![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Martha Hodes, My Hijacking: ( history v. memory )
Arthur Holland Michel, Eyes in the Sky: ( tracking people is very possible )
Ralph Watson McElvenny & Marc Wortman, The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived : Tom Watson Jr. And the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age: ( IBM corporate history )
Scott Reynolds Nelson, Oceans of Grain: ( one-commodity history )
Sarah Milov, The Cigarette:( growing tobacco )cut-tag difficulties mean you just get these short takes:
John Bew, Clement Attlee: I didn’t know much about Attlee; this book is a little long for an amateur but it gave a good sense of his rise as a politician in an age when it was possible to do that out of solid political conviction coupled with personal awkwardness. His clarity of vision and willingness to work with others, Bew argues, are significantly responsible for the enactment of Britain’s New Deal; he was also not committed to keeping the Empire in place, unlike Churchill.
Adam Goodheart, The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth: History of outsiders’ attempts to encounter people living on a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Goodheart recounts what’s known about them (not much, other than that they are violent towards outsiders) and how the related tribes near them have slowly started to have more and more outside contact.
Robin Higham, Mark Parillo, & Richard B. Myers, The Influence of Airpower upon History: My takeaway—though not the authors’—is that claims for its importance are overstated, but controlling the air is very important to winning battles now. That said, winning the war takes second place to winning the peace, as we’ve seen again and again.
Barbara Tversky, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought: Interesting if occasionally repetitive book on how our physicality channels our thinking, and how we think with our bodies—I loved the finding that preventing people from using their hands while they talk makes them worse at verbal explanations.
S.C. Gwynne, His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine: Highly recommended! You know that this ship is going down, but each chapter before the denouement is basically about a different reason that airships were never going to do what their proponents wanted because of unresolvable engineering problems. This story is also about British attempts to use technology to shorten distances between imperial outposts and thus enhance their control, which contributed to their unwillingness to press pause on the airship program.
Kidada E. Williams, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction: Black freedom prompted all-out white backlash. Reconstruction “did not simply fail; white conservatives overthrew it.” They targeted Black homes as well as other spaces that should have offered safety. Depressing but detailed.
Vicki Howard, From Main Street to Mall: History of the rise and fall of department stores and their replacement by Wal-Mart; despite the tectonic shifts in the economy represented, the book is fairly bloodless.
Arthur Holland Michel, Eyes in the Sky: ( tracking people is very possible )
Ralph Watson McElvenny & Marc Wortman, The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived : Tom Watson Jr. And the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age: ( IBM corporate history )
Scott Reynolds Nelson, Oceans of Grain: ( one-commodity history )
Sarah Milov, The Cigarette:( growing tobacco )cut-tag difficulties mean you just get these short takes:
John Bew, Clement Attlee: I didn’t know much about Attlee; this book is a little long for an amateur but it gave a good sense of his rise as a politician in an age when it was possible to do that out of solid political conviction coupled with personal awkwardness. His clarity of vision and willingness to work with others, Bew argues, are significantly responsible for the enactment of Britain’s New Deal; he was also not committed to keeping the Empire in place, unlike Churchill.
Adam Goodheart, The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth: History of outsiders’ attempts to encounter people living on a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Goodheart recounts what’s known about them (not much, other than that they are violent towards outsiders) and how the related tribes near them have slowly started to have more and more outside contact.
Robin Higham, Mark Parillo, & Richard B. Myers, The Influence of Airpower upon History: My takeaway—though not the authors’—is that claims for its importance are overstated, but controlling the air is very important to winning battles now. That said, winning the war takes second place to winning the peace, as we’ve seen again and again.
Barbara Tversky, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought: Interesting if occasionally repetitive book on how our physicality channels our thinking, and how we think with our bodies—I loved the finding that preventing people from using their hands while they talk makes them worse at verbal explanations.
S.C. Gwynne, His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine: Highly recommended! You know that this ship is going down, but each chapter before the denouement is basically about a different reason that airships were never going to do what their proponents wanted because of unresolvable engineering problems. This story is also about British attempts to use technology to shorten distances between imperial outposts and thus enhance their control, which contributed to their unwillingness to press pause on the airship program.
Kidada E. Williams, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction: Black freedom prompted all-out white backlash. Reconstruction “did not simply fail; white conservatives overthrew it.” They targeted Black homes as well as other spaces that should have offered safety. Depressing but detailed.
Vicki Howard, From Main Street to Mall: History of the rise and fall of department stores and their replacement by Wal-Mart; despite the tectonic shifts in the economy represented, the book is fairly bloodless.
