Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson (2003)

I enjoy reading Walter Isaacson's books because of his strong scholarship. He offers counterfactuals to his own interpretations. This approach provides a broad perspective on his subjects.

In my high school, a rigid curriculum required us all to study 18th-century literature (and also 19th and 20th). Like all my classmates, I preferred Franklin over Jonathan Edwards. I attended "standard" classes because I was not bright enough to be in Honors or AP. Consequently, I gained only a surface knowledge of Franklin's statesmanship, philosophy and inventions. I am young enough to be part of the leading wave of anti-Americanism that swept US education.  I was therefore taught only disparaging and critical views of our 18th century "founding fathers."

Isaacson's biography explores Franklin's entire social identity. He identifies Franklin as the architect of the American middle class. This "mediocre" class defined a new social order based on merit. Franklin's success was due to his own industry rather than birthright. I enjoyed learning about his weak French and Latin. These flaws humanize the legend. I had never questioned the rumors about Franklin's lechery. Isaacson interprets these scandals as myths. This clarification offered another perspective about the "facts" I learned in school.

My education focused on anti-Enlightenment views. Isaacson counters these views. He analyzes 19th-century Romanticism that is the root of the anti-Enlightenment sentiment. These critics attacked Franklin's pragmatism and scientific method. Isaacson again balances these pejoratives with the Humanist Enlightenment ideals of the 18th century natural philosophers (scientists) of that era. Isaacson highlights Franklin's true virtues. This balance makes his character shine.

The book feels a bit tedious because of its length. This density occasionally slows the pace. However, I recommend this work to history buffs. 5/5 Stars

Wie Das Wetter Geschichte Macht (2015)

Ronald D. Gerstes Wie Das Wetter Geschichte Macht (2015) bietet eine fesselnde Sammlung historischer Vignetten, die den entscheidenden Einfluss des Wetters auf historische Ereignisse beleuchten. Das Buch verknüpft faktenreiche Schilderungen mit spekulativen „Was-wäre-wenn"-Szenarien, die alternative Geschichtsverläufe überzeugend und anregend darstellen. Gerstes Erzählstil ist lebendig und unterhaltsam, auch wenn seine Quellenangaben und Erklärungen nicht immer umfassend sind und gelegentlich Fehler enthalten.

Die dramatischen Kommentare tragen zur Anziehungskraft des Buches bei, doch die ausschweifenden Passagen über anthropogenen Klimawandel und leidenschaftliche Klagen über die moderne Gesellschaft wirken ermüdend und fehlen am Platz. Trotz dieser Schwächen bleibt das Werk durch seine originelle Perspektive und den Fokus auf das Wetter als historische Kraft ansprechend.

Bewertung: 4/5 Sterne.

Breakneck by Dan Wang (2025)

I picked up Breakneck after reading a few excerpts online, drawn by Wang's reputation for cross-cultural analysis. The book delivers on that promise.

Wang offers a deep, objective, and nuanced view of the United States and China. He explores their similarities and differences in sensibilities and cultures with clear insights. He unpacks the attitudes, values, and policies that shape each government's actions. He also explains why and how citizens in both nations behave as they do.

Wang brings his own minor biases to the table—value judgments and occasional gaps in empathy for alternative viewpoints on citizen motivations. These are small flaws in an otherwise sharp work. On the positive side, his analysis of causal links between values, cultures, and resulting policies stands out. He connects the dots with precision.

The core thesis—that an engineering mindset defines all Chinese leadership and drives their policies, while a lawyer mindset shapes all American leaders and their decisions—holds up well. It simplifies complex systems but supports the argument with strong evidence. Wang weaves in the enduring bureaucracies of both governments effectively, showing how they reinforce these mindsets over time.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in global politics or cultural comparisons. It clarifies much without oversimplifying; 5/5 stars.

Du côté de chez Swann de Marcel Proust (1913)

It's not Proust—it's me.

I approached this classic with high expectations, drawn to its reputation for profound introspection and exquisite prose. And in that regard, it delivers: the philosophical musings on memory and perception can be genuinely fascinating, and Proust's writing is undeniably beautiful, with sentences that linger like poetry.

That said, for me, there was simply no "there" there. The book feels like a series of extended anecdotes about hypersensitive, neurotic characters in provincial French society, interspersed with the child's inner reflections—but without any compelling storyline, drama, or forward momentum to hold it together. The topics, while elegantly explored, never sparked my interest enough to pull me through.

