Rise and Fall by Paul Strathern

This book’s full title is Rise and Fall, A History of the World in Ten Empires. The most interesting comment I found was that empires based solely on power and domination, while allowing their subjects to do as they will, can last for centuries. Those that try to control the everyday lives of their people are much harder to sustain.

This book was a very easy read and does not bring up much in the way of new information for me, but then I have read a lot of history books. Why he includes the USA, I cannot say. Perhaps because a lot of people say it is decline, but only the future can really tell you this. I know that China desperately wants to replace US as the world power. But things do not always work out how you want. And, there is also that thing of being careful what you wish for.

Like it is said that the Holy Roman Empire was not Holy or Roman or an Empire, he said that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not a union, not socialist, not ruled by soviets (worker’s committees) and was not a republic. It the Russian Empire in a different disguise and it was under autocratic rule just as it was under the Czars. Actually, you can say the same thing about Russian today with Putin in charge. He is the new Czar.

When he talks about American, he talks about the period of the Robber Barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Ford. We seem to be in the same situation today and the Robber Barons are the owners of FAANGs.

It is interesting that there are only reviews on Amazon and Good Reads. I can find no reviews in any magazine or newspaper, although there are podcast reviews. Reviews on Amazon is here. The Good Reads reviews are here. A podcast is on Mixcloud.

There are no videos about this book or Paul Strathern that I can find.

An index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. I have three blogs. The first talks only about specific stocks and is called Investment Talk . The second one contains information on mostly investing and is called Investing Economics Mostly. My last blog is for my book reviews and it is called Non-Fiction Mostly. Follow me on Twitter.