The Bolsheviks and Workers Control: 1917-1921 by Maurice Brinton A quick follow-up to my previous book, this is a short work by an anarchist writer from 1972 which examines the evolving attitudes and actions of the Bolsheviks in relation to workers control during the Russian revolution. It methodically exposes the Bolsheviks as a counter-revolutionary elite, seeking from the start merely to replace one despotism with another. Despite calling his party socialist, Lenin had concluded as far back as 1902 (see "What is to be done?") that the working class was unable and unwilling to take power. His platform was one where "the party" would do so on their behalf instead. When in 1917 a revolution occurred and workers control began to become a reality (through the Soviets and factory committees), the Bolsheviks cynically associated themselves with this movement (see "April Theses", "State and Revolution") and used it to gain mass support. But then, having seized power later in the year, they set about dismantling the new organisations. To the extent that they still existed, they were subjected to control from above rather than being instruments of democracy from below. The process took some time as Bolshevik power solidified. Workers control was for a short time permitted subject to party veto. Then the trade unions, which were creatures of the Bolsheviks, were put in control. Finally even these were neutered, with the workers subject to "militarisation" and dissent even within the party crushed. The book ends at the fateful Tenth Party Congress, where factionalism is banned and the NEP is authorised. Brinton examines events step by step, showing that none of this was inevitable and derived solely from the ideas imposed on events by the Bolsheviks. He also shows that the process predated the Civil War, exposing the Trotskyist refrain that these were temporary measures forced on the Bolsheviks by circumstance as being without merit. Regardless of what one may think of his own ideals (perhaps utopian) this is an enlightening work which will be valuable to anyone who wishes to examine this one area in more detail.
Skagboys by Irvine Welsh Welsh's prequel to his celebrated Trainspotting, this one charts the descent of the gang into heroin addiction a couple of years prior. It's not as dark as Trainspotting, nor as funny as it's follow-up Porno, but I'd compare it favorably to much of Welsh's later work, ranking reasonably high in his oeuvre. As with those other novels it's spending time with these fantastic characters as they are put through the wringer of the authors twisted sense of humor, that makes it worthwhile. Highlights include Begbie fathering an illegitimate child, the others doing a stint at rehab to avoid prison time, and some abortive schemes to become drug smugglers. This all darkly takes place against the background of Thatcherism and the AIDS epidemic. Apparently it contains a lot of material that didn't make the final cut of Trainspotting but it's to Welsh's credit that he has woven that into something very worthwhile in its own right.
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Stephen Brusatte Once obsessed with dinosaurs as a young child and now with one of my own developing the same taste, my interest was piqued in refreshing and updating my knowledge on the subject. This is a recent work by a young paleontologist which covers all of the relevant areas - from the rise of the dinosaurs, their heyday, extinction and evolution into birds. But there are some problems. The most serious is that Brusatte spends a substantial portion of the text (maybe half) recounting anecdotes and discussing the personalities of the people involved in this research. It goes way beyond giving a personal flavour and it's just not remotely interesting. The sections where he confines himself to discussing dinosaurs are better and I did learn a little, including about the geographic and climactic changes that were ongoing and the evolution of the various prominent groups. But ultimately this is unsatisfying too, with the tone becoming juvenile in places (T. Rex is so awesome!) and some lack of depth - much goes unexplored and the wider context is sometimes ignored. I'm not sure if there's better around but this is far from definitive.
The Phoney Victory by Peter Hitchens Peter Hitchens (brother of the late Christopher) is a journalist and writer with right-wing but idiosyncratic views. In this he attempts to challenge (from a British perspective) the narrative of World War II being a "good war", in terms of why and how it was fought and in terms of its outcomes, which he feels has come to form a kind of national mythology. Among the subjects covered - the outbreak of war and the Polish guarantee. Hitchens claims that contrary to the appeasement narrative, this was the means by which Chamberlain ensured that there would be a war, something he would have difficulty in convincing the public of otherwise. But it was the wrong issue (Poland was itself an anti-Semitic despotism which had participated in dismembering Czechoslovakia) at the wrong time (Germany being far too strong at this point) with no hope of being followed through on (Britain and France barely lifted a finger apart from declaring war). The British hoped to embargo Germany - assuming that the Maginot Line would stop them going west - but essentially letting them have free reign in the east, something that an examination of their diplomatic track record in the interwar years supports. This strategy only collapsed with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact - which blindsided everyone. I'm not sure the the author has all of his facts right here, but it's a very interesting perspective indeed. Then on to Churchill and the home front. The great man himself, while heroic in rebuffing all attempts by the Nazis to come to an accommodation, had a very mixed war indeed. Amongst others, his decisions regarding India and Singapore were strategic and humanitarian disasters, against the advice of staff. And his status as a pre-war oracle is highly questionable in general, having taken part in many of the decisions that left Britain so weak. But Germany was never likely to invade - this was all a bluff, kept to by both sides for different reasons. It follows that he Battle of Britain - in received wisdom something that was "won" by the RAF - was no such thing. The Luftwaffe continued to bomb Britain at will for a long time afterwards. And then to America - far from disinterested, leveraging the crisis in Europe to achieve its hegemony. Terror bombing - a moral crime with little strategic value. The expulsion of ethnic Germans from