I don’t know. It was sufferable. Perhaps I built it up too much in my head. Perhaps it really was drab. Either way, it was meh for me.
Grade: C
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A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
There is a LOT here worth noting, and too much to retype. So I’ll simply highlight my favorite bit of learned information that will stick with me forever:
Mastodon means “nipple teeth” (pg 81).
Grade: B
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Amusing Ourselves to Death : Public Discourse in the age of Show Business, by Neil Postman
“People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one . . . Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us” (pg xix).
A “conversation” is “all techniques that permit people of a particular culture to exchange messages” (pg 6).
A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality” (pg 10).
“What is peculiar about such interpositions of media is that their role in directing what we will see or know is so rarely noticed” (pg 11).
“The clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded” (pg 11).
“Intelligence is primarily defined as one’s capacity to grasp the truth of things” (pg 25).
“Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the history of communications knows that every new technology for thinking involves a trade off. It giveth and taketh away, although not quite in equal measure” (pg 29).
“A technology is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates . . . Each technology has an agenda of its own” (pg 84).
“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials” (pg 93).
“Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world” (pg 106).
Grade: B
Slightly outdated, but still relevant and full of ideas and consequences worth considering.
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Pirate Women: The Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers who Ruled the Seven Seas
“As the story goes, Alexander the Great once captured a pirate and questioned him, asking, ‘How dare you molest the sea?’ The pirate answered, ‘How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the whole world and are called an emperor’” (pg 5).
The “bad girl goes good” archetyp:
“a wild woman is tamed and surrenders to her destined gender role. This type of story is perennially popular with male historians as a way of diminishing the power of a warrior woman’s legend. It is meant to teach the reader that although a woman can have her fun and possibly even do something great, in the end, she will go home and raise babies like she is supposed to” (pg 12).
Grade: C
For a historian nut, this is probably more interesting. As is, outside of the above quotes, it was meh. I actually found she spoke more about the history of male pirates than anything, but I suppose too, that is to her point - men just don’t care enough to write about female pirates. Even great ones.
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Flyboys, by James Bradley
“A dehumanized enemy is easy to kill, and Japanese soldiers were instructed that they were not dealing with humans at all but kichiku, or “devils.” The idea of treating the Chinese as beasts was not informal scuttlebutt but a command from officers whose directives had to be considered orders of the emperor” (pg 56).
Both sides played this word game because both sides would not have been able to fight, otherwise. The war and all that was needed demanded that they switch off their brains, their humanity, and simply destroy things that were not human.
“You see explosions all around you . . . these dark, threatening puffs of black smoke. You’re tense in your body, but you can’t do anything about it. You cannot take evasive action, so you get used to it. You think to yourself, ‘This is my duty and I have to do it’” (pg 194).
Kill or be killed. The same moral code all animals live by.
Yet, to see the war on film was to advertise an entirely different story.
Grade: B+
A difficult read, but an extremely important one as well. If ever you considered America to be above the rest decent in war, read again. We are terrible, just like the rest. And we’re better at it, which is why we’ve won so many times.
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