I much prefer the sweeping narratives and vivid drama of someone like Victor Hugo. In the end, I put this down unfinished—not only because reading it in the original French stretched my language skills to their limit, but also because the lack of plot and emotional stakes made it feel more like form without substance. 0/5 Stars

Mindstar Rising by Peter F Hamilton (2011)

I have long admired Peter F. Hamilton's sprawling space operas. I usually steer clear of his work that includes psychic powers, fantasy, horror, or anything involving ESP, because the soft physics behind those elements bothers me. For that reason I had skipped the Greg Mandel series.

After a few disappointing recent reads in newer space opera, I decided to return to an author whose style I already trust. Mindstar Rising did not let me down.

The plot moves quickly and keeps delivering twists. The characters are engaging and easy to follow. The near-future setting—post-climate-collapse Britain—feels plausible and detailed. I especially liked the neural augmentations and the way Hamilton explores the boundary between human consciousness and machine intelligence. Those ideas are sharp and thought-provoking.
The psychic abilities remain the one part I could do without. They feel out of place in an otherwise grounded tech story. Still, they did not ruin the book for me.

Hamilton's writing pulled me through effortlessly. I have already started the next volume in the series. 5/5 stars.

Tools That Work to Stave Off Enshittificaton

Enshittification never slows down. Microsoft. Meta, Google, Amazon – the trillion-dollar giants – keep reinforcing the battlements of their evil walled-garden ecosystems. Interoperability is dying. Open standards are disappearing. Even editing a plain text file on a phone is now impossible. In 2019 Martin Kleppman, famous for Design of Data Intensive Applications,  wrote a white paper defining the concepts of "Local First Software" that is aligned to the privacy manifesto of Max Schrems and that portended Corey's book about how terrible the tech industry is becoming.

In the first half of 2025, U.S. GDP crawled at 0.1 % per year, if we ignore the AI hype bubble. Yet Microsoft found the energy to shove Copilot into every menu, activate Recall to screenshot and watch everything you do, and push Edge into every corner of Windows. The privacy invasion is deeper and more aggressive than anything Meta or Google have tried lately. My blood pressure rises and my life expectancy declines every time I open the Start menu.

Sooner or later I will flatten every Windows machine in the house and install Linux. Microsoft completely bricked a few devices with updates so they are now running Linux. Our 2011 “Kitchen” laptop still limps along on Windows 11 Server – the only edition Microsoft still allows on old hardware.

Until the final upgrade, three simple, well-maintained tools keep the worst of the poop away. They install in minutes and need almost no attention afterward.

• RemoveWindowsAI One click removes Copilot, Recall, and every built-in AI component. If I want AI, I open a browser tab. I do not want it welded into the operating system. Download → run as admin → reboot → silence. https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI

• Sophia Script for Windows: One PowerShell command turns off telemetry, ads, forced OneDrive sync, sponsored apps, and hundreds of other unwanted connections! Every change is well-documented and reversible. https://github.com/farag2/Sophia-Script-for-Windows

• PowerToys (yes, from Microsoft itself): PowerToys Run (Alt+Space) – launch files and programs without Edge https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N0DX20HK701 
  

Five minutes of setup gives back hours of calm. Keep most of the Microsoft proctological surveillance and pain away (for a while).

Use them now, while they still work. Remember: Linux is waiting.

A Letter for the Ages by Avrohom Chaim Feuer (1989)

I have long admired Maimonides' clarity in his Talmudic summary and commentaries and his  Mishneh Torah. I also enjoyed learning about his life during a visit to the museum in Córdoba. When someone recommended this book—an edition of the famous ethical letter Maimonides wrote to his son—I ordered picked it up and added it to my stack.

The original letter itself is brief, wise, and moving. Unfortunately, everything else in the book gets in the way.

Rabbi Feuer repeats the same points dozens of times, pads every paragraph with unnecessary and bad anecdotes. He buries Rambam's words under layers of superficial and often sentimental commentary. What could have been a slim, powerful volume turns into a bloated, repetitive chore.

The primary text is good. This particular edition is not. 2/5 stars.

Starship Bandits by Jonathan Yanez and Ross Buzzel (2024)

The plot moves along well and the characters are tolerable.  The writing is somewhat flat and clumsy.  Science is disastrous.  I can accept orc-like aliens who look and act human and conveniently speak English. It's like Star Trek.  The authors' biology and physics are terrible.  Haploid insects? Body sizes and strengths that ignore basic scaling laws and biophysics? Every technical detail collapses under the slightest consideration. The bad science overwhelmed everything else and ruined the book for me. Not recommended. 1/5 Stars. 

Will we finally deploy the O'Neil mass driver?

