bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with nonfiction

I didn’t know if I was going to make this week’s book club because I left the reading to the last minute, but I did in fact read Melissa V. Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America.

The first thing that struck me about this book is that it was written in 2011 and, while the stereotypes she dissects are still around, the current/recent events she uses as case studies are much less current and recent. The last section of the book is about Michelle Obama’s public image, which was a bit of a trip down memory lane, since it’s been a few years since Michelle Obama was omnipresent in public life. It’s also striking at times how clear it is that this book was written and published shortly before the first Black Lives Matter wave; it would be impossible to write this book now without ever mentioning BLM. Other sections feel a bit less dated just because their impact seems more lasting; I don’t think about Hurricane Katrina every day but it was a really big deal and the fact that there have been other hugely devastating hurricanes since then (most notably Hurricane Helene earlier this month) makes it more important, not less, to properly analyze all the aspects of Katrina and its aftermath.

Another thing I really liked about this book is its total avoidance of polemic, zippy overstatement, or One-Weird-Trick-ery. Harris-Perry is very up front about the limitations of her research and addresses critiques about overfocus on feelings/vibes/personal psychology over materialist politics. She defends her subject both by arguing for the place of understanding people’s perceptions in political action and by matter-of-factly acknowledging that this is one book on one aspect of politics and there are other books on the other aspects of politics that are important. It’s a refreshing change from a lot of current events writing, which seems to always have to frame itself as THE book with THE answer on THE key factor to solving THE problem, and I think that is almost never true, honestly.

Structurally the book had a bit of a grab-bag nature to its case studies that some folks in book club said made it feel a little disjointed, and I think this is probably true, but the individual sections were all pretty interesting. The book walks us through the three main stereotypes about black women imposed by white society–the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the angry black woman–and also looks at the idea of the “strong black woman” and its function in both empowering and limiting both black women’s self-images and the way they relate to political action and expectation.

While the expectation of strength was probably the most analytically interesting of the stereotypes examined, the one I found myself having the strongest reaction to was the “Mammy,” partly because I was less familiar with it and partly due to the inclusion of some really fucked up tidbits like the campaign to put a national Mammy monument on the Mall in Washington DC, or the photograph of a truly hideous kitschy restaurant called Mammy’s wherein the restaurant bit is inside a big hoop skirt, like the cake part of one of those Barbie cakes that used to be a thing. It’s really ugly and weird. I promise there’s a whole lot of actual analysis of the Mammy stereotype and how it affects black women but those two little tidbits were just so starkly gross and weird.

Overall I found the book illuminating and we had a pretty good conversation about it, even if we did end up getting off-track several times.

The next book in my Ben MacIntyre mini-kick was Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis’ Fortress Prison.

Colditz Castle was a grim medieval schloss in Saxony–well, technically it still is a grim medieval schloss in Saxony, although recent restoration work has sought to make it less grim and more Renaissance–that was used in World War II as a POW camp for “incorrigible” Allied officers, by which they mainly meant ones that had tried to escape from other camps. Somewhat predictably, a camp peopled exclusively by people who had already tried to escape from other camps became a laboratory of escapology, with the inmates and the guards in a continually escalating dynamic of finding security leaks and plugging them.

For a few years the camp was international, with Polish, French, British, and Dutch officers (and their orderlies) competing in national teams, or occasionally collaborating, to escape. At some point mid-war it became a camp for British and other English-speaking countries’ officers. It was eventually liberated by an American unit.

MacIntyre takes us on an emotional rollercoaster of daring escape attempts, crushing brutality, big personalities, strict rule-following, and a large and varied cast of characters. The inmates are sometimes heroic and sometimes huge assholes. The Wehrmacht prison guards, especially head of security Reinholdt Eggers, are pretty terrible, obviously, but the look at the tensions and differences in operation within Nazi Germany between the by-the-book career military types who love rules more than murder and the paramilitary psychos who love murder more than rules (these appear to be the top two German psychological traits) could be interesting. In classic Ben MacIntyre fashion the whole thing has the vibes of a screwball comedy, though with interludes of Nazi horrors that simply cannot blend in with the general air of Daring Shenanigans even when they are themselves sort of absurd. But most of it manages to keep, if not a lighthearted air, at least a very easy-to-read, fast-paced, dryly humorous sort of tone that meant I could read it in basically three evening sessions of 100 pages apiece.

For me the biggest surprise in this book was learning that apparently Colditz Castle is, or at least at some point in Britain was, a very famous piece of WWII mythology. I thought I knew a reasonable amount about World War II but I had never heard of it. Maybe because baby me’s WWII education was mostly focused on reading Holocaust memoirs and not on military history, and adult me’s WWII education has mostly been leftist analyses of the rise of fascism and also only a little bit of military history (and that largely in podcast form–thanks, Dan Carlin!), and also I guess it was more of a thing in Britain? Every time I think I am familiar with British culture I learn about something else I’d never heard of that was apparently huge over there (see also: my current mini-obsession with the Franklin expedition).

Anyway this is basically a very good trashy spy thriller except you get to also feel like it’s not trashy because it is nonfiction, you are learning very serious World War II history things, I swear.

I’ve decided that in the final few months of the year I’m going to read one Ben MacIntyre book each month, ending 2024 with a slew of spy shenanigans before I embark upon my Year of Erics/Year of Boat Books. To that end, and with some library shenanigans, I checked out and read Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy, a biography of the life and work of Ursula Kuczynski Hamburger Beurton, codenamed Agent Sonya.

Ursula was born in Germany to a left-leaning Jewish family and grew up in the tumultuous days of the Wiemar Republic, where she got involved with the KPD, got beat up by cops, and became a dedicated antifascist. After doing some light troublemaking as a teenager she married a young architect named Rudi Hamburger and sold left-wing books out of a wheelbarrow. Rudi was then hired by a British firm to do architecture in the “international” enclaves in Shanghai, and Ursula went with him. There, she was bored stupid, hanging about with vapidly racist socialites and not being quite able to figure out how to do anything useful about the shocking poverty in China. In Shanghai she eventually befriends a vivacious American writer named Agnes Smedley, through whom she is recruited as a spy for the Soviet Union, with Richard Sorge as her handler. At first her job is mainly to provide a discreet place for other spies to have meetings. Eventually, however, the skinny young housewife is recruited for increasingly complicated and dangerous missions. She goes to a spy training school in Russia for the better part of a year, leaving her two-year-old son with his grandparents; then does a stint in Manchuria doing illegal radio transmissions in support of anti-Japanese forces. Upon leaving Shanghai–and her first husband–she is set up in Switzerland, along with nearly every other spy in the world, to keep an eye on Nazi Germany, where she does more radio transmissions and runs two agents out of the German interior, one of whom would become her second husband. As World War Two swing into full gear, Ursula and her second husband make it to the UK, where most of Ursula’s family has also fled. Here she continues her career as a spymaster, working to keep the Soviet Union apprised of things its allies weren’t sharing with it, including atomic research being conducted by fellow German expatriate Karl Fuchs. She inserted Soviet spies into a series of dangerous OSS missions into the German interior in the final days of the Reich, mainly for the purpose of allowing the USSR to get its hands on American walkie-talkie technology–the German labor organizers in exile that she recruited for this job were fully in sync with their American handlers as far as the actual mission itself went. In her years in the UK, Ursula comes under mild suspicion from British intelligence forces occasionally, but her domestic ordinariness causes the MI5 men to repeatedly clear her. Only Milicent Bagot–a Trunchbull-like figure and apparently MI5’s only competent Communist-hunter–really suspected her, but Bagot got the same treatment from the MI5 patriarchs and her warnings were ignored (and when she crossed streams and requested information from MI6, she would get the polite brush-off from Kim Philby, for entirely different reasons).