central Europe - similarly a crime. And the aftermath in which Britain was broke, mired in austerity for years with Josef Stalin granted possession of much of Europe, an act of appeasement far surpassing that towards Hitler. Partly, Hitchens overeggs things. Granted, general public consciousness of these events may be awry - but on which matters is it not? The contention that they are somehow unknown to or hidden from anyone who makes an effort to obtain a comprehension of history is unwarranted. In my experience terror bombing, to give one example, is something that gives rise to debate any time it is mentioned. Who is naive enough to think that the United States did not cleverly extract its pound of flesh from the British Empire before riding in to save the day? And who really thinks that the war was fought to stop the holocaust or for other than selfish national concerns? Mostly, Hitchens confines himself to the topic at hand, although he does slip in some other controversial views - on Israel, Northern Ireland and abortion - and at the end he includes a fairly bizarre rant about the European Union and extensively reviews two novels about the war for some reason. That aside, he ends with the conclusion that war can sometimes be necessary, even occasionally just - but never "good". I can certainly agree with him there.
II Maccabees - KJV Focuses on the time of Judas Maccabeus, and all the troublemakers from within and without the people of Israel. More of a theological viewpoint than I Maccabees, but still contains long letters and a lot of fighting against overwhelming odds. I expected the events on which Hanukkah is based to show up in one of these books, but they never are mentioned explicitly. Wikipedia tells me the miracle isn't detailed in writing until the Talmud 600 years afterward. So that's disappointing for me. That's all of the apocrypha I have in my Bible app. It was an edifying experience, but I think the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach are the only two books I'm likely to return to for any serious study.
I went to Goodwill the other day for a cheap belt to keep in my locker at work, and accidentally walked out with a couple of books. I have a backlog again. William Again (1923) - Richmal Crompton Picked this out of Gutenberg's latest list while taking a breather from slogging through my latest read. It must have been popular, with at least 25 printings over nearly two decades. William, whose last name is actually Brown, is an 11-year-old boy of the Dennis the Menace or Calvin school of characters, but more violent and much more likely to embarrass his family in front of adult society. The author is sympathetic toward William and his flights of fancy, and so is the reader, especially with his family often treating him inhumanly, almost to the point of cruelty. Like, it's funny to read in fiction, but if a real father said that to his 11-year-old son . . . yikes. Anyway, in this volume William goes on a series of 14 adventures, putting on a play, playing detective, stealing away to the circus, and assuming the role of a Borneo child whom a missionary has brought home for the villagers' edification. Sometimes the adventures end well with the help of a sympathetic adult, often they don't, always they're light-hearted and entertaining. William naively trying to sell his friend Ginger's annoying 3-year-old cousins as "slaves" was a little unsettling (he was going to steal them back once he'd spent the proceeds), but so were seeing Ginger and Vivian as men's names. But then I've never seen the name "Richmal" in my life. An internet search reveals Crompton as the top result and also that she was a woman. She wrote quite a lot of books, including a lot of William stories. [edit] Okay I just got to the bottom of her Wiki page and Good Omens started out as "What if William was the Antichrist?"
The Sword of Shannara - Terry Brooks Oh boy. You ready for this? This is the first novel of one of the more famous fantasy series out there, with umpteen sequels at last lack of count. KJ bought several of the books on the cheap and, as they were in the house, I decided to dig in. I started this book in about February or March and just finished last week. I could not sit through this and retain my sanity. Never have I resisted the urge so often to visit physical violence upon a book. One day I set it aside, and there it rested for months, ignored and maybe one-third read, while I enjoyed less exasperating books until I could face it again. The short of it is: This is a poor man's Lord of the Rings. Not the "store brand" kind of cheap. The "McDonald's hamburger" kind of cheap, with fat and grease soaked in to try to convince you that this extruded food byproduct is just as delicious as the good stuff you grill at home. All the characters are flat, dialogue is painfully absent, you can often tell what's going to happen because it's just LotR with slight twists, and oh the prose. The prose is the worst part. Fifteen years ago I might have tolerated it, but my palate is too sensitive now to not see the writing style for what it is: uneven precisely because it is so even. I'm honestly not angry, I'm just very frustrated and disappointed. 700+ pages can do that to you. The long, long, long of it may best be expressed in a Top Ten list complete with spoilers: TOP TEN SINS COMMITTED BY THE SWORD OF SHANNARA
Dr. Benjamin Rush: The Founding Father Who Healed a Wounded Nation by Harlow Giles Unger A rather slim 249 pages of biography followed by several appendices listing Rush's various medical treatises, selected writings, essays, and interestingly, Thomas Jefferson's syllabus comparing the doctrines of Jesus with those of other notable figures. Rush is not well known in the stable of America's founders, but he is a signer of the Declaration of Independence (for Pennsylvania) and was a close friend of both John Adams and Jefferson. Indeed, Rush was instrumental in getting Adams and Jefferson to start their famous correspondence in their later years. A physician by trade, Rush was a selfless humanitarian who put his own life in jeopardy on multiple occasions, treating victims of the Yellow Fever epidemics that raged in Philadelphia in the 1790s. Rush was an inveterate observer, note-taker, and researcher into medical issues. He crusaded for public sanitation, for humane treatment of both imprisoned criminals and the mentally disturbed, and the emancipation of slaves. In many ways he was ahead of his time. But apparently his life is not recorded at the level of detail of some of the more famous founders, aside from his own extensive medical writings. An enjoyable, if brief, biography.
