What's the best book you read in the last year?

For me, it probably was "Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World" by Richard Cockett. A thorough history of how a single city in a view decades had so much influence on the Western world including the fundamentals of our world views.

Animal Farm by George Orwell. It was a re-read.

Here's an excerpt from my blog about my thoughts on the book -

It is terrifyingly easy for propaganda to replace reality. Orwell shows this through Squealer, the pig who acts as the farm’s official spokesperson. He doesn’t use force — he uses language. Whenever something goes wrong, he simply explains it again, louder and with more confidence, until the animals doubt their own memories. Rules are rewritten, past events are altered, and inconvenient truths are wiped away, all through the steady drip of confident lies. Before long, the animals aren’t living in the world as it is, but in the world they’ve been told to believe in.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, used speeches, newspapers, and films to reshape public perception, presenting lies as facts.

Jews, political opponents, and other targeted groups were demonized through repeated messaging, making the population accept policies that were morally outrageous.

In North Korea, the government controls all media and education, rewriting history to glorify the Kim dynasty.

Contradictory evidence is inaccessible, so the official narrative becomes the “reality” for most citizens. . . . If you want a non re-read, I'd say Night by Elie Wiesel.

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 was really good. It looked at the history of the civil rights movement from the perspective of a military historian, analyzing each step as its own military campaign.

Before reading it I didn’t realize how much structure and organization went into the Civil Rights movement but the book goes over everything from the training of the “soldiers” in church basements, to the logistics of the ride shares that replaced the busses during the boycott.