Eric Hosbawn. Fractional times: culture and society in the twentieth century.

Like myself, he is one of the last messengers from the dying world where stories could have moral ambivalence and writing folk were more concerned with their message rather than with who they are.

The Letters of Arthur J. Schlesinger. Random House.

I always thought that personal letters were too personal to provide a fair glimpse of time and, thus, uninteresting. But these are co-o-ol.

Anne Jacobsen. Operation Paperclip.

Poorly written book on a very important subject. The amount of hurdles on the way of her research should have been staggering.

                                                                   [To be continued]

Max Tegmark. Our Mathematical Universe.

Since the Princeton "gang of four" (Witten, Polyakov, etc.) imposed its string orthodoxy on the modern quantum theory of fields, the boundary between metaphysics (disquisitions without much empirical support, or no empirical support possible in principle) and physics (an experimental science, you know) has completely disappeared.

Max Tegmark's book represents extreme proliferation of metaphysical agenda in modern academia. There is no clear distinction anymore between such interpretation of science, religion or simply technical vocabulary mumbo-jumbo.

M. David-Fox, P. Holquist, A. Marth. The Holocaust in the East. Local perpetrators and Soviet response.

Nasty little book. Bland attempt at whitewashing atrocities committed by Eastern European Nazi allies. No mention of Holocaust in the Baltics (mostly organized by "occupied" peoples themselves) at all. Systemic attempts at impugning of the Soviet sources. Only one chapter out of nine (Romania) deals with actual perpetrators. There also suggestions that Soviet sources are inaccurate and sloppy with respect to the (stellar, obviously) records of Romanian Nazi police.

Manfred Rauchenmeister. Der Erste Weltkrieg und das Ende der Habsburghmonarchie 1914-1918. Bohlau, 2013.

1200 p. dreadnought of a book. All what you wanted to know on the First World War from the Austrian prospective and were afraid to ask is now in print.