more library books to read

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age, Leslie Berlin (Simon & Schuster, 2017)
The trouble with business histories is that they're often not very readable. This one is. You want to read a history of Apple's early days that focuses on Mike Markkula, this is your book. Wozniak designed the machine, but Markkula recognized its value and built a company around it. Most histories of Apple acknowledge this, but treat Markkula as a sideshow. This one makes him central.
But that's not the only story. It tells of half a dozen driving entrepreneurs of his kind of that era, divided into small chapters interleaved. It makes more sense to read this book by picking out all the chapters on one subject, then going back for another one. That way you will also notice how much of the most interesting stuff is going on between the time periods covered by the chapters.

Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War, Douglas R. Egerton (Bloomsbury, 2010)
One thing 1860 was full of was conventions. There were three major political parties and they each had a convention, and the Democrats had about four of them to produce two competing presidential nominees. Then there were conventions in states that wanted to secede from the union, and conventions to produce compromises to persuade the states to remain in the union, and more. And Egerton is here to tell you about each one of those conventions in point by point detail.
It's less boring than you might think, because a lot of dramatic things happened. The substantive issues are treated rather lightly, but the presidential horse race is discussed in detail. One thing you'll learn is that before the Republican convention, which happened last, absolutely everyone expected that William Seward would be the nominee and made their plans accordingly. But when you get to the convention, you learn that there was substantive opposition to him as nominee, enough to make his choice doubtful from the beginning. This informational conflict is not resolved. What you do get is a lot of quotes from speeches, some of them the most astonishing racist blither I'd ever seen.
The book carries on to the death of Stephen Douglas in June of 1861, except that the war had started by then and there's almost nothing about that. Despite the fact that he's the person who shot up the Compromise of 1850 and sent the nation plummeting down the dark path, Douglas is something of the hero of this book, mostly because after he lost the 1860 election he rallied to Lincoln's side and became the most steadfast of union patriots.

Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War, Jonathan Rosenberg (Norton, 2020)
This book has no theme. It's just a narrative history, built out of lots of quotes and references to journalism of the time, of the classical music manifestations of the international conflicts of WW1, WW2, and the early Cold War, up through events like Leonard Bernstein taking the NY Phil on tours of the Soviet Union around 1960. One of the few places where Rosenberg steps back to consider what it means is when he asks why there was so much vehement anti-German feeling in WW1 (prohibiting German music, arresting German performers), but not so much in WW2. His tentative answer is that in WW2 we had the Japanese to unleash our virulent racism against, so it didn't have to be directed at the Germans.

Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language, Esther Schor (Metropolitan, 2016)
There's a lot here about the relationship between the Esperanto movement and the early Zionist movement, but it feels like it's as much the story of the author's personal encounter with Esperanto as the history of the language movement. To my regret, there's no mention of two interesting people: J.R.R. Tolkien, who expressed some interest in Esperanto in the 1930s and might have attended a congress on the subject, and the composer Lou Harrison, who learned Esperanto to communicate with practitioners of folk music in various East Asian cultures and wrote some choral works with lyrics in Esperanto.