What We Are Reading Today: Blood and Ruins

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Updated 09 April 2022
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What We Are Reading Today: Blood and Ruins

Blood and Ruins is a masterpiece from of one of the most renowned historians of the Second World War, which will compel readers to view the war in novel and unfamiliar ways.
Thought-provoking, original and challenging, Blood and Ruins sets out to understand the war anew.
Author Richard James Overy is a British historian who has published extensively on the history of World War II and the Third Reich.
Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins to recast the way in which “we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath,” said a review in Goodreads.com.
“He argues that this was the ‘great imperial war,’ a violent end to almost a century of global imperial expansion which reached its peak in the ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires,” said the review.
It said that Overy “explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked these imperial projects, the war and its aftermath.”


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Grasshoppers, Locusts, and Crickets of the World’

Updated 29 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Grasshoppers, Locusts, and Crickets of the World’

Edited by Martin Husemann and Oliver Hawlitschek

Grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, bush crickets, and katydids make up the order of insects known as Orthoptera.

Although there about 30,000 species of Orthoptera around the world, many people pay little attention to them and even scientists know relatively little about them.

Yet the world of grasshoppers is a fascinating and diverse one.


What We Are Reading Today: The Ticos

Updated 28 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Ticos

Authors: Mavis Hiltunen Biesanz, Richard Biesanz

Written with the perspective of more than half a century of first-hand observation, this unparalleled social and cultural history describes how Costa Rica’s economy, government, education and health-care systems, family structures, religion, and other institutions have evolved, and how this evolution has affected and reflected people’s daily lives, beliefs, and their values. 

The authors are particularly concerned with change since the economic crisis of the early 1980s and the structural adjustment that followed.

The book provides a comprehensive introduction to a country the writers know well, according to a review on goodreads.com.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Private Finance, Public Power’

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Updated 27 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Private Finance, Public Power’

  • Public-private negotiations over financial governance has evolved into an essential ecosystem of banking risk management

Authors: Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta

Banks in America are private institutions with private shareholders, boards of directors, profit motives, customers, and competitors. And yet the public plays a key role in deciding what risks are taken as well as how, when, and to what end. Public-private negotiations over financial governance has evolved into an essential ecosystem of banking risk management.

In “Private Finance, Public Power,” Peter Conti-Brown and Sean Vanatta offer a new history of finance and public policy in the US by examining the idiosyncratic way the nation manages financial risk across the public-private divide.

Covering two centuries, from the founding of the Republic to the early 1980s, Conti-Brown and Vanatta describe the often-contested, sometimes chaotic, engagement of bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and others in the overlapping spaces of the public-private system of bank supervision.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt

Updated 26 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt

In “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults.

He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Standard Model’

Updated 25 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Standard Model’

Authors: Yuval Grossman and Yossi Nir

“The Standard Model” is an elegant and extremely successful theory that formulates the laws of fundamental interactions among elementary particles.

This incisive textbook introduces students to the physics of the Standard Model while providing an essential overview of modern particle physics, with a unique emphasis on symmetry principles as the starting point for constructing models.

“The Standard Model” equips students with an in-depth understanding of this impressively predictive theory.