read that a couple of summers ago - it's real interesting in places, especially the parts on iran i thought, but there's also some real long sections on corporate histories that made me want to suck a tailpipe - i'd advise skipping those bits
happily, i've been too busy climbing for most of the summer to read, but i have managed to finish "they made america," a collection of biographies of 30 some odd inventors/innovators of the past 200 years which was pretty damn interesting - i never knew robert fulton, prior to "inventing" the steamboat, was essentially a dandy and male prostitute prior to settling into a menage a twois in paris - or that issac singer, the sewing machine dude, had 5 concurrent wives n' families in new york and had to flee the country after beating the holy hell out of one of them after being discovered - one of the underlying themes i liked, which maybe bill orielly would be good to understand, is that a huge number of america's most significant inventors/innovators were from totally poor/shit/disregarded immigrant families
i read "salt" too, which illustrates how pathetic my life is (at least compared to fairweather) - learned why flamingos are pink, the origins of words like soldier, salary and "wich" in english place names, the significance of cod, and why its wierd that after 3 millennia of mankind trying to make salt white n' of uniform crystal size, folks these days are willing to pay extra for dirty salt