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth - Paul Hoffman A sort-of biography about the brilliant, colorful Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, written by "the" publisher of Encyclopedia Britannica. Erdős was brilliant at math but also extremely idiosyncratic, as this book illustrates. He had his own vocabulary, possibly encouraged by having grown up in fascist Hungary, in which men and women were "slaves" and "bosses", children were "epsilons", and God was the SF or "Supreme Fascist" who was always making his life difficult. Erdős had no permanent abode as an adult, simply travelling with a couple of bags from city to city and from continent to continent to crash with whichever mathematician he wanted to discuss math with for nineteen hours a day. This single-minded approach to life worked for him, as he was listed as an author on about 1,500 papers with more than 500 different co-authors. One result was the creation of the "Erdős number", which is, in fact, a precursor to the Bacon number and works the same way. Erdős was a challenging houseguest in more ways than one, as he was helpless at nearly everything other than math, from washing his hands to driving to identifying what food had been put on his plate. The title is misleading. For the most part, Erdős paid as little attention as possible to anything other than math, hence his minimal worldly possessions. But he loved his mother, and he was fond of the little epsilons. He was also generous with his money for charitable causes. He also took interest in promising young mathematicians, and spurred other researchers on with little questions designed to get them moving on to the next big breakthrough. In light of the above, it's maybe less surprising that so much of the book tells the stories of some of the individuals whose lives were touched by Erdős, including Ronald Graham, who seems to have acted as Erdős's agent and home base for much of his life. Sometimes these stories or their mathematical achievements seem to wind quite a ways away from the man this book is principally about, but once I got used to it I didn't mind. These other people have interesting stories of their own that might not have otherwise been told, as most of them are lesser lights in the mathematical firmament. I'm used to these mathematical biographies and histories going into depth with a few theorem proofs, but there's very little of that in this book. Mainly just results. I guess the techniques would be too obscure for a popular biography. It's an entertaining read nonetheless. Feet of Clay - Terry Pratchett I don't keep close track of Discworld book order but I'm guessing this is the first book to feature golems, because of the title and the fact that it's all about golems like they're a new thing in the series. This is a Night Watch book about golems, murders, heraldry, and has Vetinari been poisoned?!? It also introduces Cheery and contains Angua angst. The themes for this book are workers' rights, class warfare, racism, sexism, miscarriage of justice, and individual intellectual freedom, and maybe a few others. This is a lot to include in one Discworld book, but Pratchett keeps the plot well in hand and drops a record number of loud, large anvils so none of the themes are missed. My one complaint is that sick!Vetinari initially doesn't feel like Vetinari at all. My two complaint is that the basic Kindle has a weird font and is not good at handling footnotes. I'd rate this a B on the Discworld scale, pretty good and par for the course but not his very best or a favorite.
Children of Dune by Frank Herbert The third book in the series, this one continues the story of the planet Arrakis (Dune) by focusing on the offspring of Paul Atriedes, twins who are still physically children but are "pre-born" and contain in their minds the collective memories of thousands of their ancestors. Things generally get more weird - we have the pre-born, varying degrees of future prescience, possession, witches, mentats, some characters who are combinations of these things - and eventually something even more fantastic still. Some of the weaknesses of the preceding book are still present. There are so many characters and groups with diverging agendas that it can be difficult to keep it all straight, particularly when Herbert introduces new points out of leftfield as he is wont to do. Nevertheless the underlying theme of any messiah no matter how well-intentioned being a danger rings true. In particular Leto (one of the twins) is a very interesting character. There are some interesting arcs for Alia, Paul's sister and a mysterious new figure known as The Preacher. With somewhat more action it's about on a par with Dune Messiah, but still doesn't reach the same heights as Herbert's original.
