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Nonfiction
I discovered that my mom was even more of a badass than I had known. More to the point, Calvin Trillin knew it and wrote about it in the New Yorker! In 1967, he explained, a recruiter from Dow met a “friendly-looking, dark-haired girl,” and asked her if she was interested in working at Dow. “I’d be more interested in working for Dow if it weren’t doing something criminal,” she said. “I was wondering if a Dow employee could be prosecuted as a war criminal ten or fifteen years from now, under the precedent of Nuremburg.” The recruiter said: “I assume you’re talking about napalm.” My mom: “That, and crop defoliates.” The recruiter said he didn’t think the war crimes prosecuted at Nuremberg were analogous, and they discussed the distinctions he posited. The recruiter said the government decided how to use what Dow supplied, and “Dow made a decision to support our government.” My mom: “Do you think this is what the German manufacturers thought?” The recruiter asked if she was interested in working for Dow. My mom: “I’m interested in the moral position of working for Dow,” and she handed the recruiter a picture of a burned baby. “I’m curious what goes through the head of a Dow employee when he sees some of these pictures.”
Adam Hochschild, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags To Riches To Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes: Jewish immigrant Rose worked in cigar factories but managed to sell stories to Jewish papers. When she got hired at one, she was sent to interview a rich guy who did charitable/leftist stuff, and they fell in love. Later, she became even more radical—she was convicted for her antiwar sentiments during WWI—while he became more conservative. It’s a messy story, but during parts of her life she was the most reported-on woman in the US.
Jason Brennan, Good Work If You Can Get It: Blunt talk about what it’s like to be an academic (most full-time faculty spend most of their time on teaching mostly indifferent undergraduates, not thinking deep thoughts and then publishing them; but most full-time faculty are happy with their jobs) and how to maximize your chances of getting an academic job if you want it. Good advice includes: never pay for a PhD (unless your subfield is one with six-figure jobs outside academia, like certain kinds of engineering). (This is not the same rule as for a Masters.) Go to the best-ranked program you can even if it’s not as good a fit for your interests as lower-ranked programs. Writing is thinking; write first, edit second.
John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: If you will be depressed to read about an earlier pandemic with a much higher mortality rate whose political failures we have duplicated despite knowing much more about science, then skip this! Barry also suffers from bloat/could have used a much more aggressive editor, not just to remove the constant refrain “it was only influenza.” But if you want to see history rhyming and read a lot of biographies of eminent medical men (a few women pop up in the margins, but not with biographical detail), this book can do it. From the indifferent political response from an administration consumed by war and mass media happy to allow that focus (“In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country,” said one source about the violence directed at pacifists/the pro-German), to the coverup/propaganda that destroyed trust, to the wasted lives and resources caused by failure to acknowledge the scope of the pandemic (ships full of men were sent to Europe, there to get sick and burden the Allies), to the disease’s originally unsuspected neurological effects that might help explain why Wilson bungled the peace talks so spectacularly, to the officials blaming disease on foreigners’ living conditions: it’s all there. Barry says that there weren’t racial disparities (he means in the US, because there clearly were worldwide, perhaps because continental North America and Europe were less immunologically naïve to influenzas), though the evidence on which he bases his claim seems thin given the limits of the data. He’s also anti-mask, which seems to have aged badly, and pro-leadership telling the truth, which has not.
Serena Zabin, The Boston Massacre: A Family History: The Boston Massacre, Zabin argues, has been stripped of its context from the very beginning. Even just after it happened, both sides had reasons to deny that the soldiers quartered in Boston had brought and made families that implicated them more in the life of the residents than we assume. “Camp followers” were often wives and children, and were a big part of many British soldiers’ lives; providing for them (and the work the wives did) meant that they were much more integrated into civilian life than the militaries based in foreign places we think about today.
Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession:Tells stories of four women’s very different encounters with crime and its fascinations. An early self-taught/volunteer crime scene investigator/funder of forensic science; a victim’s rights advocate who glommed on to Sharon Tate’s family with what might be both sincerity and opportunism; a woman who fell in love with a man on death row for a crime he likely didn’t commit and who devoted her life to rescuing him; and a young woman who was an online Nazi and flew to Canada supposedly to carry out a mass murder with her online boyfriend, whose equally half-assed planning prevented any death but his own.
Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: State financing, not private investment, lays the groundwork for much valuable innovation, and pretending that it doesn’t has led to the fetishization of private business, the stripping of government capacity, and the collapse of taxation/regulation of the “innovators” who get credit for taking tech the last 10% of the way to widescale implementation. That 10% is important, Mazzucato argues, but it can’t be the only thing we focus on. And that means that government is going to have to take risks, and will sometimes invest in losers. Solyndra goes bankrupt, but Apple is worth hundreds of billions because of investments largely by the US military and related entities in various internet-relevant technologies, and we’re at risk of missing out on green tech if we don’t start investing government resources in basic research and in moving technologies towards commercialization.
Lynn Zubernis, There’ll Be Peace When You Are Done: Fans and actors reflect on the end of SPN, with essays from Jared Padalecki, Jensen Ackles, and others. The fans are often quite moving about what the show has meant to them, including when they critique its fridging origins. The actors speak a lot about inclusivity (both Jesse and César’s actors have pieces, as does Eileen’s, and hers is hilarious and the best of the bunch). Like Joe Biden I guess, the show has grown a lot in its understanding of the world around it.
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood: Really engaging stories, as it says on the tin, of Noah’s childhood and youth; he was born under apartheid when it was criminal for his black mother and Swiss father to have a child. So he was colored, but not lawfully so, and never fit in anywhere. When he was visiting family in the townships, he couldn’t go outside because a representative of the law might see him, arrest his mother, and send him to an orphanage. He also grew up dodging pervasive violence, from the disciplinary beatings of his mother, later the drunken abuse of his stepfather, and the overall dangers of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa for a poor colored kid. As he notes, the end of apartheid “is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets.” It’s very well written.
John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty: Turner argues that Plymouth is often dismissed as a backwater compared to Boston/the Massachusetts colony, but that its struggles over (suppressing) religious freedom and governance are relevant to the larger story of British colonization. Although he tries to give consideration to the experience of Native Americans, women, and enslaved people, it’s relatively hard given who left the records. Given the history of colonists fighting over things like the difference between sprinkling an infant with water during baptism and fully immersing the infant in cold Massachusetts water, I have to wonder what distinctions we make that might look ridiculous in four hundred years.
Eric H. Cline, Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon: Archeologists: they’re just like us! Cline gives a history of the archeologists at Megiddo in Palestine, from the late nineteenth century to the thirties when the world war disrupted the dig. Megiddo has multiple cities on top of one another, so it’s archeologically rich, but this narrative focuses on the personality conflicts among the white people at the dig. Turns out, they are just as petty and slacker-like as anyone else.
Adam Hochschild, Rebel Cinderella: From Rags To Riches To Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes: Jewish immigrant Rose worked in cigar factories but managed to sell stories to Jewish papers. When she got hired at one, she was sent to interview a rich guy who did charitable/leftist stuff, and they fell in love. Later, she became even more radical—she was convicted for her antiwar sentiments during WWI—while he became more conservative. It’s a messy story, but during parts of her life she was the most reported-on woman in the US.
Jason Brennan, Good Work If You Can Get It: Blunt talk about what it’s like to be an academic (most full-time faculty spend most of their time on teaching mostly indifferent undergraduates, not thinking deep thoughts and then publishing them; but most full-time faculty are happy with their jobs) and how to maximize your chances of getting an academic job if you want it. Good advice includes: never pay for a PhD (unless your subfield is one with six-figure jobs outside academia, like certain kinds of engineering). (This is not the same rule as for a Masters.) Go to the best-ranked program you can even if it’s not as good a fit for your interests as lower-ranked programs. Writing is thinking; write first, edit second.
