Before the Great War was the Great Game, fought between Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia across continents and kingdoms. Peter Hopkirk does a great job of making history accessible, recreating episodes and context for the reader.
The book combines a bunch of subjects ranging from history and geopolitics to economics, network theory and cliodynamics (itself a transdisciplinary area) viewed through the lens of catastrophe and decision-making. What makes it worth a read is a rich dose of history and specifically disaster (mis)management, but what I missed was a narrative structure.
The book is more than a decade old, but it does a couple of things well – provide an introduction and in a way, synopsis of Chomsky’s worldview, and do that in an engaging manner because this is based on media interactions. The book was published in 2011, and while the topics might seem dated, the beauty is that his insights are timeless.
The book doesn’t answer the question – the authors make that obvious right at the start. But what it does offer is framing and perspectives, delivered with interesting anecdotes. An engaging read, though having been written in 2012, it doesn’t factor in the implications of social media.
Caste, different from class, but still an artificial construct of human value that deems one set of humans to be superior to another. In addition to the breaking down the origin and building blocks, the book alsohas some very interesting stories – the origin of ‘Caucasian’, eugenics in the US, lynching scenes-based tourism and so on.