Posts published in “review”

Piles of good reading this year, even if a great deal of it had to do withg reflections on current events and trends. It was a year in which more people could have used a little more reflection, and which might have evolved differently if the ideas in some of these books were a little more widely spread.

As previously: What follows are some reflections on 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 those leaving some of the strongest impressions, 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.

Christopher Clark - Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 (2023) At about 750 pages, this may seem a little much in the effort department to justify the time: A tightly-written an detailed review of the many concurrent revolutions erupting across Europe at almost exactly the same time, in the middle of the 19th century - revolutions that nearly all failed and did not revive.

Unless you're already well up to speed with European history of the period, most of the people involved won't be familiar either (though a number of them were striking characters with dramatic story arcs). The best-known probably is Karl Marx, who was merely an observer of the action (he wasn't at all well-known at that time, and is only a minor figure in the book) and often misread the events as they transpired.

What's the point?

The point here, besides filling in a lot of prospective gaps in knowledge of history (it filled some for me), is the usefulness of seeing the dynamic, how these eruptions from seemingly out of nowhere did emerge, what ground was needed to sustain them, what happened at first and why they were crushed.

And the point of absorbing that is the connection with our world today. The dynamics of human society may change over time but human nature often stays much the same, and while the author Christopher Clark makes only a few quick, peripheral explicit references to the state of our world today, a thoughtful read will find parallels between that unusual time and place and ours - with some implicit lessons for what could happen if our future turns darker.

The story here starts at around 1830, nearly a generation after the Napoleonic wars and at a time when Europe's political and governmental structure seemed mostly settled, that being a major goal of a lot of people, not just royalty, after the upheaval of the Frank revolutionary period. But while Napoleon and the politics of the earlier revolutionary time may have been crushed militarily and administratively, with mostly strong monarchies left in place, the ideas and desires that had made them popular in the first place had not gone away. France had a small-scale revolution, resulting in a regime change, in 1830, and the shock waves from it spread across Europe. While modern transportation and communication weren't yet around (no long-distance railroads or telegraphs quite yet) word of what was happening tended to spread fast, resulting in 1848 in a series of revolts, monarchical abdications and radical takeovers in country after country, almost all within a few weeks of each other, even though no one was actively trying to orchestrate it that way. The rebels were acting as a result of receiving distant signals - newspapers and other publications were central to this, as the internet would be now -  but there was no coordination.

The details of how all this happened should in some ways seem startlingly familiar to people in our age. An example: The radical rebels were extremely popular in the capital and main regional cities, and in many cases were able to chase monarchs out of town. But the monarchs didn't have to go far: The people in the countryside were much friendlier to them, and provided a strong base of support when time came, as it did, for the counter-revolution. That's one reason the powers that got removed were able to return. (Clark does make some references to how, later on, many of them would lose their way in years yet to come.)

The background is not simply analytical; Clark threads the historical narrative with accounts from people, famous and unknown, put concrete detail, sometimes of a grisly nature, on the proceedings.

We understand our world better when we can look at it from different angles. In Revolutionary Spring, there's a fresh angle for looking at where we are now, and where we could be going.

Mason Coile - William (2024) Among  the labels you could attach to this novel, one you can't  is "science fiction." It's tech-based and on the cutting edge and involves research (often a sci-fi giveaway), and it qualifies as a thriller, probably horror and maybe a ghost story, and a character-driven psychological study as well. But it fails the sci-fi test because all or nearly all of it sits squarely within today's reach of tech capacity.

Whatever it is, it's the most striking, provocative and haunting new slice of fiction I've read this year.

Coile (actually the pseudonym of veteran novelist Andrew Pyper) wrote this one short and compact, just a couple of hundred pages - one blurb said it was a single-sitting read. And that's about what I did with it, not only because of the efficient length but because, as a good thriller will do, you're compelled to find out what happens next; not only with the characters and in the story, but also to find out what the story is actually about. There I won't be too specific, because there's a large twisty stinger at the end that shouldn't be spoiled.

