I gave up a long time ago any serious attempt to do historical research or any wish to be a serious professional historian. Nevertheless, by reasons of personal interests and education, I obviously keep being interested in history and historiography. One of the topics I was and still am interested in is the role of …
Continue reading Huế 1968: A turning point of the American War in Vietnam, by Mark Bowden
I have recently read 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, by Eric Cline. I am totally ignorant about ancient history, and perhaps because of this it made for a fascinating, if mildly disturbing, reading (as I guess any account of a civilization collapse would be). Cline, professor of ancient history and archaeology at George Washington …
Continue reading The end of the Bronze Age, complexity theory and international aid.
I have to admit that I have some sort of weird and totally irrational fascination for the United States Marine Corps. Be it out of historical interest, passion for Vietnam war movies, the allure of the Blue Dress, I read with interest anything around and about the Corps. So when I read this article by …
Continue reading Reflections on Kate Germano’s Fight like a girl
This is the second of two posts on The great escape, a book on development for the general public written a few years ago by Angus Deaton. In the first post I gave a general overview of the work. Here I will give an overview of an interesting debate that took place in the months …
Angus Deaton is the Nobel Prize winner for Economics in 2015 (or better, the winner of the Swedish National Bank's Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2015). He has devoted most of his career studying consumption and poverty, focusing in the last few years on poverty in the United States. Although …
Seeking the link 