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Not Even My Name: A True Story  by Thea Halo, Picador, 2001.  Biography and Memoir This is a biography of Sano Halo, written by her daughter, Thea Halo. When Sano Halo was a girl, she lived in northern Turkey, in the area south of the Black Sea. Pontic Greeks have been living in this region since classical times, the days of Ancient Greece. Many Greeks have also been living in Ionia, the part of Turkey (Anatolia) bordering the Mediterranean, and in Cappadocia, a region in sou

My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir  by Clarence Thomas, Harper Perennial, 2008.  Grandfather Clarence Thomas was brought up by his mother’s father, because his own father abandoned him. He was raised Roman Catholic. Clarence Thomas called this grandfather “Daddy”. Daddy raised Clarence and his brother Myers strictly. They were required to work on the farm and study hard. Daddy subscribed to the self-help philosophy of Booker T. Washington, where colored people tried to get ahead

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes  by Chantha Nguon, Algonquin Books, 2024.  Khmer Rouge The author,  the daughter of a Khmer mother and a Vietnamese auto mechanic father, had a comfortable, middle-class childhood in Cambodia. That is, until the Khmer Rouge came to power. The Khmer Rouge persecuted non-Khmer ethnicities, such as Vietnamese and Chinese. Interestingly, the preceding ruler, Lon Nol, had also persecuted these ethnicities. But the

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World  by Simon Winchester, Harper Perennial, 2019.

Japanese Girl at the Siege of Changchun: How I Survived China s Wartime Atrocity  by Homare Endo, and Michael Brase (Translator), Stone Bridge Press, 2016 Manchuria Changchun, a city in Manchuria, found itself at the intersection of the Chinese Civil War between the Kuo Min Tang and the Communists, and at the same time, the war between the Japanese and the Russians. No side made much effort to protect civilians. Hundreds of thousands of civilians starved because all sides pri

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women  by Kate Moore, Sourcebooks, 2017.

Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line  by Ben Hamper. Warner Books; Reprint edition (1992)  A very funny book about working on the General Motors assembly line in Flint, Michigan from 1977 to 1988, taken from a newspaper column he wrote at the time.

The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice  by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Penguin Books, 2021. The Kurds are a nationless people split across 4 countries: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. There are many Kurds in northeastern Syria. This book is about how Kurdish women in Syria formed Kurdish Women Protection Units to fight the Sunni jihadists. Many of them were from the Kurdish city of Kobani, in the north, near the border with Turkey. They fought for both Ku

The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story  by Hyeonseo Lee, David John

When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge  by Chanrithy Him, W. W. Norton Company (2001)  Expulsion of Urban Elite The city dwellers were removed from the cities. The Khmer Rouge steal anything of value that the city people have, such as watches and jewelry. The author and the other females of her family were separated from the male members of their family by the Khmer Rouge, which then killed the male members. Becoming Peasants The women and girls were taken

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers  by Loung Ung, HarperCollins (2000)  Timeline April 1975 Khmer Rouge ent4r cities and tells residents the the United States will bomb the city., They must evacuate to th countryside for a few days. The Khmer Rouge stole their watches. The Khmer Rouge tells her family about the Angkar, the Organization, to which they must be loyal. They are sent to the countryside to be with the "base people", the peasants. They ar

God, Guns & Israel: Britain, The First World War And The Jews In The Holy Land  by Jill Hamilton, Sutton Pub Ltd, 2005.  David Lloyd George David Lloyd George was the main force behind the Palestinian Mandate and the Balfour Declaration. Chaim Weizmann had persuaded Balfour to support the cause of Zionism. Lloyd George believed that the Jews should have a country of their own, so he created Palestine out of South Syria.  British Protestant Outside the Anglican Church Hamilton

Victims of Yalta: The Secret Betrayal of the Allies: 1944-1947  by Nikolai Tolstoy, Pegasus Books, 2012.  Forced Repatriation This book describes the forced repatriation by Great Britain of Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union after World War II. The British made a formal agreement with the Soviet Union to return their nationals at the Yalta meeting of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. Many of these deportees  were Soviet soldiers held in German prisoner of war

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II  by Iris Chang, Basic Books, 1997.  Killing Civilians America killed many innocent civilians by nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. But the Japanese killed even more, in Nanking, in 1937. Estimates of the death toll from the Rape of Nanking range from 260 thousand to 350 thousand.  War Japan took control of Korea away from China in 1895 in the First Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese invaded Manchuria (northern Chin

Blackett's War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare , by Stephen Budiansky, Vintage, 2013.  Operational Research This book describes the origin of operational research in Britain during World War II. Blackett played a major role. Beforehand, civilian mathematicians, scientists and engineers had worked on only designing weapons, not analyzing how they were used. Operational Research contributed to winning the Battle of the Atlantic b

The Quest for Cosmic Justice  by Thomas Sowell, Free Press, 1999.  Trilogy This book is an extension of his earlier books, A Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed . The first book discussed how an economic philosopher’s economic ideas depend on his view of human nature. The second book criticized those who are satisfied with merely appearing to have compassion for the poor, instead of objectively proving that they have compassion for the poor, by testing their s

The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy  by Thomas Sowell, Basic Books, 1995.  Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy The subtitle of this book is awesome. It implies that liberals, progressives and socialists are motivated by ego, not by compassion for the poor. For liberals, self-respect depends primarily on their political philosophy. They see themselves as a moral elite, surrounded by ignoramuses. They will resist any evidenc

A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles  by Thomas Sowell, Basic Books, 2007.  Social Visions Sowell sees differing political and economic philosophies as originating from differing visions of human nature. Sowell identifies two of these visions: the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision. Constrained by what? Well, constrained by reality and human nature. Sowell favors the constrained vision, and criticizes the unconstrained vision for its

Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust  by Miron Dolot, W. W. Norton & Company, 1987.  Holodomor This book is a memoir by a Ukrainian peasant who endured Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture in the Ukraine in the early 1930s, which lead to a man-made famine that Ukrainians call the Holodomor. The author’s father had been murdered by the Communists in 1919, because he was head of the village and a holdover from the pre-Communist system. The Communists returned to

The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine  by Robert Conquest, Oxford University Press, 1986.  Holodomor During 1929-1932, several million Ukrainians died in a man-made famine. Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture was the primary cause of the famine. Stalin's Motives A desire to move property from private ownership to government ownership, A belief that large collective farms would operate more efficiently than small, individual fa