What I've Been Reading

Marcus Willaschek, Kant: A Revolution in Thinking.  A very good book, perhaps the best introduction to Kant?  Though for me it is mostly interior to my current knowledge set.

Matthew Bell, Goethe: A Life in Ideas.  A beautiful book, now in English we have Nicholas Boyle’s work and also this.  Bell is wise enough to understand and value Iphigenia auf Tauris, a good test for Goethe appeciation.  Although I had a library copy out to read, I went ahead and bought a copy of this one to own.

Benjamin Wilson, Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex is both interesting and has plenty of information on early Thomas Schelling and his precursors.

Very well researched is The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China, by Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, with Claire Cousineau.

Peter Baxter, Rhodesia: A Complete History 1890-1980.  The most complete history of the country I have been able to find.  Many of the other books contain a few dominant, non-false narratives, but one gets tired of that?  I say LLMs come especially in handy for learning this history.

Luka Ivan Jukic, Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea.  I took this sentence to encapsulate the main lesson of the book, namely that this does not usually work: “Central Europeans were, as ever, masterfully adept at rearranging polities into new configurations.”

I enjoyed Maxim Samson, Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, From the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way.