Jul 16, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min · 10 segments
It's the semi-annual books episode! Jeremiah breaks down the best books he's read so far in the first half of 2026. He discusses books about the Supreme Court, the history of cancer, criminal justice…
All right, so let's jump in to the list this year with one of the very first books that I read in January, which is A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders.
This is a book by John Elledge, and essentially this is a kind of book that I tend to enjoy, which is little historical vignettes told through some particular storytelling device.
There was a book I liked a few years back called Plagues Upon the Earth, which tells you a lot about human society and history through the lens of the different major plagues and major diseases that have existed throughout human history.
And it kind of uses those plagues, those diseases, as a just storytelling device, as a lens to look and examine human history through that particular lens.
I've also done this with, there's a book called The Fabric of Civilization that looks at the historical development of fabric and textiles and how that impacted history and society.
A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders tries to do the same thing but with basically geopolitical dividing lines.
How did borders get set? Why are they there? Who made them? How are they enforced? How real are they in an actual sense? When did borders actually become hard borders is an interesting question.
So I liked this book because it's a compendium of little interesting stories, I would say.
I don't think that the history in it is as good as some of the other history that I've read.
You're not going to be outright misinformed, but it's just a little bit more surface level.
To me, one of the most interesting parts of the book was the discussion of the reality of borders in kind of the early world.
Because borders, it's easy to look at a map from 1300 and say, okay, well, this is where this country ended and the other country began.
But in reality, for much of history, borders were just very much not a hard and defined thing.
How much territory did the King of France really control at a particular point in the 1300s? It's fuzzy.
There's a lot of little historical vignettes from early history all the way up to the current day.
All right, so let's jump in to the list this year with one of the very first books that I read in January, which is A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders.
This is a book by John Elledge, and essentially this is a kind of book that I tend to enjoy, which is little historical vignettes told through some particular storytelling device.
There was a book I liked a few years back called Plagues Upon the Earth, which tells you a lot about human society and history through the lens of the different major plagues and major diseases that have existed throughout human history.
And it kind of uses those plagues, those diseases, as a just storytelling device, as a lens to look and examine human history through that particular lens.
I've also done this with, there's a book called The Fabric of Civilization that looks at the historical development of fabric and textiles and how that impacted history and society.
A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders tries to do the same thing but with basically geopolitical dividing lines.
How did borders get set? Why are they there? Who made them? How are they enforced? How real are they in an actual sense? When did borders actually become hard borders is an interesting question.
So I liked this book because it's a compendium of little interesting stories, I would say.
I don't think that the history in it is as good as some of the other history that I've read.
You're not going to be outright misinformed, but it's just a little bit more surface level.
To me, one of the most interesting parts of the book was the discussion of the reality of borders in kind of the early world.
Because borders, it's easy to look at a map from 1300 and say, okay, well, this is where this country ended and the other country began.
But in reality, for much of history, borders were just very much not a hard and defined thing.
How much territory did the King of France really control at a particular point in the 1300s? It's fuzzy.
There's a lot of little historical vignettes from early history all the way up to the current day.
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