Bravo to you for sticking with it. Halfway thru Children of Dune is where I officially lost interest in the thing and gave up. My personal opinion is still that Dune is one of the most over-rated works in all of SF. Edit to add: Y'know, it occurs to me. As a kid in gradeschool I (and most other kids, as I recall) hated having to do book reports. But here we are as adults (well, sort of) maintaining an entire thread of what are essentially short book reports.
Been running a role playing game for my son during the height of the pandemic set in Wheeling, WV. Interesting place, surprisingly so. From one, the name appears to be a Leni Lenappe word for 'Place of the Skull', where the natives of the Ohio river valley killed a settler and put his skull on the island in the center of the Ohio river as a warning for trespassers. Here I thought it had to do with its iron industry. Anyway, I've been diving into historical records and have read a couple of decent books on the place, including a crime expose about its role in organized crime in the 30s-80s. Latest is 'Murder Never Dies.' Amazing the level of corruption in the area at the time. The author has a long and storied history in WV public service, but it's clear from his anecdotes at the end of the book he was connected with the mob. https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Never-Dies-Corruption-Friendly/dp/1882658639
The Dark by John McGahern The second of McGahern's novels that I have read, this one examines similar themes but it was written much earlier and as the title suggests, is much darker. It portrays an adolescent boy and his relationship with his father, Mahoney. The opening couple of chapters are terrifying as Mahoney abuses his children physically, emotionally and perhaps sexually. But Mahoney becomes a more complex and sympathetic character as the boy grows and the balance of power between the two shifts. His education, sexual awakening and desire to become a priest come into conflict with each other and he (and his sister) also encounter others with some distressing outcomes. The topic hit too close to home in the patriarchal Catholic Ireland of the 1960's. The book was banned, McGahern fired from his teaching post and forced to emigrate. But it's really high quality work - and I'm again reminded by the culture and language of the characters that this isn't that far removed from what I grew up in. There are echoes of Joyce and Kavanagh so one might argue that it's not terribly original. But as many forward McGahern as the best Irish writer of the late 20th century, I may have to look into others like John Banville soon in order to test the claim.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir Weir's follow-up to The Martian is equally engaging and full of science and engineering problem-solving. The situation: Earth is threatened by a blight on the surface of the sun that is slowly reducing its radiance. Scientists learn that the blight is being caused by a microscopic organism that can, incredibly, survive on the sun's surface. Ryland Grace, a high school science teacher, discouraged former scientist, and writer of a very obscure and much derided scientific paper is drafted into an international organization empowered to find the solution to the threat posed by the organisms, dubbed "astrophage." Part of the story follows Grace's efforts to figure out the astrophage's biology. Interesting stuff, especially for science nerds. Interwoven with that storyline is another that finds Grace alone aboard a large spaceship and suffering amnesia: he doesn't know where he is or why he's there. As he unravels the truth about his situation, he finds that he has been tasked with a momentous mission, but one that may be impossible. And then... I can't say any more without going into spoilers, but the big turn happens around a third of the way into the book, and I was totally hooked. I blasted through the last third in a single sitting because at the end of each chapter, I just had to find out what happened next. Weir has a knack for putting his characters into dire situations while always allowing them the slim possibility of escaping through their own mental resources. That happens a lot in this one, though Grace does get help from a very unexpected source. Is the astrophage plausible? Probably not, but Weir has crafted it wonderfully that it is both the threat to humankind and also the potential means to their salvation. This one is sure to be a movie; I've read they're looking at Ryan Gosling for the lead. I'll be first in line.
Maus I - Art Spiegelman An oral history, told by Spiegelman's father Vladek, of his life as a Polish Jew from the mid-1930s to 1944. After marrying well and starting a family, his father and all the Jews quickly fall under the shadow of Nazism as Hitler rises to power, the Germans invade and conquer, and the screws are put on the Jews turn by turn. It is, you can imagine, a harrowing story of desperate survival and difficult choices, told concisely through the form of a graphic novel and softened perhaps by the use of animals for people: mice for Jews, cats for Nazi soldiers, pigs for the uncircumcised masses. It's made clear that anti-Semitism and the Nazi ideology were rising forces in Poland before the Germans ever invaded. Time and again one Jewish character or another expresses the hope that this will all blow over, that things can't yet be as bad as they seem, even as Vladek the narrator lists off who did and did not make it out alive. In the present day, Spiegelman has a strained relationship with his father, who entered into a remarriage that he and his new wife both regret. This is considered a classic and rightly so. The illustrations are clean and effective, and Vladek has a strong voice such that you can hear the narration in your head throughout. A note for our next argument about race, to remember that the word has meant different things to different people, is the Hitler quotation that heads the copyright page: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human."
