history — Book Reviews — Dinaburg Writes

The Gun

It is the impracticality of these weapons, their purposeful malignancy and impetus to cause damage, that still gives me pause. It doesn’t fit the setting. You can’t just slice and dice in a cartoon! You can’t just start shooting wildly if you’re the hero! You can, Batman-style, bludgeon and cripple a thousand villains and skate by on the illusion of non-lethality, I suppose. But a bullet? You’re limited by the threat of death, of too much violence, of overkill. Smash a man’s face and he may live. Give a G.I. Joe a laser pistol and his or her enemies fall over in flurry of sparkly lights and scorched camouflage. Actual guns firing real bullets cannot be downplayed and will never, in the zeitgeist, come across as less than lethally efficient. They cannot be used in popular culture the way something like nunchucks or a quarterstaff or a fist can be used.

David DinaburgDecember 13, 2024Non-Fiction, guns, history

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Everything is disarmingly self-aware; its bluntness preempts attempts to poke holes with admissions that nothing is complete. That—more so than the hot-take-style quotable excerpts that serve to draw attention to the text in the first place—is what makes it remarkable. Sapiens isn’t afraid to make the best claim it can given the facts as they are known, isn’t afraid to say, “This might all be wrong but here it is anyway,” and isn’t afraid to give all the information it can without trying to steer the reader into a comfortable line of thinking.

David DinaburgDecember 11, 2024Non-fiction, culture, history, humanity

How to Hide an Empire

So if you’re trying to decide whether to read this book, the answer is definitely yes do it. If you want a direct thesis sentence to help you, here it is:

[G]lobalization, in turn, depended on key technologies devised or perfected by the U.S. military during the Second World War. These were, like synthetics, empire-killing technologies, in that they helped render colonies unnecessary. They did so by making movement easier without direct territorial control.

That’s pretty much it. I can’t summarize how we got here, because that’s the book’s job, dude. Go read it. It's fun (and also horrifying). You'll learn things (horrifying things). What else is there?

David DinaburgJuly 24, 2022history, USA, Empire, Colonial, Sesame Street

Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750

At no point did I ever want to stop reading, however, because each paragraph unlocks another piece of a grand mosaic that eventually leads to a more vivid mental image of current China.

David DinaburgJuly 2, 2019China, Book Review, Non-fiction, history