Non-Fiction Book Reviews

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Jared Diamond
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a must read.  The left doesn't really have a good explanation for why Europe developed faster and better than the rest of the world, and ended up taking them all over.  The right does have an explanation - racism.  This book works towards a more acceptable explanation.  That is, it's geography inclines it to form many small countries, which will evolve together.  It is connected to great land masses and the crossroads of israel, so it constantly got new ideas.  It was hard to take over all of it, so there was always competition; dogmatic reasons didn't dominate everywhere, so good ideas couldn't be dismissed on those grounds.  He offers a good example of naval exploration - China apparently had a huge navy in the 14th century and was exploring all over indonesia, and had even reached madagascar.  But eventually an emperor decided it was a waste of time and shut the whole thing down, and that was the end of China's age of exploration.  Some European countries also quit exploring for a time, but there were enough different systems going on there that it never died out completely.  The biological imformation is also interesting - the old world had many more domesticizable animals and plants than the new, and it was easier for them to spread there.

Stephen Pinker
The Language Instinct is a must read.  Awesome.  I'm reading The Blank Slate now and it's great.