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Adam Higgenbotham, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space: I’m not the target audience for this book, a minute-by-minute account of the years that led up to the Challenger explosion and what happened afterwards. I don’t actually want a minute-by-minute account! I want discussion of key events and larger forces. That pretty much gets lost in the morass of detail, which isn’t that important to me except for the key decisions made in the last few days leading up to the launch. It did occur to me that the explosion itself would be unlikely today, regardless of agency culture, since (1) Florida doesn’t get that cold any more, and (2) weather forecasts have improved so substantially that they might well have been able to launch before the cold came in if they’d had today’s technology.
Alison Arngrim, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated: Another Hollywood memoir by a child actress turned stand-up comedian. She writes frankly about the sexual abuse she experienced in her family and the escape she found on set.
Jonathan Haslam, The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II: Overly long, but focuses on the Europeans outside Germany and also on events in the USSR. On the one hand, fear of Communist takeover led to lots of European non-opposition or even support for fascists in Germany as the superior alternative. On the other, the USSR hoped that fascists would weaken the democracies and hurry revolutions. They were all badly wrong and almost everyone paid for it.
Into the Desert: Reflections on the Gulf War, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel: Set of essays by supporters of the first Iraq war (and critics of how the second one was fought, if not critics at the time), mainly arguing that it was a just war with an appropriately limited scope—get Iraq out of Kuwait. It’s interesting to consider the arguments about what not going to war would have looked like: a sanctions regime would still have left Iraq extremely powerful and likely able to force Saudi Arabia to behave in ways more to its liking. Would that really have been more unstable than what we got? The optimistic view is that the botched second Iraq invasion makes that counterfactual hard to evaluate, but one could also take the lesson that the US is broadly unable to predict the risks, costs, or benefits of its actions in the region.
Andrew M. Wehrman, The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution: Super interesting book about public health (and, always in American history, slavery). The key thing to understand is that smallpox inoculation was not vaccination: inoculated people carried live smallpox until their own, mostly mild, infection passed, meaning that inoculation protected the inoculee but endangered people who were not inoculated (or past survivors of smallpox). Natural smallpox had a death rate around 30%; inoculation had a death rate around 2%. And doctors wanted to charge a lot for inoculation and the necessary isolation. Thus, private inoculation imposed only costs on others, while universal inoculation of a town, with affordable prices imposed and often financed by the local government, shut down commerce for a month but provided greater security (and some even proposed to switch to a system of inoculating children regularly, so that security persisted over time). When poor people rioted or protested inoculation, it was private inoculation they opposed and often universal inoculation they sought. (Given the death rate from inoculation, it also often made sense to try isolation instead and only inoculate if the risk of an outbreak was high.) In the north, citizens occasionally got universal inoculation, although bans on private inoculation were often evaded or defied by the rich. In Virginia, by contrast, the law allowed householders to inoculate as long as they posted signs—a boon to the rich, although they often only inoculated their families and left enslaved people unprotected. George Washington’s mandatory inoculation of troops was a switch from his earlier position against it because of the risks to an army of being out of contention for several weeks at least; his wife’s successful inoculation seems to have helped persuade him. Wehrman frames the debates as a contrast in views of liberty: the liberty to inoculate in private, regardless of the risks to others, versus the liberty to decide as a polity on how to protect public health.
David Bellos & Alexandre Montagu, Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs: OK, I’m not the audience for this, but if you want a layperson-oriented book about how copyright got so bloated, you might enjoy this one. Useful statistics on just how dominant English is in terms of what gets translated from/to, and likewise the US is dominant in receiving royalties. Limiting the right to control translation, as they suggest, might change a bit of that, though copyright can’t create demand itself. The most interesting part for me was the chapter on Soviet copyright, “simultaneously wildly generous and highly dubious.” Authors couldn’t block publication and royalties were often paid to the state, but popular prose writers were entitled to at least 100 per cent of the retail price; advances and royalties were subject to fixed scales “based on the political standing and official position of the author.” Belonging to the Writers’ Union conferred access to better housing and luxury goods. “At its peak, the union had more than ten thousand members, who were collectively far better remunerated than any ten thousand full-time writers (if there ever were so many!) in the United States. However, works by emigrants, works not approved for publication, and works by non-Soviet authors were not remunerated at all.” Soviet poets held readings in football stadiums and new printings of classic works came out in runs of 100,000—but of course censorship and privation were also features of the system.
