The Makers Of Scotland: Picts, Romans, Gaels and Vikings - Tim Clarkson

 This was a super facinating book that I would recommend to no one. I have always wondered what exactly was happening in Scotland between the romans and King James.  I thought we simply didn't have any idea of what happened, and that's sort of true in that there are very few written accounts, even fewer reliably truthful accounts, but there is some scattered information that's difficult to piece together, which is why you don't see books on this topic often.  Also, it's rather boring as we only have this guy killed that guy and presumably that guy's son too because the next king on the list is that guy's brother instead of son.  It's a chronology; there's no story to be had.  Though with the popularity of vikings, I do expect to see some movies or series loosely based on the info we do have coming out in the future.  

I'll sum up the key points: The romans f-ed up a whole lot and shouldn't have even wasted their time there.  The gaels were from Ireland and culturally ate the picts.  We don't have any info on the religion before Christianity showed up because it was the Christian monks doing all the recording.  There were a ton of tiny kingdoms, not even that really, fiefdoms.  100 extra men in a battle could mean the difference between winning a losing.  All the "kings" were warrior kings and basically just a bunch of bruts that died in battle fighting each other. It was all very rugged and barely civilized at all. 

Overall, it was interesting to know, but rather forgetable and very boring.  

Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World - Rosalind Miles

 This book was difficult for me to get through.  Not because it was boring or poorly written, quite the opposite.  It was difficult because it was so compelling and fascinating and sad and frustrating.  I often had to stop just so I could process.  That being said, I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK TO EVERYONE.  I don't know how else I can stress that enough. I recommend this to everyone over the age of about 13/14, men, women, old, young, every shade and color and back ground, every religion.  There is so much here I can't even begin to offer a "best of" or "let me save you the time", so I'll briefly mention a few key points.  It's even hard to write this review. You just need to read all of it! 

Women are the most shit on group of all time.  No other group has been so widely systematically murdered, insulted, and disenfranchized anywhere else in history. This was not always the case, despite what you may have heard.  All the oldest gods are robustly female. It isn't until about the rise of agriculture that men seem to have stolen and then eradicated the female god.  This book moves chronologically across the ages and spans the earth documenting the attempted destruction of women.  If males could reproduce without females, I firmly believe we would not exist today.  

Living today, it is easy to think things were always as bad as they were in recent history, but this book lays out the argument that the industrial revolution really cemented the lowest point for women.  Being a wage slave was bad for everyone, but particualarly those the society deemed expendable: women and children.  Prior to this, women ran the farm while her husband did specialized work or at worst they worked the farm side-by-side.  Women have almost always been the driving powerhouse of commerce and markets as both sellers and buyers.  But this we stripped from them when they were corralled into factories.  There were no extra eggs to trade at the market anymore and the work often left them maimed and ill, unable to run a side gig.  ( a lot of this is documented incrediblly well in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle which I have on this list too)

But you may be saying to yourself, "Psh! What about like... Islam where women have been traded as a commodity and murdered at the discression of her family?  If women had always been so important, why did they come underfoot of such a repressive religion?" Fun fact: Women were the initial adopters and primary spreaders of both Christianity and Islam.  Why?  Well, male-centric gods had already been in these locations for a long time and particulary early Islam offered women more freedom than the local religions.  The founder of Islam even named his youngest wife to take his place upon his passing.  Guess who balked at that? In both religions, once they were established, women's rights were rapidly erroded and to call them out meant you weren't a true member of the religion along wiht all the standard dangers associated with that.  A Christian example would be how convienently we have no new testiment books of the female early saints (spoiler alert: they even had whole books) and how the most misogynistic of Paul's writings are believed to be forgeries because he worked with one of those sainted women.  

