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Nonfiction
Martha Hodes, My Hijacking: A historian was, as a child, hijacked with her sister on a flight from Israel. Her memories—or lack thereof—form a contrast to what she discovers when researching the event as a historian would. It’s both a personal history and a story about the way that people make memories into history and how all records, including diary entries, are created for a particular audience.
Arthur Holland Michel, Eyes in the Sky: In real “torment nexus” fashion, innovators in aerial surveillance, including integrating multiple systems to track people from above and from ground-level security cameras and using machine learning to allow hugely scaled-up operations, turn out to have been inspired by the film Enemy of the State. The tracking displayed in that movie wasn’t possible at the time, but is now. Good luck!
Ralph Watson McElvenny & Marc Wortman, The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived : Tom Watson Jr. And the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age: Coauthored by one of Watson Jr.’s grandsons, this is a relatively hagiographic book with some interesting bits, including an interesting overview of the stop-at-nothing tactics Watson Sr. learned at American Cash Register to create monopolies and crush competitors (his conviction for monopolization was overturned on appeal). Also of Watson Jr.’s dyslexia and depression (undiagnosed) and their relationship to the unworthiness he felt given his need to follow in his famous father’s footsteps, along with the privilege that let him succeed despite these barriers, which led to several expulsions. Both father and son benefited from, and (unusually for business titans) publicly supported, the New Deal and later the Great Society and their expansion of the need for calculating machines.
The head of IBM’s German subsidiary was a fervent Nazi, but the company’s machines and punchcards were at the time incapable of tracking individual Jews, contrary to what was sometimes claimed. Still, its tabulators were used to manage both the military and concentration camps. While the son was less naïve about global politics than the father, both were committed to treating employees very well, not just to avoid unionization but to motivate and reward performance; IBM famously didn’t lay anyone off during the Great Depression and kept it up until the 1980s, when so many things went wrong in American capitalism. Watson Jr. gave factory workers a salary, not just an hourly wage, and really did seem to have a service ethos, reducing his own salary so as not to be a “pig.” Before Brown v. Board of Education, IBM refused to segregate its southern factories. Junior took a big bet on general purpose computing that nearly destroyed the company before it paid off. I also learned that, initially, he didn’t want to call the new machines “computers,” because that was already the name of a job and he didn’t want worker backlash.
Scott Reynolds Nelson, Oceans of Grain: World history told through the story of control over grain, and its transport, as a key factor. Interesting way to do it, especially as it illuminates how valuable Ukraine is to any European power.
Sarah Milov, The Cigarette:History focusing on the dynamics of growing tobacco (as a complement to The Cigarette Century, a book that is far more focused on selling cigarettes). Unsurprisingly there are huge racial dynamics at play, including the infuriating details about racial discrimination in allocation of growing quotas in the New Deal. I had forgotten/perhaps never really known how long tobacco growing subsidies lasted even as the consensus on the health dangers of smoking lasted. Also really interesting discussion of how the antismoking movement was led by educated white women and took on NIMBY aspects, as well as leveraging “rights talk” pioneered by other movements to assert a right to smoke-free spaces.
cut-tag difficulties mean you just get these short takes:
John Bew, Clement Attlee: I didn’t know much about Attlee; this book is a little long for an amateur but it gave a good sense of his rise as a politician in an age when it was possible to do that out of solid political conviction coupled with personal awkwardness. His clarity of vision and willingness to work with others, Bew argues, are significantly responsible for the enactment of Britain’s New Deal; he was also not committed to keeping the Empire in place, unlike Churchill.
Adam Goodheart, The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth: History of outsiders’ attempts to encounter people living on a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Goodheart recounts what’s known about them (not much, other than that they are violent towards outsiders) and how the related tribes near them have slowly started to have more and more outside contact.
Robin Higham, Mark Parillo, & Richard B. Myers, The Influence of Airpower upon History: My takeaway—though not the authors’—is that claims for its importance are overstated, but controlling the air is very important to winning battles now. That said, winning the war takes second place to winning the peace, as we’ve seen again and again.
Barbara Tversky, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought: Interesting if occasionally repetitive book on how our physicality channels our thinking, and how we think with our bodies—I loved the finding that preventing people from using their hands while they talk makes them worse at verbal explanations.
S.C. Gwynne, His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine: Highly recommended! You know that this ship is going down, but each chapter before the denouement is basically about a different reason that airships were never going to do what their proponents wanted because of unresolvable engineering problems. This story is also about British attempts to use technology to shorten distances between imperial outposts and thus enhance their control, which contributed to their unwillingness to press pause on the airship program.
Kidada E. Williams, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction: Black freedom prompted all-out white backlash. Reconstruction “did not simply fail; white conservatives overthrew it.” They targeted Black homes as well as other spaces that should have offered safety. Depressing but detailed.
