Carl

Jack Weatherford provides new scholarly research that put Genghis Khan's achievements and his impact in a revealing light. I found it revealing and insightful.

Rachel Maddow provides an insightful treatise on the impact of major changes that have taken place in the relationship between the military, the government and the people over the course of the last fifty years. While I don't completely buy all that she has to say - Maddow raises major issues that have not received much debate but should be examined closely such as the militarization of the CIA, the use of contractors to supplement the military and the expansion of drone warfare.

Tyler Hamilton relates a compelling history of how a basically honest person got trapped into a web of lies and deceit. While the book provides insight into Armstrong's history of doping and evasion, the book really focuses on how pervasive it was within the sport. It explains the edge that doping gave the athletes ... but also showed how hard they still had to work.

This book is not for the faint of heart, many parts of the book made me squeamish ... the things the athletes did to dope their blood were really quite gruesome.

My favorite part was at the end during the Sixty Minutes interview when Tyler explains why he got caught up in doping by asking the interviewer what he would do if he had to choose between doping and giving up the sport.

A well researched and exhaustive book on Nikola Tesla. I found the information about the inventor and his relationship with both Thomas Edison and Westinghouse fascinating. Also the extent of his ground breaking and original research in electric power, electric motors, radio and other technologies was interesting. Also the competition between inventors, patent wars, and claims of who was "first" was interesting as well.

Too much time is spent on Tesla's personal life and relationships with different luminaries of the time. Some of his relationships like those with Mark Twain are interesting and added color to the story. Others like Tesla's relationship really more of an acquaintance with Rudyard Kipling seemed to be more of name dropping than essential to the story.

I found some of the cultural aspects like the fascination with life on Mars at the time interesting yet at the same time there was too much detail, and too many examples provided by the author. Much of the details provided seemed like overkill - I felt like I had already gotten the point and was being bludgeoned with additional trivia.

Simon Prebble does a good job in bringing color to the stories and the characters but all in all much of the book seemed repetitious and boring.

Sheinkin provided a lot of insight into Arnold and while we may never truly know what caused Arnold to turn traitor, he provides a plausible explanation.

The historical detail and the insight into the back-stabbing and gamesmanship that our early founding fathers engaged in with each other.

Good topic and well presented. Tim Wu brings clarity to the issues of Internet Governance and "Internet Control" that are so often bandied about.

This book was an interesting look at the Yugo - a car I remember hearing a lot about at the time it was being imported to the U.S. It has an interesting back story involving the Yugo's promoter James Bricklin. The book is almost as much about James Bricklin's adventures in importing cars as it is about the Yugo. Jason Vuic places the Yugo imports in an historical context involving the cold war and the conflicts within the former Yugoslavia. While I found some of the historical context that Jason Vuic discussed in the book interesting, it wasn't always clear which events had a direct bearing on the Yugo and which ones didn't. There was a long discussion about Yugoslavia defying the Russian boycott of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angelos - I kept waiting for the tie in to the Yugo but it never came - other than to highlight how Yugoslavia was independent from Russia.

An interesting look at a car most of us have heard about but largely forgotten. A nice trip down memory lane for car buffs.