I just saw an article last night about 2 more female warrior burials being unearthed in Armenia.  The public acts surprised but the people who study this point out that it seems to be not uncommon.  Studies from the early 20th century assumed any warrior's burial was male and anytime they could tell remains were female chalked up the wounds to being attacked by a band of males.  But this whole idea of "women aren't fit for battle" really stems from the 19th century ideas of feminity, being delicate and fainting and all that silliness. So when looking at the ancient past, we are actively warping in through modern ideas (that frankly need to die).  I can think of several women off the top of my head the would prove this idea wrong: Catherine of Aragon (pregnant in battle nonetheless), Budicca, Aethelflaed of Mercia, women lead the storming of the bastille during the French revolution, a Madagascar queen who held a party with all her enemies and then just masscared them (a la Red Wedding style, possibly where Martin got the idea from?) and a middle eastern queen whose name escapes me that lost her husband, the King, to an invading force that I think also captured her son so she just walked in there and murdered them all.  As I finish one mention another comes to me and I could keep going for a while, but you get the idea.  

Ironically, the more women pushed for equal rights, the harder they got the door slammed in their collective faces, continually shoved further down until there was nothing left.  The tide began to turn with women being given the right to vote, largely in the early 20th century in advanced countries, but in the US, I would say it didn't really take effect until, in an effort to make it as unpalletable as possible, a southern congressman included women in the protected classes of people in the civil rights bill.  So in 1970, when that bill passed, women were given full rights only because some men thought it would be so outlandish that they could keep a bill protecting people with African heritage from passing.  1970.  That's only 15 years before I was born.

A High Low Tide: The Revival of a Southern Oyster - André Joseph Gallant

 I both enjoyed and hated this book. I loved the topic; I hated the writing style.  It was like the longest magazine article I've ever read.  I wanted to know more about the science, failures, numbers, endeavors and politics of the whole topic but instead the author focused on the people while dropping in a heavy dose of nature scenery word porn.  I don't think I'd recommend this book to anyone even though it is a good story. 

The Death Of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic - Benjamin Carter Hett

 To tell you the truth, I've read a lot on nazi Germany but never understood how that psycho Hitler got in power.  Yea, he gave good speaches and ran in the right circles, but it always seemed like the majority of people in the government weren't keen on him, so how, exactly, did he take over everything? This book has a clear story of how that happened that I haven't seen so well laid out in any other book.  

The Weimar Republic had so much hope at its creation and it hurts to look back and see all the flaws that lead to its destruction. Its downfall was basically giving too much power to one man, Hindenburg.  The role of chancellor of Germany changed hands 23 times during the Weimar Republic.  No one served more than 2 years and some odd days. Sometimes guys were removed and reinstated a few months later. It was stupid and all because Hindenburg.  Though he never explicitly stated it, he seems to have wanted himself in the role essentially.  He wanted a puppet strong enough to keep the rest of the government in check.  But, of course, anyone smart enough to do that wouldn't follow Hindenburg blindly, which was what he wanted.  Every time a chancellor disagreed, Hindenburg would remove him, or make sure that party wasn't in a position to keep the chancellorship.  When Hitler was finally given the position, Hindenburg lamented that there were no other options, but in the (about) 2 years leading up to that unfortunate event, there were THREE guys all doing ok, or even good, jobs.  They just weren't doing exactly as Hindenburg wanted.  So he kept plotting and yanking them until only Hitler was left on the field.  Then the asshole promptly dies and Hitler is uncontested right at Germany's most volunerable moment with social anger running high, out of control inflation and nationwide shortages of everything.  Germans wanted someone to blame and Hitler pointed the finger. 

Your Best Year Ever - Michael Hyatt

 I guess this would be a good book for a neurotypical new adult? I'm not even sure.  Maybe for people searching for some sort of justification to get rolling? The major take-home idea of the book is do 1 little thing to get started.  You will feel you've accomplished something and that will give you the dopamine dump and moral boost to take step 2, probably one that's a little harder.  Frankly, I have no idea what this guy is talking about because when you accomplish the first simple task, like organizing or putting your name at the top of the paper, you still have to keep going and I think he's full of it regarding any positive feelings from finishing the easy part first.  The same difficult task you weren't excited about is still before you and it seems like you have a great excuse to say, "Alright, I got one thing done. That's enough for today." to just keep putting off the stuff you actually needed to do.  I think he's full of it and don't recommend this book at all.

Chariots Of The Gods - Erich Von Daniken

 So I knew going in that this would be ridiculous, but I was still unprepared for the white supremacy/colonizer racism.  I did not expect that.  And it was so casually thrown in too.  I must chalk it up to "back in my day" phrasing but it was just so short-sighted and ill placed that it made the author look even dumber than he already did.  Allow me to explain; I'll have to start at the beginning of this silly book.

