I spent most of this year in recovery from a concussion. That left lots of time for sitting in dark rooms reading and listening to audiobooks. See below for thoughts and Pitchfork rating for each title I made it through.
A soundtrack:
Top 5
The Last Lion Volume 2: Alone, 1932–1940, William Manchester
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano
Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, Rachel Laudan
WWII
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
To properly tell the origin story of the atom bomb, Richard Rhodes decided he had to master twenty different angles to the story. He beautifully weaves in the personalities, the physics, the international and bureaucratic history, as well as the human drama of unleashing the bomb’s power. Particularly outstanding are his portrayals of the physics geniuses, Bohr, Fermi, Oppenheimer, and the way he ties their personalities to their scientific insight. I’d recommend watching youtube videos of some of the early experiments to ensure you can appreciate just how clever these scientists were.
His diplomatic history analyses are a little dated but easily skimmable.
Rhodes’ portrait of life and research in Los Alamos is perfect. On the dances:
Eventually even the Fermis attended, with their daughter Nella, to learn the vigorous reels. Long after mother and daughter had been persuaded from the sidelines, Fermi sat unbudging, mentally working out the steps. When he was ready, he asked one of the leaders to be his partner. “He offered to be head couple, which I thought a most unwise venture, but I couldn’t do anything about it, and the music began. He led me out on the exact beat, knew exactly each move to make and when. He never made a mistake, then or thereafter. I wouldn’t say he enjoyed himself. He danced with his brains instead of his feet.”
The final scene of Hiroshima is the most chilling writing I’ve ever encountered. Page after page he quotes witness testimony. From a grocer:
They all had skin blackened by burns…they had no hair…and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back…their skin — not only on their hands but on their faces and bodies too…hung down…if there had only been one or two such people perhaps I would not have had such a strong impression. But wherever I walked I met these people. Many of them died along the road…like walking ghosts. They had a very special way of walking, very slowly…I myself was one of them.
9.6
The Last Lion Volume 2: Alone, 1932–1940, William Manchester
A masterpiece. The first scene of Churchill manically working in his study is perfect. Churchill’s journey in the wilderness of British politics as the only man who saw Hitler coming marks the most important political stand in the 20th century. Him rallying the nation post-France’s fall when none of his contemporaries had the stomach for a fight marks the great man’s most brilliant moment. Manchester’s old-school history writing does it justice.
Instead of a Manchester passage, how about Churchill’s speech in response to Munich.
I do not grudge our loyal, brave people, who were ready to do their duty no matter what the cost, who never flinched under the strain of last week — I do not grudge them the natural, spontaneous outburst of joy and relief when they learned that the hard ordeal would no longer be required of them at the moment; but they should know the truth. They should know that there has been gross neglect and deficiency in our defences; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies:
“Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”
And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.
9.4
Churchill: A Life, Martin Gilbert
If you don’t have the stomach for the thousands of pages of Manchester’s masterpiece this is a pretty good substitute. I’d recommend reading up to 1932 in Gilbert then switching over to Manchester.
8.5
Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War, Paul Kennedy
Reviewed here. 7.7
Winston’s War: 1940–1945, Max Hastings
Hastings focuses on lots of Churchill’s boneheaded ideas that the Americans overruled in the second half of the war…and the man still comes out looking pretty good.
6.7
Men of War: The American Soldier in Combat at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima, Alexander Rose
A gorier and less instructive take on John Keegan’s nearly perfect The Face of Battle. Nonetheless the Iwo Jima chapter in particular stuck with me. 5.5
The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers, and Guerrillas, 1939–1945, Max Hastings
Pretty forgettable. There were some cute stories I hadn’t heard before but have consequently forgotten. Main takeaway: espionage didn’t matter all that much. 3.6
Post-Concussion Self Help
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
God level. Will be re-reading till I’m dead.
Pain is either an evil to the body — then let the body say what it thinks of it — or to the soul; but it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility, and not to think that pain is an evil. For every judgement and movement and desire and aversion is within, and no evil ascends so high.
Wipe out thy imaginations by often saying to thyself: now it is in my power to let no badness be in this soul, nor desire nor any perturbation at all; but looking at all things I see what is their nature, and I use each according to its value.- Remember this power which thou hast from nature.
