1/22/23

This should be considered a "bail" because I am choosing to discontinue reading it. Many sections were fascinating, very readable and concise. My version was an online copy, which is not interactive for me as a hard copy. So much info I wanted to underline and star. I like how the author added cross references to history and lots of supporting evidence for his arguments.

However, I don't have an urgency to finish it, like so much of the histories I have read from the WEM. I wonder if I just did not care for Susan Wise Bauer's choices. I will say that many of them made reference back to previous histories on the list, which is a plus.

So for now I am going to finish my reading here, and if I get to the end of all I want to read and still have time left, maybe this will be one of the books I return to. ( )

I read this sometime in the mid/late 1990s (along with a bunch of Toffler), and at the time it seemed obviously true -- fall of USSR until dotcom was "nothing is really happening anywhere" and then dotcom was "tech singularity will finally save the world". Islamism/islamic terrorism, Putin/Russia, and the new US/China antagonism are superficial challenges, but don't actually refute the core proposition of the book (as I remember it 20 years later) that we're all fighting/facing challenges/etc., but from a fairly similar intellectual frame. ( )

Utterly naive. ( )

Quite good, brings out his thesis, and explains his arguments very well. When he delves deep into philosophy some readers might go a little cross-eyed, Hobbes, Hegel, et al, but a compelling book. ( )