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Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: A biography of Edward Lansdale, military/CIA man in the Philippines and then Vietnam, with a side trip to helping plan Castro’s overthrow (though he was apparently not involved with the exploding cigar plot, he did throw out some other bizarre ideas, like a light show to convince the populace that the Second Coming was imminent). Lansdale was a hard-core anticommunist, but one convinced that the alternatives offered to people in Asia had to be democratic and anti-corruption. He advised leaders to train the military to help, not terrorize, the civilian populace and to hold free elections. He didn’t always succeed, and even his success (the Philippines) wasn’t lasting, but Boot makes a compelling case that if his methods had been more influential in Vietnam, the cost in human lives and suffering would have been much lower even if the Communists had ultimately still won.
Douglas Brinkley, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: History of a D-Day assault on a highly defended point that needed to be taken for the overall success of the landing, intertwined with the history of Ronald Reagan’s speech commemorating the incident on the fortieth anniversary of the landing. They were brave men indeed; Brinkley argues that the speech was an important part of creating the image of “the greatest generation,” who until then had been largely silent about their WWII experiences.
John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup: History of Theranos from the WSJ reporter who broke much of the story of its lying and cheating. Its founder worshiped Steve Jobs and claimed to have invented a new technology that would make home blood tests simple and painless, but couldn’t deliver and kept doubling down on the fantasy. She even convinced Walgreens and Safeway that she could help them destroy their competition. Carreyrou doesn’t spend much time on what made the decisionmakers tick, whether that’s Elizabeth Holmes (who he at the end calls a sociopath, without elaboration) or the people who kept funding her, though he does better with the people in the middle—the ones who tolerated the scam for as long as they could in the hopes of improvement or because they were scared of having their lives destroyed.
Ken Jennings, Planet Funny: Jennings has written a witty book about the creep of humor into every aspect of our lives, from advertising to news to ordinary interactions (especially on social media). I think the point is to end up disturbed about the very serious problems of the world around us—a version of the “against irony” stuff we’ve seen before. But Jennings doesn’t push too hard on this, and I did think he had a point about appreciating and attending to that which is not funny.
David Finkel, The Good Soldiers: A grueling, depressing book about the 2007 “surge” in Iraq from the perspective of a group of American soldiers. Finkel is at his most harrowing when describing the physical wounds inflicted by modern combat, though the psychic damage also comes through as well. They’re very good soldiers, but there is a hollowness at the core of the fight, and that matters—to them and to us.
Ed Conway, The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944: J. M. Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy: Conway tells the story of this meeting, where the principals—including Russia—agreed on just enough to shape the global order for several decades. It could have used more economic theory, but at its core are the exchange rate, the inflation rate, and the flow of money into and out of a country (capital controls). A country can control only two out of three of these things; it has to pick (or pretend). Bretton Woods was about agreeing on how exchange rates would be managed so that countries could set monetary/inflation policies internally; it lasted until the 1970s and delivered us into the next, neoliberal phase. Though Keynes gets most of the credit, he was actually outmaneuvered by the Americans (because Britain didn’t have any power left—it wasn’t exactly his fault, though his arrogance didn’t help).
Kevin Peraino, A Force So Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth of Modern China, 1949: A political history of US-China relations in 1949, including what became the Republic of China (Taiwan) though the principals don’t get mentioned in the subhead. I ended up with a better sense of just how much the world looked like whack-a-mole to US policymakers in the aftermath of WWII, with Britain’s power definitively broken, and how Mao both respected and rejected Soviet Communism.
Frederic Wehrey, The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya: After Qadafi, Libya disintegrated into warring groups, each struggling for power even if just in some small area. Wehrey talks to people (mostly men) from many different walks of life, conveying the terror of having one’s country fall apart. Hey, it’s another terrible, depressing story of political failure.
