What Book Are You Currently Reading?

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Reading E.J. Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution, along with some things for class.

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Reading Game Change, which is pretty terrific so far. I'd recommend it to everyone on this forum.

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Game Change was pretty good, though the writing was really gratingly informal and a lot of the book veered into gossip-y unimportant personal stories. I would have liked to read more about the actual strategy behind the campaigns, instead of endless examples of the candidates using the f-word in private. Still a lot of interesting stuff in it though, and really hard to put down once you get into it.

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Over the past three weeks, I read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Victor Hanson's Why the West Has Won, and Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence for an international history seminar I'm taking. All pretty interesting, though Hanson is obviously a neocon idiot (but still the best writer of the three).

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I'm getting sick of everyone hatin' on neocons!!

Hanson's argument is that freedom and free-market capitalism are why "Western civilization" (which to him encompasses everything from Greek city states to Alexander the Great to the Franks to the Holy League to 16th century Spain to Americans in Vietnam) triumphed over... well, he never really defines who they triumphed over, just everyone who didn't love freedom and capitalism enough, I guess. It's a ridiculous, ahistorical, contrived thesis, only saved by his talent at describing battles.

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Has anyone ever read this book?



It's really fascinating. All I really knew of Soviet law was the Stalin-era show trials/purges, so it's interesting to see the more just post-Stalin mish-mash of continental-style civil law and socialist influences, as well as the way more day-to-day mundane cases were handled.

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Just powered through this book for class yesterday, really good read.



This weekend I will be reading The Yankee International by Timothy Messer-Kruse and The First International in America by Samuel Bernstein. And also Greg Grandin's Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism if there is time.

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Is that an academic paper on the fan culture of Eintracht Frankfurt? That sounds pretty cool. Didn't know anyone wrote about things like that.

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I picked up a copy of Age of Extremes for $3, having enjoyed his long 19th century trilogy already. I will hopefully fit it in between my Legal Methods textbook readings.

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Found it in a thrift store on the Upper East Side while I was shopping for cups and plates for my apartment. I also bought The Age of Empire, but they didn't have the other two for whatever reason, even though it looked like this edition of the four books had been printed together as a set.

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Can anyone recommend any good books on modern Latin American history? The Venezuelan election has piqued my interest and it's one of the areas of the world I never really learned a great deal about in school.

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http://www.amazon.com/The-Law-Torts-Examples-Explanations/dp/0735588740/ref=pd_sim_b_1

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1491 by Charles Mann

So good. Can't recommend it enough, even if you don't really care about pre-Columbian American history.

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Nixonland. It's great. Perlstein's an entertaining writer (even if he writes the book more like an internet article than a book at times) and his thesis is interesting and makes a lot of sense.

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I'm reading Tony Judt's Postwar. It's okay so far, I hope it gets better. The first few chapters just seem to be endless lists of numbers and statistics. His actual analysis is interesting, but reading page after page listing the numbers of refugees from each European state is kind of exhausting.

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And I just finished this one:

wtf