Like the other Ben MacIntyre books I’ve read–Operation Mincemeat and A Spy Among Friends–this was compulsively readable, exciting, reasonably sympathetic to the Communists given that the author seems to be a pretty mainstream liberal, full of amusing anecdotes and little digs at just about everybody. Thus far, MacIntyre’s books are not really works of political theory, but they are great looks into the real people behind all sorts of crazy mid-20th-century events, including putting these people into their cultural and political contexts. I found this book to be overall very sympathetic to Ursula Buerton, despite a bit of ribbing about ideologically rigid, dogmatic Marxists. It was also very sympathetic to her beleaguered first husband, who was cursed with the name Rudi Hamburger and whose fortunes only got worse from there. Hamburger was initially more of a progressive left-liberal type and did not want to join the KPD because they were ideologically rigid and gave “boring speeches full of jargon,” which is maybe not a very solid argument against the workability of a political philosophy but is very much a fair charge against many Communist parties. The fascist takeover of Germany, and finding out his wife was a spy, jointly served to push him into the arms of the Comintern, where he eagerly threw himself into spy work in a failed attempt to save his marriage and also a failed attempt to become a good spy. Hamburger ended up being tortured in a Japanese jail in China and then later spent several years in a Soviet gulag after his incompetence at spywork was suspected to be deliberate and he was jailed as a political subversive. And through all this hardship he was still cheerfully named Rudi Hamburger, poor man.

Overall, this book was super fun, I read it in basically 24 hours, and I’m excited for my hold on Prisoners of the Castle to come in.

For the politics book club we read a very influential but also very upsetting book: Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men, which came out in 2002. We talked it through very thoroughly on Sunday and also it’s been about a week since I finished reading it, so I haven’t really wanted to write this review but I feel like I should knock it out so it stops hanging over my head.

Reading the book was actually a similar experience. I kept reading like half a page and then mysteriously finding myself on my phone, even though when I could make myself focus and actually read the thing it was very good. The audience for most if it was squarely women who are in bad romantic relationships with men and it has thankfully been many years since I was in any sort of romantic relationships with men, but it was still nonetheless very useful to read the whole book itself and not just disjointed bits of it that get quoted in advice columns. It is definitely a pre-social-media book but I can’t expect it not to be. I have some actual nitpicks and I don’t want to go over them again. Anyway, I do recommend it with the big caveat that it’s not remotely enjoyable to read.

According to my records I had already read Thomas M. Truxes’ Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York, but I absolutely do not have any memory of reading the entire thing, and I do have what might be false memories of reading only selected chapters as assigned in my Pirates and Smuggling in the Atlantic class, back in 2009 or whenever the hell I was in college (help, I’m old). My professor for that class, Wim Klooster, is cited in the acknowledgements for this book, which is perhaps why all of us had to go out and buy it. That sounds cynical but is not actually a complaint; that was one of my favorite classes and I got to write a really fun paper on rum-running for it.

Anyway. Defying Empire is definitely an academic rather than a journalistic read and as such feels a little drier than a book about smuggling and defying empire (and water, heh heh, sorry I’ll see myself out) ought to be. On the other hand, the subject matter, while classed under the sexy term “smuggling,” is largely just a bunch of rich merchants falsifying paperwork, and “falsifying paperwork” can only carry so much drama on its own. There are however also a lot of ship captures and that ought to be Fun And Exciting; alas, one must sub in one’s own pre-existing mental footage of eighteenth-century boat chases since the captures themselves are heavy on “who was captured and what they had in the hold at the time” and light on the details of the battles. Nevertheless, while it doesn’t make much of an adventure novel, if you are interested in How Colonialism Works it offers some interesting light into the contradictions of mercantilist economics.

All that said, I did find the subject matter here very interesting! It specifically focuses on the Seven Years’/French and Indian War, and the various ways in which merchants in New York and surrounding ports managed to keep regular business going, directly or indirectly, with the French, with whom they could get pretty good prices, instead of patriotically allowing themselves to get fucked over by only trading with the British, who necessarily needed the Crown to be the ones to make the profit off the trades and not the merchants. Also, the people wanted sugar, dammit. It’s not really the kind of story that has good guys but it was sort of satisfying seeing the Crown, having set up all these guys as British citizens for the purpose of doing trading, be all “no, not like that” when they insisted upon exercising their liberties as British citizens to do trading. Like all American history it makes me wonder what the world would look like if the British and French empires had ground each other down to attrition and the “Indians” had reconquered North America, but alas, I don’t think that was ever going to happen.

There is a sort of plotline, or at least recurring figures, surrounding a whiny failed wine merchant who decides to turn informer for the Crown about all these rich guys breaking the trade laws, and has a very bad time finding anyone on this side of the Atlantic to inform to who will take him seriously. He is almost killed in a riot instigated by the rich guys he’s accusing and spends quite a while in jail, at the center of a whirl of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits, while Crown forces struggle to install some people into the New York administration who will crack down on trading with the enemy. It really highlights how small and incestuous the old New York power elite was, but eventually two merchants are publicly tried for smuggling, where their main defense is that they are being unfairly singled out for punishment because, like, everyone is doing it, man.

Overall I did find this a really intriguing and informative look into a very specific aspect of pre-Revolutionary America, and the workings and contradictions of the British empire at this time. I’m definitely keeping the book around as a future writing resource in case I ever get back to writing silly piratey historical fiction, because it has a lot of really solid information about smuggling practices and popular semi-legal trading ports.

I can’t remember what sale I picked it up at but for some-odd years now I’ve been in possession of a copy of something called The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. I had hesitated to actually read it for two reasons: one is that it is like 700 pages long, and I only have so many of those in me per year. The other is that I was not sure if it would turn out to be a total crank book, and I wasn’t confident I was familiar enough with the subject to tell. The author is David Talbot, the guy who founded Salon, who at least seems to be a real person in journalism, although certainly more than enough otherwise respectable writers turn out to be cranks about something. This book tells you right on the back cover where it’s going: It’s going to give you a biography of Allen Dulles, it’s going to give you a bunch of dirt on the CIA, and then it’s going to try to convince you that the CIA was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

I was not originally going to suggest this for book club. But when we had to skip July and take an extra-long time between book clubs, I somewhat jokingly put this forth for consideration, mainly because it was the longest book on my history-and-politics shelf. But apparently the rest of the book club thought it sounded fun and spicy, so here we are!

