📚 Non-fiction books 📚

https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?R=3678324&Entt=RDM3678324

I mostly read non-fiction books nowadays. I sometimes skip the intro/prologue, it depends on the book and what it's about.

I'm currently reading "Before the Industrial Revolution" by Carlo M. Cipolla.

It has just a short 1 page preface so I read this one lol.

I like non-fiction books a lot. There are two overall types, I think. The super detailed ones that seem to be aimed more at scholars and academics than the average reader. I remember thumbing through a bio on Rockefeller and it seemed like it went into exhaustive detail about every goddamn day of his life. Then there the ones that are very readable, obviously those are for me. I fairly recent example is Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Well, it is around 4 years old now. It is about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. Really enjoyed that one.

Other favorites would include
Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
Johnny Carson (by his lawyer Henry Bushkin)
The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper (by Dominick Dunne)
The Sociopath Next Door
The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company
Blown for Good - Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology

i love books about the american and canadian west. i have this one which i haven't read yet.

https://www.amazon.com/Dreams-El-Dorado-History-American/dp/1541672526

Read all kinds of books.

I will read the prologue but if its added to a classic book, then no, I prefer to read the book itself not someone's comments on it.

I find it hard to believe you've had your fill of non fiction novels.

Have you read all of Philip K. Dick's novels?

Yes and yes. I'm maybe 70/30 fiction/non-fiction. The last nonfiction book I read was The Wager by David Grann.

Yes, always read the prefaces & the forwards because they provide context.

Current :

US Grant's memoir

Great General, great President in many respects, great human being, great writer.

The Memoirs Of General Reinhard Gehlen

Set up West German Intelligence, more or less intact, with his (Soviet facing) Wehrmacht General Staff subordinates almost immediately at war's end - a fairly astonishing accomplishment. While most German officers were undergoing denazification, he was already at work - first in the US, thereafter in Germany.

I have recently been reading memoirs of German soldiers & officers - to get a sense of their indoctrination and, more interestingly, their reactions/eveolutions in worldview after the war ended in defeat.

It helps me understand the MAGA movement, the power of indoctrination, the susceptibility of humans to manipulation of group identification/sequestration, opinion engineering/propaganda.

Russia has just announced this week that foreign languages are off the menu for the children of non-elites. Oh boy.

I read Bruce Campbells 2 autobiographies a little while ago. Mainly i like fiction though.