about being disliked. Not sure about the psychology (but probably as reliable as any other psych book) or the metaphysics (author claims lives have value because they can indirectly improve other lives centuries in the future).

Would have given it 5 stars if not for the unfortunate length.

It's a rare treat to go through an entire work of fiction without once thinking that a character is being implausibly stupid. In this case, I was repeatedly struck by how much smarter the characters were than I would be in their circumstances. Either Imperial Space Navy training is better-designed than what passes for education in the 21st century, or two millennia of space eugenics worked as advertised.

I've never been a huge fan of extraterrestrial races as the subject of stories and the Moties are probably the least compelling element of the book, but they go down easier than most of their genre counterparts. The writing is immersive enough that they defy easy categorization as to their character - neither guileless nor especially treacherous (and not particularly skilled at treachery to boot), not imbecilic but not free from flawed judgments.

The book's depiction of technology holds up remarkably well for a 45-year-old work. Some bigger geeks than me might get a real thrill out of pocket computers, but my reaction was more to appreciate how rarely my immersion was broken by having to ponder if something was off. The only point which seemed like it was dated was the mention of inflation on breakaway worlds - wouldn't marginal states be forced to rely on some inflation-proof asset like cryptocurrency or even plain old gold?

The entire narrative is underscored by the very introduction's mention of the collapse of show more the first empire - humans throughout history can, at best, barely tolerate living with each other. Is there any reason to think we could live in peace with a truly alien race, possessing our same inborn inclinations to expand and grow? Pournelle presents a compelling case that the answer is probably no. But instead of taking the cheap out of turning it into a morality play where humans are derided for our imperfection in the face of easy choices, he shows how it would be inevitable even with heroic humans who have only the best intentions.

"They're not monsters."
"No, just our enemies."

Like the Moties, we might as well curse our biology rather than our souls. The fault lies not in our selves, but in our stars. show less

Before reading I knew nothing about Leibniz but was interested in learning about him. Now I still know nothing about Leibniz and I'm uninterested in learning more.

Largely a recap of Nitros and PPVs, unsurprisingly comes to the conclusion that WCW failed due to poor TV product since that's all they have to go off of. Relies almost exclusively on old Meltzer newsletters for backstage information. Since Meltzer's sources were guys who were trying to influence WON's reporting to aid in their backstage politicking by portraying their enemies as idiots, the history presented in the book is that everyone involved in running WCW was a moron and they just had an inexplicable run of good luck from 1993-1998.

Reads more like a 400-page blog post than a nonfiction book, with the snark expressed with liberally applied exclamation points and rarely any subtlety.
Useful only as a chronological record of what happened week-by-week in the company.

It's a book that's bound to be used as ammo for propaganda purposes more than to shed light on the often-murky past of Rabbinic Judaism, but I find Shahak's ideas interesting and compelling in their own right. Unfortunately, there's a lack of rigor which means the book can never be more than a smart guy spouting off some interesting ideas.

I understand what he's trying to do in Chapter 3, and it may have seemed more useful when this was written in 1994, but now it seems almost completely extraneous. Would exposing Talmudism in all its weirdness alienate evangelicals from Zionism? I doubt it, not today. Although the quasi-gnostic emanations of kaballah are likely an embarrassment for Orthodox Zionists who want to emphasize commonalities between their beliefs and Christianity, the tinge of sneering at the "gross superstition" of the Babylonian Talmud inclines the evangelical to side with the talmudist. Where he sees hypocrisy in the "dispensations" scholars devise to get around clear commandments, I see only theologians who take their holy text far more seriously than the woke-peddlers running American seminaries. The anti-Christian elements of the Talmud will always be handwaved away by evangelicals as the natural result of antisemitic environs, which is why Shahak attacks the received historiography in chapters 4 and 5.

Unfortunately, Chapters 4 and 5 are, like the rest of the book, uncited on their most contentious claims. Shahak almost seems to be using historical show more criticism on cultural memories - a very useful technique for developing a novel historiography, but one which absolutely must be augmented by exhaustive primary-source documentation if it's going to ever be taken seriously. It is very provocative to state that Jews were all middle-class enforcers of social order in medieval Europe, universally in better condition than the peasants. But how does he know that?