First of all, let it be known that David Talbot really, really hates his subject here. There is no pretense of academic neutrality; the book is just like “This is Allen Dulles, he sucks and I hate him and he ought to have been tried for treason before WWII was even over, and the world is a worse place because he was in it, and he was a shitty husband and a shitty dad and a shitty person and have I mentioned, fuck this guy.” I found this extremely funny, which was for sure a badly needed bit of levity because David Talbot is not wrong; Allen Dulles sucked enormously and so did all the ex- (for varying degrees of “ex”) Nazis and robber barons and Cold Warriors he surrounded himself with.

The book does not dwell for long on Dulles’ early life, just enough to set the scene and check in with his siblings a little about what growing up with him was life. The story really kicks off during World War II, when Dulles, a corporate lawyer at a firm that did lots of business with Reich-affiliated German clients until it got too embarrassing, is hired into the OSS, basically the precursor to the CIA. In the OSS, operating out of an office in the theoretically neutral but very strategically placed Swiss city of Bern, Dulles promptly begins giving the runaround to FDR’s very clearly stated policy of extracting total surrender from the Nazis. Dulles, his rotten heartstrings pulled on by the sad thought of rich guys being treated like criminals just because they did horrific crimes, starts cutting deals with various Nazis to try to broker a surrender of just Hitler that leaves something of the Reich intact for these ghouls to continue ruling. When that doesn’t quite work, he pivots to operating “ratlines,” running Nazi war criminals to safety to keep them out of the dock at Nuremberg and set them up as respectable citizens in other countries, or in some cases, back in Germany.

The most egregious of these schemes was his protection of Reinhardt Gehlen, Hitler’s spy chief on the Eastern front, who Dulles wanted to keep around to keep spying on the Russians. It seems clear that Dulles–like a truly unconscionable number of rich people–always thought the Bolshies were the real enemy, with the West’s alliance with them against fascism merely an unfortunate minor detour to clean up a moment of embarrassing excess on the part of the otherwise perfectly fine Nazi Party. Dulles, and the other right-wing Cold Warriors, kept that attitude throughout his entire life, eagerly collaborating with literally anybody, no matter how awful–Nazis, the Mafia, various mercenaries, autocrats and theocrats and other kinds of -crats and -garchs and -ocracies–in his total war against “world Communism,” here defined as anyone who thought regular working people maybe ought to have some kind of support or dignity in life, or that capitalism could stand to maybe have a single regulation put on it ever, or that brown people in the Third World actually maybe did have a reason to think being crushed under the violent bootheels of oil companies or United Fruit kind of sucked. A lot of the language Dulles and company used about “Communism” sounds suspiciously like the things we all actually learned about fascism the hard way, and it seems clear to me that guys like Dulles not just thought that Communism was worse than fascism, they psychologically needed Communism to be worse than fascism in every single particular and were not about to let piddly stuff like “the New Deal was an entirely different thing than the Soviet Union actually” stop them.

Anyway, the book walks us through the creation of the CIA under Truman (who initially envisioned it as just an intel-gathering agency and later regretted having created it at all), the consolidation of the Dulles’ brothers’ power under Eisenhower, and the tumultuous relationship between the national security services and the Kennedy administration. The stuff here that I did already know some things about, such as the coups in Iran and Guatemala, track with my prior knowledge and seem very well documented and credible. The things I didn’t already know about, like the MKULTRA program, also seem well documented, and I know there’s lots more information about these things available now than there was when I was a very young person being told they were just conspiracy theories. The setup here doesn’t try to hide itself, really: look at all these other things the CIA tried to have dismissed as conspiracy theories for decades, which turned out to be real; isn’t it likely the JFK assassination is the same?

And I will say, I am not sure I am entirely convinced that the CIA definitely killed JFK, but I for sure would put it in the “not nearly as far-fetched as it ought to be” bucket. I have not made much of a study of the JFK assassination, but from the cheap seats it kind of looks like every version of the story is kind of far-fetched and shady, which is maybe to be expected for something that unlikely.

The thing that really bothered me, though, about reading about the Kennedy administration’s, ah, difficulties in wrangling its various three-letter-agencies into doing what Kennedy wanted instead of doing whatever they wanted (mostly murdering anybody they deemed to be left of Eisenhower anywhere in the world), is what it might mean for the rest of us who would like to someday get the US off the path of being a vicious imperialist bully on the world stage. We’ve since elected presidents who got us out of individual wars–I think Nixon was the last Republican to maneuver us out of one, after deliberately tanking Johnson’s ability to do so, even though I think Gerald Ford was president by the time the war was declared officially over–but it looks like Kennedy was the last guy to be like “We should change our entire approach to foreign policy and stop being imperialist douchebags” and he simply could. not. get. the American imperial apparatus to follow his damn orders. Whether they actually killed him, or just kind of sat back and slow-walked doing presidential security because hey, this guy doesn’t respect the national security apparatus, or had nothing to do with the murder and were actually just planning to keep doing regular insubordination and sandbagging until the clock ran out, there are real serious questions the left needs to wrestle with about how to engage with a position like the imperial presidency, where the president has basically unlimited power to do whatever he wants as long as whatever he wants is violent imperial bullshit, but risks having the violence machine turn on him if he tries to rein it in. This was not fixed by electing Kennedy president and it wouldn’t have been fixed by electing Bernie Sanders president and it won’t be fixed if we elect the reincarnation of Eugene Debs president either.

Anyway, I think the book was good–depressing, but good. It’s always good to know more about the full depth and breadth of evil that America has committed in the world, if only for the sake of not being a gormless idiot. Figuring out what can actually be done about it, though, is a much more difficult task.

The politics book club decided to read Rebecca Solnit’s The Mother of All Questions, one of three books of Solnit’s essays that’s been sitting on my shelf since early in the Trump administration.

This book is mostly essays published around 2015 or so, and I’m pretty sure I’d read a bunch of them when they were first published. They’re still fairly solid essays, but for most of the book the overwhelming impression I had was that of experiencing A Blast From the Past. 2015 was almost ten years ago! Things are different now! The progress we thought we were making then has not always gone in the directions we thought they would! It was really quite an experience, revisiting all those news events.

Overall the essays were quite good but as a single book it’s a bit repetitive and uneven. I think it’ll engender some fruitful discussion but it might also engender a lot of “Oh my god, remember…?” type of commentary and I might be the one making it. I’ll try to prepare myself to do better than that.