10
Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
Reviewed here. 8.8
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams
The man was right about Trump all along. His Clown Genius piece might make it into an AP US document set one day. This book got me thinking not to set specific achievements as goals but rather systems. His blog did a better job than the book of opening me up to the importance of psychology in politics. 7.1
The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg
In combination with the First 20 Hours, shows how important habits are, and how to work with instead of against them so ‘living will’ isn’t a constant willpower fight. Didn’t finish. 8/10 for the point it makes, 4/10 for the hokey psychology. 6.2
The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman
Useful for illustrating two empowering concepts:
once you invest 20 hours into a new topic/skill/activity, it starts to get fun. And, after putting those 20 hours in you usually will have something pretty tangible to show for it.
Actual content isn’t very interesting, but instructive in how little it takes to actually create a reasonably well-selling book (“first I sucked at the ukelele, then I learned some chords, and got better…”). 4.4
Grit, Angela Duckworth
Super repetitive psychology. She’s smart and has clearly done some interesting studies but this is not a very nuanced book and won’t impact your life nearly as much as some of the others I’ve read this year. See this Atlantic review.
Duckworth mentions a journalist who chose his path precisely because “the journalism industry was very hierarchical, and it was clear how to get from A to B to C to D.” But that describes journalism maybe 15 years ago. Which made me wonder: How well does this approach — basically, pick one long-range goal, keep your head down, and don’t take a step sideways — hold up in an economy where career paths can twist and even vanish with little warning? Shouldn’t you keep your head up, ready for the next pivot? Or have many irons in the fire, as the champions of “career agility” suggest?
Duckworth gamely admitted to me that she had not thought of this — a result, perhaps, of her roots in education (where the paths to success have clear signposts) and her position in academia, one of the last truly guild-like domains. “Grit may carry risk,” she thought out loud, “because it’s about putting all your eggs in one basket, to some extent.”
3.2
Understanding Trump
Evicted, Matthew Desmond
Review here. America needs more good sociology. 8.2
Influence: How and Why People Agree to Things, Robert Cialdini
Scott Adams, who christened Cialdini the persuasion ‘Godzilla,’ put me onto him. Skimmable. The latent misogyny grates. It’s too pop for my tastes, but the ‘Readers Digest’ sections do help to illustrate points. Also the pop-ness helps to emphasize just how simple let powerful alot of this stuff is.
Influence was a great starting point for exploring the power of psychology. I now process politics and advertising differently. The tricks my dad played on me in Monopoly for years now make sense. Recognizing the six principles (reciprocation, social proof, commitment and consistency, liking, authority, and scarcity) helped me get out of my own head and see when these forces were acting on me. I don’t think this book necessarily made me a more ‘influential’ person, but just recognizing these techniques out in the world was a gift that left me feeling more in control. 7.8
Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance
This book hasn’t aged that well in my recollection after finishing it this summer. And maybe post-Trump winning just makes me more sour. 7.4
Antifragile, Nassim Taleb
See my review here. 5.9
Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, Robert Cialdini
Unlike Influence, this book overstays its welcome. Also it cites some studies that aren’t real. But again, strong at getting you to recognize that we aren’t rational. 5.7
Drugs
Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano
Modern masterpiece. A 27-year-old investigates and reflects on life growing up under the mob in Naples. This first chapter is as good as it gets. This is how the book opens.
The container swayed as the crane hoisted it onto the ship. The spreader, which hooks the container to the crane, was unable to control its movement, so it seemed to float in the air. The hatches, which had been improperly closed, suddenly sprang open, and dozens of bodies started raining down. They looked like mannequins. But when they hit the ground, their heads split open, as if their skulls were real. And they were. Men, women, even a few children, came tumbling out of the container. All dead. Frozen, stacked one on top of another, packed like sardines. These were the Chinese who never die. The eternal ones, who trade identity papers among themselves. So this is where they’d ended up, the bodies that in the wildest fantasies might have been cooked in Chinese restaurants, buried in fields beside factories, or tossed into the mouth of Vesuvius. Here they were. Spilling from the container by the dozen, their names scribbled on tags and tied with string around their necks. They’d all put aside money so they could be buried in China, back in their hometowns, a percentage withheld from their salaries to guarantee their return voyage once they were dead. A space in a container and a hole in some strip of Chinese soil. The port crane operator covered his face with his hands as he told me about it, eyeing me through his fingers. As if the mask of his hands might give him the courage to speak. He’d seen the bodies fall, but there’d been no need to sound the alarm. He merely lowered the container to the ground, and dozens of people appeared out of nowhere to put everyone back inside and hose down the remains. That’s how it went. He still couldn’t believe it and hoped he was hallucinating, due to too much overtime. Then he closed his fingers, completely covering his eyes. He kept on whimpering, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
Alongside the drugs, Saviano delves into how the mob stretches its tentacles into every corner of the economy. Illegal dumping of pollutants, high fashion (incredible moment of an anonymous genius tailor recognizing a dress he made on Angelina Jolie at the Oscars), construction, concrete, even a joint stock program to bring nonna’s capital into the cocaine business.