Stan Musial: An American Life - George Vecsey Saw this on the shelf at a Goodwill in Brewers/Twins territory and, well, nobody else was likely to appreciate it, so I picked it up. This is a biography, written shortly before his recent passing (has it really been eight years?!), about the Polish-American harmonica player who also was the greatest baseball player to be born in Donora, Pennsylvania on November 21st. Growing up in a poor, infamously polluted zinc mining town, Musial excelled in sports before entering baseball's minor leagues and working his way up to the big time with the St. Louis Cardinals. Musial proceeded to win multiple MVPs and World Series, came within a rained-out home run of winning a Triple Crown, and is quite possibly the last MLB player who will ever hit .400 in a full season. He also found time to be a successful businessman, campaign for John F. Kennedy (whence came a friendship with James Michener), serve in WWII, have a loving relationship with his family, and after retirement travel to Europe to connect with his Polish roots, meeting people such as Lech Walesa and that John Paul guy along the way. And then there's the Hall of Fame plaque, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, blah blah. Oh, and he's the most beloved player for a franchise rich in great players, and one of the most beloved people ever in the state of Missouri, period. I can't imagine who you'd pick ahead of him. He was a decent, humble, uncontroversial man who could turn on the charm and warmth for his public, and he took pains to keep his public image just that. The author also takes as a recurring idea what he calls the "Big Three" of Musial, DiMaggio, and Ted Williams, to contrast their personalities and public images, and to show their interactions as three of the greatest players of their time. Also popping up is the question of why Musial isn't as widely celebrated as those and other greats of his time. My belief: playing in the Midwest for a franchise drowning in legends, combined with his less spectacular personality than Joltin' Joe or the Splendid Splinter or Mantle or any number of other stars. The book itself, I hate to say, is something of a letdown. My early impression was that it didn't know what it wanted to be. I think my final reaction, however, is that it feels like that first big draft you write of a research paper. You've got all the info you want and a rough outline, so you get it all down in text form along with a few really good phrases you want to keep around. But you haven't finalized your arguments, some of the paragraphs are just a few random facts you're going to have to move elsewhere, the whole thing will need to be rearranged to flow smoothly, and overall it still looks like an initial report of "here's what I've found so far" rather than speaking with authority and style. Also Vecsey, who is incidentally an accomplished writer and a baseball fan, is really bad at ending a chapter. Part of the problem is Musial's own reticence about his past. Vecsey mentions that, despite all his interviews with "hundreds" of others who knew The Man, he knew he would never get an interview with Stan himself. Partly because Stan was well gone in Alzheimer's at the time, but also because Stan was upset about another biography that had been recently published. So between that, Musial's control of his image, and the fact that most of it happened so darn long ago, there's a lot of hedging that, in a real research paper, would be a signal to go back to the library and get confirmation this way or that. Or at least pick the most likely truth and assert that with confidence. But if you don't mind the prose, this is a great, if rosy, biography.
Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh. This final installment in the four (or five, depending on how you count) part Trainspotting-series, our main characters are now deep into middle age and leading separate lives in different countries and continents. Events including a traditional family Christmas back in Scotland conspire to bring them into each others orbits again and they have scores to settle. It's still riotously funny in places, but the plot is full of all sorts of contrivances and the characters have moved decidedly into caricature. A long way has been travelled since the dark realism of the original novel. Sick Boy is my favourite character here. Despite his over-the-top mysogyny (Welsh treads a fine line here) he's still the same amoral, manipulative creep he always was. It's somehow refreshing to watch someone who doesn't care what anyone else thinks run amok. Despite their baggage, Begbie and Renton have become too bourgeoise. They spend as much time here complaining about long haul flights as they do involved in their schemes. There's definitely the sense of an ending with one of the main characters dead and most other threads wrapped up. I won't complain too much - Welsh has become a pulp staple for me and I'll continue reading his back catalogue. It's just not literary fiction any more and that's fine.
Sailing The Wine-Dark Sea: Why The Greeks Matter -- Thomas Cahill Mom lent me these books temporarily, so whatever book KJ wanted me to read next is going to have to wait. Finally prose I don't have to complain about. I feel so much less cantankerous now. Cahill takes the route of largely self-contained chapters that nevertheless build on each other. "How to Fight" considers Greek warfare seen through the Iliad. "How to Feel" looks at Homer's apparent change of temperament in the Odyssey. The art chapter looks at Greek ideals as reflected in art, and traces the degradation of Athenian society as their fortunes wane, with idealized young-man statues giving way to low, crass sexual imagery. And so on. The politics, philosophy, and Greek/Judeo-Christian crossover chapters are the most central to answering the book's subtitle, as Cahill suggests in the final pages that the Greeks' greatest importance lies in their contributions to Christian thought, and in their obsession with asking questions about everything. More books should use lowercase Greek letters for footnotes. Now I'm off to the Internet to see if I can find the Rogers translation of "The Frogs" again.
Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum This is a chronicle of the vast concentration camp system that existed in the Soviet Union, written a couple of decades back when western writers began to obtain access to information previously withheld by Russian authorities. The structure of the book is somewhat atypical. First we have several chapters concerning the origin and early history of the camps. This is followed by a middle section relating life in the camps for various types of people and in relation to various things (arrest, interrogation, arrival, work, sickness etc.) Finally we return to the history of the camps during the war years and afterwards, with the camps atrophying and eventually closing following the death of Stalin. I found it a bit of a slog. The enormity of the human suffering involved cannot be overstated, however there is an encyclopedic quality to the writing - Applebaum relates the various tales of misery and horror using a mixture of statistics and anecdote. Each story is worse than the last and the effect is numbing. With perseverance, I did learn quite a bit - about the sheer variety of experience, how much of the death and suffering was caused by bureaucratic inefficiency and shortages (of food and other things), how there was - at some level - reasoning behind who was persecuted and how camp life worked, with the distinction between political and common criminals the most important. Unfortunately outside of the main chapters, Applebaum exposes some disagreeable politics of her own. She uses the introduction to excoriate the western left among others for insufficiently distancing itself from the Soviet Union and part of the epilogue to defend American Cold War policy. This is one for committed readers of history only.
This Land: The Story of a Movement by Owen Jones This is an account of the left-wing movement that elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the UK Labour party and how it fared during the five years of his tenure, from his appointment, to the attempts to remove him, his getting within a whisker of power in 2017 and finally the crashing defeat in 2019 amidst Brexit acrimony. The broad outlines of the story are familiar to anyone who was following at the time. The project faced sustained and venomous attacks from almost all sides from beginning to end - including in the media, from the Labour parliamentary party and from Labour staff. It is shocking to see the detail of this - although I disagree with Jones on the anti-Semitism issue. There was no "correct" way to handle this - it was smear and should have been treated as such. That said, Corbyn was clearly way out of his depth - indecisive, poorly organised and even prone to go missing at vital moments. A thoroughly decent man, he did not expect to be elected and ran as a figurehead for a long moribund left. He was an excellent campaigner but not fit for high office. Many of the strategic mistakes, infighting and so forth followed from his lack of leadership qualities. Jones instead extols John McDonnell, Corbyns Shadow Chancellor. There is no doubt some truth to this but Jones does so too consistently, and as someone who was peripherally involved himself, one is left wondering if there is another agenda here. All in all, an interesting read as Labour now lurches back towards corporate shill territory under Keir Starmer.
A Political History of the IRA by Daniel Finn I'd previously read a lot about the Northern Ireland Troubles, about which there were a large number of books during and immediately after the peace process reached its conclusions. These have been fewer recently - but this is an important one, given additional perspective by the passage of time and by the release of state documents in the interim. It's not one for the casual reader, presuming quite a lot of familiarity with events. Finn approaches it from a left-wing political perspective and analyses the evolving relationship between the IRA and left-wing politics, including with regard to the various splits and sub-groups that emerged over time. The conclusion is that in the mainstream IRA, such leftism is a badge of convenience - irrelevant to much of the membership, entirely secondary to the national struggle and ditched when inconvenient. The book spends some time on the pre-1960s IRA and then more on the civil right movement that erupted in the late 1960s, before moving onto the conflict itself. There are some key things that it brought into focus very well for me. The first is how distinct the early and later periods of the conflict were. The early period (1968 - 1976) involved intense civil disturbance and higher levels of violence and it can be argued that the IRA had some success with their aims of smashing the Protestant state that had existed since 1921. The following period (into the 1990s) was characterised by low-level conflict and dwindling success rates for the IRA. The leadership, including Gerry Adams, aware of this and knowing that they faced eventual defeat, were fully aware of the compromises that they would eventually have to make as soon as they entered the political process.
God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert The fourth one in the series, this one takes place 3,500 years later - with Leto II (now virtually immortal and possessing immense powers of memory and prescience) having ensconced himself on the throne as "God Emperor" for all of that time. Leto leads an Empire that he has deliberately stagnated, an enforced peace in place with all of the hitherto squabbling factions reduced to subservience to him. He does this not out of an arbitrary desire for tyranny but as a means to an important end. Leto is a fascinating character and he dominates the novel. He's at once a supreme evil and supreme good, pitiable despite his vast power and intelligence. The ending is a conclusion of sorts for the plot that has been running so far. (There are two sequels which apparently go off in a different direction.) And one thing that this does very successfully is to make the events of the preceding two books in the series much more explicable. I've always been told that the Dune novels are meant to be re-read and I'm tempted to go back over some passages now. There are weaknesses. There's a lack of action, many of the chapters consisting of other characters debating philosophy with Leto. And these other characters lack real agency, mostly being Leto's pawns. But the world-building is great and the sense of being privy to the unfolding of a lost history of the far future is tangible. That might wrap up the Dune universe for me now.
