Each story features Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as they go about Victorian England solving crimes and mysteries, often in parallel with the incompetent Scotland Yard.
They are light, quick to read stories but for today’s audience, I think their main attraction comes from their historical insight into a society with much more obvious class barriers than that of ours today.
Smil uses historical information and data to show how modern civilization, far from being at the cusp of turning its back on fossil fuel dependence, is more likely to continue its current trajectory of using ever more in the years to come. And he explains that even if stepping away from fossil fuels was an uncontested objective, actually shifting society away from fossil fuels would be very complicated in the near term.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is about how immigration law has changed over the decades, primarily between 1924 and 1965 but also more recently.
Jia Lynn Yang studies the men in positions of power that determined what American immigration law should resemble. She shares their upbringing, private letters, and the context in which they acted.
As a person, Emma Goldman has my respect for the difficulties she lived through and her unwavering pursuit of justice. During her life, she was a leading light for liberty and conscience. Nowadays, I think her ideas are less shocking and more mainstream. Her essay on prison reform and her criticism of prisons would hardly be out of place in a moderately left-wing newspaper today; similarly, her thoughts on love, marriage, birth control, and patriotism.
Ronald White recounts the president’s life chronologically, drawing upon personal correspondence, newspaper articles, reports, and other biographies and memories to inform his work.
As an audiobook, the piece flows easily. One can follow the narrative and get a feeling for the principal figures without strain. For the chapters dedicated to the civil war a map could be useful. In that way, the audiobook may compare unfavorably to the printed version (assuming there are some maps there.)
Quicksilver is the first of three books of the Baroque Cycle trilogy, and it’s also three independent books in one. It follows the lives of three fictional characters interwoven with real figures from the 17th century such as Louis XIV, Isaac Newton, and Leibniz.
Drunk describes the effects alcohol has had on human civilisation. It covers the physiological, mental, psychologic/creative, and communal effects of alcohol, as well as its negative aspects. Slingerland keeps one foot in the scientific fields but his text is more for the general public.
Wilkerson argues that many of America’s problems elsewhere labelled as Racism, or Systemic Racism derive from an unacknowledged caste system. She suggests that we, as Americans have an unwritten code of conduct imprinted on us by centuries of history and that this code instructs our assumptions, behaviors, and values.
In order to better understand caste, she travelled to India and met with people from high and low castes. And she studied the Nazis’ attempts to copy American law to create their own short-lived racial hierarchy.
Pretty crazy to be reading this as Russia invades Ukraine in what I can only imagine is the last futile power grab of a disillusioned once-great empire.
The Changing World Order is very popular in the Crypto-verse and with investment influencers on Youtube. As I watch people line up outside of banks in both Russia and Ukraine to get their life savings out while they still can, I see why.