Andrew W. Kahrl, The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South: Another chapter in the extended story of white expropriation of black labor and land. Racial and environmental exploitation went hand in hand; segregation on the beaches became more important to whites as whites saw more value in beachgoing and beach-adjacent property. Blacks were barred from swimming in pleasant areas and blamed for letting their children run wild if those hot and summer-sweaty children strayed into white areas (and were beaten or worse) or swam and drowned in non-humanly dangerous areas. When African-Americans agitated for beach access, they were met with protest or with “beaches” exposed to raw sewage and denied lifeguards. Still, black people carved out spaces of their own—which have now mostly been lost.
The book is also an excellent demonstration of the truth in Carol Rose’s work on the significant but undersung role of pleasure in property law—especially in the law relating to water and its associated shores. It’s further an excellent illustration of Ta-Nahesi Coates’ argument about white expropriation of black wealth, which was repeated, coordinated, reinforced by overlapping levels of government and private agreements, and kicked into panic gear whenever African-Americans seemed to be accumulating sufficient land to provide them with security/less need to depend on whites (to which something like intellectual property or success in sports might intriguingly and sadly be contrasted).
“Working within discriminatory real estate markets and denied equal access to credit, African Americans with ambitions to own land and start businesses were often led to enter into dubious investment schemes, take out large loans on usurious terms, or engage in other necessary risks in order to achieve the American dream of landed and economic independence.” If the contract terms weren’t bad enough, white businesses would conspire to destroy black competition, often with the assistance of local governments and their permit powers, and in extremis there was always fire or other acts of terrorism to destroy working capital. Discriminatorily assessed local property taxes, insulated from outside scrutiny, were also deployed to prevent blacks from living in areas whites wanted for themselves. Internal divisions among African-Americans led some “higher-class” (and often lighter-skinned) people to try to exclude others they perceived as socially beneath them using language indistinguishable from that of the politer white racists, though this wasn’t aided by government as it would have been with whites—instead, Maryland sheriffs underpoliced African-American beach areas, allowing both whites and blacks to misbehave.
Even successfully participating in capitalism could mean extracting wealth from fellow African-Americans, often the only apparent source of advancement. Then in later years, when formal segregation was no longer legal and the land became valuable to white people, distant heirs might force a sale at below-market rates for a small share of what was otherwise worthless to them. “Fifty years ago, a wooden groin topped with a metal fence extended into the waters off Hampton’s shore [in Virginia], dividing ‘white’ from ‘colored’ sand and water and, perhaps fittingly, accelerating rates of erosion on both sides.” Now there are expensive homes and colorblind, facially neutral regimes that somehow still end up with white people on top.
Douglas Brinkley, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: History of a D-Day assault on a highly defended point that needed to be taken for the overall success of the landing, intertwined with the history of Ronald Reagan’s speech commemorating the incident on the fortieth anniversary of the landing. They were brave men indeed; Brinkley argues that the speech was an important part of creating the image of “the greatest generation,” who until then had been largely silent about their WWII experiences.
John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup: History of Theranos from the WSJ reporter who broke much of the story of its lying and cheating. Its founder worshiped Steve Jobs and claimed to have invented a new technology that would make home blood tests simple and painless, but couldn’t deliver and kept doubling down on the fantasy. She even convinced Walgreens and Safeway that she could help them destroy their competition. Carreyrou doesn’t spend much time on what made the decisionmakers tick, whether that’s Elizabeth Holmes (who he at the end calls a sociopath, without elaboration) or the people who kept funding her, though he does better with the people in the middle—the ones who tolerated the scam for as long as they could in the hopes of improvement or because they were scared of having their lives destroyed.
Ken Jennings, Planet Funny: Jennings has written a witty book about the creep of humor into every aspect of our lives, from advertising to news to ordinary interactions (especially on social media). I think the point is to end up disturbed about the very serious problems of the world around us—a version of the “against irony” stuff we’ve seen before. But Jennings doesn’t push too hard on this, and I did think he had a point about appreciating and attending to that which is not funny.
David Finkel, The Good Soldiers: A grueling, depressing book about the 2007 “surge” in Iraq from the perspective of a group of American soldiers. Finkel is at his most harrowing when describing the physical wounds inflicted by modern combat, though the psychic damage also comes through as well. They’re very good soldiers, but there is a hollowness at the core of the fight, and that matters—to them and to us.
