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Nato: The Dangerous Dinosaur by Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato Institute, 2019

How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe  by Benjamin Abelow, Siland Press, 2022.

The Language Instinct T he Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language  by Steven Pinker, Harper Perennial, 1995.  Summary:   This book is at the border of cognitive science and linguistics. It argues that language is partly inherited and biological.  Deep Structure:   Noam Chomsky asserted that part of grammar is built into the brain at birth. Chomsky called it “deep structure”. Chomsky considered the earlier hypothesis that children infer grammatical rules from general

A Leaf in the Bitter Wind: A Memoir by Ting-Xing Ye, Anchor Canada, 1998

No Wall Too High: One Man's Daring Escape from Mao's Darkest Prison  by Xu Hongci, Erling Hoh, (Translator). Sarah Crichton Books (2018).  White Grass Ridge The author was born in Shanghai in 1933. While in medical school in 1957, he and some fellow students put up a big character poster advocating for greater democracy in China. This got hm expelled from both school and the Chinese Communist Party, and then sent to a forced labor camp called White Grass Ridge in Anhui Provin

The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings  by Wei Jingsheng, Viking, 1998.

Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard  by Fan Shen, Bison Books, 2006.  Cultural Revolution At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he was a Red Guard who destroyed traditional Chinese culture and looted. Later he was sent down to Shaanbei to perform manual labor with the peasants. For awhile he was a “barefoot doctor”, healing injured and sick people with minimal equipment or supplies. For awhile he worked at the Three Red Flag Reservoir, then the East Wind Aircraft Facto

After the Bitter Comes the Sweet: How One Woman Weathered the Storms of China's Recent History  by Yulin Wang Rittenberg with Dori Jones Yang, East West Insights, 2015. Yulin’s father was a wood carver and furniture maker. When the author was little, her family fled Beijing to avoid the Japanese invasion. Her older sister was beautiful and was raped by a Japanese soldier. Her mother’s feet had been bound as a child, starting at age 3. Nevertheless, she had to drag corpses at

To the Edge of the Sky: A Story of Love, Betrayal, Suffering, and the Strength of Human Courage  by Anhua Gao, The Overlook Press, 2003.

Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win by Peter Schweitzer, HarperCollins., 2022.

The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury, Henry Holt and Co.,...

Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods by Amelia Pang, Algonquin Books, 2022.  Sun Yi Sun Yi was a prisoner in Masanjia Reeducation Through Labor Camp. Here is part of the contents of the letter written by Sun Yi: This product produced by Unit 8, Department 2, Mashanjia Labour Camp, Shenyang, Liaoning, China. (中國,遼寧,瀋陽,馬 三家勞動教養院二所八大隊) People who work here, have to work 15 hours a day with out Saturday, Sunday break and any holid

Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed  by Jason L. Riley. Encounter Books, 2015.  In Chapter 6: Affirmative Discrimination , the author writes: “. . . the more accurately you describe affirmative action, the worse it polls.”

The Book of Why  by Judea Pearl with Dana MacKenzie, Basic Books, 2018.  Correlation is Not Causation It is widely known that correlation is not causation. Correlation comes from observation. Much effort has gone into trying to figure some way to discover causation from analyzing observational data. Interventions and Counterfactuals The author says that in order to understand causation, observation and analyzing observational data is not enough. It is necessary to take two fu

From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey  by Pascal Khoo Thwe, Harper Perennial, 2002. Between the Shan State and the Karen State He was born in 1967 in Phekhou, which is between the Shan State and thee Karen State. Education But he also has exposure to Western culture because he was educated in Roman Catholic schools. In 1984 he went to college in Mandallay. Here he studied English, history and literature. Because of his interest in literature, he met John Casey, a l

Gulag: A History  by Anne Applebaum, Anchor Books, 2004.  GULAG Acronym GULAG is an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, which means Main Administration Camp. The book describes the origin of the gulag as the forced labor camps set up by the Bolsheviks to house their political enemies.  Lenin's Red Terror The gulag started in 1918-1919 during the Bolshevik Red Terror as concentration camps. The initial inhabitants were White Guards, counter-revolutionary priests, former C

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York  by Robert Caro, Vintage, 1975.  Park Commissioners Robert Moses served as New York City Park Commissioner for 26 years. Alfred E. Smith, governor of the state of New York, played a major role in the ascension to power of Bob Moses. Built by Moses Van Wyck Expressway to Idlewild (JFK) Airport Gowan’s Parkway in Brooklyn Cross-Bronx Expressway West Side Highway Henry Hudson Parkway Triborough Bridge Verrazano Narrows Brid

The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television  by Evan I. Schwartz, Harper Perennial, 2003.  Electronic versus Mechanical:   Philo T. Farnsworth invented television. His basic innovation was to make it purely electronic, in contrast with the other efforts at the time, which were partly mechanical. His competitors all used mechanical devices and so were too slow to change the image quickly enough so that the eye would perceive continuous motion.

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich, Pantheon, 2018.  Ancient North Eurasians These were a people whose descendants contributed substantially to both Native Americans and Europeans. But they are no longer present in North Eurasia itself. India India is a mixture of Ancestral North Indians (Aryans, Indo-Europeans) from the Caucasus and Ancestral South Indians (Dravidians) from Iran. Cousins The book also discusses ou

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies  by Jared Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.  Pre-History This book is an interesting complement to the more common books that study pre-history by means of language and genetics. The domestication of plants and animals was the beginning of civilization. This process depends on which plants and animals were present in various parts of the world and whether they were amenable to domestication. Domesticated Plants: Fertil