After zipping through two other books at the lake I spent the bulk of the weekend immersed in a book from my Casino City days that I had apparently picked up at Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg, PA: Paul J. Vanderwood’s Satan’s Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at America’s Greatest Gaming Resort. During Prohibition, it turns out that for legal reasons America’s greatest gaming resort was actually in Mexico–specifically in the border town of Tijuana, just a few miles from the supposedly respectable city of San Diego. This book is a little bit a history of Tijuana and a little bit a history of San Diego, but mainly it is a history of the short-lived but majestic precursor to the great Las Vegas casino resorts: the Agua Caliente.

The incident that forms the structural backbone of the book is an attempted stickup of the Agua Caliente money van on its way back to a San Diego bank, in which two small-time mobsters with machine guns get into a shooting match with the drivers of the money car, even though–according to the mobsters–the job was supposed to be ‘fixed.’ The robbery thus escalated into a double homicide, shocking San Diegans and kicking off a massive and sometimes embarrassing manhunt and investigation. This was the first and most infamous but not the last of a series of attempts by organized crime to get money out of the very profitable Agua Caliente without doing the thing you ordinarily needed to do to get money out of the Agua Caliente, i.e., be on the business end of it and skim.

Along the way of this nearly 400-page book (it could have been a little shorter, frankly), we get to meet the Agua Caliente’s owners, patrons, workers, government enablers, enemies, and even some of its horses. There are plenty of pictures, both of the over-the-top Spanish Mission Revival-style resort itself and of the various people profiled. Could I keep them all straight? No. Did that matter? Probably also no; I could usually follow what was going on. My biggest criticism of the book is that sometimes the author’s opinions were a bit intrusive, but mostly it was a fun read.

In my effort to clear out some of my old Harvard Bookstore Warehouse Sale purchases, I followed up my reading of Dead Wake with another nonfiction book in sort-of the same time period. This one was Dean Jobb’s Empire of Deception: From Chicago to Nova Scotia - The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation.

The master swindler in question was one Leo Koretz, an affable German Jewish immigrant who had come over from Bohemia with his family as a child. His parents had worked their way into the respectable-enough stratum of Chicago’s vibrant Jewish community and were able to send Leo to high school at a time when only about 1% of the city’s youth graduated high school. Young Leo then got a job in a law firm and took night classes until he was able to become a lawyer himself. While there were plenty of job opportunities for lawyers in litigious and corrupt early-20th-century Chicago, it wasn’t quite the path to lavish riches that Leo had envisioned, so he started with the shenanigans–first siphoning money from the dead clients whose wills he was executing; then selling fake mortgages on real properties; and eventually his master swindle–selling stock in an entirely fake natural resource extraction syndicate in the Bayano Valley, Panama.

This book is split into three “acts.” Act I is the bulk of Koretz’ life, from his childhood up through the years of increasingly daring and complicated fraud. The scale and coldheartedness of Koretz’ Bayano Syndicate swindle was pretty stunning–this was a dividends-from-capital swindle, meaning you need a constant stream of new investors in order to keep the old investors in the dark about the fact that they aren’t actually invested in anything, so the scam tends to have a short lifespan. Koretz kept it going for over a decade, faking exclusivity and selling shares to his closest friends and his own family members.

Eventually, of course, even he can’t keep it going anymore. When it gets too big, he sends a bunch of investors down to Panama to check out the nonexistent company–and uses their absence to cash out all his bank accounts, send some apologetic cash gifts to his nearest and dearest, and go on the lam. Act II is his life under an assumed name as a jolly millionaire and man of letters in New York (briefly, just long enough to establish an identity) and then Nova Scotia, where he buys an old hunting lodge and turns it into a swanky woodland resort-hotel. He spends about a year scandalizing the good backwoods Nova Scotians with his big-city ways and lavish parties, until he is eventually found out via some discreet questioning between his tailor and a bunch of bank officials, and then the law comes to bring him back to Chicago.

Act III, unsurprisingly, is his trial and imprisonment in Chicago, and all the other fallout/aftermath with his friends and family. There is an odd little twist at the end, which provides an interesting end to the story, although I’m not sure I agree with the author that it constitutes “cheating justice” (I might not be the world’s most committed prison abolitionist but there’s times when I realize my assumptions are not always quite the same as other people’s assumptions about these things).

This might not have been the most riveting piece of nonfiction I’ve read lately but that’s because I’ve read a lot of nonfiction about fairly sensational events these past few months–wars and spies and gangs and whatnot–so I feel like the bar is fairly high. This is pretty comparable to a lot of those though; it’s certainly not a dud if you’re in the mood for the sort of thing it’s about. It gives a pretty good look into the politics and corruption and general scamminess of Prohibition-era Chicago and its very colorful cast of characters. I also learned a tiny little bit about Panama during this era, although it’s no substitute for reading a book actually about Panama. Overall this was a solidly entertaining episode in historical true crime, and it apparently inspired an episode of Leverage, so I’m glad I finally got around to reading it.

I can’t remember where I picked up my copy of Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools, but I have been hearing good things about it from my fellow editors for several years. I think I got it off another editor, but regrettably I can’t remember who.

Anyway, Writing Tools lives up to the hype. It would be worth the price of the whole book just for the bits on the ladder of abstraction, which gives a nice concise framework to a particular type of dull writing I run into all the time, thus allowing easier pinpointing of what is wrong with it. (How to fix it still may often require more time than I’m given, but whatever.) Some of the tools are on the “nuts and bolts” of writing–word choice and sentence structure and all–and others are more about organization and process. There are exercise questions for the reader to practice applying these tools, which I did not do but which seemed like very useful homework assignments, and possibly I should go do them at some point. Overall a very solid little book; a classic for a reason.

In 2017 at a Harvard Bookstore Warehouse Sale I picked up a copy of a book by Erik Larson, best known for The Devil in the White City, which I have still not yet read. I have read the disturbing and fascinating In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin , although I hadn’t as of this particular Warehouse Sale. I don’t even think I picked this up out of any particular interest in World War One; I don’t think I particularly remembered from high school history why the Lusitania was important off the top of my head. No, I only remembered looking at my great-grandfather’s immigration papers many years ago, and that he had come over to the US on it, and at the time taking note of that because it was a recognizable and notable ship.

Anyway, if you too have a complete blank spot where your World War I naval history should be, the Lusitania was not a military ship. It was a real big fancy passenger steamer, operated by the Cunard line, and it remained a passenger steamer throughout the war, as it was so big and fancy that transforming it into a battleship would be prohibitively fuel-intensive. It was officially a British ship, but on its 201st and last voyage it was coming out of New York with a load of American passengers, which meant it was supposed to be treated as neutral, both because it was a civilian merchant vessel and because America was still neutral. However, Germany–despite the risk of inducing America to join the war on the opposite side–was getting increasingly bold about using its terrifying new technology, U-boats, to sink basically anything that got too close to the British Isles. The torpedoing of the Lusitania, which sank the behemoth ocean liner in merely 18 minutes and had a casualty count of over a thousand–more than half the people on the ship–was one of the highest-profile German atrocities that ended up drawing the US into the war.

Dead Wake gives us a practically minute-by-minute account of the ship’s final crossing, with accounts of many different passengers, the ship’s brave but taciturn Captain Turner, the goings-on within the secretive Room 40 within the British Admiralty, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, and the infamous submarine U-20 under the command of Walther Schweiger. The pacing is quite good, and builds up a lot of narrative tension even though you basically know where the story is going. This cinematic pacing is somewhat unfortunately bolstered in time-honored fashion by that most shopworn of dramatic devices, the Obligatory Romantic Subplot, provided in this case by the recently bereaved President Wilson and his newfound lady friend Edith Bolling Galt. My other major criticism of the book is that there are no pictures. (I am much more surprised by this second criticism than I am by the first.)

The bulk of this book is given over to recording in fine-grained narrative detail what happened during that fateful week, and in the time before and after it as is relevant. But the various lawsuits and inquests in the aftermath do raise some interesting, if somewhat under-explored questions about why precisely it happened. Obviously, the German submarine warfare policy bears primary responsibility, but there seem to have been a number of negligent or at least questionable decisions made about the Lusitania’s safety on the part of the British Admiralty, raising the disturbing specter of a conspiracy to leave the ship exposed in the hope that eventually something would happen to draw the Americans into the war. The book doesn’t take a hard line on this, just relating the bare bones of the controversy. It certainly seems plausible enough, but it is also still plausible that it could have been, as one historian put it, “an unforgivable cock-up.”

Overall I found this to be a thoroughly enjoyable read.

I picked up a copy of Ancient Ireland: The User’s Guide for five euro when I was visiting in 2016, although our trip wasn’t particularly focused on ancient stuff. Ireland has a lot of history and we could only get so much of it in in 10 days.

One issue I keep running into with material about very ancient Ireland is that the audience is usually either academics or New Agey types. I don’t have any academic background in this stuff so the serious academic writings are all a bit over my head, but the familiarity I’m interested in developing is more academic in nature than it is New Agey, so I get put off by the stuff that’s stripped down to be accessible specifically for people who want to incorporate the Wisdom of the Ancients into their lives, especially because that stuff is then usually written by people who have their own opinions about the Wisdom of the Ancients that they’re trying to evangelize. This book, unfortunately, is no different–it’s not a really serious academic study of Ancient Ireland, which is fine, but the accessible-to-non-experts stuff in it is peppered with the author’s somewhat generically cranky Old Guy Opinions about everything wrong with the modern world. This is especially awkward given that the book itself was written in the early ‘90s so even some of the cranky old guy opinions that could have sort of held up in 1992, like that the murder rate in New York City is pretty high, have now aged poorly even by cranky old guy opinion standards.

The material that is in fact on topic is pretty easy-to-read and interesting. We get a nice grab bag of ancient monuments and places, and some of the accompanying mythology. We are introduced to the various ancient peoples of Ireland and how they ascended into mythology. There are some pictures, although they are in black and white. It definitely makes me want to go back to Ireland and do a trip with a focus on visiting ancient sites, though hopefully I could find some more historical and less New-Agey tours and materials on it.

I already can’t remember how I found this book and I am only vaguely convinced it was the LitHub newsletter, but I found myself putting in a library request for a new nonfiction release: Henry Hemming’s Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Spies, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland. This book appealed to multiple of my interests, mainly Irish history and spy shit.

This book tells the story of Frank Hegarty, IRA quartermaster and British informer, and his murder, most likely by the high-ranking British secret agent codenamed Stakeknife. A double agent getting whacked by another double agent! Juicy stuff!

And it is juicy but it is also profoundly sad. Frank seemed like a nice, regular guy, not at all the sort of hardened psycho that you’d picture spending years as a double agent (Freddie Scappaticci does seem to fit that vibe a little more, though). He seems to have become vulnerable to something as taboo and dangerous as informing because he had actually lost faith in the IRA militants’ strategy of a “long war” and wanted the violence to stop, and genuinely thought that helping the British would save lives. There are strategic notes to be taken, here, about the cost of violence, and the limits on the efficacy of terror to achieve political goals, but mostly the note in question is this: the same thing that gives a terror campaign its efficacy–mainly, that it’s terrible–also means that even people on your “side” may run out of stomach for keeping it going. By the time the Troubles ended, the IRA was absolutely lousy with spies. Most notoriously, Agent Stakeknife, the Brits’ most valuable spy, was the most valuable spy because he had infiltrated the Nutting Squad, the internal enforcement unit tasked with identifying and eliminating spies.

Though most of the action in this book takes place over the course of the Troubles itself–which was certainly long enough, dragging on for about thirty years–Four Shots in the Night takes us all the way up to the present day, through the murder investigation known as Operation Kenova, an attempt by one high-minded (by police standards) faction of the British police to identify and expose Agent Stakeknife and, in essence, solve all the murders that were attributed to him. This operation in some ways succeeded, in that it gathered a lot of information, enough to put a case together against the man they’d identified. However, the other police units–mainly MI5, the infamously shadowy intelligence organization that wasn’t used to answering to anyone about anything–were less than cooperative, and after the case against Stakeknife was submitted to whatever government body decides if the state is going to prosecute the case or not (I returned the book to the library already, sorry), two things happened before a verdict could be rendered. One was that Stakeknife died, under completely non-fishy circumstances, due to just being old by this point. And the other was that the British government introduced a bill to essentially make it impossible to prosecute anyone of any faction for any crimes committed during the Troubles whatsoever. This has been highly controversial and fits within a longstanding and infuriating British tradition of doing a bunch of war crimes and then immediately getting all “let’s not bicker and argue about ‘oo killed ‘oo” about it and making it illegal to remember anything they did because, you know, these situations are very complicated and we’re terribly concerned about reopening old wounds and at some point we’ve all got to coexist and move on with our lives, and other sentiments that are both true and clearly being abused here.

This book follows well in the vein of Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Mystery in Northern Ireland and Rory Carroll’s There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes that Changed History. All three books are engaging narrative nonfiction that explore one notorious IRA action and trace its history throughout the entire development and resolution of the Troubles. Some familiar faces and events start cropping up once you’ve read more than one of these, but since they each focus on events that are far enough away from each other–the murder of Jean McConville in Belfast, the Brighton Bombing in England, the murder of Frank Hegarty right on the border in Derry–they don’t get too repetitive. After having read the other two, it was interesting to get a much deeper dive into the British infiltration operation and into the IRA’s Nutting Squad, both of which had been only briefly addressed in the other two books, focused as they were on people who were not spies (even the McConville story, in which she was accused of being a spy, could only get so deep into Nutting Squad lore, given that it’s almost certain she wasn’t a spy and the story was therefore not in fact about spies). Writing-wise I found this one a little bit less tight than the others–I don’t necessarily mind a book that bounces around a lot, especially when it’s detailing a complicated story–but the bits that seem to be overdoing the melodramatic stage-setting are few and far between compared to the amount of just genuinely dramatic material, and it didn’t get in the way of being able to follow the story. I think this book maybe does a little bit less hand-holding on the public parts of the Troubles than, for example, Say Nothing does, which is carefully written to be accessible to even the most geographically ignorant American who can’t find Northern Ireland on a map. Overall, I would highly recommend it to anyone who has enough of an interest in the Troubles that they already sort of know what they are, and especially to anyone who liked Keefe’s or Carroll’s books.