Monica Hesse, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land: True crime story of serial arsonists in rural Virginia. Aspires to be about more—folie a deux, what it’s like when there are so many abandoned buildings so far spread out that it’s easy to burn a bunch down without being caught—but ultimately is just kind of a newspaper report.
Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis: There are a couple of paragraphs in this interesting book about how African-Americans interpreted the Bible and how American Jews did, but mostly it’s about how white Americans and Europeans, Protestant and Catholic, thought about the American Civil War, slavery, and race in terms of theological debates. Was Catholicism akin to slavery because of its adherence to the Pope, or was the individual interpretation of the Bible promoted by Protestantism the foundation for chaos and sectionalism? Could God’s intent be seen directly, as evangelical Christianity generally claimed, or only obscurely, as Lincoln suggested in the Gettysburg Address? Did the New Testament reject slavery, or enshrine it? The whole idea of not debating with a sacred text is a bit alien to me, but I was particularly interested in the idea that things that American Christians found troubling were distinct from the things that European Christians did. Most prominently, American Christians, pro and anti-slavery, took very seriously the question of whether the Bible supported slavery, while Europeans were much more likely to see American racial, hereditary slavery as easily distinguishable from Hebrew slavery and to focus on American racism.
Henry Reynolds, Why Weren't We Told?: Mostly a personal narrative of a white Australian historian about the failures of representing the country’s past with respect to Indigenous people. It was an interesting contrast to books about the US: white Australians told themselves that the native peoples didn’t resist colonization, suppressing lots of history about violent attacks, and using that putative lack of resistance as evidence of “savage” inferiority; white Americans told themselves that native peoples resisted colonization and thus needed to be exterminated. Both narratives end in the same place—pretending that native peoples existed only in the past and were not influential then. White Australians had to engage in a fair amount of retconning, not just about violence committed by and against native peoples but also about native land title—including the fact that nineteenth-century settlers, including government entities, fully acknowledged that native groups had rights in land.
Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten 20th Century: Collection of review essays, mostly about a single thinker or book, mostly pretty negative. Judt writes painfully accurately—15 years ago!—about Israel and Palestine; in other cases, the interesting thing is how much 15 years can change in terms of which countries seem to be flailing around.
Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure: Explores a number of technologies that never took off for various reasons, reminding us not to draw lessons solely from successful innovations. Survivor bias is real and easy to fall into!
Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Chayes went to Afghanistan after 9/11 as an NPR reporter, and stayed to work on democratization/reconstruction initiatives. She offers an account of Afghanistan’s history of being conquered and then throwing off the conquerors, mainly by resisting any central governance, though she argues that the Russian invasion changed things by being so widespread and bloody that PTSD is a dominant factor in subsequent events. She also suggests (sometimes by her own example) how American assumptions and lack of knowledge interacted with Afghan cultural practices in the worst possible way—Americans listened to the words, while Afghans looked to see who was sitting with whom, and when Americans made common cause with warlords, that spoke for itself. She blames Pakistani interference, and American unwillingness to recognize that their supposed allies were acting against them, for a lot of the chaos. She also details exactly what it meant for American attention to leave Afghanistan for the new Iraq war, though things weren’t exactly going swimmingly before then. The narrative ends in 2006, but you can see why the next fifteen years didn’t improve.
Karen E. Fields & Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life: Essays about the construction of race in the US. I was bleakly amused by one argument: racists insist that their claims about biology are truth-telling and that opposition is "political correctness," but the authors argue that no one attributes the demise of the anti-immigrant narrative of "inferior white races" to political correctness. Except they were a bit optimistic about that, since JD Vance and others are reviving it. A key argument is about the rhetorical forms that attribute causation to a Black person's skin color and not to a racist act: if you say that the cops killed a fellow (Black) cop "because of his skin color," you should wonder "why don't white cops get killed by black cops for the same reason?"