William centers on artificial intelligence, or AI, and a researcher named Henry who is breaking through several barriers in his home laboratory. The whole of the story takes place at that house, roughly over the course of one day, and it gallops in what feels like real time. The driver is the increasing activity of an AI creation- named William - in that attic of that house, and what happens when William starts to understand his (or its) creator a little too well, and displays a highly active id.

You might say that Isaac Asimov's idealistic three rules for robots do not figure into this story.

Things get a little juicer when William starts to gain control of the house, accomplished because the house is a smart house - a very smart house. One of the book's chills is in the recognition that nothing here (excepting maybe some of the AI elements relating to consciousness) is beyond our current ability, and in nearly all cases is in use, in some fashion somewhere.

The fact that the reach from our everyday existence to what Coile presents here is so slight, makes the novel hard to shake.

It does get me to think again, and a little harder, about how much and what kind of tech advances I want in my living space.

There are larger questions here too, including a good basis for considering what it makes to think and to be alive.

Start your read relatively early in the day. There's no point to losing a night's sleep over it, which could happen even though the reading process isn't all that long.

But if this description sounds at all appealing, do read it.

Hein De Haas - How Migration Really Works (2024) This, written by an academic who has devoted his career to studying the realities of migration, both historically and currently - addresses exactly this. It is not an ideological polemic: His views are not designed to give partricular comfort to any place on the political spectrum. They also make a surprising amount of real world sense.

Here's a list of propositions drawn from some the chapter titles, some of which will appeal to the left and others to the right:

• "Migration is at an all-time high"
• "The world is facing a refugee crisis"
• "Development in poor countries will reduce migration"
• "Immigrants steal jobs and drive down wages"
• "Immigration lifts all boats"
• "Immigrant integration has failed"
• "Immigration sends crime rates soaring"

Here's what I left out: Every one of those chapter titles also describes each of these ideas as a myth, and De Haas does an effective job of demolishing all of them. Or nearly all; I had minor quibbles in some places. But his case appears overall to be solid.

What causes immigration, specifically immigration from a distance to places like the United States? (Did you know that not only our country and western Europe but also much of the Middle East and southeast Asia are immigrant magnets as well?) The are driven to travel not primarily, he argues, because of conditions on the ground in the countries of origin, and usually not extreme poverty or emergency. Traveling at a distance usually takes planning and financial resources; emigration from origin countries actually is low where economic and other conditions are especially weak, rise mainly in the case of moderate prosperity, and then slacken when higher-level prosperity is achieved. Rather than being effectively expelled from their home lands, most are attracted by economic prospects  in the destination countries. One reason the level of immigration is high now in the United States is that our economy is so strong; immigration was far lower after the big crash of 2008.

De Haas posits too that strong border security actually leads to more immigration and causes many more people who do enter the country, legally or not, to stay rather than have to go through the tougher border situation; a more fluid border leads to more of a revolving-door effect.

There's much more, all backed by extensive studies - in many places, world wide - and well worth reviewing. If you'd open to thinking about migration in a serious way, as opposed simply enjoying the emotional trigger, this is more than worth your time.

Chris Dixon - Read Write Own (2024) Most of what I have heard about blockchains has been in the context of cryptocurrency - a topic notable in the last few years for associations with uncertainty and untrustworthiness. (That sound of dismissal isn't entirely warranted, though cases like that of Sam Bankman-Fried give it some rationale.) But what about the technology underlying it? Tech is just a tool, right? Tech can be used for all sorts of things, good and bad.

The author, a tech investor, makes a strong case that the underlying computing elements - the most key component of which is something called a blockchain - could become the lever for solving many of the worst current ailments of the internet as we know it. And more than that, a sizable slice of the problems of many societies around the world, not least ours.

The book is not large (the main text of the print book I read is just 230 pages) but it is tightly written and argued, and written in plain enough English than non-tech people can follow it regularly. For the most part, you'll understand his points, his concerns and his proposals, reasonably well if you're an active user of the net ... as most of us are these days.