For book club (which I ended up missing) we read Amanda Montell’s Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, which is about… well, it’s about a range of things. Nominally it is about cult linguistics; functionally this means it is about manipulative language and marketing. There’s a section about actual full-blown “suicide” cults, like Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate, and some primers on some other cults that are definitely cults, like Scientology and Synanon (the cult the author’s dad was raised in), and then there are some explorations of areas of American culture that are much more mainstream but also very culty, like MLMs and some of the more over-the-top boutique fitness brands.

A lot of the stuff about language itself was fairly familiar to me; the language of being full of shit is a special interest of mine and has been for many years now, although my focus has more often been in politics and activist spaces, as well as the everpresent evil of advertising. Both of these do appear to have some overlap with full-blown cults, sadly. The language part of the book is a good refresher (or primer, if you don’t already know all these things) about manipulative techniques such as thought-terminating cliches, us-vs-them language, lovebombing, all that stuff.

I kept myself entertained through those parts by trying to pay attention to when the author was using dubious language tricks on the reader. The most common offense here was overselling the premise, which then had to be backtracked when we got to the part where she was giving us real information. There was just way too much fluff about how language is THE ULTIMATE TOOL and the SOURCE OF ALL POWER for culty gurus and like, look, I am also a professional language user and believe that language is very important, but some of this wording was so over-the-top that, especially when combined with the fact that we were talking about politics-adjacent stuff, it seemed to tip into one of my current pet peeves about modern political life, which is the belief held by many well-educated liberals that words are the only real and legitimate and powerful thing in life and everything else is base nonsense and probably not even real. I’m not saying Montell is one of those posters-who-think-they’re-activists for whom “micro” is the highest level of aggression, but sometimes she sounds a little like them, because she sounds like the internet and the internet is overrun with those types of people.

The most egregious example of Montell using the tricks she’s teaching us about on us is in the chapter on the Jonestown massacre, when she interviews a bunch of people on why they don’t like the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid.” These people are not, however, described as people who are of a different opinion about the inappropriateness of the phrase; they are instead described as “a select few who grasp its gravity.” And if you read the rest of the paragraph, you too can become part of this select few! I think this rubbed me the wrong way because “Actually the phrase ‘drink the Kool-Aid’ is about murder and you shouldn’t use it and it wasn’t Kool-Aid anyway” was, for me, the sum total of things I knew about the Jonestown massacre–I didn’t know what country it had happened in, or what decade, or how many people died, or what the cult’s shtick was outside the murder part, or anything. I only knew that “drink the Kool-Aid” was a phrase you could use on the Internet if you wished to provide people an opportunity to yell at you. Anyway, now I also know that the Jonestown massacre took place in Guyana, and not in the US!

Complaints about the overblown framing aside, this was a fun foray into a somewhat random assembly of medium-to-high-control groups and how they function. The book focuses pretty much exclusively on American groups, with a little research into what in American culture and history makes it so prone to alternative spiritualities, snake-oil salesmen, ~~pyramid schemes~~ three-dimensional-triangle-shaped business models in which everyone is their own boss and also the boss of other people who are their own boss, and “secular churches” of various sizes and levels of nefariousness. I was unsurprised to learn that a lot of this had to do with capitalism and a hyper-individualistic culture that leaves lots of people starving for community but also basically unable to consciously figure that out and search for it in a way that is healthy (a lot of the culty communities examined here use the language of intense individualism and personal specialness, especially the brands).

Overall I like this book more when I think of it is as a book about media literacy and dodgy advertising than if I try to think of it as a book about the linguistics of cults, because it meets the bar for the first handily but for the second it seems a bit of a stretch. Don’t get sucked into a suicide cult about aliens or scammed into overpaying for skin cream, kids.

Several years ago at a Harvard Bookstore Warehouse Sale I picked up a book on the Irish revolutionary decade, A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913-1923, by Dearmaid Ferriter. I cannot truthfully say I remember anything particularly specific about this book that caught my eye other than “Hey, look, a book on the Irish Revolution,” but that was quite enough for me to spend the seven dollars it was going for at the sale. It then sat on my shelf for as many years until I decided it needed to be part of this March’s sad Irish reading, in part due to a request from a friend for book recommendations that gave a good overview of the Irish revolution.

This book, it must be said, is not exactly an overview of the Irish revolution, so I will still be on the lookout for one of those. What this book is is more of a history of the history of the Irish revolution, which I did mostly have enough existing knowledge to follow, even if a good amount of it is dramatized edutainment like The Wind that Shakes the Barley (fantastic movie, not a substitute for actual history reading).

That said, this book, from my layperson’s perspective, is very good at what it does, which is bring together like a bajillion different sources and viewpoints and archival materials to lay out a much more multifaceted, nuanced, and detailed picture of both the revolutionary decade itself and the historical memory of that time in Irish (and sometimes Irish diaspora) society than you would find from, say, half a lifetime of half-remembered songs (hi). There’s a big focus in the beginning of the book on the Irish school system, and the changes in focus on what history study was for, what should be included, how it was taught, when something stopped being the last batch of current events and started becoming history that you had to actually teach people about, etc., and a big focus at the end of the book about state commemorations, both formal and informal. The chunk in the middle is more focused on slowly going through different aspects of the revolutionary decade itself and sifting through claims by various historians and what sources do and do not support their claims. There’s a lot of primary source stuff from regular people that I found particularly fascinating, especially regarding what happened after the revolution–the section on just the pensions claims for service in various British and Irish militaries and police forces really expanded my mental image of “what overthrowing a government and installing a new one looks like.” The book also contains a few choice selections of bad poetry, which I suppose is of important historical value in pointing out that just because Ireland has produced a lot of great poets that doesn’t mean that everyone in Ireland is a great poet. Also it’s entertaining, which is nice in a book this dense and whose subject matter is so generally heavy.

I don’t know that I would recommend this book to someone with no background on the Irish revolution but I would for sure recommend it very, very strongly to anyone with a nice pat narrative grasp of the Irish revolution and is using that to inform their views on basically anything at all. Ferriter does a very good job of gently poking at the assumptions at play in a variety of narratives used by various parties and it’s good to be critical of when those narratives are being used for particular ends.

I decided to get a jump on March reading (Irish History Month, no longer short-book February) by picking up a book I’d borrowed from my father: Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.

