Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
So they sold their personal weapons and any other army equipment they could obtain. The officers were worse than the men and the generals worst of all. By June 1948 the KMT army was down to 2.1 million; the CCP army had risen to 1.5 million, equipped with a million rifles and 22,800 pieces of artillery, more than the KMT (21,000); virtually all these weapons had been bought from government troops. The Americans, who had supplied Chiang with $1 billion worth of Pacific War surplus, thus equipped both sides in the conflict.62 There was a series of clear Communist victories in the closing months of 1948, culminating in the decisive battle of Hsuchow at the end of the year. By December virtually all Manchuria and North China was in Mao’s hands. Tientsin fell in January 1949 and Peking surrendered. Hsuchow cost the KMT 400,000 casualties. But of these, 200,000 prisoners, unpaid and hungry, were immediately integrated
Modern Times
Paul Johnson
By the middle of the nineteenth century most learned people thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions of years old, but probably not more than that. So it came as a surprise when, in 1859 in On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald, an area of southern England stretching across Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, had taken, by his calculations, 306,662,400 years to complete. The assertion was remarkable partly for being so arrestingly specific but even more for flying in the face of accepted wisdom about the age of the Earth.*10 It proved so contentious that Darwin withdrew it from the third edition of the book. The problem at its heart remained, however. Darwin and his geological friends needed the Earth to be old, but no one could figure out a way to make it so.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
He first defines our ultimate goal—the very purpose of being alive, the thing we’re shooting for—the same way a young swimmer might identify “Olympic gold medal” as a target that would mean “maximum success.” Aristotle says that thing is: happiness. That’s the telos,4 or goal, of being human. His argument for this is pretty solid, I think. There are things we do for some other reason—like, we work in order to earn money, or we exercise in order to get stronger. There are also good things we want, like health, honor, or friendships, because they make us happy. But happiness is the top dog on the list of “things we desire”—it has no aim other than itself. It’s the thing we want to be, just… to be it. Technically, in the original Greek, Aristotle actually uses the nebulous word “eudaimonia,” which sometimes gets translated as “happiness” and sometimes as “flourishing.”5 I prefer “flourishing,” because that feels like a bigger deal than “happiness.” We’re talking about the ultimate objective for humans here, and a flourishing person sounds like she’s more fulfilled, complete, and impressive than a “happy” person.
How to Be Perfect
Michael Schur
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise