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A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam  by Neil Sheehan, Vintage, 1988.

Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam  by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, University of North Carolina Press, 2012.  Viet Minh The Communist Party of Vietnam was called the Viet Minh. They promoted both Vietnamese nationalism and Communism. They fought to expel both the Japanese (during World War II) and the French (after World War II). South Firsters It was not a majority of the North Vietnamese communist party (the Viet Minh) that wanted to convert Sout

Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam  by H. R. McMaster, Harper Perennial, 1998.  Escalation This is a detailed description of how the administration of LBJ got involved in a ground war in Asia without ever explicitly deciding to do so. Contempt for the Military Another theme is that the civilians had contempt for the military men and tried to keep them out of the loop. The civilian politicians s believed that bra

The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family  by Duong Van Mai Elliott, Oxford University Press, 2000.  North Vietnam It was fascinating to read the author's description of the changes following the arrival of the French. But the problems caused by the French were mild compared to the Japanese invasion during World War II. Northern Vietnam endured a famine during the winter of 1944-1945, primarily due to this invasion. At least four hundred thousand

Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From  by Daniel Pipes, Free Press, 1997.  Summary This book describes the history of political conspiracies and conspiratorial thinking. Ironically, imaginary political conspiracies preceded actual political conspiracies, and, in fact, helped create them.  Christian Military Orders There were several Christian Military Orders during the Middle Ages, including: (a) Knights Hospitallers of St. John, (b) Teutonic K

Heaven On Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism  by Joshua Muravchik, Encounter Books, 2002.  Summary This book presents a history of socialism organized into chapters for each major economic figure. My summary includes only those chapters that I found most interesting.  Babeuf Gracchus Babeuf was a radical egalitarian of the French Revolution. In addition to liberty and property of the Anglo-American enlightenment, the some leaders of the French revolution added a more radic

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World  by Steven Johnson, Riverhead Books, 2006.  Cholera This book is a study of the outbreak of cholera in London in 1854. Cholera originated in the Ganges delta. Cholera arrived in Britain in 1832. The cholera patient can be saved by the infusion of large amounts of water and electrolytes. But they did not know that then. The bacterium that causes cholera was d

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters  by Rose George, Metropolitan Books, 2009.  Dalit Scavengers In India, there is still widespread discrimination against the Dalits (previously called the Untouchables). There are subdivisions of Dalits: (a) Tanners of animals, (b) Burners of corpses, (ccc) Sweepers (manual scavengers). It is only sweepers who are the scavengers of excrement. It is estimated that there are 400 thousand to 1.2 million

Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey  by David Horowitz, Touchstone, 1997.  David Horowitz Freedom Center David was a prominent champion of academic freedom and political diversity on college campuses through his organization, the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Paternal Ancestors Morris (Moishe) Horowitz, David's Paternal grandfather was a tailor in Mozir in Western Ukraine. Morris and his wife Anna left Russia 1905 and emigrated to the United States. In New York City Morris w

Inside the Criminal Mind, Revised and Updated Edition by Stanton Samenow, Crown, 2012.  Bad Thinking The author sees the root cause of criminal behavior as being bad thinking.  Nature or Nurture? The author objects to the idea that a child’s mind is a blank slate leads to the idea that society is at fault when someone becomes a criminal. Whether there is a genetic predisposition to criminality remains an open question. But there is evidence that temperament is largely inborn.

Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us  by Robert D. Hare, Guilford Press, 1999.  Self Reporting When trying to diagnose prisoners for psychopathy, he found that earlier tests for psychopathy, which were called personality inventories, suffered from the defect of self-reporting. They were vulnerable to coaching. Prisoners gave answers tailored to convincing the psychologist that either they were not mentally ill, or that they were suffering from

The Doctors’ Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever and the Strange Story of Ignác Semmelweis  by Sherwin B. Nuland, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.  Puerperal Fever Puerperal fever became more common after the medicalization of childbirth. During the 19th century in Europe and America, midwives were often replaced by doctors. A new surgical specialty developed, called obstetrics. Puerperal fever was much more common in hospital deliveries than in home deliveries. Ignác Semmelweis Igná

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler, Penguin Books, 2007.  Changes in American Society During the early twentieth century, the unwed mother usually kept her baby after birth. Maternity homes helped girls find work as domestics so that they could support their child. After World War II there was a change in philosophy. The church charity volunteers were replaced by professio

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution  by Jonathan Eig, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.  Birth Control This is a book on the development of birth control pills. Before birth control pills, contraception was often promoted by the rhythm method, which was promoted by Leo J. Latz, a professor at Loyola University in Chicago.  Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology: It was founded in 1944 by scientists Gregory Pincus and Hudson Ho

The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom  by Phyllis Chesler, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.  Chesler describes how the feminist movement has become corrupted by other agendas, and how it has ostracized traditional femists, who focus on women's rights. Embracing Other Agendas Chesler believes that mainstream American feminists have in large part abandoned their main goal of protecting women from misogyny in order to embrace other agendas:  Multicultu

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe  by Lee Smolin, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.  Determinism:   Pierre-Simon Laplace: with total knowledge of the present, one can project the future of the universe Block Universe:   The author objects to the theory called the “block universe”, where the future is set in stone by the initial conditions and completely deterministic laws of physics. Block universe: the whole universe is a timeless mathemati

Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics  by Ruth Lewin Sime, University of California Press, 1996.  Female, Jewish Physicist This is a biography of an Austrian, Jewish, female nuclear physicist, who, with Otto Hahn, discovered nuclear fission. Meitner worked in Berlin at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute. She was an experimental nuclear physicist. She bombarded uranium atoms with neutrons. Her primary collaborator was Otto Hahn. Hahn performed the chemical isolations and chemical analyses

The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World  by Edward Dolnick, HarperCollins, 2011.  Before the Age of Reason, people thought in the old ways: natural disasters, plagues and fires were punishment from God for sinning, astrology, comets were bad omens curiosity was a sin (according to St. Augustine) religious dissenters were punished inanimate matter had goals great chain of being the Bible was full of hidden meanings God control

Philosophy: Who Needs It  by Ayn Rand, Penguin, 1984. At the most general level, philosophical systems can be categorized into two groups: those that are based on the primacy of existence and those that are based on the primacy of consciousness. Aristotle and Ayn Rand favor the primacy of existence. The anti-conceptual mentality has several characteristics: (a) intellectual passivity with respect to forming concepts at higher levels of abstraction, (b) difficulty distinguishi

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature  by Steven Pinker, Viking, 2002.  In this book Steven Pinker demonstrates an unusual degree of clarity and subtlety of thought. Philosophy of Mind Steven Pinker compares three traditional theories of mind to what is known from current research in cognitive psychology. The three theories are: The Blank Slate: This theory was introduced by British philosopher John Locke. Locke believed that the child is born a blank slate, with