Reflection on And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

     This was a really good book. When I read Murder on the Orient Express, I was a little disappointed, but And Then There Were None is excellent from start to finish. Ten people arrive on an island estate, all invited for different reasons. It turns out that each of them has killed someone before in ways that allowed them to avoid legal justice. Then, they start dropping like flies in a way that matches an old children's rhyme. This was a really good and satisfying murder mystery.

Reflection on Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

     Pillars is truly an EPIC of historical fiction. This book covers lifetimes and generations of medieval English people and major historical events of 12th century England: the sinking of the White Ship, the anarchy that followed, the Battle of Lincoln (1141), and the assassination of Thomas Becket, among other events. But the focus of the books is not the historical events, it's the lives of the people who were on the periphery of history. We follow Tom Builder and his family at first, and then move onto other characters, all of whom are forced to deal with the evil William Hamleigh, who is just fucking horrible. The book is long. But even though it's about 1,000 pages, I read it in like a week because it was just so damn interesting and readable. I could not put it down.

    Maybe the best thing about Pillars is how Follett includes small details about medieval life. These include the fact that bishops had mistresses, although monks were more chaste, or that people kept stones in their fires to pull out and use to rapidly heat small amounts of water or soup. One interesting aside is that sermons were becoming more common in churches in the 12th century, and we see that change happen in the books. Follett also teaches us about how stained glass is cut, using a red-hot rod to trace a line and cause a crack. There are a million more examples of this in the book. The uniting theme of the book is the mission to build a church in Kingsbridge, so the reader learns a ton about architecture and its evolution in the High Middle Ages. People don't realize it, but lots of invention and innovation happened throughout the Middle Ages, and it wasn't just stagnation until the Renaissance.

    All in all, this is a highly recommended book.

Reflection on Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

    This was a great book that is written like a novel. Empire of Pain is a highly readable history of the Sackler family and their rise and fall from grace. The book starts with the brothers Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond, who made millions off of various medicines and advertisements for medicines. It continues, after Arthur's death, with the children of Mortimer and Raymond, who gradually take over the company. One in particular, Richard, son of Raymond, is especially important, as he invents and aggressively markets Oxycontin, the drug that would earn billions for the family and become a major cause of the opioid crisis in America.

    The entire first part of the book is really about Arthur, who was the leader of the brothers. If you are totally interested in the opioid crisis and not the family, this part is probably not even necessary for you to read. However, it was really well-written and interesting. You get to see Arthur rise up from a working-class family in Brooklyn and become a multi-millionaire who is completely obsessed with work and collecting art and artifacts from around the world. His only other hobby is donating said art and artifacts (as well as millions of dollars) to museums so that he could have his name put on galleries and wings. His second wife said that, "Arthur found safety and comfort in objects; they could not hurt him, they could not make demands on him." Arthur had very little public life besides his philanthropy. Arthur's death is so abrupt and sudden I had to reread it. He felt chest pains and went to a hospital without informing his family and checked in under a fake name. He did not want to be dependent on anyone and feared that someone may take advantage of him while he was impaired. By the time his family found out that he was in the hospital, he was already dead. He left $600,000 to each of his four children and over $100 million to his third wife. 

    In general, this family sucks. It's not just Arthur. They're not just callous to all the human lives they ruined with Oxycontin, but they are also just terrible to each other. Constant fighting over money, disrespect for one another, and backstabbing. The environment they lived in seems really horrible.

    Oxycontin even had a damaging effect on Purdue because it made higher returns than anything else. As a result, people didn't want to invest in products that couldn't return as much as Oxy, and there was simply nothing they could invent that was better. As a result, Purdue's profits depended more and more on Oxycontin, and the company never diversified. Purdue tried to claim that they were responsible for only 4% of the opioid epidemic, but that was only in pills sold. Purdue sold the highest-intensity pills, and when you account for that, they sold 27% of all oxycodone. In some areas, Purdue's market share was 30%. 

    The Sacklers, and their company, Purdue Pharma, knew early on that Oxycontin was addictive and that people were abusing it. They tried to argue that the special slow-release coating they put on it meant that the drug was not addictive, but all that happened was that addicted users would crush the pills or chew them to break that layer and get a huge hit of oxycodone. When Purdue finally got in trouble in 2007, three non-Sacklers took the fall and were each paid millions by the company. From 1997 to 2007, Purdue paid out $126 million to the Sacklers. But once they knew that the company was in trouble, they raided the treasury. After 2007, the company paid out billions to the Sacklers, who moved it overseas to avoid US authorities. The feds will be searching for that money for a long time.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• During the 1930's, many American medical schools established Jewish quotas, as by the mid-1930's more than 60% of applicants were Jewish. Yale marked Jewish applicants' forms with H for Hebrew.
• Curtis Wright (the former FDA Director, not the company Curtiss-Wright) left the FDA and worked for a small pharmaceutical firm for one year before accepting a position at Purdue Pharma (the Sackler company) that paid him a first-year compensation package of nearly $400,000 dollars. CORRUPT.
• African-Americans were hit less hard by the opioid epidemic. The author writes that doctors were less likely to prescribe black patients with opioids because they either did not trust them to take the drug responsibly or because they did not feel as much empathy or belief for/in their pain. 
• Tasmania, Australia grows 85% of all the thebaine in the world. Thebaine is similar to opium and used in Oxycontin.

Reflection on Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger

Storm of Steel was a very fast read for me, in which Junger details his experiences as a German soldier on the western front of World War One. Junger adapted his memoir from his journal, so sometimes the narrative is not so clear, but he writes very descriptively and there were times when I couldn't put this book down. One example is how he describes weathering an artillery barrage, like being tied to a post while a man swings a hammer at you over and over, just barely missing you, sometimes hitting the post, and sending splinters raining down over you.

