What We Are Reading Today: When the War Was Over

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Updated 16 July 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: When the War Was Over

Author: Elizabeth Becker

“When the War Was Over” is Elizabeth Becker’s masterful account of the Cambodian nightmare. The award-winning journalist started covering Cambodia in 1973 for The Washington Post, when the country was perceived as little more than a footnote to the Vietnam War. Then, with the rise of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 came the closing of the border and a systematic reorganization of Cambodian society.
Everyone was sent from the towns and cities to the countryside, where they were forced to labor endlessly in the fields.  Encompassing the era of French colonialism and the revival of Cambodian nationalism, this is a book of epic vision and staggering power, according to a review on goodreads.com.
“When the War Was” Over illuminates the darkness of Cambodia with the intensity of a bolt of lightning.

 


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.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Dynamics and Astrophysics of Galaxies’

Updated 24 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Dynamics and Astrophysics of Galaxies’

Author: Jo Bovy

This book provides an in-depth introduction to the dynamics, formation, and evolution of galaxies.

Starting with the basics of galactic structure and galactic dynamics, it helps students develop a sophisticated understanding of the orbital structure of spirals, ellipticals, and other types of galaxies.

The book demonstrates how observations led to the discovery that galaxies are dominated by dark matter and explores in detail how structure evolves from the primordial universe to form the halos that host galaxies.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’

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Updated 24 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’

  • Haley structures Malcolm’s blistering critiques — including his rejection of nonviolent protest and disillusionment with white liberalism — with journalistic precision

Author: Alex Haley

Malcolm X’s posthumously published 1965 autobiography, crafted with Alex Haley, remains an indispensable document of the 20th-century US.

Its visceral narrative traces an extraordinary metamorphosis — from street hustler to revolutionary thinker — and offers enduring lessons about systemic injustice and the power of self-reinvention.

The opening chapters detail the African American civil rights activist’s fractured youth: His father’s violent death (officially a car accident, though family attributed it to white supremacists), his mother’s mental collapse and his pivot to crime as “Detroit Red.”

What struck me most was how imprisonment became his unlikely crucible.

Through voracious self-education and conversion to the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X transformed into one of America’s most incisive racial commentators.

Haley structures Malcolm’s blistering critiques — including his rejection of nonviolent protest and disillusionment with white liberalism — with journalistic precision.

Malcolm X’s 1964 pilgrimage to Makkah proves the memoir’s most consequential pivot. Witnessing racial unity in the holy city fundamentally reoriented his worldview. He began advocating cross-racial coalition-building against oppression, a philosophical evolution abruptly halted by his February 1965 assassination.

Haley’s contribution deserves note: His disciplined prose tempers Malcolm’s polemical intensity, lending the narrative reflective depth without diluting its urgency.

While academics occasionally quibble over timeline specifics (notably Malcolm X’s early NOI chronology), the memoir’s moral core stands unchallenged.

What lingers for me is Malcolm X’s intellectual ferocity — how his advocacy for education as liberation weaponized knowledge against subjugation.

Malcolm X’s demand for Black self-determination continues to challenge America’s unresolved racial contradictions with unnerving relevance. Half a century later, the book remains essential reading not for easy answers, but for its uncompromising questions.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Puzzle of Ethiopian Politics’

Updated 23 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Puzzle of Ethiopian Politics’

Author: Terrence Lyons

The book offers insight into a political group, with its origins in a small insurgency in northern Ethiopia, which transformed itself into a party (the EPRDF) with a hierarchy that links even the smallest village in the country to the center.

“The Puzzle of Ethiopian Politics” offers a study of legacies of protracted civil war and rebel victory over the government, which continue to shape Ethiopian politics.

Terrence Lyons argues that the very structures that enabled the ruling party to overcome the challenges of a war-to-peace transition are the source of the challenges that it faces now.