John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: If you will be depressed to read about an earlier pandemic with a much higher mortality rate whose political failures we have duplicated despite knowing much more about science, then skip this! Barry also suffers from bloat/could have used a much more aggressive editor, not just to remove the constant refrain “it was only influenza.” But if you want to see history rhyming and read a lot of biographies of eminent medical men (a few women pop up in the margins, but not with biographical detail), this book can do it. From the indifferent political response from an administration consumed by war and mass media happy to allow that focus (“In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country,” said one source about the violence directed at pacifists/the pro-German), to the coverup/propaganda that destroyed trust, to the wasted lives and resources caused by failure to acknowledge the scope of the pandemic (ships full of men were sent to Europe, there to get sick and burden the Allies), to the disease’s originally unsuspected neurological effects that might help explain why Wilson bungled the peace talks so spectacularly, to the officials blaming disease on foreigners’ living conditions: it’s all there. Barry says that there weren’t racial disparities (he means in the US, because there clearly were worldwide, perhaps because continental North America and Europe were less immunologically naïve to influenzas), though the evidence on which he bases his claim seems thin given the limits of the data. He’s also anti-mask, which seems to have aged badly, and pro-leadership telling the truth, which has not.
Serena Zabin, The Boston Massacre: A Family History: The Boston Massacre, Zabin argues, has been stripped of its context from the very beginning. Even just after it happened, both sides had reasons to deny that the soldiers quartered in Boston had brought and made families that implicated them more in the life of the residents than we assume. “Camp followers” were often wives and children, and were a big part of many British soldiers’ lives; providing for them (and the work the wives did) meant that they were much more integrated into civilian life than the militaries based in foreign places we think about today.
Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession:Tells stories of four women’s very different encounters with crime and its fascinations. An early self-taught/volunteer crime scene investigator/funder of forensic science; a victim’s rights advocate who glommed on to Sharon Tate’s family with what might be both sincerity and opportunism; a woman who fell in love with a man on death row for a crime he likely didn’t commit and who devoted her life to rescuing him; and a young woman who was an online Nazi and flew to Canada supposedly to carry out a mass murder with her online boyfriend, whose equally half-assed planning prevented any death but his own.
Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: State financing, not private investment, lays the groundwork for much valuable innovation, and pretending that it doesn’t has led to the fetishization of private business, the stripping of government capacity, and the collapse of taxation/regulation of the “innovators” who get credit for taking tech the last 10% of the way to widescale implementation. That 10% is important, Mazzucato argues, but it can’t be the only thing we focus on. And that means that government is going to have to take risks, and will sometimes invest in losers. Solyndra goes bankrupt, but Apple is worth hundreds of billions because of investments largely by the US military and related entities in various internet-relevant technologies, and we’re at risk of missing out on green tech if we don’t start investing government resources in basic research and in moving technologies towards commercialization.
Lynn Zubernis, There’ll Be Peace When You Are Done: Fans and actors reflect on the end of SPN, with essays from Jared Padalecki, Jensen Ackles, and others. The fans are often quite moving about what the show has meant to them, including when they critique its fridging origins. The actors speak a lot about inclusivity (both Jesse and César’s actors have pieces, as does Eileen’s, and hers is hilarious and the best of the bunch). Like Joe Biden I guess, the show has grown a lot in its understanding of the world around it.
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood: Really engaging stories, as it says on the tin, of Noah’s childhood and youth; he was born under apartheid when it was criminal for his black mother and Swiss father to have a child. So he was colored, but not lawfully so, and never fit in anywhere. When he was visiting family in the townships, he couldn’t go outside because a representative of the law might see him, arrest his mother, and send him to an orphanage. He also grew up dodging pervasive violence, from the disciplinary beatings of his mother, later the drunken abuse of his stepfather, and the overall dangers of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa for a poor colored kid. As he notes, the end of apartheid “is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets.” It’s very well written.
John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty: Turner argues that Plymouth is often dismissed as a backwater compared to Boston/the Massachusetts colony, but that its struggles over (suppressing) religious freedom and governance are relevant to the larger story of British colonization. Although he tries to give consideration to the experience of Native Americans, women, and enslaved people, it’s relatively hard given who left the records. Given the history of colonists fighting over things like the difference between sprinkling an infant with water during baptism and fully immersing the infant in cold Massachusetts water, I have to wonder what distinctions we make that might look ridiculous in four hundred years.
Eric H. Cline, Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon: Archeologists: they’re just like us! Cline gives a history of the archeologists at Megiddo in Palestine, from the late nineteenth century to the thirties when the world war disrupted the dig. Megiddo has multiple cities on top of one another, so it’s archeologically rich, but this narrative focuses on the personality conflicts among the white people at the dig. Turns out, they are just as petty and slacker-like as anyone else.