Ed Conway, The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944: J. M. Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy: Conway tells the story of this meeting, where the principals—including Russia—agreed on just enough to shape the global order for several decades. It could have used more economic theory, but at its core are the exchange rate, the inflation rate, and the flow of money into and out of a country (capital controls). A country can control only two out of three of these things; it has to pick (or pretend). Bretton Woods was about agreeing on how exchange rates would be managed so that countries could set monetary/inflation policies internally; it lasted until the 1970s and delivered us into the next, neoliberal phase. Though Keynes gets most of the credit, he was actually outmaneuvered by the Americans (because Britain didn’t have any power left—it wasn’t exactly his fault, though his arrogance didn’t help).
Kevin Peraino, A Force So Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth of Modern China, 1949: A political history of US-China relations in 1949, including what became the Republic of China (Taiwan) though the principals don’t get mentioned in the subhead. I ended up with a better sense of just how much the world looked like whack-a-mole to US policymakers in the aftermath of WWII, with Britain’s power definitively broken, and how Mao both respected and rejected Soviet Communism.
Frederic Wehrey, The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya: After Qadafi, Libya disintegrated into warring groups, each struggling for power even if just in some small area. Wehrey talks to people (mostly men) from many different walks of life, conveying the terror of having one’s country fall apart. Hey, it’s another terrible, depressing story of political failure.
Andrew W. Kahrl, The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South: Another chapter in the extended story of white expropriation of black labor and land. Racial and environmental exploitation went hand in hand; segregation on the beaches became more important to whites as whites saw more value in beachgoing and beach-adjacent property. Blacks were barred from swimming in pleasant areas and blamed for letting their children run wild if those hot and summer-sweaty children strayed into white areas (and were beaten or worse) or swam and drowned in non-humanly dangerous areas. When African-Americans agitated for beach access, they were met with protest or with “beaches” exposed to raw sewage and denied lifeguards. Still, black people carved out spaces of their own—which have now mostly been lost.
The book is also an excellent demonstration of the truth in Carol Rose’s work on the significant but undersung role of pleasure in property law—especially in the law relating to water and its associated shores. It’s further an excellent illustration of Ta-Nahesi Coates’ argument about white expropriation of black wealth, which was repeated, coordinated, reinforced by overlapping levels of government and private agreements, and kicked into panic gear whenever African-Americans seemed to be accumulating sufficient land to provide them with security/less need to depend on whites (to which something like intellectual property or success in sports might intriguingly and sadly be contrasted).
“Working within discriminatory real estate markets and denied equal access to credit, African Americans with ambitions to own land and start businesses were often led to enter into dubious investment schemes, take out large loans on usurious terms, or engage in other necessary risks in order to achieve the American dream of landed and economic independence.” If the contract terms weren’t bad enough, white businesses would conspire to destroy black competition, often with the assistance of local governments and their permit powers, and in extremis there was always fire or other acts of terrorism to destroy working capital. Discriminatorily assessed local property taxes, insulated from outside scrutiny, were also deployed to prevent blacks from living in areas whites wanted for themselves. Internal divisions among African-Americans led some “higher-class” (and often lighter-skinned) people to try to exclude others they perceived as socially beneath them using language indistinguishable from that of the politer white racists, though this wasn’t aided by government as it would have been with whites—instead, Maryland sheriffs underpoliced African-American beach areas, allowing both whites and blacks to misbehave.
Even successfully participating in capitalism could mean extracting wealth from fellow African-Americans, often the only apparent source of advancement. Then in later years, when formal segregation was no longer legal and the land became valuable to white people, distant heirs might force a sale at below-market rates for a small share of what was otherwise worthless to them. “Fifty years ago, a wooden groin topped with a metal fence extended into the waters off Hampton’s shore [in Virginia], dividing ‘white’ from ‘colored’ sand and water and, perhaps fittingly, accelerating rates of erosion on both sides.” Now there are expensive homes and colorblind, facially neutral regimes that somehow still end up with white people on top.
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