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Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust  by Götz Haydar Aly. Metropolitan Books (2014). Germany Excellent history of the growth of German prejudice against Jews during the century leading up to the Holocaust. First, the traditional prejudice against the Jews based upon their religion was replaced by envy and shame of the greater economic success of the emancipated Jews. Racism Then the Nazis gave the German people a rationalizati

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution  by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, Basic Books, 2009.  Recent Human Evolution This book describes how human evolution did not stop with the emergence of homo sapiens two hundred thousand years ago, but instead continues even now. In fact, they argue, the rate of human evolution is speeding up. Race The authors discuss the scientific arguments made by the opponents of the concept of race. The oppone

Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes -- the Yanamamö and the Anthropologists  by Napoleon A. Chagnon, Simon & Schuster, 2013.  Yanamamö The author describes the many years he spent among the Yanamamö tribes in Venezuela. In the 1960s there were 25,000 Yanamamö people spread among 250 villages. He writes about the Yanamamö language, name taboos, genealogy (kinship relations), tribal history and geography.  Marxist Anthropology The Marxist anthropology establishmen

Not Out of Africa: How "Afrocentrism" Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History  by Mary R. Lefkowitz, Basic Books, 1996.  This book is a...

Impostors in the Temple: The Decline of the American University  by Martin Anderson, Simon & Schuster, 1992.  Favoring Research over Teaching America’s colleges and universities make teaching students a secondary goal, with research as the primary goal. Much of the teaching is performed by graduate student teaching assistants, rather than by professors. The author believes that it should take only 3-4 years of graduate school for a college graduate to obtain a Ph.D., but it a

Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It  by Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., Basic Books, 2012.  Thomas Sowell This book is a criticism affirmative action at colleges and universities. Moderately talented black students who attend elite colleges and universities have significantly greater drop-out rates than similarly talented black students who attended second-tier schools. This situation has been na

Property and Freedom  by Richard Pipes, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.  The Ancient World The institution of private property predates the...

Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics  by Henry Hazlitt, Crown Publishers, 1979.  Cause and Effect The author approaches economics from the perspective of cause and effect. In order to properly understand economic one must study not just some of the effects of an action, but all of them. One must study not just the short-term effects, but also the long-term effects.  Zero-Sum Game For every job created in public works, the taxes th

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability  by Amy Chua, Anchor, 2004.  Ethnic Minorities In many countries throughout the world, wealth is concentrated in the hands of successful ethic minorities. The ethnic majorities often operate cottage industries which do not evolve and which cannot compete with the dynamic entrepreneurs. This disparity in business success generates much envy in the majority ethnic group. The poor see

Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour  by Helmut Schoeck, Liberty Fund, 1987.  Envy Envy plays a major role in many primitive cultures. Envious people suspect successful people of having achieved their success by practicing sorcery. People who are envied fear that the envious ones will practice black magic against them to hurt them. If something bad happens by chance to the envied person, they will believe that their misfortune was caused by the black magic of the envier. Witchc

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life   by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Free Press, 1996.  Social Problems Caused by Low Intelligence poverty, out-of-wedlock births, dropping out of school, violent crime, divorce.  Confounding Variables The authors use statistical methods to distinguish the effect of low intelligence from confounding factors, from other causes, such as poverty or lack of education. After accounting for differences in t

Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980  by Charles Murray, Basic Books, 1984.  The War on Poverty Charles Murray describes how American President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s failed to decrease poverty, and instead had negative, unintended consequences.  In 1965, there was a loosening of restrictions on giving government aid to poor families. Welfare benefits provided families with about the same or somewhat greater income as working for a living. Th

From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967   by David T. Beito, The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.  Beito describes the era in American history before the establishment of the welfare state, an age where voluntary, private mutual aid benevolent associations helped people who were down on their luck. These were mutual self-help societies where the members helped each other, not charities where the members helped non-memb

What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought  by Keith E. Stanovich, Yale University Press, 2009.  Intelligence and Rationality are Not the Same Thing This is a book about cognitive psychology. Its main points are that: (a) Good thinking requires more than intelligence; it also requires rationality, (b) Intelligence tests do not measure rationality, they measure only intelligence, (c) There is a poor correlation between intelligence and rationality, (d) Th

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall  by Anna Funder, Harper Perennial, 2011.  Informers This is a story about the East Germany (formally, the German Democratic Republic) a country which existed after the end of world War II until the end of the Cold War. Is is about how the Communist secret police of the country spied on their own citizens. The East German secret police, formally the Ministry for State Security, were called the Stasi. Besides the official employees

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956  by Anne Applebaum, Doubleday, 2012.  Poland In 1943, the Red Army created a Polish Infantry Division, named after Tadeusz Kościuszko, a famous Polish military engineer. Selected soldiers from this division and from Polish Communist parties were sent to NKVD training schools in Smolensk, Gorky and Kuibyshev.  As the Red Army pushed the Nazis back, these people became the security police in Poland. Security Police Install

Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution  by Helen Zia, Ballantine Books, 2019.  Timeline 1927: Kuo Min Tang (Nationalists) White Terror 1931: Japan invades Manchuria 1932: First Japanese attack on Shanghai 1937: Second Japanese attack on Shanghai 1941: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor 1943: Foreign nations (WWII Allies) in Shanghai are imprisoned 1943: Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 repealed (United States) 1945: Japan surrenders 1945: Kuo

Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China After the Tiananmen Square Massacre  by Liao Yiwu, Translated by David and Jessie Cowhig and Ross Perlin. One Signal Publishers / Atria / Simon & Schuster, 2019 Hardcover.  The Proletariat Most reports on what happened at Tianmen Square in June 1989 focus primarily on the student demonstrators, the Capital Autonomous Federation of University Students. In contrast, this book describes the working-class people and peasants who worke

A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel  by Ho and Huang, PublicAffairs, 2013.  Jockeying for Position People in the upper levels of the hierarchy of the Chinese Communist Party are jockeying to go to the top and become members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Death of a British National This book is about one of these people, Bo Xilai (party chief of Chong Qing), his wife Gu Kailai (a prominent attorney),

Fifty Miles from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People  by William L. Iġġiaġruk Hensley, Sarah Crichton Books, 2008.  The...