He begins with a quick review of the last 30 years or so if the online world and how it developed into the one we know, transitioning from a system dominated by protocols (meaning, generally, e-mail, websites and a few others services) to one dominated by a handful of tech giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Those mega-companies, he points out, started out by building networks of users, which became enormous with time, and transitioned from an effort to add people and groups to their networks, to trying to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of them (the "take"). So much money is being pulled in this current extractive phase, he says (and he's clearly right) that much of the commerce and creativity of our world is being diminished, and our society and democracy are being weakened.

Dixon's answer to this and other related problems relates in large part to blockchains, a subtly different software technology which relies on strict usage rules and open-access, along with openly-accessible information, to do many of these same kinds of things our other networks (like those of the tech giants) have been doing, along with some new things that might be added to the mix. Blockchains could be controlled by users rather than a small group of owners, Bixon points out, and while the operators of them can operate profitably, either as profit or non-profit entities, the built-in incentives would provide for a far smaller take, and few fewer cumbersome and restricting rules, than the current regime imposes.

The possibilities seem large,  and by the end of the book he even offers plausible ideas for how we might more effectively cope with such challenges as artificial intelligence and deepfakes. Dixon's approach is basically a solution through ongoing research and business development, but this is no libertarian tract: He sees a need for regulation and guardrails as well. It is in all a broad-minded view of how we might work out way out of what seems a muddy swamp.

If you get concerned and depressed at times about where the internet, and our tech future, may be headed, pick up this book. The solution it offers may not materialize (Dixon describes himself as optimistic but not a prognosticator), but it could. And it demonstrates the way answers to our problems may be developed, possibly in the not too distant future.

Arlie Russell Hochschild - Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right (2024) Three recommendations here, actually, for the spot of one. That's because the question of where and how the new political extremism - Trumpism, Q-Anonism, extremist violence and more - developed is a vast subject. In the last two or three years I've read a couple of shelves worth of books addressing that, and while most (maybe all) had useful additions to understanding of the phenomenon, none has constituted an absolute flat conclusion as to why it happened.

In this last month of the year, I read three pieces that expanded my sense of the how and why, vectoring in from different angles, and they're all more than worth a look.

One is a magazine article by the essayist David Brooks in the December edition of The Atlantic, called "How the Ivy League Broke America," about the creation and failures of many of the elites in this country. It effectively outlines what many of the people in this country who see themselves as put-upon outsiders are rebelling against, and offers some useful ideas. It's a good overview of what went wrong with the best of intentions. As such, it's necessarily incomplete - a full and lengthy book wouldn't cover the subject completely - but it should be a read for anyone hoping to understand how we got there.

Another is a relatively short book called Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society and Capture American Politics (2024) by the journalist Elle Reeve. It's a series of profiles of people whose activities gave us such poison as Q-Anon and much of the rest of what ails our society, and if you wanted to know why those dark internet corners developed as they did, Reeve will provide enlightenment. It's another useful piece of the puzzle, and also well worth reading.

The recent reading that to me cut deepest, though was Hochschild's Stolen Pride. In 2016 she released a similarly-themed book, Strangers in Their Own Land, about how Tea Party and Trumpism developed in the poorer quarters of Louisiana, and it was based around intensive discussions with and research of the people there. It unearthed fine insights, but to me it felt somehow incomplete, still missing exploration of some vital element of the emotional component of what made that brand of political activism so appealing.

Transferring her research this time to eastern Kentucky, she seems to have honed in on exactly that point. Her sore observation is that much of what has activated what might gently be called the new populism is shattered pride (growing out of economic and other social changes), resultant shame and humiliation, and more recently - Trumpism is key to this - a revenge motif.

Stated that way it sounds almost simplistic, but Hochschild clearly is on to something here, seeming to me to cut closer to the bone than just about any others among the large crowd of researchers on the general topic. The appeal is deeply, down to the core, emotional, not philosophical, and Hochschild is excellent at sketching the dynamic driving it.

But read all three of these writings, if the subject grabs you. It's too big to be addressed by a single book, or even a single armful of them.

Annie Jacobson - Nuclear War (2024) What with all the other things on our plate, many of us have shoved to the side, or into the background, something that used to be - as in, it was when I was growing up - Topic A among serious items for discussion: Nuclear warfare. But this book, framed as fiction but actually only marginally speculative, ought to restore our consideration of the threat to its proper, and much more prominent, place.

She structures this highly readable overview within a fictional but stunningly compelling frame: A scenario for how a large-scale nuclear war could happen today or in the near future, and what would result if it did.

Such a war could happen all too easily, and the consequences could be far more absolute than many of us probably have come to think.

After all, in this day of super-tech capabilities, the prospects for shooting missiles out of the sky should be realistic, shouldn't they? (Look at what Israel has recently done to non-nuclear missile swarms sent from Iran.) But it turns out that no, we don't actually have a decent defense against something like that.

And we must surely have enough safe4guards and backups to keep sanity at the fore? Well, no. One of the scariest elements of the book is its gamed-out time frame: Less than a half hour from an initial missile launch until World War III is well and truly underway. All the critical decisions probably would be made in the span of about 15 minutes. The whole immense global war could be over and done - along with all of us - in a couple of hours. No time to prepare, or even run for a shelter (not that those would do any significant good, given the power of today's nukes.)

The scenario Jacobsen sketches involves an initial nuclear attack on the United States by North Korea, which on its surface suggests something of limited scope. But no: The whole world is rapidly drawn up, and all or nearly all of human civilization, as well as most of the human population on our globe (not to mention immense numbers of other living things) are rapidly wiped from existence.

There's no going back. Since the first person figured out how to create a nuclear weapon, humanity has been stuck with it: We could (in theory) destroy every nuclear weapon, but we can't eliminate the knowledge of how to make a new one.

Jacobsen offers few thoughts on how to improve our situation - that's one weakness in the book - but possibly additional research on blocking the weapons, improving defenses and maybe ultimately finding ways to disarm them could be helpful. Maybe, since you could never say can't-ever to technology.

In the meantime, here's a book with some solid motivation to work toward finding some answers, and avoiding the nobody-wins scenario that would be nuclear war.

Shefali Luthra - Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America (2024) This was a book inevitably going to be written, but Luhra made this necessary story gripping as well. Critical tears in our social fabric often descend to the status of"issues," become shorthand phrases or even just acronyms ... while the dirty, difficult impacts on actual human lives go unremarked.

As the title indicates, the issue is abortion, and specifically what happened in the lives of many people - those who were pregnant, working as medical or administrative personnel or in other roles - as the law surrounding what was legal, and wasn't, kept changing at blinding speed.

Many of the impacts are what you might imagine, but many - as emerges through the detailed reporting here - are less obvious. The effects in states where abortion is wholly or almost completely banned might not surprise, but some of the impacts on the still-legal states might: Massively swamped health facilities that limit the ability of patients (for abortion and other health treatments) to obtain care. Some of those challenges might ease up in time as resources shift location, but the unknowns are many.

There are some important impacts that seem to have escaped, at least mostly, news media and other journalistic attention. One example is the effect of abortion bans on medical education; in ban states, medical schooling for many areas of health - not only abortion, and not only reproductive health, but many subjects beyond - will be impaired. The training of a generation of physicians in something close to half the country is about to be badly damaged.

The individual stories are gripping; the tension and risk involved is (in the reading) novelistic.

And like any good book about social changes, there's a nod to what lies ahead. Luthra doesn't, course, try to produce a crystal ball; we'd have to know for sure what the results of November's general elections will be before we could even hazard a guess.

But while Luthra's story may for now lack a second act, the lessons from the first are evident: A lot of people are likely to be badly damaged, and probably will die, as long as our current path is unchanged.

Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson - American Gun: The True Story of the AR 15 (2023) The AR-15, that weapon highly useful on the battlefield and mechanized death when crazed shooters get their hands on one, has a long and twisted history, almost snuffed out at many times before the years when it become explosively popular and started selling by the millions.

The first of them were made in southern California, by an experimental division - new product development - of a military contractor. The actor John Wayne was the first person outside the company who actually shot one. A gun collector, he was interested in the weapon and happy to try it out. But he had no thought of buying one. As developed in the late 50s, they were intended strictly for military use, and years would pass before anyone conceived of a commercial market for them.

One of the original surviving developers, one of the few who made it to the recent time when AR-15 had become a household word, pondered what the original inventor (Eugene Stoner) and the people like him who had contributed to the effort, thought about what had come of it since. He said, "every gun designer has a responsibility to" - he paused, and said, "to think about what the hell they're creating."

That is the last quote in the new book American Gun: The True Story of the AR 15," by the journalists Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, and it sums up what came before. Stoner, a classic absent-minded inventor (of many things, not just guns), had in mind developing a much more powerful, reliable and easily-used military grade weapon, and by all accounts (apart from some people who were personally committed to earlier models) it did that job quite well. It ran into problems when it moved into the civilian market, where large number of military and law enforcement leaders have argued with unimpeachable logic over many years that it doesn't belong. The marketplace says otherwise.

The AR-15 has become the subject of literal worship, a hunk of metal many people have made a part of their personal identity. The story of how the gun was made, how it survived numerous challenges and leached into the private sector makes American Gun a strong read. The accounts of what has happened to the many victims of mass shootings - there's a long, painful chapter about the aftermath of one of those shootings who survived, barely, but never really recovered - is wrenching.

But some of the most important sections lie elsewhere: In what about this weapon makes them so overwhelmingly, powerfully, attractive to so many people. They're not very good for hunting or target shooting (their main feature is rapid spraying of bullets), for personal defense (they'd be no more useful than a handgun inside a house) or most other conventional civilian uses of guns. They are designed to kill - and in an unusually gory and destructive way - large numbers of people, period. So why are so many Americans attached to them?

McWhirter and Elinson touch on a number of prospective answers to that question. They don't come up with a conclusive reason, and probably there isn't just one.

Jordan Minor - Video Game of the Year (2023) When I read a new non-fiction book, I hope that it will tell me something I didn't know already (not an unusual occurrence). Even better, I hope it will open for a whole new world I hadn't been aware, or barely aware, existed - but which matters. I hadn't expected this to do more than the first. But I came away with a whole new perspective on a big part of our American culture in the last half-century.

What's here may not be especially new to you, if you're a video gamer and especially a gamer of longstanding. I'm not, because of no great desire to spend the time and effort needed to become accomplished at the games (or even learn much about them), not because of any animus toward them. My personal involvement with video games started with Pong and ended with either Space Invaders or Pac-Man (all three are profiled in this book), and after that the games, and the environment around them, became too much effort to attract much of my interest.

That doesn't mean they didn't attract lots of other people, of course; over the years I've known quite a few people who play them, to one degree or another. Some of the most popular games have sold immense numbers of copies, into the hundreds of millions, and some of them (Pokemon go is an example) have burst into the general cultural fabric. (Some years ago we often spotted PG players at a residential intersection near our house, deeply engrossed.) But what effect do they games have? Where did they come from? How have their evolved, and where might they be going? I didn't have much of a handle on any of this.

Minor has neatly filled this gap, for me and probably a lot of other people, through the device of naming a game of the year for (almost) every year since Pong arrived in the late 70s. The selections seem carefully chosen to throw light on the development of video games, not least their variety. If like me you're aware of these games only on the periphery - spotting the occasional ad or box in a store or news story that relates to one of them, often in a negative way - there's a lot to miss.

The variety of the games, for example. I'm tended to associate video games in the last couple of decades with hard-core shoot-em-up (or blow-em-away) violence, but while that is a key part of the picture, there's also much more. Some are gentle and artistic. Some are educational; I'd almost forgotten about Sin City, and had never been aware of many of the spinoffs it generated.

And more generally: What are some of the factors that have made some games immensely popular, while others fall flat? Some useful lessons in consumer preference and economic activity emerge from this. Not to mention some useful dissection of what goes into designing a game, an absorbing subject I'd never much considered.

Rachel Slade - Making It in America (2024) The United States was renowned for generations as the manufacturing center of the world, and now ... well, it isn't. Why is that?

