I recently finished A Leaf in the Bitter Wind, which is a personal memoir by Ting-Xing Ye of her life growing up as one of 5 children of a former factory owner in communist China. What an incredible, compelling story – I would highly recommend it. Many parts of her story are deeply tragic and […]
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This is a book summary for Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940-1944 by Dallas Michelbacher. As in much of Europe during the 1930’s, anti-Semitism had become a powerful force in Romanian politics in the years leading up to WW2. Romanian leaders openly called for the expulsion of Jews from everyday life and expressed a desire
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My personal viewpoint tends to be libertarian-leaning. I generally prefer free market solutions with limited government intervention, and I tend to lean that way both due to political philosophy (I’m skeptical of the morality of extracting resources by force from people who earned those resources through their own efforts in consensual, mutually-beneficial transactions with others.
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Chapter 7 – In the Engine Room In this chapter, A.S. describes the court system, and how sentences are determined and handed out. A.S. starts with the day he and his fellow cellmates have received their sentence. He is brought into a room and seated on a stool opposite a neat, black-haired NKVD major. Leafing
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Chapter 4 – The Bluecaps This chapter discusses ‘the Bluecaps’, those members of State Security responsible for the investigations, arrests and interrogations. Throughout this chapter (and as with much of the book) A.S. discusses human nature and good vs evil with a tremendous nuance and depth which is one of the reasons I personally found
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The Gulag Archipelago is Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s comprehensive history of the Soviet Gulag system, which he experienced firsthand having been a prisoner himself. Early after his arrest he made it his goal to catalogue his experiences and those of the people he met there, and to write this book to give the world and in particular
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Charlie Munger, billionaire investor and business partner of Warren Buffett, often discusses the importance of developing a framework of mental models in order to better understand the world and our own behavior. With reference to my introductory post, I thought a good place to start off this blog is to discuss some of the more
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“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become aware of how difficult it is to consistently see myself and reality clearly, without distortion. The mind seems to have an almost limitless ability to delude itself, and