Plenty more good reading this year, a little more – it seems on review -weighted toward history this time. Or is it that gazing on the past can be a relief from coping with the present?
As previously: What follows are some reflections on 10 of the books I read for the first time this year – not necessarily the 10 best, or those I enjoyed most (though I recommend all on both counts) but the 10 that left the strongest impression, that drew my attention back weeks and months after I first consumed them. Not all are new, though most were, but they all were new to me this year.
And once again, they’re listed here in alphabetical order (by author name), not preferential ranking, which would be too problematic for books as different as these.
Tim Alberta –
Steve Coll – Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016 (2023). The title oversells slightly; we more or less knew the wars were going on, as they were happening. What Coll does spectacularly here is throw a whole new layer of explanation for what happened in Afghanistan all those years, including (but certainly not limited to) American dealings with the Pakistan intelligence agency, notably the division of it (Directorate S) which was involved with double- and triple-dealing with the Taliban and other players in the area. There’s great insight too into the shifting and problematic role of the American-backed Afghan government. The story is long, complex and reiterates how difficult was the American effort to make headway in that part of the world, even recognizing the significant number of mistakes we made along the way.
Jonathan Eig – King: A Life (2023). Some years ago I read the Taylor Branch trilogy, America in the King Years, an epic of research which probably totaled eight times the words of the new Jonathan Eig biography of Martin Luther King, and gave me the satisfied feeling that I had the waterfront covered. I didn’t. For all the vast detail and immense depth of the Branch books (he seemed almost to have documented every time the man got in a car and drove somewhere), I had to conclude that while the books gave a great overview of the Civil Rights era and environment, and lots of detail about both the central and surrounding personnel, they didn’t really tell me who King was. Hence, this book, which was well worth filling in many gaps I hadn’t appreciated were there. Eig was blunt up front in saying that he intended to write about the man in full, and the result is neither expose nor hagiography. Rather, I felt after reading it that I had a better sense of the human being. Who turned out to be plenty impressive enough.
Henry Grabar – Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (2023). So you read the title and your first thought is, oh yeah? Prove it. (I seem to run into books like this two or three times a year.) Okay: After reading Grabar’s extensive case, I’m not sure that parking does fully and entirely does explain the whole world. The press for motor vehicle parking does explain a scandalously large portion of it, though, and not just in the United States, and not just in road and building design; these and other factors lead to ripple effects all over the place. You might expect this to devolve into an anti-car and pro-public transit screed, but while Grabar does nod in those directions a bit, his view – and his range of research – is much more sophisticated, with a surprising number of prospective solutions on order. This is a livelier account than you might anticipate, given the surface (ahem) name of the core subject.
Adam Hochschild – American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (2023). A close call here between two books covering related territory. I probable enjoyed (as in, it was easy reading) Timothy Egan’s A Fever in the Heartland a little more; it was the smoothly told story of the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, miraculously done without explicit (only implicit) mention of similar problems in our own time. Hochchild’s more rigorous history put the period in a larger perspective, though, and offers even stronger lessons for us a century later. A reviewer in the Philadelphia Inquirer said it “chronicles our nation’s horrific period from 1917–21, when Woodrow Wilson, his men, and a paranoid culture went to war against union activists, immigrants, resisters, and Black people, among others—on a level that should forever shatter any myth about American Exceptionalism. A cautionary tale of what happens when democracy goes off the rails.†It ought to be a required read these days.
Laura Meckler – Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equality (2023). I’ll admit this book first grabbed my attention because, at a long-ago high school event in Washington, I was in a group including a student who loudly and proudly proclaimed himself as being from Shaker Heights, Ohio, at every opportunity. (Guess what his nickname was?) But Shaker Heights actually had some bragging rights I wasn’t aware of: It was well ahead of nearly all of the country, and still is, in working toward developing a school system fair to all of the people who were in it, a system aiming to avoid the problems so many people encountered elsewhere, including in neighboring communities. How well did they do? Meckler (who attended school there) reports here on the history of the work in progress, which still very much is in progress. It’s partly a cautionary story and partly a pointer for hope. It’s also an exceptionally well researched slice of recent history.
Jacob Mikanowski – Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land (2023). The war in Ukraine doubtless had something to do with it, but I wound up reading a lot about central and eastern Europe this year; the fact that it’s been an under-read subject (by many Americans, I suspect) gave it additional pertinence. And there were some good reads. For a solid, straight-through narrative (that educated me considerably about the area), I can strongly recommend
Chris Miller – Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022). I do have a bone to pick here with Miller’s periodic lionizing of the Great Men who launched key new phases in the development of microchips. I’ll forgive him that because this book lays out, better than anything I’ve seen elsewhere, the shape of chip development and how and why key choke points in the system have developed. Miller makes the apt point that if oil was the central commodity of the last age, microchips have replaced it: Our society is (way too) dependent on those tiny and immensely complex items, and our growing reliance on a handful of providers is a little frightening, and an underappreciated global problem. This book helps place much of the situation in perspective.
Simon Sebag Montefiore – The World: A Family History of Humanity (2023). As coherent histories go, this is a huge, fabulous, boggling mess: Not in its scholarship or insight (which are impressive indeed) or its lively writing but for its sheer overwhelming mass of barely connected details, linked mainly by the fact that almost everyone in the book, which ranges across most of human history, is related to someone else. I’d love to see Montefiore on a panel discussion with, say, Jered Diamond, who famously thematically reduced (in considerable part) much of human history to Guns, Germs and Steel. That one barely mentioned individual people; this one is all about individuals (mainly royalty and rulers, with some exceptions). In Montefiore’s case, you have to pick out the concepts and through-lines while watching Niagara Falls roar by. (The frequent romps of sex, scandal and violence keep the pages turning at a fast clip.) It’s a good lesson, though, in the usefulness of looking at things through new angles: This book is almost like flipping the telescope on Diamond, and seeing history anew.
Louise Penny – A World of Curiosities (2022). This year tended to do less for me in the area of fiction; there I wound up re-reading old favorites more than enjoying new ones. The leading exception to that was unexpected, in that I tend to tire of lengthy novel series after a while, and too often they start feeling like carbon copies (remember those?) of each other. Behold an exception, in the case of the 18th book in the Louise Penney murder mystery series about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, and much the best among those I’ve read. Gamache is an unusually well-drawn character among the army of fictional dogged police officers, but that’s really the lesser attraction here. This longish novel is packed with detail and wide-ranging subject matter and striking characters, veering expertly between historical revisionism, psychopath thriller and small-town cozy. The first quarter or so struck me as a little confusing; get past that and you’ll find as solidly ripping – and inventive – a read as has come along in the last two or three years.
(image/libreshot)
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