A Year in 100 Books: Quarantine Edition

As many of us are compelled to stay home due to the spread of Covid-19, I felt it might be time to start up the blog again until things settle down. I have found that I feel a bit useless sitting at home, and need to feel like I'm doing something helpful and productive to keep the anxiety at bay. So I'm gonna talk to you all about the books that I'm reading. And maybe share pictures of whatever I'm knitting, or the kittens. You know, uplifting stuff. So lets start with the first book:

The End is Always Near

by Dan Carlin

I know right, starting of with some super uplifting material. It was a really good read. For those who don't know Dan Carlin, he is the host of Dan Carlin's hardcore history, a long form podcast about different events in history (and by long form I mean long. Most pods are 5 hours or more, and most stories are like good apologies, they come in three parts). 

This book looks specifically at humanities most apocalyptic moments, beginning with the bronze age collapse ("the sea peoples!") and ending with the proliferation of nuclear arms and examining how our quest for greater weaponry has changed who we are as people. Very well researched, though a quicker read than I thought it would be given the length of his podcasts. Carlin asks big questions about how these changes have shaped humanity, "What's the connection between the factual past and the speculative future?" He ties in effects of the effects of such events as the collapse of Rome, and the great plagues of the past, and looks at how the people living then might have felt. (There's a cool argument to made that the rise of guilds, and workers rights, might have arisen as a consequence of the black death.)

I give The End is Always Near four and a half out of five stars. It was a good reminder that things have been bad before, and they will be bad again, but we still have power to create the world we want to live in. I wish it was longer.