All Posts

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human  by Richard Wrangham, Basic Books, 2010.  Cooking Food Increases Calories Absorbed Cooking was a major step on the path to being fully human. Cooking food is important, because cooked food is easier to digest, and the body can absorb more calories from cooked food than from raw food. Roots versus Leaves As we evolved and moved out of the trees, our diet changed from leaves to roots. Roots provide more calories than leaves. This change

Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa  by Keith Richburg, Basic Books, 1997.  Washington Post Keith Richburg was a reporter for the Washington Post who covered Africa for 3 years in the 1990s. He reported from: Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda , Burundi , Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa Problems with Governance:  the big man corruption tribalism honest African leaders are jailed or killed the casual disregard for human life Telling the Truth about Africa:  press

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War  by Craig Whitlock, WP Company LLC, 2021.  Foreign Aid Corrupts Locals Many critics blamed our failure in Afghanistan on the corruption of their government officials, but we were the ones who gave them the money. American aid for public works projects was siphoned off not only by corrupt government officials, but also by the Taliban. The United States poured money into building schools, even though there were few jobs for sc

Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell by Jason L. Riley. Basic Books, 2021.

Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag  by Harry Wu, Wiley, 1994.  Lao Gai This book is about the 19 years Harry Wu endured as a political prisoner in China’s huge system of forced labor camps. They are called láodòng gǎizào (Mandarin pinyin), ( (劳动改造)) which means Reform through Labor. The name is usually abbreviated to laogai.  Harry Wu Wu was born in Shanghai in 1937. He was educated by Jesuits, who gave him the Western name, Harry. In Communist eyes, he had a

The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements  by Lynne Viola, Oxford University Press, 2007.  Deporting Kulaks This book nicely complements Robert Conquest's book, Harvest of Sorrow. Conquest's book describes what happened in the Ukraine when the kulaks were removed. The kulaks were the more prosperous peasants. Most of them were poor, but not quite as poor as the other peasants. Viola's book describes what happened to the kulaks in their places of exile.

I Little Slave: A Prison Memoir From Communist Laos  by Bounsang Khamkeo, Eastern Washington University, 2006.  Laos There are several different ethnic groups living in Laos. Lowland Lao (Theravada Buddhists), who speak the Lao language, which is similar to the Thai language. Lao Theung, on the mountain slopes, who speak a Mon-Khmer language, the language group of Vietnamese and Cambodian. Lao Soung, on the mountain tops, who speak Hmong.  Author's Education The author, Bouns

Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag  by Janusz Bardach and Kathleen Gleeson, University of California Press, 1998.  Deporation of the Poles Eastward Janusz Bardach was a Polish Jew who joined the forces of the Soviet Red Army in Belarus during World War II to fight the Nazi invasion, He lost the tank he commanded because he forgot to close the hatch before he crossed a river. He was arrested by the KGB for this mistake and courtmartialed. Instead of being executed, he was

Gulag: A History  by Anne Applebaum, Anchor Books, 2004.  Summary 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.  The gulag started in 1918-1919 during the Bolshevik Red Terror as concentration camps. The initial inhabitants were White Guards, counter-revolutionary priests, former Czarist officials, Menshevi

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother  by Amy Chua, Penguin, 2011.  Chinese-American parents are in general much more strict with their children than most other ethnicities. The author describes how she raised her two daughters to become excellent musicians. The elder daughter, Sophia, studied piano, the younger daughter, Lulu, studied the violin. She restricted how her daughters spent their time, giving maximum priority to studying their chosen instrument. The girls were required

Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution  by Nick Lane, W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.  Alkaline Hydrothermal Vents The prime example is the Atlantis massif in the mid-Atlantic, also called the Lost City. The tectonic plates are spreading apart to expose fresh mantle. Seawater invades mantle, which then emits hydrogen, methane, and ammonia. Alkaline hydrothermal vents generate acetyl thioesters. Carbon dioxide plus acetyl thioester produces pyruvate. Phosphate plu

Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis  by Bat Ye’or, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005.  Europe the Victim of Arab Antisemitism During the years after World War II most Europeans were sympathetic to the Jews and Israel. This is still true. What has changed is that now the political leaders of Europe have turned against Israel. This change did not come from the European people, and it came only secondarily from European intellectuals and politicians.  It came mainly from pressu

Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City  by Russell Shorto, Random House Trade Paperbacks; Illustrated Edition, 2013.  Greco-Roman Culture Amsterdam was the first European city since the Greco-Roman era to promote liberalism: religious tolerance, private ownership of land, and freedom of the press. This book describes the history of how this happened.  Private Property When Dutch farmers reclaimed land from the sea, it belonged to the farmers, not the feudal lor

Brilliant!: Shuji Nakamura And the Revolution in Lighting Technology  (Updated Edition) by Bob Johnstone, Prometheus Books, 2015.  This...

Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror  by Nonie Darwish, Sentinel HC, 2006.  Nonie Darwish was born in Cairo. Her father, Colonel Mustafa Hafez, served in the Egyptian army in Gaza. Darwish went to elementary school in Gaza. The Palestinians in Gaza were prevented from entering the rest of Egypt, even though Gaza was part of Egypt. Egypt intentionally kept the Palestinians in Gaza in poverty, in order to make Israel look ba

The War against Excellence: The Rising Tide of Mediocrity in America's Middle Schools  by Cheri Pierson Yecke, Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2005.  Middle School Movement The National Middle School Association was founded in 1973. It is easier to create a new institution than to change an existing institution. That is why the activists did not simply repurpose junior high schools. The activists renamed junior high school (grades 7 and 8) as middle school (sometimes also inc

Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy, Third Edition, Revised and Expanded  by E. G. West, Liberty Fund, 1994).  Proposed Justifications for Government Schools This book describes the rise of government schools in England. The author shows the flaws in the following justifications for government schools that were given during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:  Protect minors from negligent parents, who fail to ensure that their children receiv

NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education  by Samuel L. Blumenfeld, The Paradigm Company, 1984.  Government Schools This book describes the rise of government schools in the United States. When the country was founded, there were no government schools. Schools were private and run by the church. The first government-run primary schools were created in 1818, in Boston, by the Unitarians. They were inspired by Robert Owen, a Scottish socialist.  National Educational Association T

Knowledge and Decisions  by Thomas Sowell, Basic Books, 1996.  Knowledge Has a Cost Sowell makes the point that knowledge has a cost. Sowell talks about the relationship between economics and knowledge. The kinds of knowledge that are relevant are supply and demand. That is, what people can produce and how much labor is required to produce it, and what people want, and how much they are willing to pay for it. The market and pricing are a way for producers and buyers to commun

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914  by David McCullough, Simon & Schuster, 1978.  The Railroad and the French This book describes the building of the Panama Canal. Before anyone started building a canal, the Americans built a railroad across the isthmus. Then came the aborted French efforts of the 1870s to build a canal. The French removed a great deal of mountain earth, but ran out of money before they could complete the earth removal, muc