Mysteries of the Middle Ages And the Beginning of the Modern World - Thomas Cahill "The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese edition as follows: Cahill, Thomas. Mysteries of the Middle Ages : the rise of feminism, science, and art from the cults of Catholic Europe" I didn't expect to enjoy this one as much as the Greek volume, but I was wrong. It feels much more dense of information, and Cahill, as he did with the Greeks, is willing to take all the cultures and individuals examined on their own terms. This volume is organized by focusing each chapter on one or more locations. The story starts in Alexandria, continues through Rome and its overthrow, and visits such cities as Paris, Oxford, and Florence. Along the way we see the organic rise of the church to political power, as local pontiffs do their best to preserve civilization against barbarian invasions following Rome's fall. The cult of the Virgin Mary is explored. And we get to know people such as Hildegard, Eleanor, Giotto, and Dante. Cahill wants to repair the Middle Ages' reputation, circa 1100 - 1300 or so IIRC, showing that there was still lively debate and learning amid the Catholic and Orthodox churches' dominions. Islam gets a quick look-in too, largely in the context of "let's all get along shall we". His final thesis is that Greek, Jewish, and Christian cultures all melded together to create Western Civilization as we know it: the Greeks provided a rational framework to contain the Judeo-Christian interest in morality and earthly experience, and together they led to artistic realism. There's also a Very Special epilogue where Cahill pleads with the Catholic church to stop covering up child abuse. All in all, I feel much better equipped to understand what's going on in The Name of the Rose.
The Black Tides of Heaven - J. Y. Yang This is the "first" of that four-volume set written by an Internet acquaintance I've been reading through. I'm not actually sure if we have the fourth book in the house . . . ? Anyway, this one follows the twin offspring of the grand illustrious Protector, Akeha and Mokoya, who are given to a monastery as fulfillment of a debt and who turn out to have special powers of their own. The two grow up as close as twins in a world of psychic abilities can, until political events set them on divergent paths. Along with political intrigue comes action, worldbuilding, love and heartbreak, and a string theory version of the Force with element-bending flavor. The main plotline follows the close bond between Akeha and Mokoya, which feeds into one of this series's main strengths of having intense personal stakes. Other strengths are the descriptions, the worldbuilding, the political intrigue, the "silkpunk" if you even like the sound of that aesthetic, and getting to watch the same patch of history play out from three (presumably four) very different, compelling viewpoints. This particular book was a bit more difficult for me. In this world, people start out as indeterminate sex, and then, typically at some point in their teen years, decide what they want to be and then the Tensors do their thing and wham you're a guy or gal. With twin children running around doing everything together for much of the book, you can imagine there are a few "they"s where I had to go through an extra step of deciding whether one or the other or both was meant. But the story is compelling and the action keeps going and it's a good read.
Silent Spring - Rachel Carson Rachel Carson, primarily a marine biologist, is one of the pre-eminent cultural figures of the twentieth century if you measure impact by number of mentions in Peanuts. At the time this book was published (1962), physics and chemistry were king in America, promising Progress and saving us from the Commies. Governments and private citizens routinely doused yards, farms, and millions of acres with toxic chemicals such as DDT on the assurance of magically killing only the insect pests and bringing about a manmade paradise on Earth. Carson explains in layman language how many of these chemicals work and how they fail to distinguish between friend and foe, then methodically collates a staggering collection of reports from birdwatchers, scientists, and farmers to show how those chemicals poison water, impregnate soil, and kill fish, birds, plants, useful insects, and unsuspecting human beings, while often not doing much to the bugs they were supposed to wipe out. Despite failure after failure it never feels repetitive, just horrifying. Carson cleverly draws parallels between insecticide spraying and the horrors of nuclear fallout that the public was already aware of. She also calls attention to the expenses of the larger failed programs and, when possible, points out the cheaper price tags of successful implementations of her preferred control methods, like importing selective predators to deal with invasive species, setting up pheromone traps, or simply restoring the balance of the local ecology. She also attacks the credibility of government agencies who keep insisting that everything's just fine while pushing huge, inefficient programs. The foreword and afterword inform us that this was the book that introduced the American public to the idea of ecology, led to the EPA and Endangered Species Act, saved the eagles, and largely ended the fascination with the new shiny toy of chemical warfare against insects. Nowadays, one hears about deforestation and civilization's expansion threatening wildlife, but I wonder how much more wildlife we'd still have if the blindly optimistic chemical spraying of a few decades hadn't wiped out large swaths of populations. It's upsetting to say the least, and sobering to think that, if not for this book that connected all the dots and aroused the public interest, we might not have an ecosystem at all today.