The single best point he makes, which needs the least research backing it up (and has the most citations actually backing it up), is that peasant mobs were always violent in premodern Europe. We don't pathologize German peasants for what they did to their lords in 1525. We don't accuse Irish peasants who got rowdy with English lords and merchants from time to time of being anti-English bigots. Why then should we assume that any uniquely deep-seated animus was the driving force behind pogroms and expulsions? If it could be demonstrated with more rigor that it was indeed always the aristocracy and church leadership opposed to pogroms, and always peasants and mendicant orders in favor of them, then this would be an important insight.

There is a need for an accessible and critical history of the Rabbinic Jews up through Mendelssohn. I suspect that it would agree with Israel Shahak's conclusions. Perhaps I ask too much, since some of his claims are necessarily extremely hard or impossible to verify (intentional talmud mistranslations in English, secret teachings and customs occasionally dispensed to commoners). But, in lieu of verification of major claims, this book does not come close to filling that need. show less

Uncharacteristic intuition (and even sympathy!) regarding religious experience from an academic and encyclopedic knowledge of primary sources combine perfectly to reconstruct the unbridled, fanatic ecstasy in which Joseph Smith spent his entire life. And not just Smith, but of frontier life of the second great awakening - when America was a land of men digging for cursed treasures, who saw angels around every corner, who felt so close to unraveling all the mysteries of existence through divine artifacts and prayer.

The 18th-century prophetic wave which began with Swedenborg and crested with Blake saw in Smith its culmination, for he was the last prophet to proclaim a love for the American project not just by words or divine decrees but in his very theology. At the same time William Miller eschewed the experiential in his sterile eschatological exegesis and Emerson shed all concept of received knowledge as insufficient, only Smith among the intellectual innovators of his day could perceive the promises of scripture realized in the world around him.

Brodie was the first to apply critical scrutiny not just to Mormon apologia, but also to a tradition nearly as old: anti-Mormon polemic (for Mormonism Unvailed was published only 1 year after Joseph Smith's first crude attempt at church history in the Book of Commandments). She finds that the traditional image among historians (when they think of him at all) of Joe Smith the simple huckster is as untenable as the guileless, pious show more teenager promulgated by Salt Lake City.

She shows him at his worst: a dilettante who rushes headfirst into matters far beyond his comprehension, occasionally destroying his followers' welfare (when he tried his hand at banking), their marriages, or even their lives (when he fancied himself a general). She shows an intemperate man who was unable or unwilling to distinguish between his appetites and the will of God, to the degree that he ensconced "a burning in your bosom" as the final test of divine authority in scripture. But she shows him at his most heroic, too: an unschooled youth who needed a miracle to reconcile his unchurched father and his relapsed Presbyterian mother after his brother Alvin's death. show less

A more rigorous attempt at wrestling historiography than any attempted before. Good interviews from heretofore unheard perspectives, including guys from Turner corporate and Kevin Sullivan. Frustrating unwillingness to draw conclusions or even conjectures for contentious topics. Subpar editing makes long stretches of the book seem unfocused.

Almost a mystical experience to read through and see the heavens opened up. I can offer no judgment as to whether Barker is correct or simply so clever a mind as to construct an irrefutable falsehood.

(Both Volumes)

Presents an in-depth revisionist history of primitive Christianity so compelling that it was almost enough to drag me all the way through some of the most impenetrable prose I've ever had the misfortune of slamming my head into.

Provocative and flamboyant. Well-presented Nietzschean discourse on human nature, bits on darwinism and pantheistic apologetics are hard to follow at times. A few one-liners drew laughs from me. Lots of references to events which are fairly obscure even for contemporaries are going to look extremely dated in a few years, especially at the end.

Unique brusque narration which suits the characters well. Very strong ending. Compelling struggle for protagonist. Perhaps overwrought with a few too many false starts and twists, but these serve to keep the reader on his toes and heighten the catharsis when the victory really is won.

Oversized cast of characters and sometimes plodding narration can't detract from how it's insult-hurling mechs vying for control of anime-ified alternate future america