Mike Johnson

Complete Sociohistory

Revisado: 12-10-19

Personally I prefer to have a deeper insight into how people actually lived in particular places at particular times and London in the 18th Century is excellent as this is just before Modernity just begins to begin its exponential roll powered by the mass use of Coal.
London is the emerging World Capital and choosing to outline this city in this era is a brilliant idea.
As a reader/listener you will be more interested in lives lived rather than the Great Man theory of history.

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POWERFUL History

Revisado: 08-12-18

I have read some of the reviews and please understand that this is not a novelization and 100 years covers a great deal of material as we have so many more preserved records and other data as opposed to the reign of Charlemagne just to cite one comparison but if you want to try to develop deep insights into the immediate events prior to the modern era this is an excellent source. It ends with WW1 which decisively annihilates the Ancien Règime. Getting an understanding of the situation 1815 through the 1840s just with respect to plague and famine makes this book more than worthwhile.
I actually purchased this title because Napoleon Ryan is the reader!
I really enjoy trying to get into the narrator's style and over a number of books I have become an NR fan. He is working with the material and trying to do it in a more artistic fashion than many other readers. Not that you must or should but this is recorded buy also a cooperative human venture involving us all on the writing (Thank You Richard J.Evans) and the production crew especially the narrator.
In the introduction Mr. Evans makes it clear that he has made personal decisions as how to organize and present the material and this is worth listening to and contemplating. Of course every historian must do this but his explication helps with the clarity. The same applies to the narrator as to how all this can be made lively for the many many hours (41.5) so, please, you too are part of this as well. To make it all work listeners must adjust too and, perhaps, not be overly stiff.
On a closing note I certainly will purchase the other works in this series.

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Get them young!

Revisado: 06-01-18

This is an excellent book and I urge you to think about what you are reading or hearing. Research- real research- tells us that the human brain does not mature until a person reaches their early 20s and for the people in the 2-16 the average age is 19 just like Vietnam.
You can call them Men and Women but they are not- physically they are close enough but mentally it is not there yet so the Army wants to get the Infantry YOUNG - they will not know what is going to hit them.
If you know Military Psychiatry you know that average Americans can take about 200 days of combat risk and then they begin to come apart psychologically though some will not even last that long and some will last much longer. Combat risk means days when you might have reasonably been at risk of cobat not simply when you were actually shot at or bombed, mortared, rocketed, etc. A 15 month deployment at Camp Rustamiyah will be 400 days of combat risk. To subject a soldier to 1000 days of combat risk riding up and down the same roads waiting to be blown to pieces means the Pentagon is just .... you fill out the rest.
This book was written prior to 2009 and it is now 2018 and if you have not learned by now you just cannot learn and that is okay- its all good.

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Complex Human Being

Revisado: 05-03-18

To understand today we must understand yesterday and to understand and appreciate ourselves we must understand other people and this book is very approachable in both senses. Mr. Chernow is excellent at biographies and this book also delivers a kind of narrative that enrichens the learning experience greatly.

Most of what we are taught at every level of formal education is purely propaganda designed to compel us to see only in certain ways with the result that current events and recent history are rendered unintelligible.

As with many historical figures we see that President Grant was a very unusual and complex individual.

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A Favorite

Revisado: 12-24-17

I have listened to this book many times and there is so much content and departure points for thinking I find it almost like a memory museum if you know the ancient method.
Mr. Ryan is about perfect especially at 0.75 speed.
In many ways this period roughly 800 to 1806 is more significant than WW1&2 politically and structurally by a very wide margin if you are moved to think about it.

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Many interesting facts.

Revisado: 11-17-17

I like data and this book allows you to screen out quite a bit though one must be vigilant. This could have been a much better book and should be rewritten with the environmentalism and anti-corporate politics stripped out.
Much of this is partisan as well as bogus and results in soiling a core of interesting work. Even if you agree with Mr. Coll the book is fatally dated as a result. The Climate Hustle was a great money maker but was time limited and even in 2017 reads as dated rendering the book largely obsolete.
Authors can strive to get OUT OF THE WAY of their topics in nonfiction material such as this short account of Exxon which is really in a pretty plain primary industry. Far greater catastrophes of all descriptions await us in the times to come so we do not want to wring every tear drop and gasp of moral outrage over oil spills.
A general Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical war or a collision with a major Space Rock will make a few million gallons of oil spilled the spilt milk of this rather better era in History.

