Astral Codex Ten

1587

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1587

Article

1587 is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 01, 2022 and September 02, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “I’m adding four more: 1587”; “Ray Huang’s 1587 also tells the tale of a slowly decaying empire”; “1587 is his best-known and most widely acclaimed book”. It most often appears alongside ACX, God Emperor of Dune, Kora In Hell.

Metadata

  • Category: Books
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: August 01, 2022
  • Last seen: September 02, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Open Thread 235
August 01, 2022 · Original source
1: We’ve made it through the original twelve Book Review finalists. I’m busy the next few weeks and want to keep the free Friday posts, so I’m adding four more: Exhaustion: A History, God Emperor of Dune, 1587, and Kora In Hell. I chose these through a combination of reader preference, my preference, and wanting to showcase some unusual genres of review. I realize this is annoying to other finalists who will have to wait longer for a smaller chance at a prize, so I’ll double the amount of all monetary prizes as compensation.
Your Book Review: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
August 19, 2022 · Original source
I bought this book because of its charming title: 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline.
Like Edward Gibbon's monumental Decline and Fall..., Ray Huang’s 1587 also tells the tale of a slowly decaying empire: in this case, the Ming dynasty of China.
1587 is just 200-some pages, including the appendix. So is it worth reading? Yeah, I'd say so.
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
2nd: 1587, A Year Of No Significance, reviewed by occasional ACX commenter McClain.
Inline links: 1587, A Year Of No Significance
Kora In Hell, reviewed by Lucas Paletta. Lucas is a writer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He blogs (in Spanish) at www.stackdamage.com.ar. I really enjoyed all of these. A few notes of special praise: The Internationalists was probably most fascinating, in the sense of describing a strange historical episode I didn’t know about before. The Outlier was similar and I give it high marks for making Jimmy Carter interesting. Consciousness And The Brain was a whole new neuroscience theory I knew nothing about and I expect to reread it a bunch of times to try to get it to sink in. Sam Altman sent me an email saying he enjoyed the review of The Future Of Fusion Energy. The Making Nature review did a great job talking about and analyzing a trend I’d never thought about before, far beyond even what was in the book. I think about Exhaustion every time I see a CFS patient - specifically, about the claim that 19th century psychiatrists would prescribe a “West cure” of going off and doing cowboy things on a ranch; I haven’t yet recommended that to anyone, but like I said, I think about it often. God Emperor of Dune and Kora In Hell were the token fiction and poetry reviews; I thought they did a spectacular job overcoming the difficulties of reviewing their respective media. I was reading some of the non-finalists and found 1587 in there and was surprised it hadn’t reached finalist status and decided to promote it; based on your votes it seems like that was the right choice. My process for picking finalists was kind of haphazard; I had you rate all reviews on a scale of 1-10, anyone above 8 got in automatically, and then I picked my favorites from the reviews between 7 and 8. This was sort of unfair, and meant there were some reviews that scored better on the voting than finalists but weren’t finalists themselves, and others that I liked better than some finalists but couldn’t pick. All of these are Honorable Mentions. You’ll notice some of them are politically charged, and yes, I did sort of discriminate against these (though not so much that I wouldn’t have picked them if they’d made it above 8). They are: Unsettled, reviewed by Julius S. Julius is a machine learning engineer from San Diego. He blogs at Curious About Ideas.
Inline links: Kora In Hell, www.stackdamage.com.ar, Unsettled, Curious About Ideas