The Open Boat and Other Stories - Stephen Crane This is a collection of short stories by the author of The Red Badge of Courage. The first part contains complete stories about men facing life and death at sea or in the American or Mexican Wild West. There's also a footrace. The second part contains short narratives about drifters, babies out for an explore on their own, a mortifying auction, and a young couple. The prose is full of detail without turning purple. It sets scenes, describes action, and shows intimate understanding of the human psyche, even as the characters remain fairly simple. Men are men and women are women, but both sets are simply people, nobody iconic in machismo or nobility or villainy, with no particular morals attached to any tale. It's very readable despite being from the 19th century. The babies, both of which are toddlers from the poor side of town who are out ambling through the streets by themselves, are described so true to life as to cause me anguish for their safety, after I had set myself to not get too wrapped up in whether all those people in the first part lived or died. If I had to pick standouts, they would be "The Open Boat", "Death and the Child", and "An Ominous Baby". Gutenberg kindly includes the end matter, a series of reviews for Crane's other works, including the assertion from The Athenaeum that "The Third Violet incidentally contains the best dog that we have come across in modern fiction."
Afghanistan: A Cultural & Political History by Thomas Barfield Motivated by recent events in the country, I decided to brush up on my understanding of Afghanistan. I found this work quite dense and challenging in terms of following all of the tribal groups and subgroups, but also valuable. What emerges is something of a refutation of common myths about the place. It is often portrayed as a perennially failed state, impossible to govern and in a constant state of warfare. But that's an image that does not stand up to scrutiny if one goes back more than 40 years. It is true that in modern memory, Afghanistan has always been very poor and relied on external subventions to keep its economy afloat. However from ancient times, passing between several multicultural empires, Afghanistan was actually relatively easy to govern. People typically viewed the ability to hold power as synonymous with the right to hold it, and participation in politics was limited only to the elite classes. Starting with the British intervention in the 19th century, there began a trend that has increased since - whereby elites have mobilised the population to make things difficult for outsiders. The upshot of this has been increasingly to make things difficult for themselves as well. The monarchy which ruled for much of the 20th century governed via a paradox - by declaring its rule to be absolute, yet not attempting to exercise it in practice, they left local tribal structures to take care of themselves outside of the main cities. Following the collapse of the monarchy those vying for power have found it more difficult to establish any legitimacy. Tribal complexities aside, decades of warfare have in recent times led to people supporting whoever can best provide a degree of law and order. It is this phenomenon (alongside the malign influence of Islamists in Pakistan) which explains the Taliban. As such the American intervention was initially welcomed, but serious mistakes were made with that - its footprint initially being far too light and the model of governance imposed far too centralised that by the time the Obama Administration took a different direction, much damage had already been done. The book ends around 2010 and I will look out for commentary from Barfield on recent events. His book certainly help to illustrate why such a collapse would happen - Afghan tribal allegiances being endlessly pragmatic, it is virtually a repeat of what has happened more than once in the past.
The Mystery of the Yellow Room - Gaston Leroux This is one of the detective stories mentioned positively by Agatha Christie via Hercule Poirot in that one where the guy is doing the detecting thing and the gal is doing her thing and it turns out the murderer was doing the other thing and meanwhile Poirot was doing the retirement thing again and reading detective stories to pass the time. Don't remember the title, but umm it wasn't The Clocks. No, wait, maybe it was The Clocks. It wasn't the Seven Dials, is what I'm trying to say. I think it probably was The Clocks actually. Anyway, this having a distinctive title, and being singled out by Christie-through-Poirot as being a commendable story, led me to eventually look it up on Gutenberg, where I found that it is indeed a spectacularly good example of a "locked room" mystery. It goes out of its way to make it clear that it upstages "The Murder in the Rue Morgue", whose solution it spoils, incidentally, so read that first if you're into the genre, that's the granddaddy of detective fiction if you didn't know. The main detective in this one is a teenage journalist known as Joseph "Rouletabille" because of having a red face and a round head. An attempt is made upon the life of the daughter of a visionary scientist in her yellow bedroom, while her father works in his laboratory on the other side of her door. When she screams for help and good people force their way in, she is found near death, but her attacker is gone and there seems no way he could have escaped. This drives everybody nuts, and events eventuate in mysterious fashion until (as promised in the beginning) Rouletabille barges into open court at the end to propose his solution that will save an innocent man from being hanged. Rouletabille prides himself on clear reasoning and method, rather than on recognizing twenty-five types of cigarette ash, but the story produces its effects much like a Sherlock Holmes story, with the detective making a lot of seemingly inconsequential remarks or unsupportable leaps of logic for shock effect. This is what genre readers know as "fun". There are also plenty of clues, false trails, things that get explained immediately, things that take a while to get explained, drama, human interests, and a range of smaller points that can be deduced or guessed by the reader without spoiling the final solution. The full solution is fair and worth the wait, although you might have to be a Poirot to get full points. This really should be considered a classic of the genre. I see several sequels by Leroux on Gutenberg, plus a ghost story about an opera, so I guess I have more reading to do in this direction.