Marjoleine Kars, Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast: Story of a 1763 rebellion by thousands of slaves, many African-born, in the Dutch colony of Berbice, in what is now Guyana. The Dutch eventually defeated the rebellion by keeping supply lines open. Kars is sensitive to why enslaved people might have feared that rebellion would end with worse conditions, as they did in fact for almost everyone involved. She also emphasizes that the leaders often wanted to keep slaves of their own, usually based on preexisting ethnic divisions (African tribes, Indigenous peoples, and “Maroons”).
Bruce H. Franklin, Most Important Fish in the Sea: A depressing book about how we’ve devastated menhaden, who have two important ecological jobs: feeding other fish that taste a lot better to humans, and eating plankton to keep water clear and fend off things like algal blooms. A monopolist is the remaining player in the industry, and it keeps killing off huge percentages each year because it can sell the resulting slurry for hog feed and other low-quality, high-substitute uses. Whoops.
Susan Stranahan et al., Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster: Fukushima is not a climate change story, but it is a story about how nuclear design has not been required to take extreme scenarios seriously, such as an accident that cuts power to the plant—required for cooling, which itself is required to avoid meltdown—for more than 12 hours. I myself am willing to consider nuclear power as part of the mix, but I was convinced that I shouldn’t trust existing US regulators to make reactors safe (US standards are extremely influential, but they decided there was nothing to learn from Fukushima’s exposure to supposedly impossible conditions).
Lauren Benton, They Called It Peace: History of how Europeans defined war, as against violent conditions other than war, as they fought in Europe and in areas they colonized. They were far more likely to consider that non-Europeans weren’t engaged in war, as opposed to brigandage and resistance to lawful government. I found it somewhat underwhelming.
Benjamin C. Waterhouse, One Day I'll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America: Cultural history of the myths Americans tell ourselves about small businesses/self-employment. Primary among them: they’re job creators. Reality: The proportion of jobs “created” by small business has been essentially static for decades; most businesses fail; most “small businesses” lack even one employee. Small businesses/self-employment are far more prevalent in other countries where the economy is much worse—self-employment is often the best of a bad set of options, both in the US and elsewhere. More significantly, the rhetoric of small business innovation functions to (1) assure people that they are on their own, with no structures in place to help them, (2) suppress employee rights, including minimum wage increases and health care, and (3) obscure the big businesses behind supposedly entrepreneurial endeavors—although I think we may have finally seen the truth with the “gig” economy that is nothing but enriching the middlemen. But then again, the same promises were made and broken before, including with multi-level marketing, so maybe we aren’t going to learn.
Alison Arngrim, Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated: Another Hollywood memoir by a child actress turned stand-up comedian. She writes frankly about the sexual abuse she experienced in her family and the escape she found on set.
Jonathan Haslam, The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II: Overly long, but focuses on the Europeans outside Germany and also on events in the USSR. On the one hand, fear of Communist takeover led to lots of European non-opposition or even support for fascists in Germany as the superior alternative. On the other, the USSR hoped that fascists would weaken the democracies and hurry revolutions. They were all badly wrong and almost everyone paid for it.
Into the Desert: Reflections on the Gulf War, ed. Jeffrey A. Engel: Set of essays by supporters of the first Iraq war (and critics of how the second one was fought, if not critics at the time), mainly arguing that it was a just war with an appropriately limited scope—get Iraq out of Kuwait. It’s interesting to consider the arguments about what not going to war would have looked like: a sanctions regime would still have left Iraq extremely powerful and likely able to force Saudi Arabia to behave in ways more to its liking. Would that really have been more unstable than what we got? The optimistic view is that the botched second Iraq invasion makes that counterfactual hard to evaluate, but one could also take the lesson that the US is broadly unable to predict the risks, costs, or benefits of its actions in the region.
