Books! (Wars and Coups Edition)
Governing Through Technology: Information Artifacts and Social Practice (Jannis Kallinikos, 2017/#37): Basically "The Medium is the Message" for ERP software and the internet in general (weirdly, I don't recall it mentioning McLuhan). It makes the interesting remark than even before we "negotiate" with a technology we've already been affected by (trained to be conversant with) it, and that the flexibility of software comes paired with extremely rigid constraints. I would add: we confuse the number of options with their range (this feels like a short way to describe a lot of situations...). I think it misses the mark in a number of things, but it's certainly an interesting book.
Eliphas Levi and the French Occult Revival (Christopher McIntosh, 2017/#38): An entertaining book, if not one that'll reinforce your faith on the rational powers of the human mind.
Caesar's Legacy: Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire (Josiah Osgood, 2017/#39): A cleverly titled book about the civil war(s) between the murder of Julius Caesar and the immediate aftermath of Actium. It's a period of time I haven't read much about - a lot of history books go "Republic, Caesar, Ides, mumblemumble, Augustus." Yet the way the book describes it, it was a deeply traumatic period pretty much around the Mediterranean, and particularly in Italy, and you can't really understand Augustus' empire (or, it turns out, Roman imperial literature) without the background of the wars. Highly recommended.
Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (David M. Perry, 2017/#40): Mostly a study of the ways people narrated and reacted to the transfer plunder pious theft movement of sacred relics from Constantinople to the West after the Fourth Crusade, with something of an emphasis on Venice. Not as much as I had hoped, though, and with more textual analysis than I'd have liked, so the book was a relative disappointment.
Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups (Naunihal Singh, 2017/#41): A reasonable application of game theory (more specifically, the concept of coordination games) to coups. It actually applies to most organizational changes, I think.
The Atlantic in World History (Karen Ordahl Kupperman, 2017/#42): A short, somewhat impressionistic look at history with the Atlantic Ocean as the guiding focus. Interesting facts and observations, but probably not as structured as it could be.
Eliphas Levi and the French Occult Revival (Christopher McIntosh, 2017/#38): An entertaining book, if not one that'll reinforce your faith on the rational powers of the human mind.
Caesar's Legacy: Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire (Josiah Osgood, 2017/#39): A cleverly titled book about the civil war(s) between the murder of Julius Caesar and the immediate aftermath of Actium. It's a period of time I haven't read much about - a lot of history books go "Republic, Caesar, Ides, mumblemumble, Augustus." Yet the way the book describes it, it was a deeply traumatic period pretty much around the Mediterranean, and particularly in Italy, and you can't really understand Augustus' empire (or, it turns out, Roman imperial literature) without the background of the wars. Highly recommended.
Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (David M. Perry, 2017/#40): Mostly a study of the ways people narrated and reacted to the transfer plunder pious theft movement of sacred relics from Constantinople to the West after the Fourth Crusade, with something of an emphasis on Venice. Not as much as I had hoped, though, and with more textual analysis than I'd have liked, so the book was a relative disappointment.
Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups (Naunihal Singh, 2017/#41): A reasonable application of game theory (more specifically, the concept of coordination games) to coups. It actually applies to most organizational changes, I think.
The Atlantic in World History (Karen Ordahl Kupperman, 2017/#42): A short, somewhat impressionistic look at history with the Atlantic Ocean as the guiding focus. Interesting facts and observations, but probably not as structured as it could be.