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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Some books have been sitting on my to-read shelf for so long I can no longer remember when or how they got there. One of these books is Charles Squire’s Celtic Myth and Legend, which I apparently got long enough ago that I either didn’t notice or was at least sort of interested in “New Age”/pagan revival stuff rather than history/folklore studies. The back cover labels it “New Age/Mythology” and the introduction is by one Sirona Knight, a neopagan author of books with titles like “Faery Magick.” I could probably find a bunch of her books around town but I’m frankly no longer as interested in reading them as I was back in the day. Anyway, the intro to this text is a bit incongruous to the rest of it, burbling happily about how great it is that modern people are rediscovering Celtic mythology as a serious spiritual practice and blithely assuring us that recent scholarship has shown anything nasty ever said about it (especially the big wickerwork statues full of human sacrifices) to be the work of the pernicious Romans and Christians. From this there’s a sort of emotional smash cut to the extremely British, extremely Victorian opinions of Mr. Charles Squire, writing in 1905, dutifully ranking every last thing he can find to rank into “higher” and “lower, “primitive” and “civilized,” “degraded” and “advanced”; comparing Celtic antiquity to Greek at every turn; and confidently breaking down every supposed historical claim about ancient Britain and Ireland to show that it’s just myth, except the nasty ones (like the big wickerwork statues full of human sacrifices). It is, at least by Victorian standards, strictly a work of serious, secular scholarship. Knight’s intro and Squire’s own intro are two such different flavors of editorializing that I’m rather amazed they were allowed into the same book.

Anyway, I have a high tolerance for smug Victorian writing, so that didn’t really stop me from enjoying both the peek into the state of early 1900’s scholarship into Celtic myth, nor from enjoying the myths themselves. The book is split into roughly two parts: the first part gives us a study/overview of the ancient myths of Ireland and the Gaels; the second gives us the myths of the Brythonic Celts, aka the Welsh, both as they relate to the Gaelic myths (many of them seem to be basically the same gods and stories with slightly different names), and how they eventually grew into the legend of Arthur, undoubtedly one of the most influential legends/bodies of storytelling in the British literary tradition.

This seems to be as good a primer as any, if you are a particular type of reader who doesn’t need a primer on “reading Victorian scholarship” but does need a primer on Celtic mythology, which is… maybe not too many people these days, but it works for me. It’s not a compilation of tales put together short-story-anthology style, the way a lot of my Baby’s First Mythology books were that I read when I was a kid, but a dense 400 pages of names, place-names, context, legacies, and whatnot, mapping out the relationships between different stories more than telling them. That said, you get a good overview of the major player and there are a select handful of ripping good tales in there that you’ll learn the basic storylines of–the legends of Cuchulainn, and of Fionn Mac Coul, and of Diarmad and Grainne, and of Deirdre and Naoise and King Conchobar, and of Balor and his eye of death, and a bunch of other tales of the Tuatha De Danann and the beings who came both before and after them. I’m not great at remembering any of the gods’ names but that’ll change if I read more on the subject. The chapters on the Welsh were a little harder because I really can’t remember any of the Welsh names, but I remember the stories were fun, and the genealogy of the tales of Arthur was fascinating if only because of how much it deviates from the Arthuriana I’m most familiar with, most of which is already a generation or two downstream of Tennsyons’ Idylls of the King or Malory’s Morte Darthur, which I have never read. It’s a long way from ancient Wales to BBC’s Merlin or even T.H. White’s The Once And Future King. I received a book of the real olde-skool Welsh versions of the legends when I was in fourth grade, and the Welsh threw me so badly I didn’t get around to actually reading it until 2011.

Anyway, I can’t necessarily recommend this book to anybody as the most approachable intro to Celtic mythology, but I’m certainly really glad I read it, outdated as it is! I’m looking forward to reading more weird Victorian takes on ancient Irish literature from the Irish Literary Revival period. I’ve got a bunch of that weirdo Yeats sitting on my shelf.
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I don’t remember exactly how this book first came into my view but sometime in the last two months, when I’ve been thinking a lot about political violence and strategies for change and intractable conflicts that are popularly miscast as solely sectarian violence, I became aware that there was a recently released new book about the Troubles, titled There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and the Two Minutes that Changed History, by Guardian columnist Rory Carroll.

This book is structured similarly to Say Nothing in that it focuses on one event of the Troubles, and tries to build the fullest possible picture of that event–before, during, after, context, interviews with the major players (except Gerry Adams, who refuses to ever be interviewed for these things because he still maintains he was never in the IRA), the occasional photo. This one is weighted a bit less on the “history of the entire Troubles” end, probably because the actual operation of the Brighton bombing and the subsequent manhunt for Patrick Magee was somewhat more complex than the murder of Jean McConville. It situates the England Department within the rest of the IRA and the discussions about strategy and resource allocation that were going on in the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein.

