Dave Schoettinger > Recent Status Updates

The author begins with descriptions of societies on the perimeter of ancient Egypt.

The author maintains that the forces (racism, greed, etc.) which scuttled the Reconstruction of the American South also were responsible for the removal of indigenous peoples from the majority of the American West.

The impact of Reconstruction on the American South can best be gauged by the expeditiousness of the State of Mississippi's ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. That amendment, eliminating slavery, was ratified by Mississippi in 1995, a mere 130 years after the end of the Civil War.

Just in case you were feeling too comfortable with your cushy life, Robert Kaplan wants to let you know that the world could collapse into chaos, or worse, at any moment.

Who knew that in the 1890s bicycle races were a major spectator sport? A crowd of 50,000 people jammed the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts in 1896 to watch such a race.

The author has now completed her transit of Central Asia and the Caucasus, and is now crossing the Black Sea en route to the Ukraine. At the time of her trip the current war had not yet started.

I am following the author around the perimeter of Russia. She has just crossed the border from Mongolia into Sinkiang.

Townley's narrative is a positive one concerning the aviation portion of the US Navy. Thus far, there has been no mention of Operation Tailhook and, I suspect, there is not going to be.

In the latter part of this book the author describes the environmental degradation of the Gulf Coast from the uprooting of mangrove forests for tract housing to oil spills.

The author describes the wealth and variety of avian life around the Gulf in the mid-19th century, including this ode to one of the species:

What a wondrous bird is the pelican,
His bill holds more fish than his belican,
He crams into his beak
enough food for a week,
But I'll be damned if I know how the helican.

This book was published in 2017 so the author could not have known that the name of the body of water off the west coast of Florida would become a political litmus test. The author does relate that the name by which it was known prior to last year was bestowed upon it by European cartographers in the mid-16th century. Nothing lasts forever.

Although I'm still trying to figure out what Lost in Translation was about, like most Americans, I saw both Shogun and Crazy Rich Asians and therefore consider myself somewhat of an expert on Asia. Professor Auslin has credentials that suggest that he has real expertise on the subject, and though his essays are more than five years old, they still seem to be relevant.

Winder has pretty much come to the end of the Habsbug Dynasty, but he is not quite finished with Central Europe, and especially its contributions to music and the arts.

Winder has now followed the Hapsburg into the second half of the 18th century where he detects a shift in artistic energy from the religious to the secular.

This is a history of the Habsburg Empire with few footnotes and a fairly light-hearted writing style. The river that inspired the title has thus far been mentioned only in passing.

The author provides detailed descriptions of the conditions that prompted migrants to leave the American South during the first half of the twentieth century.

The author is telling the story of the migration of African-Americans out of the American South during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. She focuses on three different individuals and tells their stories in detail.

The author is providing a response to all who have been dismissive of the history of the African continent and its peoples.

According to the author the first use of the term Middle Ages in English was in the mid-18th century. It was about this time that Europeans realized they had developed a civilization comparable to Rome and Greece of antiquity.

This is basically a history of development of the Christian church in Western Europe.

The author suggests that Christianity is a blend of Judaism and Greek philosophy.

I tried to google the author and got a bunch of pictures of Spiderman and someone named Zendaya.

The author has now taken us to the South Pacific with Margaret Mead and is guiding us through her personal life as well as her academic work. Many readers will find the former to be the more interesting.

Thus far, the book has primarily been a biography of Franz Boas.

All right; the author has convinced me that AI is way smarter than I am and my fellow humans are too busy trolling each other on the internet to care. Hopefully, he has something to say in the last chapter that will make me want to wake up tomorrow.

Harari goes into detail on how a populist leader can turn a democracy into an authoritarian state. If he hadn't written the book more than a year ago, I would have sworn that he was reciting Trump's activities of the last 6 months.

Harari is presenting his analysis of information and the means by which it passes between and connects individual humans.