lightreads | Entries tagged with history

A more Beautiful and Terrible History

3/5. A fascinating look at the way civil rights history is used and abused and retold, most often to serve current racial status quo.

I liked this and found it helpful, but hesitate to casually recommend it to people. The problem is that the author occasionally drops a comment that is squarely in my expertise and that she is dead wrong about. Which, people are allowed to be wrong about things not in their wheelhouse, but it makes one wonder about the rest of their thinking.

An example: I don’t have the exact passage bookmarked, but she says something super casual early on about how the 2016 election was stolen and then moves on without addressing that at all. I suspect this is an artifact of that particular 2017 twitter brain rot that infected many people on the left. My problems with this are many. There has been extensive legal and factual investigation of this, and it simply isn’t true. Did we know that in 2017? No, but speaking for myself, I was pretty sure of it at the time and was validated by all the evidence subsequently gathered. Second, gosh, where have we heard this particular bit of red pill thinking before? Or since, I should say? “My guy lost so it had to be illegitimate?” Hmm. This is where all the Jan. 6 defendants started out, mentally. It’s

Look, she could have been saying something more fundamental about the nature of U.S. elections – how structural racism has permeated them to the point that they are not legitimate. I have heard these arguments and yeah, you can get me there. But if so, why is 2016 the one we point to? And why doesn’t she unpack that? Saying an election was “stolen” can mean approximately ten thousand different things, be precise, people! Here, it’s just leftie red pill stuff. And if her thinking is that messed up on that, boy, I don’t know. I don’t love marking a book down hard for throwaway comments, but then again, it’s the throwaways that really tell you how someone thinks, isn’t it?

Content notes: Racism, structural and personal. Historical accounts of civil rights history which, of course, include much racial violence.

The Song of the Cell

4/5. Very good medical history and topic exploration under the broad umbrella of cellular biology. A lot of expected things here – IVF, cancer – but also some surprises and his usual elegance and humanism. Ignore the subtitle, it’s dumb publisher irrelevance.

Secret City

4/5. A long and winding unearthed history of queer people in and around Washington. Fascinating and delightful and horribly depressing, as you might expect. There’s a whole lot of injustice here, and suicide, and ruination, and death. Also a lot of grit and courage and humor. I learned a lot, including about places I’ve been many times.

Do note that there are a lot more men than women in these pages, and almost everyone is white.

Content notes: Suicide, homophobia, outing, assault, AIDS in the 80’s.

Eternal Darkness

3/5. Account of the history of deep-sea exploration, before turning to the author’s career which includes the discovery of the Titanic’s wreckage, among other things. Way more interested in things than people. He’d be like, ‘let me tell you how this capsule worked that people went half a mile down underwater in,’ and I’d be like ‘okay, but tell me about the maniacs who volunteered for this, because they sound more interesting.’ You can also tell that he is breezing past huge personal slapfights that convulsed the entire field, and on the one hand, he’s not grinding axes, how refreshing. On the other, it’s a bit bloodless.

Interesting stuff, though.
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Fight of the Century Eds. Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman

3/5. A fundraising book, the overwhelming evidence suggests, and a star-studded one. Forty authors each wrote a short essay on a particular case, with wildly varying quality. Jacqueline Woodson, for one, took my breath away, while I'm still not sure WTF Neil Gaiman thought he was contributing here. And I have now developed a strong dislike for Brenda J. Child, who I'd never heard of before, based on her discussion of Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, which is one of those essays whose principles I agree with, but where the author is so smug and blinkered about those principles that she does things like assuming only the people on her side are actual human beings. That's a particularly egregious way of thinking in respect to that case, of all cases.

Anyway, probably a good book for the civil rights history or legal history enthusiast.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Story of America's Great Migration

4/5. A narrative of the Great Migration of black Americans out of the South in the mid twentieth century, told through the stories (given orally to the author) of three who leave – one to California, one to Chicago, one to New York. A beautiful, gripping, scary book about the psychology and practicality of fleeing the place where your ancestors were enslaved, and what you might find far away. I won't soon forget the description of a black man driving through the night across multiple states because no hotel would serve him and if he tried to sleep in the car, he risked attack.