O’Toole was born around the same time as my father, which provided a certain reading experience for my dad, an Irish-American Catholic growing up in postwar suburban Connecticut. I am thirty years younger than both of them so the reading experience was quite different for me; I only started having that “oh yes, I remember what was going on over here during that time” and “I think I heard about that while it was happening” kind of comparative experience right toward the end, when he was talking about things like the gay marriage referendum and the repeal of the constitutional abortion ban. For the rest of it I was pretty squarely Reading About History Times, which suited me just fine as I enjoy reading about history times.

O’Toole is a very engaging writer. Most of the chapters start off with an attention-grabbing anecdote–sometimes personal, like the time he accidentally let the pigs out on a summer trip to the Gaeltacht and the pigs had to be rescued by Sean O Riada, but other times more traditional newspaper-article type teases–which he then ties into the larger analysis of whatever aspect of Irish life and politics in whatever year or years the chapter covers. He’s also got a good handle on that sort of dry, respectable humor that really good reporters ought to have, where they are funny without doing anything as overt as making jokes.

We Don’t Know Ourselves is largely a chronicle of the various hypocrisies, self-delusions, bits of wishful thinking, and self-defeating romanticism of post-Independence Ireland, including his own journeys of disillusionment with such pillars of Irish society as the Catholic Church, the Fianna Fail party, and militant nationalism (more specifically, the tradition of venerating doomed blood sacrifice to make songs about over figuring out how to actually win material political victories). In the hands of a less skilled and thoughtful writer it could be possible to conclude that independence was a mistake, or that the Irish really are as ungovernable and uncivilized as their critics say, with their slavish devotion to a backward, medieval faith and their affinity for doing terrorism. O’Toole is, fortunately, not that writer. He writes insightfully and sympathetically of the shame and insecurities that gave rise to the bad psychological habits of the Irish–the colonial survival mechanism of knowing things without acknowledging them, an increasingly maladaptive habit that festered until the country broke open–while being unsparing about the human toll of the various things Ireland looked away from for decades, from the physical and sexual violence of the Church institutions that ran so much of Ireland’s social infrastructure to tax evasion. (The tax evasion was a really big problem.)

The nuance, the attention to detail, and the determination to look through rhetoric and sentiment and justification to find the human element in every story, was really thrown into sharp relief when I was fortunate enough to have tickets to the Wolfe Tones’ farewell concert in Boston fall into my lap immediately upon finishing this book. The show was enjoyable but did not exactly showcase a coherent political analysis, being a celebration of Irish militant nationalist history without regard to its contradictions and carefully calculated to avoid offending the political sensibilities of current Irish-Americans essentially regardless of what they were, or at least to keep everyone so hyped that they don’t notice that they sort of offended everyone’s political sensibilities regardless of what they were. The show started off with a (regrettably very good) Boston police pipe-and-drum parade band that barely fit on the stage and then, following a reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in its entirety, went into a slideshow about the Easter Rising that began off with a photograph of an Irish Volunteers recruitment poster railing against the excesses of the “Peelers” (i.e., the cops). A very kumbaya-esque let’s-all-hold-hands-and-pray-for-peace-and-brotherhood type ditty (“Give Me Your Hand,” maybe?) segued seamlessly into “Come Out Ye Black and Tans,” a nationalist classic about getting into street fights with either the actual Tans or maybe your racist neighbors, depending on how you want to read it; it’s a bit ambiguous. “The Streets of New York” was dedicated to an NYPD police officer and was followed up almost immediately with a rendition of “Joe McDonnell,” a song about one of the hunger strikers, whose chorus begins “And you dared to call me a terrorist while you looked down your gun.” Pro-peace, pro-cop, and pro-terrorism all at the same time! Erin go bragh!

It’s undeniable that the Tones are a forcefully good time; O’Toole has a hilarious anecdote about himself as a teenager watching a Wolfe Tones concert and finding himself unexpectedly yelling “Up the IRA!” at the Taoiseach immediately afterwards. But being surrounded by the whitest crowd I’ve ever seen in Dorchester clapping for the BPD and yelling “ooh ah up the ‘ra” while a very 1990s-looking PowerPoint of grainy old photos of the patriot dead played behind the band was for sure a bit over-the-top, and I could feel a critical little ghost Fintan O’Toole sitting in the back of my mind, possibly having a nosebleed. (We left after a very drunk woman in a Free Palestine shirt–featuring a keffiyeh-masked militant with a rocket standing back-to-back with a balaclava-masked Provo with an Armalite–was gently removed by the mostly-Black theater staff–the only Black people on the property–after they asked her to stop putting her handbag on the stage about twelve times, and we decided we’d had enough of a politically weird experience to keep busy analyzing it for the rest of our lives.)

Where was I? Right, actual history.

This book clocks in at about 500 pages and I feel like if I got going I could probably write 500 pages about it, but I’d end up carefully rereading the whole thing in the process, and that might be a project better put off a bit, at least if I want to get through other books this year. I found this book unputdownable enough that I stayed up too late reading it more nights than one; at the same time, because it touches on so many different things, I also spent a lot of time looking stuff up on my phone (starting with aerial photographs of Crumlin and going through a bunch of music on Spotify and the artwork of Jim Fitzpatrick), and staring off into the middle distance while my brain struggled to tie in the things I was reading about here to all the others scattered bits and pieces that make up Irish history in my brain–here’s what O’Toole says, and here’s what Rory Carroll said in There Will Be Fire, and didn't Patrick Radden Keefe also talk about that in Say Nothing, and sure there was just an episode about film censorship on The Irish History Podcast, and hey look it’s Michael D. Michael D. Up On His Bikeldy Higgins!

At any rate, I understand why my dad’s been talking my ear off about this book for months and why he insisted I read it, and I may find myself becoming completely insufferable about it too!

For this Black History Month I finally (after too many years) read James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, which, at fewer than 200 pages, also counts for “short books for a short month.” I think I bought my copy at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture sometime in 2019. Five years is, sadly, not an atypical amount of time for something to sit on my bookshelf before I actually read it.

Reviewing Baldwin feels vaguely blasphemous not just because he is widely recognized as one of the greats but also because he is a Black man writing in the 1940s and 1950s and I am a white girl who wasn’t even born until the 1980s, so what am I gonna do, say he’s wrong about anything? I don’t know, I’m reading to learn here. Also, the first three essays are all critical reviews of books and movies that I haven’t read or seen; he could be making them up whole cloth and I wouldn’t know (I assume someone else would have noticed by now if that were the case, of course). But anyway all I can say about the first section of the book is that I’m not always sure what he’s talking about due to my lack of familiarity with the subject matter, but he is entertainingly savage in the particular digs he makes at these pieces of media. Baldwin is not known for showering praise upon pretty much anyone or anything so it’s probably unsurprising to see that he doesn’t really like “protest novels” or “social novels” by either white or black authors, although his diagnoses of what’s wrong with them differs.