The strength of Italian criminal business lies precisely in maintaining a double track, in never renouncing its criminal origins. In Aberdeen, the system is called ‘scratch,’ like the rappers and DJs who put their finger on the record to keep it from spinning normally, for a moment a businessman momentarily stopped the movement of the legal market, ‘scratch,’ then make it spin even faster…When the Lattori legal track was in crisis, the criminal one was immediately activated. If cash were short, they had counterfeit bills printed. If capital was needed in a hurry, they sold bogus Treasury bonds. They annihilated the competition through extortion and imported merchandise tax-free.
Scratching the record of the legal economy means that clients get cheap prices, bank credits are always honored, money continues to circulate, and products continue to be consumed. Scratching reduces the distance between law and economic imperative, between what regulations prohibit and what making money demands.
The interaction between pop culture and gangsters was chilling.
‘Ever since Tarantino, these guys don’t know the right way to shoot. they don’t keep the barrell straight anymore, now they hold it crooked, which makes for disaster. they hit the guts, groin, or legs, seriously wounding, but not killing, so they have to finish the victim off with a bullet to the nape of the neck, a pool of pointless blood. Female bosses have bodyguards who dress like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill with blonde hair and phosphorescent yellow outfits.
More beautiful writing.
Not all blood is the same color. Dario’s is reddish purple and seems to still be flowing. The piles of sawdust seem to have a hard time absorbing it all. After a bit a car takes advantage of the space and parks on top of the stain.
Everything comes to an end, everything gets covered over.
Another tour de force here. 9.1
ZeroZeroZero, Roberto Saviano
Saviano branches out into the global economy of cocaine. His opener about the Gomorrah Don’s lecture to the Mexican mobsters is perfectly executed, but the book doesn’t maintain the consistency of Gomorrah and loses steam in its second half. But some anecdotes struck with me. A taste:
In Latin America and particularly in drug trafficking countries, beauty pageants are also fairs where thoroughbreds already belonging to a particular stable are paraded. The contest is often fixed from the start. The girl who belongs to the most powerful owner wins. The best present you can give to a woman is to buy her a beauty queen’s crown, a gift that also makes the prestige of the man who chose her shine.
And some Black Mirror shit.
One day in San Fernando, a village about 85 miles away from the US-Mexico border, Los Zetas stopped several buses traveling along Highway 101 and made the passengers get off and fight like gladiators, armed with clubs and knives. Whoever survived was guaranteed a place with Los Zetas. Whoever succumbed was buried in a mass grave. In spring 2011, such a grave was discovered in San Fernando; it contained 193 corpses, the victims all killed with powerful blows to the head.
6.6.
Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel: Tom Wainwright
Reviewed here. 5.5.
China
The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds, Jonathan Spence
Jonathan Spence is one of the 20th century’s great historians with a magnificent eye for detail. The Chan’s Great Continent looks into a handful of westerners from Marco Polo to Kissinger in how they saw and tried to bend China. This is a jewel of a book.
For a taste, his take on Father Mateo Ricci, who showed up to convert the Chinese emperor in the early 1600s.
In choosing the Chinese characters that should be used to translate the Christian monotheistic conception of God, Ricci took another characteristically ingenious yet compromising stance. He decided that the two Chinese characters Shang-di, connoting something approximating “Lord-of-all” or “Highest Ruler,” could be retained for use in the new context. This was partly because current Chinese use of Shang-di was not religious in the Christian spiritual sense. Ricci also argued that in the far recesses of the Chinese past such a concept of the one true God had existed, although the knowledge of that God had subsequently faded from Chinese consciousness…Yet to balance these interpretations, Ricci also suggested that a new coinage — Tian-zhu or “Heaven’s Lord” — might also be used.
