Favorite Recent Books?

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Post a book you read recently that you liked.

I recently read "The Hunt for Vulcan", which detailed how the planet Vulcan was postulated in the 18th century to explain Mercury's perihelion, and how its existence was eventually disproved by Einstein. It explores how even science isn't as impartial and indifferent to squabbling as usually portrayed, but also how it inspires people to catalog natural phenomena and explain how they work.

Jay Solomon's the Iran Wars.

re-reading "Notes from the underground", a favorite since hs, actually russian writers, old skool, i like best, must be my old soul, haha, but there's the 'Entfremdung' from necessity in a simple way.

-Ursprünglich bezeichnete „Entfremdung“ einerseits juristisch und wirtschaftlich das Veräußern von etwas, z. B. von Besitz und Freiheit, und andererseits das sich Lösen vom nur Weltlichen, in Vorbereitung auf das Göttliche. In diesem Sinne war der Begriff positiv markiert und blieb das auch bis ins 19. Jahrhundert, bis zur Romantik und dank der an der Antike orientierten Weimarer Klassik. Der Mensch war durch die Götter in die allumfassende Endlichkeit des Universums eingeordnet. Die Begeisterung der Romantik für das Mittelalter brachte die negativ konnotierte Entfremdung als Kehrseite der Freiheit mit.

-"the view that one lives in an intelligible world might be a prerequisite to expectancies for control; and the unintelligibility of complex affairs is presumably conducive to the development of high expectancies for external control (that is, high powerlessness)".
-... meaninglessness should be reinterpreted for postmodern times: "With the accelerating throughput of information [...] meaningless is not a matter anymore of whether one can assign meaning to incoming information, but of whether one can develop adequate new scanning mechanisms to gather the goal-relevant information one needs, as well as more efficient selection procedures to prevent being overburdened by the information one does not need, but is bombarded with on a regular basis." "Information overload" or the so-called "data tsunami" are well-known information problems confronting contemporary man.