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Crazed War Monger

Revisado: 11-08-17

I am not left wing or any other 'wing whatever that means in the current context but, in my humble opinion, is that Kilcullen should be held under house arrest in Australia, forbidden to travel, and be denied the right to leave the country.
There is a great deal to know about War especially the state of endless war we have embarked on since 2001 especially as to who is financing all these conflicts and the means by which they are financed which would be the sales of guns, oil, and drugs.
I expected a level of information from this writer commensurate with his reputation as he is almost as responsible for the mess the US wanders into ever deeper.
Kilcullen thinks 50 or even 100 years of War is what is needed trying to pacify the entire Globe.
Ask yourself why the US the US instigated civil war in Afghanistan during the Carter Administration- what the goal was then- and the millions and millions of killings since then.
It is no longer possible to stop the war Machine as in 1974 when the insane generals were cut off by Congress as we are well past that. Then of course the US had been involved in Indochina from 1945-74 so you want to stay as far away from the meat grinder as possible.

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You are too busy

Revisado: 05-19-17

I work which is why I prefer Audible. I have worked for about 55 years mostly out of doors at various semi skilled jobs and did a full days work today. I am reasonably up to date on technological evolutions and staggering, skyrocketing inequality.
Mr. Friedman is a very wealthy man which I do not resent in and of itself but I DO resent the efforts by him and his ilk to suggest that those who are not already above the top 0.5% in 2017 can be successful if they just work 2 or 3 times faster than the did in the 20th Century and take advanced classes in an unknowable future. That a handful of people out of 7.5 or (soon) 11B people become multi billionaires or trillionaires indicates nothing, not really.
No one who is not the child of the uber wealthy should accept these accounts.
Rich people better get those armored cars. armored helicopters, and live in walled compounds. Study the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmet II as this is your real future. You Knew.

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Thanks to R. Cosham

Revisado: 05-16-17

For this type of material (subject matter) I found Mr. Cosham's approach to be perfectly well suited.
Mr. Judt had a brilliant though very uneven mind so his work is to be commended to a critical thinker who can se where he is very solid and where he runs badly into the hedges. The challenge is that he is so well polished one feels pressured to accept al that he says uncritically and you may wish to be very alert in this regard.
Here is the base case which has two primary aspects. Academics like Mr. Judt are attached to Late Edwardian England and the entire World which would be blown apart by the Wars of Modernity 1914-1945. The figure most attractive to them is J.M. Keynes who epitomized the English Gentleman Academic in an era when servants were still available at a good price and the International Academic Clerisy traveled with no questions from upstart governments or their officials. Passport controls emerged from WW1 and is the reason our reactionary academic class is currently trying to get them discarded so that they may travel as Keynes once did.
The main aim of turn of the century Europe was that academics would eventually seize state power and the commanding heights of culture to which they had been striving since Louis 14 and which had always been denied them by Royals, Merchants, Clerics, Peasants and so forth.
The 75 Years War (if you like) put paid to all that everywhere other than the NW NATO countries and the residual rump states of collapsed Euro empires. Colonial Police were sent home from Burma/India as in the case of the very embittered George Orwell for example and the nominally marxist nations of the east deported their antiquated intellectuals by the boatload to the West- these were the Marielistas of the time known as 56ers and so forth in contemporary argot. This was certainly a 2 edged sword as New Years Gift in that this enormous class of deportees from the 19th Century provided some glorious gas lighting to our colleges at the cost of holding them back to the era of gas light itself.
The second difficulty is that loss of their 19th Century Eden has obsessed them with those who they blame for taking it all away from them. Academics were almost prepared to seize power if they could just somehow summon up some sort of motivation when of a sudden the prize was seized from them by Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, and innumerable unnamed lower social types. As a result there is no other perspective for them but their rape and disempowerment by the people prepared to actually act in the course of the 20th Century and subsequently.
In the 21st Century we do need to be alert to the onrushing Totalitarian Technocratic State but it is NOT going to be a rerun of 1845 to 1945 in terms of strutting operatic dictators.
For our purposes in retrospect Fascism and Bolshevism (Communism) can be taken as equivalent if not identical. Yet for academics like Judt and Snyder the traumas of the 20th Century are endlessly re-enacted as in a sort of PTSD induced state though neither Mr. Judt or Mr. Snyder can proceed by any other means than that of *selected* personal accounts and the archives.
One terrible outcome is the wave of current students they have consciously ruined and who wave Fascist and USSR flags as they are inundated by debts for worthless dysfunctional credentials. They would find advocating a return to Horse traction to be of more advantage.
The USA will never have any sort of Totalitarian Government of the Wagnerian Euro type because we are individuals, primarily, who despise centralized dictation. Please see US War of Independence. People like Judt do not understand that one does not become the citizen of another country other than in a legal sense through some sort of endorsement. So we see Judt drift back and forth from country to country swapping jobs, ideologies, and grad student 'wives' along with citizenship almost as often as often as he purchases new more stylish shoes.
He is the Republic of Tony Judt at the end and slips below the waves in the Sea of Solipsism. For Dr. Snyder I am concerned as it seems to me that Tony Judt has knocked the brains out of him and that while Judt claims some genuine identity as a postwar Jew riding the bus from Putney - certainly a fact- poor Mr. Snyder is left as a sort of rootless cosmopolitan inhabiting a vanished virtual world. Other than this the book is good practice for deconstruction.
Afterword: Mr Judt died from the effects of ALS and contrary to his claim ALS often carries comorbidities affecting cognition and inducing dementia and one may see such influences in this work.

