Toynbee: politically incorrect, factually correct.

A Reader is about two-thirds into Leonard Susskind’s The Black Hole War, but decided to take a quick peek inside Toynbee’s first tome:

[W]hen a frontier between a more highly and a less highly civilized society ceases to advance, the balance does not settle down to a stable equilibrium but inclines, with the passage of time, in the more backward society’s favour. — Toynbee, Arnold J.; D.C. Somervell (1947-12-31). A Study of History: Abridgement of Volumes I-VI (p. 10). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Can you imagine a current day teacher using the phrase A Reader bolded above?

New Books for April 2013

In the last month A Reader has bought four new non-work books, and will — might — write reviews, book notes, or reading observations (in increasing order of detail) for them:

1. Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History (abridgment by D. C. Sommervell), in two volumes. History, but without the leftist “let’s all hate Western Civilization” bias of most history books written after the 1960s. This will be my Big-Ass Book Challenge for April.
2. Leonard Susskind’s The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. Physics.
3. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. Apple’s hardware may be horribly overpriced and its users are mostly libtard proglodytes, but A Reader admires Jobs for what he achieved, especially his comeback from defeat.
4. Tim Harford’s Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. He’s an economist, so I’d generally ignore this kind of book, but it was recommended by two guys I respect, both engineers with good taste in pop science books.

A Reader has been avoiding fiction for a while, because the way the world is going, fiction cannot compete with reality for shock value.