After having just finished Let This Radicalize You and If We Burn, I found the strategy talk to be some of the most interesting stuff in the book–despite pearl-clutching from the respectable media there’s actually an enormous difference between organizing strategies that don’t involve armed struggle (known in the official literature as “nonviolent resistance,” although in popular parlance the designation of nonviolence can be revoked for any reason whatsoever) and organizing strategies in which shootings, bombings, and arson are the main tools one’s repertoire of resistance. But at the same time, it would appear that questions about burnout, opsec, training, not talking to cops, PR, public sympathy, the limits and contradictions of any given strategy, internal diplomacy, and resource allocation are fairly constant across any organization that is trying to effect political change. I find myself once again impressed by the IRA’s creative strategic thinking–combining the hunger strikes, which had gotten easy to ignore, with election campaigns, which necessarily force attention upon the candidate as an individual, was a stroke of genius that saved what seems like would have been an otherwise ineffective act of self-destruction; I also think Sinn Fein’s policy of abstentionism is the only way I’ve ever seen of disrupting or signaling illegitimacy in an elected government that isn’t self-defeating at worst or irrelevant at best. (Not contesting elections is a perfectly fine strategy for groups that aren’t interested in the electoral sphere or don’t have the resources to stand elections, but it certainly doesn’t exert any power within the electoral sphere, no matter what goofy shit you tell yourself about “not legitimizing” or “boycotting” or whatever. Standing an election, winning it, and then refusing to take the oath of fealty to the Crown or haul your ass to Westminster at least keeps the seat out of the hands of your political enemies, and allows you to do constituent services.)

Anyway, back to the bombing. This was a meticulously planned operation, and Carroll gets us inside the heads of both the IRA operatives involved with carrying it out, several of the Conservative Party targets and victims (not always quite the same thing–Thatcher was really the target, although I don’t think the republicans would have been upset if the execrable Norman Tebbit had got got), and a whole slew of police detectives, bomb disposal technicians, fingerprint experts, and other law enforcement and anti-terrorism personnel across at least a dozen different jurisdictions and departments, with working relationships to each other in varying degrees of functionality. The investigative work on display in this book is both riveting to read and an interesting look into what solving public safety threats can look like when the cops don’t have endless guns and free reign to just bust anyone’s heads that they feel like. A key quality on display was patience, in this case necessitated by political realities rather than any personal virtues of the cops in question: Magee spent quite a while on the lam at Ballymun Towers outside of Dublin, in the Republic where the English police didn’t have jurisdiction. England, for various reasons, wasn’t in a hurry to start another full-blown war with the Republic, and as such, simply airstriking Ballymun Towers to rubble wasn’t on the table. So instead they waited. This, as a quick look at the news will tell you, is not the only possible response of governments to terrorism; the political conditions have to make it not just the sensible and humane thing to do, but the only course of action that’s not suicidally costly.

Anyway, political analysis aside (it’s so hard for me to set it aside right now though!), this is a ripping good read. We get cameos from well-known shady characters in the IRA weapons pipeline, like Whitey Bulger and Muammar Gaddafi; we learn about bomb technology, Victorian engineering, and the art of fingerprint analysis; no detail is spared in the grisly account of the explosion and its aftermath. Carroll manages to mostly keep his own opinions out of the picture, but does a very good job with both dry, understated humor and in humanizing–not necessarily sympathizing with, but definitely humanizing–all parties involved. The actual historical events do more or less follow a conventional story structure–the plot is hatched, planned, and carried out, then the investigation is conducted and the perpetrators are caught and imprisoned. In the epilogue, to the degree that real life has epilogues, they are let out early as a result of the Good Friday Agreement. As we leave off, the Conservative Party’s paranoia and meanness had led to Brexit, opening up the tantalizing possibility that Ireland might, at some point in the near future, actually be reunited–democratically, by referendum. This is not to say that the Brighton bombing didn’t accomplish anything or that Violence Doesn’t Work or anything that simplistic–indeed, the psychological damage it inflicted upon Thatcher’s party may well have been part of what got Britain to this point. History is a funny old thing like that.
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I made the book club read Vincent Bevins’ new book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, even though what I kind of really wanted to do was inflict The Jakarta Method on them, except that I really didn’t want to have to reread The Jakarta Method so soon. Anyway.

