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Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water , Revised Edition, by Marc Reisner, Penguin Books, 1993.  Summary The author argues that the United States dammed way too many rivers. Not only did the dam builders harm nature, they also promoted irrigation and power-generation projects that failed a cost-benefit analysis. The early dams, such as Hoover Dam, did provide great benefits for modest costs. But as the years went by, all the best sites had been built on

The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution  by Yang Jisheng, Stacy Mosher (Translator), Guo Jian (Translator). Picador Paper; (2022)  Communist Philosophy Communists saw discrepancies in wealth as prima facie evidence of exploitation. Communists saw the middle class as exploiting the working class and land owners as exploiting the peasants. The Communists favored the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Mao Zedong wanted to turn each Chinese ci

Mao’s Last Revolution  by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Belknap Press, 2006.  Jiang Qing Sent to Shanghai Mao began by sending his wife, Jiang Qing, to Shanghai to contact Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan and enlist their help in a campaign against the intellectual Wu Han, vice-mayor of Beijing. Mao’s actual target was Wu Han’s superior, Peng Zhen, Beijing mayor and leader of the Group of Five. The Group of Five were the current overseers of the Cultural Revoluti

Th e Brilliant Disaster: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs  by Jim Rasenberger, Scribner, 2012.  Summary During the transition from the hawkish Eisenhower administration to the dovish Kennedy administration there was carried over a plan to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro. What emerged was a hybrid plan that attempted to be both effective and deniable, but which ended up being neither.  The man running Cuba prior to Fidel Castro, General F

Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story of Fidel Castro,  3rd revised edition by Georgie Anne Geyer, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2001.  Favoring the Underdog Castro wanted to be remembered by history as a revolutionary hero and champion of the oppressed. Castro did not believe in any particular political ideology, such as Marxist-Leninism, but, in general terms, favored poor people against rich people, and poor nations against rich nations. In particular, Castro hated the United St

Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him  by Humberto Fontova, Sentinel, 2007.  Summary The author debunks the myth of Che Guevara as a revolutionary hero who liberated the poor. Fontova proves that Guevara was instead a cowardly psychopath, who had nothing going for himself except being handsome and photogenic.  Che the Symbol Che is famous because Fidel was happy to make Che out to be a hero, after Che was dead and no longer a threat to Fidel’s p

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War  by Michael Dobbs, Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.  Cuban Missile Crisis Soon after Fidel Castro became dictator of Cuba in 1959, he turned to the Soviet Union for financial and military hep. In particular, the Soviets installed missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba in 1962. American U-2 spy planes discovered this fact. This book has a tremendous amount of detail about what happened in Cuba during the

Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage  by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, with Annette Lawrence Drew, Harper Paperbacks, 1999.  Navies This book describes how  U.S. Navy diesel and nuclear submarines fought the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Topics :  collisions of U.S. and Soviet submarines sinking of submarines submarines tailing one another U.S. submarines spying on Soviet military naval ports attempts to salvage sunken submarines rescu

Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, 4 th  Edition  by Paul Hollander, Transaction Publishers, 1997.  Summary In the West, due to ignorance to what was actually going on under the Bolsheviks, many intellectuals had an idealized view of life in the Soviet Union. When Western intellectuals visited the Soviet Union to see for themselves the achievements of Communism, they were duped by their hosts. They were amenable to being duped, because th

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy  by David E. Hoffman, Anchor Books, 2010.  Treaty The U.S.A. and Soviet Union signed a Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention treaty outlawing biological weapons, which the Americans abided by, but the Soviets did not.   Accidents There was an accidental pulmonary anthrax exposure to the local population of weaponized anthrax bacteria in April 1979 in Sverdlovsk, a city of one million people.

Snowball Earth: The Story of the Great Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life as We Know It  by Gabrielle Walker, Crown, 2003.  Earth Freezing Over:  In the 1960s Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko considered the possibility of the Earth freezing over forever. Once the ice forms it reflects sunlight back away from the Earth, so the Earth cools: a positive feedback loop. Budyko thought that there was no way that this scenario could be reversed, so it must never have happened. 

Massacre at Montsegur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade   by Zoé Oldenbourg, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997.  The Cathars The Cathars believed that Jesus was the son of God, and they believed in the Bible. The Cathars believed that they were closer to the original Christianity than was the the Roman Catholic Church, which, they believed, had deviated from Jesus and the Bible. One of the primary divergences was that the Cathars did not believe that God created the physical wo

Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World  by Lawrence Goldstone, Nancy Goldstone, Broadway, 2002.  Gutenberg Bible During the 16th century in Europe, the Gutenberg printing press was the main enabler for the spread of ideas to reform the Roman Catholic church. But there was no freedom of the press and the Vatican prevented the publication of what it deemed to be heresy. Michael Servetus A Spanish s

Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now  by Jan Wong, Anchor Books, 1997.  Number One Machine Tool Factory In July 1972 the Chinese government gave Jan Wong permission to go to Beijing University starting in August. While a student Jan worked at Number One Machine Tool Factory. This was part of Mao’s effort to make city dwellers and intellectuals understand the lives of peasants and workers. Big Joy Farm Jan graduated from McGill in May 1974 with honors in history. She

Life and Death in Shanghai  by Nien Cheng, Grove Press, 1987.  Mistrust This is a memoir of a businesswoman who was arrested during Mao's Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Nien Cheng was accused of being a spy for the British.The Communist Party mistrusted her, because: she came from a prosperous family background, she was well-educated, she was an employee of Shell Oil, she had extensive contacts with foreigners as part of her job, she had spent time in England and Au

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China  by Jung Chang, Simon & Schuster, 2003.  Three Generations of Chinese Women A memoir of the author, her mother, and her mother’s mother. This is a journey through the 20th century history of China: the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, World War II, the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.  Author's Grandmother The author’s maternal grandmother had bound feet and grew up in Nor

The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited  by Louisa Lim, Oxford University Press, 2014.  Summary This is a book about the massacre of several hundred students by the Peoples Liberation Army at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4, 1989. The book also talks about similar protests that occurred on the same day in Chengdu.  Timeline April 15, 1989: Death of General Secretary Hu Yaobang April 17, 1989: Beijing Students Autonomous Federation gather at Beijing Normal

Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler  by Thomas Hager, Crown, 2008.  Potassium Nitrate:   The Chinese combined potassium nitrate  with ground charcoal to invent gunpowder. The British East India Company found a huge supply of potassium nitrate in the mud flats of the river Ganges.  Sodium Nitrate:   A related chemical is sodium nitrate. Sodium nitrate is not as good for explosives as is

The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers  by Richard McGregor, HarperCollins, 2010.  Overview:   The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a parallel system to the official government and is not subject to government law. The CCP is the hidden power behind the governmental structures and the major businesses. CCP actions are reviewable only by its own internal methods. The CCP is not mentioned in the Chinese constitution, except briefly in the preamble. Greater Pers

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed  by Eric H. Cline, Princeton University Press, 2014. [New edition in 2021!] Metals Different periods of ancient history are named for the main metals and metal alloys they used. The Bronze Age was named for bronze. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. Cyprus was a good source of copper, but in was harder to come by. Causes The book is mainly about the Bronze Age Collapse, where civilization was followed by a less advanced dark ages.