9.0
Mao’s Great Famine, Frank Dikotter
Now here’s some indignant history writing worthy of its subject. Dikotter is masterful on both in Beijing and the provinces. It still astounds me how a government could starve fifty million of its own people. Economic policy never has and hopefully never will again go as wrong as it did in China during the Great Leap Forward. 8.7
China in Ten Words, Yu Hua
After reading a too many white guys on China, this was a refreshing essay-based memoir by a novelist born in 1960 growing up in the Cultural Revolution and living through modernization. 8.4
Mao: The Unknown Story, Jon Halliday, Jung Chang
People give this book crap for having a vendetta but when you’re writing about one of the world’s great criminals that billions of people don’t recognize as one I’ll give the authors a pass. I appreciate the passion/scorn and don’t think it detracts from the analysis and scholarship. 8.3
The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, Frank Dikotter
Reviewed here. 6.8
Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life, Alexander Pantsov, Steven Levine
It paints an unflattering and convincing portrait of Deng in the Mao era, but the book oddly skims over Deng’s actual reign. Pantsov’s Russian language skills shine through with strong analysis of PRC-USSR relations and the impact the Communist big brother had on their southern neighbor. 7.4.
USSR/Russia
Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
Can also go under the ‘Understanding Trump’ category. Fictionalized narrative of an apparatchik under the Great Terror. Near-perfect. 9.4
Lenin’s Tomb, David Remnick
The Soviet Union collapsed. Remnick was there to have adventures and write about it. He’s a pretty perceptive dude and wrote a very good book. Unfortunately the writing only sometimes matches the material.
In 1988, when he was thirty, he moved with his wife to Moscow as the Washington Post’s correspondent. It draws from John Reed 10 Days That Shook the World where travels around Russia as historic events transpire while reasonably frequently breaking with ‘objective’ newsman convention. Instead of Reed’s sympathy for Lenin and Trotsky he admires the early moves of Gorbachev, the ‘saint-like’ protests of Andrei Sakharov and the everyday dissident. There’s also a taste of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in how he colors more analysis of high politics with his personal observations, but more of the book centers on character portraits of the men and some women who brought down or fought till the bitter end to preserve the empire.
Remnick starts off with one of the most powerful and illustrative scenes of the book: him knocking at then ninety year old Lazar Kaganovich’s door. ‘Iron Lazar’ was one of the history’s most prolific killers, orchestrating the famine in Ukraine. By Gorbachev’s Glasnost, Remnick could get away with buzzing his doorbell and calling his phone number a few hours a week in hopes of an interview. “Reporting is often foolish work,” Remnick writes, “but there was something especially shaming at knocking endlessly at a tyrant’s door. It raised insane questions of etiquette, such as what the rules of harassment are when a mass murderer is concerned.”
Remnick really likes heroic historians. Dima Yurasov, born 1964, was a curious middle schooler who was struck when reading the Soviet encyclopedia entry that referred to someone who had been “illegally repressed and rehabilitated after his death.” For Dima, Remnick wrote, the phrase “was as strange to hi as a sentence of Burmese.” He resolved to investigate. Inspired also by Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Live Not by the Lie’, after graduating with top marks, he chose a lowly clerical placement at a secret archives to see what really happened. He spent decades filling out about 100,000 index cards with information on “the lost names of history,” only to reveal his findings in 1987. Another, General Dmitri Volkogonov stood up to conservatives who would not accept his scathing draft of the new official history which attacked the reputations of Trotsky, Stalin, and most gallingly Lenin.
Unfortunately there are no economics in a story that needs some to be somewhat comprehensive.
Favorite quote: Gorbachev said that the political environment he was operating in was like a “lake of gasoline.” 8.7
The Great Terror, Robert Conquest
Trump undertones of creating reality and getting people to believe in it. It’s incredible how he wrote this book in 1968 and was basically right about everything.
From his obituary:
“The Great Terror: A Reassessment” included new information made available after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was less a reassessment, however, than a triumphant vindication of the original edition, since newly released material from the Soviet archives supported Mr. Conquest’s findings at every turn.
“In the circumstances, Mr. Conquest is merely left to dot the i’s,” the historian Norman Davies wrote in The New York Times Book Review. In a moment of gleeful malice, Mr. Conquest told friends that his suggested title for the new edition was “I Told You So, You Fools” (with a vulgar adjective inserted between the last two words).