Andrew M. Wehrman, The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution: Super interesting book about public health (and, always in American history, slavery). The key thing to understand is that smallpox inoculation was not vaccination: inoculated people carried live smallpox until their own, mostly mild, infection passed, meaning that inoculation protected the inoculee but endangered people who were not inoculated (or past survivors of smallpox). Natural smallpox had a death rate around 30%; inoculation had a death rate around 2%. And doctors wanted to charge a lot for inoculation and the necessary isolation. Thus, private inoculation imposed only costs on others, while universal inoculation of a town, with affordable prices imposed and often financed by the local government, shut down commerce for a month but provided greater security (and some even proposed to switch to a system of inoculating children regularly, so that security persisted over time). When poor people rioted or protested inoculation, it was private inoculation they opposed and often universal inoculation they sought. (Given the death rate from inoculation, it also often made sense to try isolation instead and only inoculate if the risk of an outbreak was high.) In the north, citizens occasionally got universal inoculation, although bans on private inoculation were often evaded or defied by the rich. In Virginia, by contrast, the law allowed householders to inoculate as long as they posted signs—a boon to the rich, although they often only inoculated their families and left enslaved people unprotected. George Washington’s mandatory inoculation of troops was a switch from his earlier position against it because of the risks to an army of being out of contention for several weeks at least; his wife’s successful inoculation seems to have helped persuade him. Wehrman frames the debates as a contrast in views of liberty: the liberty to inoculate in private, regardless of the risks to others, versus the liberty to decide as a polity on how to protect public health.
David Bellos & Alexandre Montagu, Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs: OK, I’m not the audience for this, but if you want a layperson-oriented book about how copyright got so bloated, you might enjoy this one. Useful statistics on just how dominant English is in terms of what gets translated from/to, and likewise the US is dominant in receiving royalties. Limiting the right to control translation, as they suggest, might change a bit of that, though copyright can’t create demand itself. The most interesting part for me was the chapter on Soviet copyright, “simultaneously wildly generous and highly dubious.” Authors couldn’t block publication and royalties were often paid to the state, but popular prose writers were entitled to at least 100 per cent of the retail price; advances and royalties were subject to fixed scales “based on the political standing and official position of the author.” Belonging to the Writers’ Union conferred access to better housing and luxury goods. “At its peak, the union had more than ten thousand members, who were collectively far better remunerated than any ten thousand full-time writers (if there ever were so many!) in the United States. However, works by emigrants, works not approved for publication, and works by non-Soviet authors were not remunerated at all.” Soviet poets held readings in football stadiums and new printings of classic works came out in runs of 100,000—but of course censorship and privation were also features of the system.
Monica Hesse, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land: True crime story of serial arsonists in rural Virginia. Aspires to be about more—folie a deux, what it’s like when there are so many abandoned buildings so far spread out that it’s easy to burn a bunch down without being caught—but ultimately is just kind of a newspaper report.
Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis: There are a couple of paragraphs in this interesting book about how African-Americans interpreted the Bible and how American Jews did, but mostly it’s about how white Americans and Europeans, Protestant and Catholic, thought about the American Civil War, slavery, and race in terms of theological debates. Was Catholicism akin to slavery because of its adherence to the Pope, or was the individual interpretation of the Bible promoted by Protestantism the foundation for chaos and sectionalism? Could God’s intent be seen directly, as evangelical Christianity generally claimed, or only obscurely, as Lincoln suggested in the Gettysburg Address? Did the New Testament reject slavery, or enshrine it? The whole idea of not debating with a sacred text is a bit alien to me, but I was particularly interested in the idea that things that American Christians found troubling were distinct from the things that European Christians did. Most prominently, American Christians, pro and anti-slavery, took very seriously the question of whether the Bible supported slavery, while Europeans were much more likely to see American racial, hereditary slavery as easily distinguishable from Hebrew slavery and to focus on American racism.
Henry Reynolds, Why Weren't We Told?: Mostly a personal narrative of a white Australian historian about the failures of representing the country’s past with respect to Indigenous people. It was an interesting contrast to books about the US: white Australians told themselves that the native peoples didn’t resist colonization, suppressing lots of history about violent attacks, and using that putative lack of resistance as evidence of “savage” inferiority; white Americans told themselves that native peoples resisted colonization and thus needed to be exterminated. Both narratives end in the same place—pretending that native peoples existed only in the past and were not influential then. White Australians had to engage in a fair amount of retconning, not just about violence committed by and against native peoples but also about native land title—including the fact that nineteenth-century settlers, including government entities, fully acknowledged that native groups had rights in land.
Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten 20th Century: Collection of review essays, mostly about a single thinker or book, mostly pretty negative. Judt writes painfully accurately—15 years ago!—about Israel and Palestine; in other cases, the interesting thing is how much 15 years can change in terms of which countries seem to be flailing around.
Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure: Explores a number of technologies that never took off for various reasons, reminding us not to draw lessons solely from successful innovations. Survivor bias is real and easy to fall into!
Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Chayes went to Afghanistan after 9/11 as an NPR reporter, and stayed to work on democratization/reconstruction initiatives. She offers an account of Afghanistan’s history of being conquered and then throwing off the conquerors, mainly by resisting any central governance, though she argues that the Russian invasion changed things by being so widespread and bloody that PTSD is a dominant factor in subsequent events. She also suggests (sometimes by her own example) how American assumptions and lack of knowledge interacted with Afghan cultural practices in the worst possible way—Americans listened to the words, while Afghans looked to see who was sitting with whom, and when Americans made common cause with warlords, that spoke for itself. She blames Pakistani interference, and American unwillingness to recognize that their supposed allies were acting against them, for a lot of the chaos. She also details exactly what it meant for American attention to leave Afghanistan for the new Iraq war, though things weren’t exactly going swimmingly before then. The narrative ends in 2006, but you can see why the next fifteen years didn’t improve.
Karen E. Fields & Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life: Essays about the construction of race in the US. I was bleakly amused by one argument: racists insist that their claims about biology are truth-telling and that opposition is "political correctness," but the authors argue that no one attributes the demise of the anti-immigrant narrative of "inferior white races" to political correctness. Except they were a bit optimistic about that, since JD Vance and others are reviving it. A key argument is about the rhetorical forms that attribute causation to a Black person's skin color and not to a racist act: if you say that the cops killed a fellow (Black) cop "because of his skin color," you should wonder "why don't white cops get killed by black cops for the same reason?"
Marjoleine Kars, Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast: Story of a 1763 rebellion by thousands of slaves, many African-born, in the Dutch colony of Berbice, in what is now Guyana. The Dutch eventually defeated the rebellion by keeping supply lines open. Kars is sensitive to why enslaved people might have feared that rebellion would end with worse conditions, as they did in fact for almost everyone involved. She also emphasizes that the leaders often wanted to keep slaves of their own, usually based on preexisting ethnic divisions (African tribes, Indigenous peoples, and “Maroons”).
Bruce H. Franklin, Most Important Fish in the Sea: A depressing book about how we’ve devastated menhaden, who have two important ecological jobs: feeding other fish that taste a lot better to humans, and eating plankton to keep water clear and fend off things like algal blooms. A monopolist is the remaining player in the industry, and it keeps killing off huge percentages each year because it can sell the resulting slurry for hog feed and other low-quality, high-substitute uses. Whoops.
Susan Stranahan et al., Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster: Fukushima is not a climate change story, but it is a story about how nuclear design has not been required to take extreme scenarios seriously, such as an accident that cuts power to the plant—required for cooling, which itself is required to avoid meltdown—for more than 12 hours. I myself am willing to consider nuclear power as part of the mix, but I was convinced that I shouldn’t trust existing US regulators to make reactors safe (US standards are extremely influential, but they decided there was nothing to learn from Fukushima’s exposure to supposedly impossible conditions).
Lauren Benton, They Called It Peace: History of how Europeans defined war, as against violent conditions other than war, as they fought in Europe and in areas they colonized. They were far more likely to consider that non-Europeans weren’t engaged in war, as opposed to brigandage and resistance to lawful government. I found it somewhat underwhelming.
Benjamin C. Waterhouse, One Day I'll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America: Cultural history of the myths Americans tell ourselves about small businesses/self-employment. Primary among them: they’re job creators. Reality: The proportion of jobs “created” by small business has been essentially static for decades; most businesses fail; most “small businesses” lack even one employee. Small businesses/self-employment are far more prevalent in other countries where the economy is much worse—self-employment is often the best of a bad set of options, both in the US and elsewhere. More significantly, the rhetoric of small business innovation functions to (1) assure people that they are on their own, with no structures in place to help them, (2) suppress employee rights, including minimum wage increases and health care, and (3) obscure the big businesses behind supposedly entrepreneurial endeavors—although I think we may have finally seen the truth with the “gig” economy that is nothing but enriching the middlemen. But then again, the same promises were made and broken before, including with multi-level marketing, so maybe we aren’t going to learn.
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