Content notes: Racist violence, racist terrorism, references to child death.

Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

3/5. Recounting of the infiltration of the security services (so, by definition, organized crime) into control of the Russian state and economy over thirty years. The sheer scale of the looting of assets is stunning, and that's not even to mention the evidence this book lays out suggesting various governmental figures orchestrated mass civilian casualties for their own political ends. For all that, this book is really boring? It's stylistically dry and more inclined to spend its time on talking about money than people. It's also not really about Putin who, to be fair, is a cipher in a lot of important ways, so much so that her guess as to his thoughts and motivations is probably little better than anyone else's, even though she clearly did years of research.

Anyway, that is a kleptocratic autocracy; the candyass crap Trump pulled is a pale imitation.

FDR's Splendid Deception

3/5. A brief biography of FDR's public life, with a focus on his disability and how it was concealed. An interesting concept, and a book worth writing, but also a frustrating one as you can tell the primary sources are extremely tight-lipped. That's the point, though – there was an elaborate ruse constructed around him, including literally hundreds of people, and almost none of them talked about it. Most of them didn't even want to think about it. Including FDR who, it is clear, played jolly cripple so hard he sprained something and his face got stuck that way.

I have mixed feelings about this book as a book. It is #ownvoices, if you will, which I appreciate. But it has moments of unreliability, like talking about the conspiracy of restraint that kept press photographers from taking pictures of FDR in his wheelchair, enforced when necessary by the secret service detaining people and breaking their cameras, but anyway, this completely voluntary agreement, how extraordinary. Um. Voluntary, you say? This book is also too devoted to some psychological diagnosis across the decades, but not in the way I'm interested. It will go on about how FDR's categorical inability to speak of his disability itself ruined his health (he has lots of opinions about this), but is zero percent interested in why. Why the deception and, more complexly, why so many went along with it. Not just went along, but were deeply invested. Why, to this day, the word paraplegic is so rarely applied to FDR, even though it's what he was. The answer is obviously ableism, but there's a lot of layers to that particular cake here.

The Hardest Job in the World

4/5. What it says on the tin – a review of the modern presidency and what makes it hard. It's good at being that book, but I recommend it for something else entirely: this book is very good at distinguishing things that Trump does which are actually aberrant from the things that are not. Anyone who gets their primary news and commentary from twitter may find this helpful, because yeah, knowing this is something that twitter is particularly and noticeably bad at.

These Truths

4/5. Specifically a political history. An ideas history. The sort of history that has few details of battle dates and tactics, and many details of what we fought over. This book is very good as an antidote to the sort of historical education I got, as it tells the story of slavery as the story of this nation. How we fought and agonized over it from before the Constitution was ever written, what it cost, what it really looked like. I didn't get that in my AP U.S. History class, I tell you what.

I will say that this book, for all its bulk, can be oddly conclusory. I found myself shaking my head and muttering "yeah, no," about a number of things in the final few chapters covering the history I've lived through, which always makes you wonder about what has come before. And speaking of that bulk, you could strip a good 20,000 words out of this book in flourish alone. She fancies herself quite the prose stylist. She's not always right. AS a small example, she announces in the intro that she will keep the footnotes "clipped and short, like a baby's fingernails," which aside from being a straight up weird simile, is a tiny example of chronic over-writing. When you are making the point that you are keeping something clipped short, you don't add a rhetorical flourish! Come on! It's innocuous in the singular; when a thousand similar choices are made, it's shaggy at best.

On the plus side, this is the exception to Light's first rule of audiobook production: thou shalt not let the author read the audiobook. She does it, and she's good at it.

Why We're Polarized

3/5. A good book that presents a lot of data and argumentation on the history and trajectory of polarization, and particularly counters a lot of the liberal well if you just expose people to the right ideas they will agree with me thinking. No. That is not how that works. A valuable book that I am downgrading because the author reads the audio, which he delivers exactly like he delivers podcast monologues, and my dude, no. The huffing, the incredulous snort laughs, the repetition of phrases for emphasis, it works fine for a podcast but is a poor choice for delivering a book.

