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History

The Long View: The Death of the West Book Review

I think it was John who taught me the idea, "things that can't go on forever, don't". Demography is a pretty good example of this. A lot of ink has been spilt in the last hundred years agonizing over both why too many people

The Long View: History

John's History index: everything from Thomas More to Black Hawk Down. I haven't even scratched the surfaces of John's many book reviews and essays. There are a lot of good ones here. The Life of Thomas More made an impression on me when I

The Long View: Alternative History

The Long View: Alternative History

I put up the first of John's subject matter indices today: Alternative History. Since I am proceeding in roughly chronological order, most of what you see here is not yet uploaded. However, there are some pages filled in at later dates, because John intensively curated his website, and

The Long View: The Pity of War

Niall Ferguson's book on the Great War was written 16 years ago, but his style fits in well today. There is a constellation of quant bloggers that center around Steve Sailer who use a similar style of analysis to Ferguson, heavy on economics and demographics, and looking for

The Long View 2002-02-07: The Irrelevance of Peace

This entry of John's blog is pretty short, and pretty pithy, so I'm just going to copy the whole thing here. John Derbyshire, unlike John Reilly, is rather a pessimist; John Reilly described himself as an inveterate optimist, and the mission of his blog was to

The Long View: The Man in the High Castle

The Long View: The Man in the High Castle

Phil Dick was a friend of Tim Powers. Thus this book review is really favorite authors squared. John Reilly reviewed a seminal novel by a man who influenced one of my favorite fiction writers. I think I first read this review before Powers became one of my favorite writers, but

The Long View: If the July 20 Plot had Succeeded.....

More alternative history from John. Often, the main thrust of his thinking was that the world could have been very much worse than it was, even though it was frequently awful. Hitler may have been a bad leader, but Himmler would have probably been worse.... If the July 20 Plot