In 1937, Edwin Northrup wrote about an "electric gun" in his (terrible) novel "Zero to Eighty." The book contained diagrams and the author actually built some prototypes at Princeton to prove out the idea, demonstrating it works well. Gerard O'Neill scaled up the concept and proposed a mass driver, aka "coil gun" in 1974.  That same year, O'Neill's "Colonization of Space" paper came out in Physics Today.  Reading that article changed my life. I joined the L5 Society (our song). It seems Jeff Bezos is also one of "Gerry's kids," embracing O'Neill's vision of human space colonization.

Among the key elements in O'Neill's vision is the use of mass drivers to move materials in space and also as a form of propulsion.  Land solar-powered mass drivers on a small asteroid, and use some of the mass of the asteroid itself as reaction mass to push the rock through space and park it in an orbit you want.  Robots assemble a large mass driver on the moon, then send the lunar regolith to a Lagrange point between the Earth and Moon, where solar smelters turn the ore into aluminum to build space colonies (and oxygen to breathe).  As O'Neill said in his lecture tour (that I attended), "The calculations [proving viability] are simple freshman physics."

If you are a "space nerd" like me, you should really read the book or watch the 2023 documentary "The High Frontier." I attended the MIT independent activities period (IAP) where they built a mass driver. I was a founding member of the L5 Society.

The military developed a rail gun for ships and the system is operational, but it will be phased out in favor of other systems that are superior for the military's purposes.

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A new Space company, "Moonshot Space" just came out of stealth and will develop a terrestrial mass driver to move fuel and cargo to low earth orbit. The payloads must be able to survive extremely high acceleration and the scale-up to send over 100 Kg per launch will be interesting to watch.

Perry Rhodan: Zwei Milliarden Hefte und immer noch optimistisch

Vor ein paar Wochen bin ich zufällig über Perry Rhodan gestolpert und war sofort interessiert: Seit September 1961 erscheint jede Woche ein neues Heft, ohne eine einzige Unterbrechung gab es nie. Über 3300 Hefte, mehr als zwei Milliarden verkaufte Exemplare weltweit, allein in Deutschland über eine Milliarde. Das ist größer als Harry Potter, Herr der Ringe und Star Wars zusammen.

Ich liebe die Science-Fiction der Goldenen Goldene Ära, die unerschütterliche Zuversicht, die knappen Dialoge, das pure Staunen über die Weite des Alls. Also habe ich mir die allerersten Hefte im Original besorgt und auf Deutsch gelesen.

Die Geschichte beginnt 1971 mit der Mondlandung von Major Perry Rhodan, der auf dem Mond ein havariertes Forschungsschiff der Arkoniden findet, ein uraltes, dekadentes Sternenreich, das technologisch Jahrtausende voraus ist. Rhodan nutzt die fremde Technik, zwingt die verfeindeten Erdblöcke zur Zusammenarbeit und gründet die Dritte Macht, um die Menschheit vor sich selbst zu schützen.

Die ersten drei Hefte hatte ich an zwei Abenden durch. Mein Eindruck: Das ist genau der optimistische, raketen treibende Raumfahrt-Sound, den ich wollte, schnoddrige Sprüche zwischen Piloten und Wissenschaftlern, harte Physik bei Triebwerken und Bahnmechanik, und auf jeder zweiten Seite ein neuer atemberaubender Einblick ins Universum. Die Arkoniden und ihr sterbendes Imperium faszinieren mich richtig.

Einzig die plötzliche Einführung von Mutanten mit Telepathie, Telekinese und Teleportation in Heft drei hat mich gestört, Parapsychologie liegt mir einfach nicht. Ich weiß aber, dass das ein Markenzeichen der Serie bleibt, also werde ich damit leben.
Fazit nach den ersten drei Heften: knappe 4 von 5 Sternen. Ich lese auf jeden Fall weiter, wahrscheinlich aber nicht linear, sondern springe zu den besonders gelobten Zyklen („Die Meister der Insel", „Aphilie", die Kosmonukleotide). Dreiundsechzig Jahre wöchentliche Zukunftsgeschichte linear zu lesen wäre selbst mir zu viel.

Wer jemals Heinlein-Jugendbücher, Doc Smith oder frühes Star Trek möchte und ein bisschen deutsche Heftroman-Ästhetik erträgt, sollte Perry Rhodan unbedingt einmal probieren. Es ist die längste und wohl optimistischste Zukunftsvision, die je geschrieben wurde, und sie läuft 2025 immer noch weiter. Ich berichte, wenn ich tiefer ins All vorgedrungen bin.