About 76 results
https://www.coryd.dev/reading/books/182141808/red-scare · 9 Apr 2025
History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Our current political moment is one that rhymes with the red scare . Clay Risen does an admirable job covering the history of and events around the post-war red scare and the hysteria fueled House Un-American A...
https://www.coryd.dev/reading/books/9781639733361/death-is-our-business · 1 Apr 2025
This felt like more of a primer on Wagner than a comprehensive history. Nonetheless, it’s a compelling explainer of private military companies (PMCs) with Wagner at the heart of it. From the conflict in Ukraine to its presence in Africa and Syria, Wagner...
https://www.coryd.dev/reading/books/9780593581261/above-the-noise · 25 Mar 2025
DeMar is one of those classic "fuck fuck fuck stay in front of him — oh god he's in the paint — fuck put your hand up — nice defense, oh shit he made it anyways" guards. Stay in front of him, make the game as hard as you can but know that he's going ...
https://www.coryd.dev/reading/books/9781035037483/meltdown · 21 Mar 2025
A neatly organized chronology of yet another bank failure. You get some history on Swiss banking, a good deal of insight into the firm and a conclusion that ends with its failure and an acquisition by rival UBS (there's even a brief aside about the run on ...
https://www.coryd.dev/reading/books/9781668027813/when-the-sea-came-alive · 16 Mar 2025
I've never — probably will never — be a history buff. I enjoy reading about it, value the insights gleaned from studying it but never find myself getting lost in it. I don't actively seek it out, I do value it. The latter doesn't require that I do the ...
https://www.coryd.dev/reading/books/9780385548519/rogues · 7 Mar 2025
Patrick Radden Keefe has a knack — hell, actually, let's call it a gift — a gift for crafting truly compelling retellings and detailed nonfiction narratives. He did it in Say Nothing , Empire of Pain and he did it in The Snakehead . That's not quite wh...
https://www.coryd.dev/reading/books/9781529349252/smoke-and-ashes · 28 Feb 2025
This made for a fascinating read about a historical topic I only had a vague familiarity with. It's detailed inasmuch as it connects the spread of opium's history, production and consumption — meticulous research as narrative. Chinese rulers had banned o...
https://www.coryd.dev/reading/books/9780316276177/ask-not · 23 Feb 2025
The author's qualifier that they've taken creative license with some of these accounts is...well, it does a lot to strike down a lot of trust you might have had in what follows. Everything that's described is both salacious and not exactly beyond belief. T...
https://www.coryd.dev/reading/books/9781250284471/the-exvangelicals · 17 Feb 2025
An explanation of the cult-like Christian right as the author works through her own exit from it. You gain empathy, compassion and a freedom to think while losing the friends and family still tightly enmeshed in the institution. I never grew up in an insti...
https://www.coryd.dev/reading/books/9780316477574/chaos-charles-manson-the-cia-and-the-secret-history-of-the-sixties · 12 Feb 2025
This was a fascinating read that did a lot to punch holes in the default narrative of the Manson murders that Bugliosi established in Helter Skelter . What it doesn't do is draw any definitive conclusions. It's a decade plus of pulling at threads, unraveli...