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The Body: A Guide for Occupants  by Bill Bryson, Anchor Books; Vintage; Reprint edition, 2021.  Interesting Biological Topics The fungus cccidioidomyccosis  causes Valley Fever Umami was discovered by Kikunae Ikeda, who cofounded Ajinomoto to promote it The Scoville Organoleptic Test measures how hot chili peppers are McGill Pain Questionnaire Elephants and whales have their testicles on the inside Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease is more common than cirrhosis Hepatitis C is

Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II  by Robert Kurson, Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition, 2005.

Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny  by Mike Dash, Crown Reprint, Paperback, 2003.

The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride  by Daniel James Brown, William Morrow, 2009.

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger  by Levinson, Marc, Princeton University Press, 2006.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin  by Timothy Snyder, Basic Books, 2012.  Where  Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, Western Russia.  When  1933-1945. Number of Civilian’s Killed by Soviets and Nazis: 14 million.  Holodomor  Holodomor: 3 million Ukrainian peasants killed by Stalin by sending in the Red Army to steal their grain harvests Stalin’s Great Terror  380,000 prosperous Ukrainian peasants (kulaks) executed by the NKVD, because of their eco

The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century  by Christopher Simpson, Common Courage Press, 1995.  Armenian Genocide The Armenian genocide of 1915 was lead by a group of young Turkish military officers named the Ittihad, and informally referred to as “The Young Turks”. They deported the Armenians in Anatolia southward, to Syria. The Ittihad then declared their property abandoned, and the stolen loot became patronage for the Ittihad supporters. Th

The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis  by Arthur Allen, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

The Magic Furnace: The Search for the Origins of Atoms  by Marcus Chown, Vintage (Rand), 2000.

Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad  by Melanie Kirkpatrick, Encounter Books, 2012.  North Koreans Escaping China The author describes how Christian volunteers help North Koreans who have crossed the Yalu River into China. Heilongqiang, Jilin, Liaoning. There are two million ethnic Koreans in these three Chinese provinces. In Jilin: Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture.China to: Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia. Chinese prosperity

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea  by Barbara Demick, Spiegel & Grau, 2010.

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine  by Anne Applebaum, Vintage Paperback, 2018.

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster  by Adam Higginbotham, Simon & Schuster, 2019.

The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State  by Nadia Murad, with Jenna Krajeski; Foreword by Amal Clooney; Tim Duggan Books (Crown) (2017)  Jihadist Attitude Towards Women This is a memoir of a young Yazidi woman who was kidnapped during the time that jihadist Sunni Arabs took over the northern part of Iraq where the Kurds and Yazidis live. Unlike mainstream Muslims, jihadists believe that if a woman is unmarried and not a Muslim, they any Mu

Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome  by Venki Ramakrishnan, Basic Books, 2018.

Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Forty-year Rivalry that Unraveled Culture, Religion and Collective Memory in the Middle East  by Kim Ghattas, Henry Holt, 2021.  Shia Muslims In the 1970s and 1980s, there were several political groups involved with Lebanon and Iran: Amal Movement (Lebanon) Liberation Movement of Iran Islamic Republican Party National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps  Amal Amal was a political group in Lebanon which

Bibi: My Story  by Benjamin Netanyahu, Threshold Editions (2022)

The Devil's Highway: A True Story  by Luis Alberto Urrea. Little, Brown and Company (2004)

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico  by Amy S. Greenberg, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.  Manifest Destiny President James K. Polk started the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) in order to steal the southwest from Mexico. He needed an excuse. So he made a big deal about where exactly the border was between Texas and Mexico. Was it the Rio Grand River or the Nueces River? The Nueces River was further to the North, and the true extent of Texas, which

The Collapse of Dignity The Story of a Mining Tragedy and the Fight Against Greed and Corruption in Mexico  by Napoleon Gomez, BenBella Books (Perseus), 2013.  Miners Union The author, Napoleon Gómez Urrutia, was the leader of a miners union for many years, the National Union of Mine, Metal, and Steel Workers of the Mexican Republic. This book describes how he lead his labor union against corrupt businessmen in league with corrupt politicians who colluded against the workers.