He his pitch-perfect the near-impossible tone I think you need to make atrocitity-writing bearable — equal parts derision, irony, and horror. 15% too long but many of the details are too perfect to cut. 8.5
Stalin: Volume I, Stephen Kotkin
You could skip forward past Stalin’s earliest years without missing too much. This book is strongest not on the biographical elements but the dynamics around the fall of the Russian Empire and Russian civil war.
Stalin’s first encounter with Lenin:
Kerensky’s abolition of the Tsarist police reminded me of ‘debaathification’ in 2003–4 Iraq. 8.2
Arab World
The Arabs, Eugene Rogan
Very strong pre-WWI. Rogan told some great stories about the Drooze Borgias, Fakhr-al-Din II. A short dude (the joke was that “an egg could fall from his pocket without breaking”), he schemed and allied his way (with the Medici!) into a creating a statelet underneath the Ottoman Empire. The Sultan, none too pleased with his upstart emir, forced him into exile in Italy. After five years, he came back to Lebanon only to again get too big for his breeches.
It’s decent before 1973, then tails off as we get closer to modern day. Rogan does a good job of relying on Arab voices to narrate events instead of settling for Western diplomats’ notes. 6.2
Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS, Joby Warrick
Mostly a Zarqawi biography. Not particularly relevatory and no clue how this wins a Pulitzer. His past book, Triple Agent, was much better. But It did have one cute moment.
One of the early attempts at a bombing had been a spectacular failure. A member of the group had volunteered to plant explosives inside a local adult cinema. After a few minutes in the theater, the would-be assailant had become so engrossed in the film that he forgot about his bomb. As he sat, glued to the screen, the device detonated under his feet. No patrons were hurt, but the bomber lost both his legs.
4.9
Science
Stuff Matters, Mark Miodownik
Surprisingly fun! A materials scientist who can write takes you through twelve of the modern world’s most important materials. Each chapters gives you a bit of history, molecular science, design, and only slightly cringeworthy personal anecdote. The evolution of chocolate from something bitter and gross to a sweetened bar that melts at exactly your mouth’s temperature was its best chapter. 8.1
Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart and Mind, David Linden
Reviewed here. 4.3
Global History
Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, Rachel Laudan
This book was such a joy. Unlike books like ‘Salt’ or ‘Cod,’ Laudan takes on the entire history of humans cooking food in 400 pages. She does a fantastic job of incorporating technology, religion, high and low culture, and the interaction between empires to give you a much more grounded sense of how food evolved over the past few thousand years. She’s at her best when she talks about the transmission of culinary ideas, taste preferences, and cooking styles across cultures and continents. Among the nuggets off the top of my head — most cultures around the world in 0AD thought we had literal fires in our bellies and Romans’ invention of a more efficient way of grinding grain freed up a huge percentage of the labor force that no culture in the Americas figured out.
The photo she printed of a vulcanized loaf of bread from Pompeii with the baker’s stamp still visible alongside the context she provided of what bread did for Rome was heartstopping.
It’sa joy to read, with literally every page giving you a new perspective on food you eat every week. Her econtalk interview is a great place to get a first taste if you need more convincing.
9.5. Some may take more deductions for density, but I appreciated the concision. It’s richer if you know some world history.
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson
Fun, wacky revisionist global history detailing how ‘play,’ broadly defined, drove modernity. It’s a nice Trump break happy book. He talks about imagining automatons in an Arab book from the 1200s presaging a wealth of industrial age inventions, shopping becoming fun in London driving colonialism, Thomas Jefferson’s vanilla ice cream obsession, and the start of mountaineering for sport.
Mountains in particular were thought to be aesthetically offensive. They were called warts, boils, and even in one bizarre case, nature’s pudendum. As late as the 18th century, travelers through the Alps often asked to be blindfolded to avoid looking at the awful scenery. When they looked at a mountain, they imagined it as a habitat they might have to survive in rather than a postcard image of natural beauty.
7.0
1946: The Making of the Modern World, Victor Sebestyen
I meant to write a review of this book but then didn’t have much to say about it. It’s very reporter-ly without much analysis beyond ‘the world was very unstable and alot of stuff happened in 1946.’ Usually I’m drawn to this sort of book but you have to be a great writer to pull it off and Sebestyen isn’t.
The most novel chapter to me was on the US-USSR Iran confrontation (said Truman: “I am tired of babying the Soviets”). I spotted some pretty glaring errors on chapters I knew more about (using only UK sources to assert that America only supported a Jewish state because it didn’t want more Jewish immigrants). I wish he wrote a chapter about Vietnam, and tease out hypothetical he points to of the US supporting the nationalists over the French.
