New Reading list (non-Tech)
I picked up The Unknown Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Holiday. It's been fluctuating in the Amazon top 10 for a while and I recently grabbed a copy. So far, i got through the first 10 chapters. It's a pretty heavy read weighing in at around 800 pages and pretty much looks like one of those books that you dreaded reading in college because it was so big. Fortunately the chapters are small so you can easily knock out a chapter at a time in 20 minutes or less.
So why am I mentioning it? Well, b/c Mao gets pretty good press in most circles over here and he's pretty much an amazing dude. Amazing in the most repugnant sense of the word. Mike Tyson for instance has a Mao tatoo. I've seen almost as many Mao shirts in college as I have Che Guevera shirts and both of them, from most of what I've heard , are regarded as Freedom fighters more than anything else.
Since I've been alive, every time some politician does something unpopular on the left or right, out comes the Hitler analogies. Well, either Hitler or Nazi analogies, a difference without distinction. Anyway, if I was related to Hitler, I'd be calling up John Edwards or some other Trial Lawyer and suing the living crap out of everyone. For instance, during the 20th century, Europe did a pretty good job at trying to wipe out a good segment of the population. But compared to ol Mao, they were total bums. Why? Well, because as much of a monster as Hitler was, he was a total piker compared to Stalin, who was in turn a total piker compared to Mao. Granted, I haven't read the whole book so I'm not going to say too much... but from what I can see, the authors don't have an ax to grind. At least if they do, they are subtle enough about it that they keep it to themselves and let the footnotes speak for themselves. Depending on how you want to count, Mao killed between 80 million and 100 million people. Yes, you have to consider starvation a method of killing people but 80 million is no joke. But that's not really the crux of the book. I starts out in the late 1800s with Mao and his mom and pop. From what the authors describe, old boy had an Oedipus complex that would in and of itself, convince msot folks that Freud had something right in this regard. It moves on through his early education, then his becomming a communist, then him hooking up with Stalin and then, well, i didn't read that far yet. But man was he one sick puppy. In a nutshell, Mao was the living carnation of the NY Times characterization's of GW. With 100 million dead under his belt, I can't even imagine what the American Friends Service Committee would be saying if Mao was a religous republican instead of a Marxist.
Anyway, if you're interested in a pretty good non-tech read, this is as good as anything else I've come across.