The other essays are largely biographical, about life in Harlem, a job in New Jersey, his father, newspapers, getting arrested in Paris. Baldwin is unsparing in his analysis of the social and psychological ills of, again, basically everybody. Some of it is dryly funny in a way that Baldwin always manages to immediately make you feel bad about finding funny, because it really is a blistering look at a lot of harsh realities (and, perhaps more importantly, unrealities). There are a lot of the sorts of really profound quotes that people like to dig out of the essays and post as standalones and many of them do sort of do that themselves in the essays themselves, kind of jumping off the page and slapping you in the face, but they really work much better as punctuation of whatever tragically human anecdote Baldwin was telling us.

For book club I might have to google for smarter discussion questions than the ones I can come up with. It probably wouldn’t go amiss for me to re-read some of the more complex essays, like the titular one about Baldwin’s father’s death and the riots that broke out in Harlem at the same time. As one of the few non-Jews in the group I’m also particularly interested in the discussion that will ensue about the second half of “The Harlem Ghetto,” which is about Black anti-Semitism and Jewish anti-Blackness, and the causes and effects of each and their relationship to each other and the wider social structures of the U.S. I am personally more “at home” in the sections on “let’s talk about why newspapers are so bad” and, of course, the later essays where Baldwin dunks on the French (and on Francophiles), so I think it will be instructive.

Medieval January is over so I finally read the non-medieval book that the politics book club was supposed to read for January: Naomi Klein’s newest release, Doppelganger.

Nominally, Doppelganger is about the identity crisis Naomi Klein had that was precipitated by her continual conflation with Naomi Wolf, whomst has become a crank and a conspiracy theorist. This is actually quite interesting, especially if you’ve read a bunch of Klein’s other books, where she doesn’t tend to foreground herself that much. Getting mixed up with Other Naomi so much was deeply destabilizing for Klein (whom I have started thinking of as Good Naomi), and the psychological exploration of identity formation and maintenance that she goes through is fascinating, especially for someone whose public identity–or personal brand, as we call it these days–is so tied up with critical deconstruction of ideas like personal branding. But it would still be a pretty navel-gazey book if that was all that was going on–which, fortunately, there isn’t. Klein uses the trajectory of Wolf’s career as a case study/jumping-off-point to diagnose various ills in our current political discourse, and the political reality that discourse obscures.

I definitely regret missing the book club about this because there’s a lot of juicy stuff here–about Covid, about weaknesses in the left and the sort of mainstream liberalism that presents as the left (“progressivism”), about where conspiracy theories come from and how they function, about the power and the limitations of words, about Red Vienna, about Palestine. It’s a difficult book to explain but it really clarified and solidified a lot of stuff I’ve been seeing and worrying about over the past few years.

For the book club we are reading my favorite type of book right about this time of year: 700-page chonkers about medieval Europe. The lucky tome this month is A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning popular historian Barbara Tuchman. This book was published in 1972, but still seems to be considered pretty credible, as far as popular history goes.

Though the framing is that it’s about the 14th century world, this is really a book about 14th century Europe, focused predominantly on France. France is of course actually smack in the middle of Europe, although Europe only thinks it is smack-dab the center of the world. But this is only annoying in the intro and outro chapters. The rest of the book is just a wild ride through Europe and has a much, much more interesting framing device: our unifying thread through the story is the life one Enguerrand VII de Coucy, lord of a castle in Picardy with a ridiculously large central keep. Enguerrand survives for most of the century by a combination of being very lucky and being actually kind of smart, or perhaps more specifically wise, which isn’t really among the noble classes at this time.

The 14th century was a bad time in Europe. It was certainly exciting, but mostly in awful ways. The second half of the century was punctuated by outbreaks of the Black Death, which first hit in 1347 and of which there were about half a dozen waves by 1399. This was also the century of the infamous schism in the Catholic Church, where there was a Pope in Avignon and a Pope in Rome and then at one point a third Pope somewhere else. Most of the hundred years of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England fell into this century. There were a bunch of Crusades that all went comically poorly (they certainly weren’t comical at the time, but from the vantage point of 700 years and personal apostasy from the Catholic Church, I cannot help but think it’s funny when the Christians lose crusades). Whenever the wars stopped, big groups of discharged warriors formed little bandit companies and roamed around continuing to do warfare-type activities upon the populace. Medieval warfare appears to have consisted about 2% of embodying the chivalrous ideal of knights heroically stabbing other knights in pitched battle on an open plain, and 98% things that have since been (theoretically) banned as war crimes and terrorism under the Geneva Convention. (This math leaves 0 percentage points available for newfangled tactical tomfoolery like “reconnaissance.”) If you, like me, enjoy reading about awful things, 14th century France provides an embarrassment of riches. It also provides an embarrassment of riches if you, like me, think people ought to be embarrassed about the riches they acquire by violence and dispossession.

The writing style of this book is not dense, as in it is neither dry nor academic, but instead infused with a sort of dryly chatty sense of humor that might not be wholly objective but which I enjoyed a lot. This is important because the content is very dense, in that there’s a lot of stuff and a lot of people to keep track of. The morass of repetitive names and titles can make it very easy to forget who we are talking about at any given time, and at some point I had to decide to just roll with it instead of constantly going back and trying to re-establish who was who. This is of course not Barbara Tuchman’s fault–she did, after all, go to great lengths to give us a distinctive “main character” whose name was neither Philippe, nor Louis, nor Charles–it’s mainly the fault of the French and the English. Tuchman is able to turn some of the repetitiveness of the 14th century into jokes as well, such as an extremely funny running gag about how much the moralizers of the time hated pointed shoes, which persisted in being popular despite being objectively one of the dumbest fashion trends of all time. I am sure book club will have a nice deep conversation about the politics of the time and what it says about the politics of now but I’m just gonna be like “lol, pointed shoes” the whole time.

Anyway, I loved this book. Get thee to a library anon and check it out.

A few Christmases ago, at the illustrious Strand bookstore, I picked up an intriguing-looking little paperback with a beautiful border on the cover: Illuminated Calligraphy by Patricia Carter.

Since then I have been reading little snippets of this not-very-long volume, in the service of tiny half-assed projects like drawing borders on the pages of my planner and making myself a sign to remind me to eat salad. I have resisted the urge to run to a craft store and buy all the tools to do proper illuminates borders, like paint and gold leaf. I have mainly been using colored pencils.

Today I finally “read” the whole book cover to cover, carefully looking through the examples gallery and reading all the associated advice. I’ve only actually started taking a little of the advice in drafting my New Year’s Resolutions document so tomorrow’s writing-out will likely involve a little bit more winging it than Ms. Carter would strictly approve of.

Illuminating calligraphy is an art that requires more practice than book study, which I figured going in, but this book does provide a lot of good advice on where to start, how to practice, etc., in its 64 pages, as well as a number of beautiful examples to copy off. I’m going to try to get better at utilizing the tips I can implement with my existing materials and perhaps when I’ve gotten better at that—and more in the habit of doing illuminated calligraphy at all—I can buy myself some paint as a reward.