Vicki Howard, From Main Street to Mall: History of the rise and fall of department stores and their replacement by Wal-Mart; despite the tectonic shifts in the economy represented, the book is fairly bloodless.
Arthur Holland Michel, Eyes in the Sky: In real “torment nexus” fashion, innovators in aerial surveillance, including integrating multiple systems to track people from above and from ground-level security cameras and using machine learning to allow hugely scaled-up operations, turn out to have been inspired by the film Enemy of the State. The tracking displayed in that movie wasn’t possible at the time, but is now. Good luck!
Ralph Watson McElvenny & Marc Wortman, The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived : Tom Watson Jr. And the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age: Coauthored by one of Watson Jr.’s grandsons, this is a relatively hagiographic book with some interesting bits, including an interesting overview of the stop-at-nothing tactics Watson Sr. learned at American Cash Register to create monopolies and crush competitors (his conviction for monopolization was overturned on appeal). Also of Watson Jr.’s dyslexia and depression (undiagnosed) and their relationship to the unworthiness he felt given his need to follow in his famous father’s footsteps, along with the privilege that let him succeed despite these barriers, which led to several expulsions. Both father and son benefited from, and (unusually for business titans) publicly supported, the New Deal and later the Great Society and their expansion of the need for calculating machines.
The head of IBM’s German subsidiary was a fervent Nazi, but the company’s machines and punchcards were at the time incapable of tracking individual Jews, contrary to what was sometimes claimed. Still, its tabulators were used to manage both the military and concentration camps. While the son was less naïve about global politics than the father, both were committed to treating employees very well, not just to avoid unionization but to motivate and reward performance; IBM famously didn’t lay anyone off during the Great Depression and kept it up until the 1980s, when so many things went wrong in American capitalism. Watson Jr. gave factory workers a salary, not just an hourly wage, and really did seem to have a service ethos, reducing his own salary so as not to be a “pig.” Before Brown v. Board of Education, IBM refused to segregate its southern factories. Junior took a big bet on general purpose computing that nearly destroyed the company before it paid off. I also learned that, initially, he didn’t want to call the new machines “computers,” because that was already the name of a job and he didn’t want worker backlash.
Scott Reynolds Nelson, Oceans of Grain: World history told through the story of control over grain, and its transport, as a key factor. Interesting way to do it, especially as it illuminates how valuable Ukraine is to any European power.
Sarah Milov, The Cigarette:History focusing on the dynamics of growing tobacco (as a complement to The Cigarette Century, a book that is far more focused on selling cigarettes). Unsurprisingly there are huge racial dynamics at play, including the infuriating details about racial discrimination in allocation of growing quotas in the New Deal. I had forgotten/perhaps never really known how long tobacco growing subsidies lasted even as the consensus on the health dangers of smoking lasted. Also really interesting discussion of how the antismoking movement was led by educated white women and took on NIMBY aspects, as well as leveraging “rights talk” pioneered by other movements to assert a right to smoke-free spaces.
cut-tag difficulties mean you just get these short takes:
John Bew, Clement Attlee: I didn’t know much about Attlee; this book is a little long for an amateur but it gave a good sense of his rise as a politician in an age when it was possible to do that out of solid political conviction coupled with personal awkwardness. His clarity of vision and willingness to work with others, Bew argues, are significantly responsible for the enactment of Britain’s New Deal; he was also not committed to keeping the Empire in place, unlike Churchill.
Adam Goodheart, The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth: History of outsiders’ attempts to encounter people living on a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Goodheart recounts what’s known about them (not much, other than that they are violent towards outsiders) and how the related tribes near them have slowly started to have more and more outside contact.
Robin Higham, Mark Parillo, & Richard B. Myers, The Influence of Airpower upon History: My takeaway—though not the authors’—is that claims for its importance are overstated, but controlling the air is very important to winning battles now. That said, winning the war takes second place to winning the peace, as we’ve seen again and again.
Barbara Tversky, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought: Interesting if occasionally repetitive book on how our physicality channels our thinking, and how we think with our bodies—I loved the finding that preventing people from using their hands while they talk makes them worse at verbal explanations.
S.C. Gwynne, His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine: Highly recommended! You know that this ship is going down, but each chapter before the denouement is basically about a different reason that airships were never going to do what their proponents wanted because of unresolvable engineering problems. This story is also about British attempts to use technology to shorten distances between imperial outposts and thus enhance their control, which contributed to their unwillingness to press pause on the airship program.
Kidada E. Williams, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction: Black freedom prompted all-out white backlash. Reconstruction “did not simply fail; white conservatives overthrew it.” They targeted Black homes as well as other spaces that should have offered safety. Depressing but detailed.
Vicki Howard, From Main Street to Mall: History of the rise and fall of department stores and their replacement by Wal-Mart; despite the tectonic shifts in the economy represented, the book is fairly bloodless.
no subject
Clement Attlee is a bit of a personal hero of mine, I might look into that.