It did have a pretty strong collection of fun facts: in 1946 the US manufactured more goods than the rest of the world combined. Chaing Kai Shek’s wife had an affair with Wendell Willkie. Nehru slept with Mountbatten’s wife. FDR after appointing Herbert Lehman, who ran UNRRA before LaGuardia took it over, “I want to see some of those godddamn fascists begging for subsistence from a Jew.” Then LaGuardia on what UNRRA does, “go to the library and ask for a book called the Bible, New Testament, and that will tell you what UNRRA is about.”
On the train to Missouri to give his Iron Curtain speech, Churchill played poker, “a game the former PM didn’t enjoy, with some of the President’s Missouri cronies. Churchill lost $75. Later, he told the British Ambassador to Washington, that it had been ‘well worth it.’
A UK jingle:
Our Uncle Which art in America, Sam be thy Name, Thy Navy come, thy will be done…Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our un-American activities.
5.8
War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft, Robert D. Blackwill, Jennifer Harris
Reviewed here. 4.7
In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, David Rieff
A little over-intellectual revisionist take on historical memory, arguing that memory is so easily weaponized that we should probably do a whole lot more forgetting. A decent book review will make the point. 4.4
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, Peter Frankopan
Frankopan published this book at only 44, and it shows. He should’ve written this after 10 more years of scholarship. Many of the points he makes peak at “oh hey there’s something interesting going on here” not at “here’s the interesting, defensible revisionist point I’m getting to.” The book falls on its face in the late 20th and 21st century, with uninspired and unoriginal critiques of Bush-era foreign policy. 3.9
Ancient Rome
History of Rome, Books 21–25, Livy
More in Tunisia trip write-up here. Some excerpts:
A Roman representative went to Carthage to complain about their invading Seguntum, and the Carthaginians started talking legalese about past treaties. His response:
Then the Roman, gathering up his toga, said, “Here we bring you war and peace, take which you please.” (tum Romanus sinu ex toga facto ‘Hic’ inquit ‘vobis bellum et pacem portamus: utrum placet, sumite’.) He was met by a defiant shout bidding him give whichever he preferred, and when, letting the folds of his toga fall, he said that he gave them war, they replied that they accepted war and would carry it on in the same spirit in which they accepted it.
Fabius trying to convince the Consul replacing him not to engage Hannibal in battle. “Experience is the teacher of fools (stultus)”…
It is said that truth is far too often eclipsed but never totally extinguished. The man who scorns false glory will possess the true. Let them call you a coward because you are cautious, a laggard because you are deliberate, unsoldierly because you are a skillful general. I would rather have you give a clever enemy cause for fear than earn the praise of foolish compatriots. Hannibal will only feel contempt for a man who runs all risks, he will be afraid of one who never takes a rash step. I do not advise you to do nothing, but I do advise you to be guided in what you do by common sense and reason and not by chance. Never lose control of your forces and yourself; be always prepared, always on the alert; never fail to seize an opportunity favourable to yourself, and never give a favourable opportunity to the enemy. The man who is not in a hurry will always see his way clearly; haste blunders on blindly.
And finally, Fabius burning a pretender to the consulship:
It is of more importance to you, T. Otacilius, than it can be to any one else that you should not have a burden placed upon your shoulders whose weight would crush you.
8.3
SPQR, Mary Beard
Fun romp through Roman history. Starts out strong on Cicero and Cataline, then drags for awhile through the Kings, but picks up steam with the Republic and into the later sections on daily life. Her attempt to discount the progress of history in the Empire (basically saying the Empire was the same deal after Augustus set the mold for the next few hundred years) seems like a lame excuse to not write about a part of the Roman story she finds less interesting. But her few chapters towards the end of the book on daily life are among the strongest.
Fun facts: “Candidate” comes from ‘candidatus,’ which means whitened (ie the toga you had to starch for people to take you seriously). Boundary stones had the names of the commissioners who granted the land (ala today’s mayors putting their names on parks). The Parthians cut of Crassus’ head in battle and used it as a prop in the Bacchae. ‘Liberal Arts’ mean the subjects that free men should study. Tacitus power quote on colonialism: “[the colonial subjects] call it in their ignorance civilization but it was really part of their enslavement.” Augustus wore platform shoes to look taller (like lots of other dictators…). Tacitus reported that Emperor Vespasian ‘did some miracles’ suspiciously similar to Jesus’.
