The Second World War by John Keegan

The first chapter of John Keegan's The Second World War is absolutely the best chapter from any history book that I have ever read. It is a concise, insightful, and persuasive examination of what led to World War II.

The simple answer is, of course, World War II was fought to reverse the outcome of World War I. But Keegan turns the question from why this happened to the much more important how it happened. Wars had raged across Europe for millenia prior to the World Wars; and like their predecessors, the two World Wars had myriad cultural, historial, linguistic, and political roots.

But none of the previous wars had involved so many people with so much bloodshed. I'll leave those who are interested on the cliffhanger of Keegan's answer to how. Go to your local library or bookstore and spend the 30-45 minutes reading the beginning chapter. You'll learn something, I promise; and what's more awesome than that?

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

I'm only about 60% done with it, but this book is the best I've read since Neuromancer and/or Slaughterhouse-5 (I read them both around five years ago). It is really incredible that it is fiction because the story is so real and vibrant that it feels like it must have actually happened. Absolutely no surprise that it won the Pulitzer. I'm tearing through it.

Pick it up!

Disquiet

The best word that I have ever found to describe my current state is Disquiet. It is from the title of a book, The Book of Disquiet, by an apparently unknown Portuguese poet named Fernando Pessoa. I bought this book a few weeks before I began dating the girl from the previous post, after having told her months before that I couldn't be just friends and then removed her from my life. I have yet to finish this book. I keep picking it up during times like this, and then dropping it when I yank myself out of my oblivion of self-introspection.

Disquiet is not quiet, yet it is not unquiet. To me, it means a low, almost imperceptible sound, heard in the background, that alerts one that something is not quite right in the world. The disquiet I hear, in my mind, is the sound resonating in the gap between who I am, where I am, what I am and the person that I pretend to be, both to myself and others. The last few years of my life has consisted of my (pathetic? Sometimes.) attempts to close that gap, to feel right with how things are and will be.

I acknowledge that I can not control the world; my dad said to me once that the absolute maximum you can control is the circle whose circumference is drawn by your fingertips as you spin around in place, with your arms outstretched. I think that's very true.

I hope my next great leap, into Medical School, make my world a little better. I think that it will, but who knows?

Frustratingly, when I am honest with myself, I believe that my sense of Disquiet will become inaudible only when I find The Girl. It could be that everyone is built like that. Only time will tell, I suppose.