Tricia Romano. The Freaks Came out to Write.

     This is a book about the times when America was great. New York was a dirty, decaying rathole, but the people there carried the idea of infinite possibilities. Chuck Close, Andy Warhol, Philip Roth, Normal Mailer measured the streets and the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Alexander Coburn wrote about their New York. These days, Manhattan is an abode of banksters and tourists with the sprinkles of homeless people here and there, more a transportation hub than a place where real people live. 

Amanda H. Podany. Weavers, Scribes and Kings: A New History.

     Very thorough reading of the texts from ancient Mesopotamia but with very limited reflection, which is typical of the modern Anglo-Saxon historical discourse. Real science is formulating hypotheses and proving them with facts or the results of experiments, even if they are proven wrong later. But the right of making mistakes is not conducive to earning a tenure in the modern hyper-competitive university culture. 

Denise L. Herzing. Is anyone listening? What animals are saying to each other and to us?

    

        There is a hint that dolphin system of ultrasound whistles and clicks form a some kind a vocabulary, which allows them to express rather complicated signals (I would not yet say "thoughts") and that they can distinguish between friend and foe of their own species sufficiently to cover up their communication from the latter. Only one unproven step -- namely that (some) animals can objectivize past experience to plan the future course of action -- removes them from what we humans mean by consciousness.  

David Chaffetz. Raiders, rulers and traders. The horse and the rise of empires.

    Eminently readable book with a lot of interesting information. However, what is strange, for Chaffetz is a horse rider himself, there is very little information on the evolution of harnesses, saddles, stirrup and other equipment needed to turn a horse into an indomitable war machine. Peacetime application of horses does not interest him that much. 

    Chaffetz' numbers of the size of pre-modern armies are taken from contemporary chronicles and are not reliable because chroniclers shamelessly exaggerated the numbers of the opponent and diminished the numbers of their own. For instance, he estimates the size of Mongol hordes as 600,000. But the army of such size in the absence of railroad supply would simply eat their horses first, and then die itself from starvation. In fact, the Mongols divided their troops into corps of 10,000 riders (tumen), each of each traveled by a different road. The next village, which they would plunder -- and they ate only meat considering plant eaters as cud chewing animals -- must be located within a length of march supported by slaughtering the village livestock. 

Angela Merkel. Freedom. Memoirs 1954-2021.

        

       Firstly, the English translations of non-fiction books cannot be considered true to the originals because New York publishing milieu edits them to conform to the ruling neocon ideology. Being beset in all corners of this big country, neoconservatism still runs triumphant in the BosNyWash corridor. So, I cannot be held responsible for the parts, which were either excised, heavily edited or added by request of the American editorial houses. 

Secondly, because the memoirs these days are created by professional imagemakers, they are serving the primary role of glorifying the notional author rather that to be testimony to the facts of her life. So, the most interesting things in the current memoirs are the ones, which inadvertently cropped into the memoirs past attention of media gurus. Such was a tacit admission by Chrystie Freeland, a former deputy Prime Minister of Canada that, during her time as a Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, she moonlighted for the Russian oligarchs in the capacity similar to Ghislaine Maxwell supplying them with nubile flesh. Without insider trading tips obtained during their drunken orgies, how could she come so well off from Moscow as to finance from pocket her electoral campaign? 

    Angela Merkel is certainly in a completely different category from C.F. both as a politician and as a human being. The only new thing except forgettable names for her foreign policy advisers I learnt from cursory glance of her book was her hatred of dogs for she mentions Putin's "canine stubbornness" or some other negative characteristic ascribed to dogs. 

    The most interesting events in foreign policy, which she could have described but did not was removal of Muammar Khaddaffi -- because she mentions the chaos after his demise and very probable cautionary messages to the Ukrainian Government after the Minsk accords she helped to negotiate. She now admits that the treaties were signed -- and deposited to the UN, which she mentions as her achievement -- in a bad faith, which is a centuries-long tradition of German diplomacy beginning at least from the violation of Pragmatic Sanction by Friedrich II. But, unlike Scholz, she probably cautioned the Ukrainian leaders that she would look the other way at their violations and help them, militarily and economically only if they do not challenge two basics. Namely, they would not make loose talk of obtaining nuclear weapons and try to recover Crimea by the military means. 

I shall look at "Freedom" again to find snippets other than her hatred of canines, which make the book worth reading.