The great philosophers: from Socrates to Turing - Edited by Ray Monk and Frederic Raphael

When I was a restless and immature high school student, I used to ignore my philosophy professor’s lectures while talking about silly topics with my classmates or doing the hell knows what. Most of the time, at least. Yet, something managed to sink in and the spark of curiosity ignited by that great teacher has never died. Ever since that confused phase of my life, I’ve tried to fill the gap by reading textbooks such as Russel’s “History of philosophy” and Gaarder’s “Sophie’s world” or some works by the most prominent western and eastern thinkers.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a very short introduction - Martin Bunton

I found this short essay on the shelves of a very nice second hand book shop in Pattaya, of all places! It’s a very useful overview on a conflict whose causes are very old and intricate, academic style but easy to read, free of all the irritating and confusing biased nuances typical of those media outlets that tend to support one side, for genuine or dubious reasons. It starts telling us about the Ottoman Empire land reform that lead to the centralization of most of the agriculturally interesting areas in the hands of some Muslim prominent families.