The premise is that ancient man could in no way have built, mapped, calculated, guessed, or understood so much of the knowledge to come out prior to .... the enlightenment period? Or maybe the renaissance period? Basically, anything before white people came onto the intellectual scene.  And the only other possible explaination for this is that humans were routinely visited by an advanced alien civilization that gave them maps, math, technology, insight, new philisophical ideas, etc.  Pretty much any impressive feat ancient people accomplished could show evidence of this interaction.  

My approach to deciding what is true often reverts to "what is the most likely answer" barring some strong evidence.  It pretty much kills most conspiracy theories.  So in the case of this book, sure it's possible these advancements and ideas could come from aliens, but is that the most likely answer? No.  This book relies on poor understanding of technology and civilizations at this time coupled with the assumption that ancient people were not very smart.  They would have used every trick they knew at the time and just because there isn't a continuous line of this knowledge doesn't mean people didn't once have it.  Europeans lost the knowledge of iron production and ripped it out of the colusseum in Rome.  In a pre-historic peoples, this loss of knowledge seems even more likely to occur.  So which scenario is more likely? Aliens helped/built stone henge because ancient people were to stupid to figure out where the sun would rise/set and couldn't work together enough to haul giant stones that far.  Or they did just that. Sure there's the argument that there weren't many good, straight trees around for rolling the stones on and those pullies would have been massive and difficult to work, and it all would have been very dangerous, but is aliens the more likely anwer?

Another example is the carved heads on pacific islands.  The author argues that these have features this genetically narrow group of people wouldn't have seen like narrow noses and thin lips.  But what the author is really arguing is that these people spending hours, days, months? carving stones wouldn't want to change it up.  There is no way they didn't make the faces thinner, thicker, fatter, skinnier, big-eyed, squiny eyed, heavy browed, or all the other variations to the human face just to make each unique.  It doesn't mean they had some mysterious contact with other people.  Any group is going to have natural variation and even if the carvings have greater variation than seen in the local population, just go look at some anime to see people don't really draw/create their art in exact copies of the world around them.  The author really shows his colonizer attitude in thinking that these people couldn't have "come up" with variations in features.  Again, which is more likely: people taking artistic license or aliens?

He brings up the Nazca lines as obvious evidence that ancient peoples were drawing art/trying to guide/wanting to please aliens coming from the sky.  However, the author seems to totally forget that many of the oldest religions were based on sun/moon worship.  The "god in the sky" concept is incredibly old and huge endeavors for a god above is not unheard of either.  So which is more likely: people continuing the "god is above" concept as created by man, or visiting aliens?

Honestly, the bible has the most convincing evidence with the balls-tripping description of "angels" that really do sound like badly translated descriptions of space ships.  I'll give him that.  But time has taught me to be incrediblly skeptical of taking any of the old testament and most of the new at face value.  I can name multiple mistranslations right off the top of my head.  The most interesting point of this argument is how the same stories crop up across the globe.  But again, is the more likely answer that these stories pre-date people leaving Africa and carrying the stories with them, or aliens?

These are just a very few well-known examples.  While in the process of reading this book, I could immediately think of more likley reasons for these "phenomena" than the answer the author offered.  It was like a bizarre fall into non-logic-land.  If anyone is interested in the psychology of conspiracy theories and why/how people get wrapped up in them, this is a good excercise in observing the failure of deduction, while being easily thought around with a second's worth of consideration. I have sitting on my counter right now Carl Sagan's Demon haunted world which I know has a small chapter on aliens and I'm super excited to read it to compare notes from this book.

The Origin of Names, Words and Everything in Between - Patrick Foote

 This book is absurdly somehow both fun and forgettable.  Lots of interesting history and linguistics.  Lots of "Oh now that makes so much more sense!" moments.  But 24 hours after finishing the book, I can't seem to recall any of it.  Perhaps that's lucky?  The author has a youtube channel apparently and I could always pop over there for some reminders.  Overall, I'd say it's a fun read, but won't really change your life.