Grand unified books thread

[Maladict]

Finishing Andrea's Wulf's The Invention of Nature, bio on Alexander von Humboldt. Highly recommended.

[The Brain]

Finishing Andrea's Wulf's The Invention of Nature, bio on Alexander von Humboldt. Highly recommended.

Sounds gay.

[CountDeMoney]

For $15 you can buy 15 Warhammer - Horus Heresy books, plus some other goodies.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/horus-heresy-warhammer-book-bundle

Oooh, the second Trump Administration!

[Syt]

 

[Gups]

Finishing Andrea's Wulf's The Invention of Nature, bio on Alexander von Humboldt. Highly recommended.

I thought the first half was brilliant but it faded towards the end when get not allowed to leave Prussia.

Amazing how little he's known now, given his achievements.

[Maladict]

Finishing Andrea's Wulf's The Invention of Nature, bio on Alexander von Humboldt. Highly recommended.

Sounds gay.

It does include that part, yes.

[Maladict]

Finishing Andrea's Wulf's The Invention of Nature, bio on Alexander von Humboldt. Highly recommended.

I thought the first half was brilliant but it faded towards the end

Kind of hard to avoid given that he did all the really cool stuff in his twenties.

[MadImmortalMan]

I'm still reading The Deluge, and it's probably a record for me, since I usually read incredibly quickly. The thing here is that I keep stopping to look up stuff on wiki and other things. The wars between Sweden and Poland are just not discussed much in our education. One thing struck me, and that's how much of the language in The Witcher games I understand more now. An awful lot of the background stuff is really Polish (Lithuanian?) in nature. They even called the Germans "Black Ones".

[The Brain]

The wars between Sweden and Poland are just not discussed much in our education.

Not sure if serious.

[MadImmortalMan]

The wars between Sweden and Poland are just not discussed much in our education.

Not sure if serious.

I had to search them out myself. School =/ Education.

[Eddie Teach]

The wars between Sweden and Poland are just not discussed much in our education.

Not sure if serious.

Typical history major- "Who is Gustavus Adolphus?" 

[The Brain]

[CountDeMoney]

"Who is Gustavus Adolphus?"

I'll take "Roman Caesars" for $400, Alex.

[The Minsky Moment]

Typical history major- "Who is Gustavus Adolphus?" 

I prefer leaders that don't get killed in major battles.

[Savonarola]

I finished Last Train to Paradise by Les Standiford, about Henry Flagler and the over the ocean railroad.  Flagler was John D. Rockefeller's right hand man.  He came to Florida and, as a second career, built the rail and hotels down the east coast.  He continued the rail all the way down to Key West, believing that the newly opened Panama Canal would lead to a boom in trade between the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean.  (At the time Key West was the only deep water port on the east coast of Florida, as well as the largest city in the state.)  This was an amazing, and costly, engineering feat, especially at the early years of the twentieth century.

The trade boom never materialized and the tracks were damaged in the hurricane of 1935.  While they could have been repaired, the Florida East Coast railroad had been losing money for so long on the line that they sold the right of way to the federal government who built the current highway on the same area.

Flagler was one of the most influential figures in the development of Florida.  Some of his hotels still stand (The Breakers in Palm Beach, for one) and the Florida East Coast railroad still runs.  The book tries to portray Flagler's over the ocean railroad as one last mad attempt at immortality for Flagler and quotes Shelly's Ozyamdidas.  Ulysses, both the Tennyson and the Dante version (from the Inferno) might have been better, an old man trying to beat his fate.