The reasons are many and intertwining. Ideologues have no shortage of villains to suggest, but most of those answers feel - and are - too thin, failing to account for much of what really ails American manufacturing in this new century. Most of what pass for criticisms too often fail to propose serious answers, either. This book looks at the question not from a macreconomic viewpoint but from the micro side: The story of how one business has tried to launch a serious manufacturing operation, and the obstacles it faced.

There is some philosophical agenda here, both on the part of the writer and the business founders. The founders of a company in Portland, Maine, set up to manufacture hoodies, came to it from an atypical standpoint: The husband in the founding couple was a veteran labor union organizer, and that shaped some of his attitude toward business (by no means as negative as you might expect), perspectives the author evidently shared. But the question raised was a useful and pertinent one: Can a company in today's American prosper while making good products (in this case, in the area of clothing) while acting with social responsibility and while taking care of the workforce (which quickly became unionized), customers and business partners?

The answer, on the basis of the story told here, is yes, but not at all easily, and only with some luck and some kind of edge. Ben and Whitney Waxman, the two founders, got their edge is considerable part from Ben's extensive national labor connections: The bulk of the hoodies the company produced were sold, early on at least, to unions and union members. They had some good luck, too, sometimes in odd and unexpected places: The pandemic, which at first seemed like a business-killing disaster for them, wound up helping them enormously by providing a mass market for masks and other health goods they were able to produce.

Making any and all of this work was never easy, however, and the company repeatedly came close to collapse. (This business case story does not lack for drama; it could be made into a mini-series.) Many of the problems they ran into concern business structures, supply chains and distribution blockages: You have to be either well connected or extremely well capitalized, in many cases, to do business either with other businesses that provide materials for what you're producing, or help you sell it once it's made. The Wamans multiplied their challenges with a self-imposed restriction: Their hoodies would be made entirely of American-made components, and some of those components were hard to find from American sources, at any price. Upshots from this included the fact that their hoodies wound up on the expensive side, which was somewhat more acceptable to buyers who were big on American-made or union-made products, but wouldn't necessarily be elsewhere.

The story has some complexity, in that there aren't any easy or simple villains to the core manufacturing story (though the author and the business founders do have their targets in a more general sense). But it does get into the realities of American business in a practical way that those operating from a more theoretical or ideological perspective may be less likely to perceive.

 

 

Critical tears in our social fabric often descend to the status of"issues," become shorthand phrases or even just acronyms ... while the dirty, difficult impacts on actual human lives go unremarked.

In Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America, writer Shefali Luthra has taken mostly the less visible and often rougher road of recounting how a massive policy change made by players in D.C. and certain statehouses actually played out among the Americans those decisions were intended to affect. They affected them, all right, but often in unexpected and frequently tragic ways.

As the title indicates, the issue is abortion, and specifically what happened in the lives of many people - those who were pregnant, working as medical or administrative personnel or in other roles - as the law surrounding what was legal, and wasn't, kept changing at blinding speed.

Many of the impacts are what you might imagine, but many - as emerges through the detailed reporting here - are less obvious. The effects in states where abortion is wholly or almost completely banned might not surprise, but some of the impacts on the still-legal states might: Massively swamped health facilities that limit the ability of patients (for abortion and other health treatments) to obtain care. Some of those challenges might ease up in time as resources shift location, but the unknowns are many.

There are some important impacts that seem to have escaped, at least mostly, news media and other journalistic attention. One example is the effect of abortion bans on medical education; in ban states, medical schooling for many areas of health - not only abortion, and not only reproductive health, but many subjects beyond - will be impaired. The training of a generation of physicians in something close to half the country is about to be badly damaged.

The individual stories are gripping; the tension and risk involved is (in the reading) novelistic.

And like any good book about social changes, there's a nod to what lies ahead. Luthra doesn't, course, try to produce a crystal ball; we'd have to know for sure what the results of November's general elections will be before we could even hazard a guess.

But while Luthra's story may for now lack a second act, the lessons from the first are evident: A lot of people are likely to be badly damaged, and probably will die, as long as our current path is unchanged.