There’s a crazy primary document about one Christian martyr Perpetua worth a read. When she gets into the Coliseum to die:
For the young women, however, the Devil had prepared a mad heifer. This was an unusual animal, but it was chosen that their sex might be matched with that of the beast. So they were stripped naked, placed in nets and thus brought out into the arena. Even the crowd was horrified when they saw that one was a delicate young girl and the other was a woman fresh from childbirth with the milk still dripping from her breasts.
8.0
Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, Richard Miles
I read it in companion with Livy…it didn’t add all that much. The most gripping parts where when he basically followed Livy’s narrative and there wasn’t too much added by weaving in other ancient sources. He does harp on Hannibal’s attempt to recast himself as Hercules which was an interesting wrinkle. 4.4
New York City
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nahesi Coates
Prefer the Atlantic pieces but executed this book’s vision masterfully. 8.8
Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League, Dan-El Padilla
Outrageous how lucky Dan-El had to be to be able to express his genius. 6.3
Primates of Park Avenue, Wednesday Martin
I’m glad my mom worked. 3.4.
Fiction
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Mohsin Hamid
I listened to this book to before my brain could handle fiction and imagining the characters proved very draining. But it was short, fun, and touching. 6.8.
The Handmaiden’s Tale, Margeret Atwood
Cute premise, but dragged. 5.6.
Other!
The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad, Seth Schwartz
I now know things about ancient Jews! Scholarly yet readable. 7.4
The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History, Paul Andrew Hutton
The second half of the book was a little too tactical for my tastes but I loved the sociology and bureaucratic history. The feedback loops of cruelty between the westerners and the Apaches, the dilemmas of accommodation and betrayal was. For instance, the Apaches learned scalping from the Spanish in Mexico. The Taliban parallels stood out.
Hutton’s not a fantastic writer but captured this beautiful image to close the book.
Old Nana encourage the people to believe that it was only a matter of time until they could be returned to their homeland. One day a lady philanthropist vised Mount Vernon Barracks to write a report on the conditions there. Nana told her that the people did not want to stay there but wished instead to go back to their homeland. The lady had brought a small globe with her and handed it to Nana. She told him that people were coming from all over the globe to America, that the country was becoming crowded. The Apaches could no longer roam over the vast territory that once was their land.
Nana stared at the globe, shaken to the core. He told the visitor to give it to a younger man, for he was too old to learn. Kaytennae reached down and took the globe from his shaking hands. After that visit, Nana slipped into a deep depression from which he never recovered.
6.4
The Politics of Innovation: Why Some Countries Are Better Than Others at Science and Technology, Mark Zachary Taylor
America has maintained technological preeminence long enough for us to get complacent. However, as historian Donald Cardwell pointed out in the early 1970s after looking at a millenium of change, “No nation has been very creative for more than an historically short time.”
Mark Zachary Taylor, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, poses a simple question. “Why are some countries better than others at science and technology?” In his compelling yet accessible new book, he rejects consensus explanations and instead puts domestic and international politics front and center.
Most scholars and policymakers today put their faith in institutions to drive innovation. The “Five Pillars,” property rights, R&D subsidies, education, research universities, and trade policy many contend are sufficient to unclog market failures to get creative juices flowing. But Taylor demonstrates that these policies explain some but not all of national innovation rates (measured mostly through patent filings weighted by future citations). He also points out that of the top national performers, only the US, Canada, and Japan rank well on more than two of categories. While institutions may show how nations innovate, they don’t why they do.
Another school of thought points to to democratization and markets free of government interference as keys to national science and technology success. As Daren Acemoglu and James Robinson laid out in their recent bestseller ‘Why Nations Fail,’ countries need inclusive and competitive politics to ensure institutions don’t just preserve elite wealth at the expense of dynamism. In a convincing critique, he runs a regression showing how countries that have democratized the most over the past forty years haven’t had their innovation rates increase any more than those that haven’t.
He concludes that it’s “creative insecurity” and networks that nations need. Countries need to be threatened enough externally to be willing to take on monopolies and cut back on statism, but not too overwhelmed by their neighbors to be losing wars. Given his thesis, it seems like the threat of an alien invasion is all we need to really boost total factor productivity.
It’s very political science-y but that means you can skim and not miss much. 5.4