Reading Storm of Steel gave me a better appreciation for the different phases of the war, as it began in pitched battles that resulted in stalemate and trenches, followed by a war of materiel and artillery barrages, followed by some mechanized warfare at the end.

Some things that stood out to me included the general absence of life not on the front. Junger frequently tells us about when he has leave to go back home or when he goes to training or when he is in the hospital convalescing, but only to inform us that there is a pause. The action of the book does not take place in the hospital or Hanover (Junger's home). Rather, he tells us that he is gone for a while, and then, in the next sentence, we are back fighting in northern France. I also thought it was strange that the officers and maybe other men wore their awards in battle. It is strange to imagine them fighting with ribbons and iron crosses on.

Junger as a person at times seems like an absolute madman who sometimes really enjoyed the war. He writes about how "these short expeditions, in which a man takes his life in his hands, were a good means of testing our mettle and interrupting the monotony of trench life. There's nothing worse for a soldier than boredom." The book is highly emotional, as Junger is deeply introspective about his own reactions to war. He is enthusiastic at times, and at other times paralyzed with fear, sometimes throwing himself on the ground and crying, "sobbing hysterically," as he writes it. Other times, he finds himself experiencing no fear at all and experiencing "fits of laughter I was unable to repress."  Twice Junger thinks that he is about to die, and his descriptions of that are very interesting, especially the second time. He mainly describes surprise and relief as his emotions, where he gains a deeper understanding of his purpose in life. For Junger, war evokes the entire range of human emotion, often not the types that you would expect would match the situation. He is unapologetic for showing emotion. Junger reflects on seeing a dead English soldier who was so young that Junger calls him a boy-- "the state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams." I think that is the best line of the book.

Reflection on The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Empire by Max Boot

Boot's biggest point in this book is that America's small wars (Nicaragua, Haiti, Philippines) are the way we fight wars and the big wars (WWI/II, Korea) are exceptions. I think he is right about that. He convincingly points out dozens of different operations that US forces have been a part of from our founding until the modern day, and it is clear that we have a long history of interventionism. The problem is that he ties this history to his own interventionist ideology, and pointing out past interventions is seemingly his way to argue that there is precedent for more interventionism in the future. But the book is weak in evidence that those interventions worked. Boot is always arguing that the occupation just needed to go on for longer, and I think he would always argue that even if we occupied countries for centuries.

This is definitely a well researched book, though it is not really systemic in its treatment of small wars. The book is really split with the time period from the Revolution through World War One just recounting different random small wars and then a big skip to Vietnam and a little bit about the nineties. I don't think I changed to many preconceived notions, though I think I am a little more appreciative not of how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not a pure waste. While we should have been focused on China, fighting those wars definitely honed the skills of a generation of American warriors, and so it was not a pure loss of time, blood, and money. However, I would still say that America should not be invading landlocked countries without planning to stay for the long haul. The clearest lesson that I can get from this book and my other readings is that you can't win an occupation unless you plan for it to be permanent. If there is going to be a handoff later, you are always going to lose the territory by design. The great empires of history did not invade lands so that they could do nation building and then leave.

Miscellaneous Facts and Quotes:

• "The strategy of guerrilla war is to put one man against ten, but the tactic is to pit ten men against one." -Mao Zedong
• Congress authorized the Medal of Honor for officers after the battle for Veracruz in 1914 and gave out 55 medals, which was probably too many. Smedley Butler tried to refuse his because he thought the award was now watered-down.
• Haiti invaded and occupied the Dominican Republic from 1801-05 and 1822-43. The Dominicans could not defend themselves and even volunteered to return to Spanish sovereignty in 1861, though Spain pulled out in 1865. The Dominicans asked the USA to annex them but the treaty was defeated in the Senate in 1871 even though President Grant was interested.
• Smedley Butler voted for the socialist candidate Norman Thomas in 1936 and shared speaking platforms with members of the American Communist Party. He also opposed US intervention in World War Two. 
• In the early twentieth century, marines were known as "State Department troops."
• General Victor Krulak was only 5'5" 138 pounds. 
• Between 2003 and 2008, 10,000 people died of suicide bombings in Iraq
• "Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum." -Vegetius (Let him who desires peace prepare for war).

Reflection on Disunited Nations by Peter Zeihan

 So in this book, Peter Zeihan talks all about a predicted decline in American leadership, an increase in isolationism, and how that will affect the world. The book is about international relations, but honestly is even more about geography. I don't feel like writing a big post, but I'll say that it was interesting, but had no sources for anything and he talked way too much about rivers. I know he was getting stuff wrong because he said Cuba is only 90 miles from Miami, which is false. Cuba is 90 miles from Key West. So I think he is bullshitting. Way too much about rivers and demographics, not enough hard facts. I will say he made one interesting point about how or people to have kids, they need space, which is something interesting about suburbs.

All in all, I would say this was a decent introduction to international affairs, but was too light on the facts and too heavy on the sarcastic comments and speculation.

Reflection on Nemesis Games (The Expanse #5) by James S.A. Corey

 I really didn't take notes on this one, but just another solid entry in the Expanse series. I will say that I hate the redemption arc for Clarissa Mao and I wish we had more protomolecule in this one. I think splitting up the crew was cool, but there was a lot of stuff revealed that felt like it came out of nowhere. Like this book had a lot of character development that we should have already known about. I'm sick of new villains who just keep popping up. I liked the overall plot point that occurred when SPOILERS Earth was basically destroyed, which I assume will force everyone through the ring.