Historical Book Recomendation Thread

To much of the population is overweight :(
Eat some skinny people to balance it out, perhaps?

What was that book on cannibalism someone posted a thread about a short while ago? I think it was Yeekim.
 
To much of the population is overweight :(

The shorthand solution is "Diet and exercise", but too many people think of the horrible health foods when they hear the word diet, and the stressful activities that aren't too fun when they hear exercise. You gotta find the good tasting healthy fare (yes, it really exists, honestly) and find activities you find fun.

Activity is the key. When you are typing, do crunches or leg lifts, hold in your abdominal core, and have weights available for the periods you are reading... or just go out and take a walk, tend the garden, play basketball or baseball, whatever. Make passionate love to your lady... frequently (if you're old enough of course). Take a walk at lunch. Laugh. Working up a sweat at least once a day is a good thing. As with all things, start easy, and improve over time, and you will meet eventual success.

It's not a secret why our nation is overweight, and the solutions are, individually, rather simple. I think our psychology works against us. Read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin for some simple tricks and mindset to get what you want.
 
Anyway, John Adams was...okay. I read like the first bit before stopping. Just not ineterested.

I loved that book. I ended up finishing the last 200 pages in a long reading fest one day, starting with a break at work and ending in the middle of the night.

The shorthand solution is "Diet and exercise", but too many people think of the horrible health foods when they hear the word diet, and the stressful activities that aren't too fun when they hear exercise. You gotta find the good tasting healthy fare (yes, it really exists, honestly) and find activities you find fun.

Activity is the key. When you are typing, do crunches or leg lifts, hold in your abdominal core, and have weights available for the periods you are reading... or just go out and take a walk, tend the garden, play basketball or baseball, whatever. Make passionate love to your lady... frequently (if you're old enough of course). Take a walk at lunch. Laugh. Working up a sweat at least once a day is a good thing. As with all things, start easy, and improve over time, and you will meet eventual success.

It's not a secret why our nation is overweight, and the solutions are, individually, rather simple. I think our psychology works against us. Read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin for some simple tricks and mindset to get what you want.

I could go on and on about this. Another problem is that people think "diet" means "temporary, then I go back to eating cake every day". The other secret as to why we are overweight is the evils of food advertising...just watch Supersize Me. You can see it for free on hulu.com right now. :)

Now, back to books.
 
Back to historical books:

One historical classic, is Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin LeFevre. It is actually a fictionalized version of the early years of the life story of Jesse Livermore , a early twentieth century stock trader.

Written in 1923, it's a pretty fun read if you are at all interested in the history of money. You can't take the specifics for advice, since the market doesn't quite work the way it did back then, but it is illuminating to see how the person in the story reacted to the changes in the trading markets in the early 1900s. But it does illustrate that the biggest enemy of you building your wealth can actually be YOU!

Spoiler :

A couple excerpts:
“ It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market. You always find lots of early bulls in bull markets and early bears in bear markets. I've known many men who were right at exactly the right time, and began buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level which should show the greatest profit. And their experience invariably matched mine--that is, they made no real money out of it. Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. ”
“ Old man Partridge's insistence on the vital importance of being continuously bullish in a bull market doubtless made my mind dwell on the need above all other things of determining the kind of market a man is trading in. I began to realize that the big money must necessarily be in the big swing. Whatever might seem to give a big swing, initial impulse, the fact is that its continuance is not the result of manipulation by pools or artifice by financiers, but depends upon basic conditions. And no matter who opposes it, the swing must inevitably run as far and as fast and as long as the impelling forces determine. ”
 
Stolen Rutters said:
The shorthand solution is "Diet and exercise", but too many people think of the horrible health foods when they hear the word diet, and the stressful activities that aren't too fun when they hear exercise. You gotta find the good tasting healthy fare (yes, it really exists, honestly) and find activities you find fun.

Just to have me eat them?

Stolen Rutters said:
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin LeFevre

Sounds right up my alley.
 
Speaking of crappy Gavin Menzies books, when did this fascination with using years as titles begin? 1066 and All That (or whatever it's called) is the first I've heard of it.
 
Speaking of crappy Gavin Menzies books, when did this fascination with using years as titles begin? 1066 and All That (or whatever it's called) is the first I've heard of it.
Almost-but-not-quite: Livy's Ab Urbe Condita? The year numbering system itself! :p
 
Almost-but-not-quite: Livy's Ab Urbe Condita? The year numbering system itself! :p
Well, I meant recently. I remember a couple of monastery-produced texts with years as titles as well.
 
1948 was a good read.
 
So, has he gained any sense since the last one, or has China stolen the entire world's history?
More like the entire world stole its history from China.
 
Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe by William Rosen
 
Dudes, books on the history of China please, for every era; even-handed and critical of Chinese sources, preferably.
 
Sun Yat-sen by Lyon Sharman, about funnily enough, Sun Yat-sen.

The Rise of Modern China by Immanuel C. Y. Hsu. About, funnily enough, the rise of modern China.

I'm reading both of these right now for an essay next week, and they're quite good. Especially the Sun biography.
 
Dudes, books on the history of China please, for every era; even-handed and critical of Chinese sources, preferably.
You'll be looking for awhile...:mischief:
 
Dudes, books on the history of China please, for every era; even-handed and critical of Chinese sources, preferably.

China Since 1911, by Richard T. Phillips. He's my lecturer in uni.

Word of warning with that though is that you must read the language very carefully. (e.g. he uses the official declaration of the KMT party to determine the KMT's age whereas the KMT uses the beginnings of the Revive China Society to count its age - I personally feel the former is more accurate, but most Western scholars claim this to be a factual error)
 
China Since 1911, by Richard T. Phillips. He's my lecturer in uni.

Word of warning with that though is that you must read the language very carefully. (e.g. he uses the official declaration of the KMT party to determine the KMT's age whereas the KMT uses the beginnings of the Revive China Society to count its age - I personally feel the former is more accurate, but most Western scholars claim this to be a factual error)
I thought the KMT was formed when Sung merged the Brotherhood with several smaller political parties in 1912? Can't remember the exact date - which is problematic, since the other window I have open right now is an essay I'm writing on Sun Yat-sen's career, and it's somewhat important - but that's when I've always counted it from. So's every other non-Taiwanese source I've come across. Is it wrong?
 
Dudes, books on the history of China please, for every era; even-handed and critical of Chinese sources, preferably.

Ask and you shall receive:

An Historical Atlas of China by Albert Herrmann
Cultural Atlas of China by Caroline Blunden & Mark Elvin
The Cambridge History of China (volumes 1-15) by various authors
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of China by Brian Hook
Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization by Paul S. Ropp
A History of Chinese Philosophy by Fung Yu-lan
The World of Thought in Ancient China by Benjamin I. Schwartz
A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought by Wolfram Eberhard
The Trouble with Confucianism by Theodore de Bary
Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation by Wei-ming Tu
Chinese Religion: An Introduction by Laurence G. Thompson
Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way by Lao Tzu
Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey by Kenneth Chen
Science and Civilization in China by Joseph Needham
The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis
Chinese Ways in Warfare by John K. Fairbank
The Archeology of Ancient China by Kwang-chih Chang
The Origins of Statecraft in China Vol 1: The Western Chou Empire by Herrlee G. Creel
The Han Dynasty by Michele Pirazzoli-t'Serstevens
Mirror to the Son of Heaven: Wei Cheng at the Court of Tang T'ai-tsung by Howard J. Wechsler
Village and Bureaucracy in Southern Sung China by Brian E. McKnight
The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China by John W. Chaffee
Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276 by Jacques Gernet
Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's Evolving Political Culture by Thomas A. Metzger
The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China by Thomas Barfield
Foundations and Limits of State Power in China by Herbert Franke
Legitimation in Imperial China: Discussions under the Jurchen Chin Dynasty by Hok-lam Chan
The Mongols by David Morgan
China under Mongol Rule by John D. Langlois, Jr.
Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century by Susan Naquin & Evelyn Rawski
The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism by Max Weber
Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power
Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites and the Founding of the Ming Dynasty
The Censorial System of Ming China by Charles O. Hucker
Hidden Power: The Palace Eunuchs of Imperial China by Mary M. Anderson
The Star Raft: China's Encounter with Africa by Philip Snow
Crisis and Transformation in Seventeeth-Century China: Society, Culture, and Modernity in Li Yu's World by Chun-shu Chang & Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang
The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence
The Rise of Modern China by Immanuel C.Y. Hsu
The Taiping Revolutionary Movement by Jen Yuwen
Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1769-1864 by Philip A. Kuhn
The 1911 Revolution: Interpretive Essays by Shinkichi Eto & Harold Shiffrin
The Presidency of Yuan Shih-k'ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China by Ernest Young
Backward Toward Revolution: The Chinese Revolutionary Party by Edward Friedman
The May Fourth Movement: Intellecutal Revolution in Modern China by Chow Tse-tsung
A Military History of China by David A. Graff and Robin Higham
Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilisation by Paul S. Ropp and Timothy Hugh Barrett
Ancient China and it's Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History by Nicola Di Cosmo
The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 by Valerie Hansen
"Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900" by David Graff
Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang
China: Fragile Superpower by Susan Shirk
 
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