Zimran Ahmed, author of Winterspeak, which is one of my all-time favorite Weblogs (despite the fact that so much of it is over my head), writes:
“Favorite books:
– The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver, The Confusion,
The System of the World)
– This book(s) is enormous, messy, funny, smart, stupid, etc. The man
has clearly transcended editing, and *this is not a good thing*.
However, his characters were smart, interesting people tackling what
were, at the time, genuinely new and confusing ideas, including money,
the economy, trade, class, and markets. We take these things for
granted now, but I think they are still fundamentally alien to humans
and therefore not understood by most of the people who have benefited
so much from them.
– The Last Lion, a biography of Winston Churchill, by William Manchester
– Another too-long, sprawling book. I resolve in ’05 to read only
shorter books, maybe only comics. I read this mostly to learn about
WW2, but instead, I learned about how the world ignored the rise of
Nazi Germany, ridiculed the one man who said it was a threat, and
beleived that appeasement would save the day even in the face of
continual aggression. I learned how old alliances and prejudices kept men from making the decisions they needed to recognize the threat
and nip it in the bud. I learned how an unwillingness to see and
confront evil resulted in carnage.
Sobering thoughts in our time. Manchester died before writing the last
volume, so the series ends on the dawn of WW2. Nazism has finally been
unmasked, Winston comes in from his long political exile to lead a
nation that honestly beleives it is finished as Britain stands
absolutely alone against Fascism.”