I’ve noticed that a book will hype something — myelin is important to learn a skill (The Talent Code) or mitochondria in mental illness (Brain Energy) — and these books will have a chapter or two really on this subject, but then they go into a survey of the field and lamely tie everything back to their hook, such as the mental health book saying, well meditation sometimes helps with mental illness and meditation affects mitochondria because, as we have seen, it’s in everything in the body. Perhaps length requirements are the reason why it’s padding itself out by unnecessarily surveying the field.

I’m not opposed to surveys, but it needs to be fairly niche to keep it manageable. If it’s a broad, well-known topic, a survey is not going to be that valuable.

A survey like this is the book Eye Color, which is all about correlations between eye color and behavior, something I didn’t know much about, but the thorough survey is only 150 pages long and manageable.

People of the Right tend to write much more interesting books, because they are full of truth and hope. But the big publishers are all in London and New York City, so they don’t publish these ‘nobodies’.

Bismarck and Metternich certainly did.

Also, Charles Oman is very good history, especially on the Peninsular war.

Winston Churchill could certainly write with authority on the World Wars, both of them, as he was a principal in both cases. Read Churchill with a critical eye and many lessons.

He marked up every other paragraph for the first three chapters, then quit. CS Lewis said this was the mark of every book read by a scholar.

Now I may have 2-3 going at once and bounce back and forth.