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Completely Unbalanced to the point of Evil

Revisado: 04-15-17

Okay, Dr Snyder has written two great books (Bloodlands/Black Earth) which are among the most outstanding works I have read of the shorter type. I have recommended these to people on social media and personally and I recommend them to you if you have a very strong constitution as rough material is covered.
This book is terrible though I recommend it to those with a strong history background and an interest in deconstructing carefully created propaganda. You might enjoy the lessons. In essence Dr.Snyder accuses everyone, academic or otherwise, of being a supporter of Tyranny and Mass Murder as well as being liars, spreaders of false news, and distorters of truth.
Having castigated all those he disagrees with he then proceeds to use all the same devices of distortion plus many more. This actually borders on academically polished hate speech from my point of view.
In short this is fine grade trash from a wonderful scholar and is a brutal disillusionment for me personally.
Here is the nugget. Academics have become seriously detached from any account of social reality a working person or normal individual would understand. To assure you I am 70 have been a laborer since 15 or 16 and worked to a degree at IBM at night as a factory worker and other jobs followed by a SOLID 47 years of laboring that continue today.
After 16 years of lying and endless war under Bush and Obama along with a steady degradation in respect for all and any law by the D.C. Insiders and their pet academics, journalists, and think tankers there had to be a change.
Hillary Clinton had so many negatives many voters were revulsed. The levels of lying, open law breaking, and corruption in D.C. at all levels in Congress and the Executive Branch Agencies has been unparalleled.
Academics like Dr. Snyder and many others became very very comfortable with the crimes and killing committed right before them as other academics almost always have and have reacted with real outrage when the government changed. Academics are almost 100% for Democracy as long as you vote exactly as they tell you and dismiss the lessons of your life in favor of their personal academic formulations. If you do then you *might* be barely tolerated but they actually despise all those they see as beneath their august status. If you vote contrary to their views than you are a racist, fascist, likely mass murderer shooting people before death pits etc.
This is a disgusting revolting work of class hatred. The real world always pushes academics aside when it has heard enough of them and this has been a healthy reaction.
In a final word of note I see a burning desire among academics and generals to refight the issues of the 1930s and 1940s as if nothing had happened in the 70 years since the creation of the C.I.A. and the Military Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower rightly warned the nation about . This *may* be because it is the last era they understand emotionally and intellectually. The Generals seek the Glory associated of succeeding where Germany failed in WW 1&2 and France under Napoleon and by that I mean winning a war against Russia which was basically destroyed in 1991, 26 years ago, when the USSR collapsed.
For the young people graduating with massive debts after becoming unemployable coffee shop revolutionaries trained as weapons of mass social destruction and nothing else by your "professors" I regret that you have become victims of academic abuse.
Mr. Trump is not Satan but a 70 year old Real Estate developer who is learning to do as he is told just like Bush and Obama. Like Obama and Bush he will be given a little space to mess up but he will comply in the aims of the War Party. He will leave office and another figurehead will be installed- that is all.

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