Leadership: in Turbulent Times

3/5. Sketches of the biographies, ascensions, and *points at title* of Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and LBJ. This is interesting, but it also smacks way more of so I did a whole bunch of research on these guys for other books, let me repackage it than I was expecting.

And yes. Obviously it is depressing to read right now. That was the point, when you come right down to it.

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

3/5. Hello. I went back to work, can you tell? I was also reading this absolute brick of a book.

This is what it says on the tin, a sprawling, high-level view of Europe from 1945 to 2005. This book describes briskly but with precision a lot of things – the rise and fall of communism, the Baltic wars – that are by themselves many books. And this narrative is explicitly framed, at the start and at the end, by the holocaust, and its shadow stretches from one end of these 60 years to the other in ways I had not previously understood.

So it's a good book, but it also. Hm. I lack the technical terms for what I mean here, but this book's historiography is very interested in what prominent public intellectuals had to say about things. And it's noticeably less interested (not uninterested, mind you) in what the people to whom many of these things were happening had to say. There is some overlap in these groups, obviously, but still. This is an orientation that becomes really really noticeable over 800 something pages, and it's not really the mode I'd like to consume in.

Unmaking the Presidency by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes

4/5. A sharp and articulate and eruditely scathing book that gets into what it actually means to say that Trump breaks norms. It's thoughtful about the presidency as an institution, with plenty of call-backs to prior disaster presidencies, and I think the general assessment of what has happened and what needs to happen is pretty much right. A good resource for the well-informed observer who wants to know more about the technicalities of executive power and executive tradition. I don't actually give a damn about Trump himself – his psychology is overanalyzed and frankly uninteresting – but this book manages around the edges to pin him down pretty much exactly.

Devil Take the Hindmost

3/5. You guys are about to get an intimate tour of my brain by way of the stuff I read when things start to go very, very wrong. This is the book I reached for when we got the first rumblings that something we were excited and happy about was going to fall apart. This book is an excessively dry, somewhat exhausting history of speculative manias. It is far more interested in recounting events than it is in thinking about the psychology of speculation, though it does in passing touch on the long-running debates over the place of speculation in society, and whether it is a social good or not. So I read this in many many waiting rooms and on many many long drives to doctors' offices, and retained very little of it, and don't actually think it is particularly accessible or interesting. But by God did it serve its purpose for me.

Embracing Defeat

3/5. An exhaustive – and occasionally exhausting – survey that I read slowly over six months, and thus have very little specific to say about. But for purposes of setting a placemarker here, can I just complain for a second about how difficult it is to find specific nonfiction that is more than six or seven years old in an accessible form? Grr. I read this in place of the well-regarded and personally intriguing recent political history of Japan that I wanted, but that is apparently not for the likes of me. One of the talking points we used in a small political push five years back was that less than 1% of the world's books were in a form accessible to the print disabled. The number is higher now, but if it's risen more than a few points, I'd be shocked. What must it be like to want a book and to just . . . be able to buy it and read it? Or to borrow a copy from a friend! What is that like? TBF, I remember when book inaccessibility was a real, daily, awful problem I had. Now it's like . . . a weekly problem. Progress? It helps a lot not to be in school anymore, and Bookshare is taking heroic strides, and of course the audio market exploded. But still. Still. There's a reason I read a lot of recent releases by major publishers and don't read a lot of small press stuff from any era.

Whistlestop: My Favorite Stories from Presidential Campaign History

4/5. What it sounds like. Yeah yeah, I'm a nerd, don't I get enough of this stuff already, blah blah blah.

But let me explain something about John Dickerson, journalist, pundit, historian. He's an extremely successful history nerd who has the air of someone from a different era, and his sense of humor is – I mean, he's a walking dad joke. But here's what I actually like about him.

He quotes women.

Not just about women's suffrage or "women's issues." Not occasionally. But all the time. In every context. Talking about politics. Rendering their political opinions. Being involved in power. He quotes women senators from seventy years ago and women convention floor bosses. He just . . . quotes women. Like they're a part of history. I had no idea how extraordinary this was until I read it, and was astonished.

I could get all psychological here and theorize that it's because of Dickerson's mother, who is a legend in her own right, and who had an extraordinary impact on him. He wrote a book about her, in fact, so clearly he is used to the idea of women being movers in history. But the truth is, I don't care why he does it, I'm just glad he does.

Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America by Dan Balz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I will be sitting out the midterms this year, so I wanted a hit of wonkiness to tide me over, and here it is. You already know if you'll like this sort of thing, so I'll confine myself to saying that this is well-organized and interesting from a trade of elections perspective, but far less gossipy than the casual reader seems to want. I liked it.

Some observations: this book offers an excellent overview of what the Obama for America internet operation was doing and how it worked – I was particularly interested in getting a few more details on the Facebook utilization and how the tools worked to suggest that, e.g., rather than sharing this campaign video with your entire feed, why not send it to Facebook friends X and Y, undecided voters in Florida that you seem to know well. For me, the most interesting aspect of that part of the campaign is the strides made in deciding who not to contact. I'm a swing-state resident and a political donor (though not to presidential campaigns because that is a total waste of my money) and I was contacted by OFA multiple times in 2008. In 2012, I was not contacted at all because, presumably, the OFA algorithm determined correctly that I was a sure thing and did not require the use of resources. Works for me. The only annoying thing about that is I suspect it will only increase the romance of the "independent" voter in the popular consciousness. Note: these people do not actually exist. You can almost always tell what a supposedly "independent" voter is going to do, except in a very small slice of the population. It just so happens that small slice is increasingly valuable these days. But you get a full third of Americans claiming to be independent voters because it sounds sexy and independent-minded, when actually it's a giant self-deception. But a lot of these people actually like being courted by campaigns, which is utterly baffling to me, and with more and more campaign resources being precisely targeted to them, I guess they're welcome to enjoy the fruits of the massive money machine they continually bitch about.

Also, I am increasingly suspicious of the Romney campaign's post election "couldn't be done" narrative. I mean, don't get me wrong, I thought with 95% confidence Obama was going to win by the spring, and so did anyone else who knew what they were looking at, and that was without the series of lucky breaks he got in the summer and fall. But no race is unwinnable, and this idea that the Romney campaign was irretrievably outclassed from day one, particularly on the electronic and ground operations, seems self-serving. "Oh woe is us, they built better software than we did, if only we'd known we would have given up in June." Yeah, whatever, dudes. You lost. Suck it up and figure out where you lost it (early and organizationally) and stop acting like you bore no responsibility whatsoever.

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The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam by Barbara W. Tuchman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A collection of pieces exploring terrible policy, and specifically policy counter to the actors's interests. Appealing in concept, but lacking that put together incisiveness of Tuchman at her best. She can talk about the ruinous behavior of the Renaissance Popes and Britain's blinkered inability to correctly handle the American colonies with her usual detail and erudition, but this book lacks cohesion, or a real message other than institutional idiocy: weird, eh?

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A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Grinding, grueling, exhausting account of a series of genocides and the United States's response – or generally lack thereof.

Other people have criticized this book at length for failing to address the ways the United States was actively complicit in genocidal violence through support of its perpetrators. The criticism is accurate, though I think it's a product of the focus of this book very specifically on passive complicity.

I had read excerpts of this over the years, and I'm glad I finally sat down and went through all of it, cover-to-cover. But this is a first generation book, and now I want the fifth generation, or the seventh generation, if you know what I mean. Because Power spends a lot of time documenting American disinterest in mass death, and some time talking about the reasons, but the reasons are very . . . cerebral. This economic interest, that political exigency, a few general comments about racism.

This book made me think a lot about pain, and being the observer of it. I mean, most of us catch glimpses of indescribable anguish out of the corners of our eyes all the time, but we've developed defensive emotional blinders. But once in a while, someone looks at the newspaper headline that ten thousand other people read and forgot, and that one person is seared. Irrevocably changed just by knowing that five thousand people halfway around the world were "disappeared." I've known some people like that, and worked with them. One of them was the first person to make me read excerpts of this book.

I want the book about those people. And the contextual, psychological, physiological, etc. differences between them and the rest of us. And the book that takes a deeper, more honest look at the psychology of passive complicity, not just its economic logic. Because Power wrote mostly about when and where and who, and left me pretty messed up over why.

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