If We Burn is a wide-ranging series of interviews getting behind the scenes of major protest movements across the globe, mostly in the Third World, in the 2010s. I followed some of these at the time they were happening via Twitter, others I followed less, so my prior knowledge was very uneven, but even the protests I sort of thought I knew a bit about it turns out I knew a lot less about than I did about protests going on in the US, like Occupy and the first wave of BLM. Anyway, there’s a lot of interesting firsthand accounts of the behind-the-scenes action in uprisings from Tunisia, Egypt, Brazil, Chile, Ukraine, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Some of these revolutions were more or less successful–South Korea’s ousting of Park Geun-hye seems to have been followed up in a pretty orderly fashion with somebody else kind of normal being president, although I think the current guy is a bit more right-wing than Moon Jae-in–and some collapsed into military dictatorship, as in Egypt, or worse, like whatever you want to call the current state of things in Libya.

While much of the value in this book is just having a ton of primary sources that were close to the issues at hand, so this information doesn’t get lost in the future, there are a couple of themes that do seem to emerge. One is that the big, digitally coordinated mass protests, however much positive press they got from Western media for being the right and correct and respectable way to make change, had a very uneven record of making any kind of change. Clearly, the theory of change that’s just “Have mass protests until a better society emerges” is missing some key details. Bevins doesn’t lay out a One True Way to Achieve Social Change–his stance even on the age-old “reform or revolution” question isn’t that one is inherently better than the other, just that you should consider doing whichever one you are better positioned to actually pull off–just that there aren’t any shortcuts to thinking strategically and having more than one tool in your “repertoire of resistance.” “Don’t create power vacuums and then leave them open for somebody else to step into, because they will” is a big takeaway, and probably one of the easier ones to start doing something about (Gabriel Boric isn’t having a perfectly flawless term as president of Chile, but he’s still the president, which is a better time than the Egyptian left is having).

Some of the lack of strategic thinking on display in this book is honestly very tragic. The Hong Kong protests were in a tight enough spot given the positive backing they were getting from the U.S., which has been concerned about China’s economic development because we still think it’s against the rules for any country to develop economically except the handful we hand-pick to be allowed to do the same things we coup other countries for trying (called either “democracy” or “communism” depending on whether the US thinks it’s strategically beneficial for the US). Foreign money, especially foreign money from the US, which has lots of it, seems to be capable of overwhelming whatever organic, domestic-policy-oriented protests occur in a nation if the foreign money thinks it could be useful for its own ends. The Hong Kong students thought they could use the US’ sympathy for their own ends, and ended up cosplaying The Hunger Games right into the sea waiting for the US/UK cavalry to come in and deliver them. Also, for Christ’s sake, they were literally cosplaying The Hunger Games. (Made me think of this essay: https://newsocialist.org.uk/outlaw-kings-rebel-chic/.) There’s also some talk with Egyptian leftists who boycotted the four-way election after the fall of Hosni Mubarak and then were shocked Pikachu face that one of the right-wing candidates won, all of whom regretted being all anarcho-vibesist about it and wished they had in some way engaged with the question of who would succeed Mubarak.

Unrelated to issues of theory and strategy, my favorite thing about this book was how personally insulted Bevins is by what the right wing did to Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. Bevins is normally fairly good at not making himself part of the story, but he did get caught in some fairly escalated situations during the protests in Brazil, and he got to witness the soft coup impeachment vote that removed Dilma from office, and he was clearly deeply offended by what he saw. He really dislikes the smug little American-funded faux-punk neoliberal group MBL (named deliberately to confuse people by sounding almost like the more popular and sympathetic MPL) with a palpable and visceral dislike, and I am definitely here for it because they sound fucking insufferable. He certainly makes the case convincingly that Dilma was done dirty by just about everybody, but it’s adorable how hurt he seems to be about it.
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Full disclosure: I went into Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care almost not wanting to like it, since it’s been praised to the skies and I get concerned about people just reading whatever they want into things. On the other hand, this particular type of burnout–suspicious, reading everything through a filter of “how resistant is this to co-optation by the most self-absorbed people in the world” (even though bad actors can co-opt anything), generally dour about my fellow leftists–is exactly the sort of thing I need some way to heal from, so I figured it was worth a shot to see what they had to say.

Hayes and Kaba go to great lengths to ensure this book is not just a litany of “how not to be” advice but let’s face it, there are a lot of potential pitfalls in organizing and a lot of ways that good organizers should not be. Advice on taking care of ourselves and each other, constructive (and not constructive) ways to onboard newbies, how to think strategically (and why it’s so important), the limitations of both traditional and social media, navigating hot-button rhetoric around “violence” and other buzzwords, the importance of political education and emotional processing… it’s a wide-ranging category of topics but it all comes down to being solid advice on how to safely and sustainably do organizing. Hayes and Kaba gently and compassionately insist that “organizing” means organizing, and not just any old shit you do to tell yourself that you are Making The World A Better Place. Honestly, one of the main strengths of this book is that Hayes and Kaba clearly have a lot of experience gently and compassionately telling people stuff they might not always want to hear, like “sometimes one thing really is more effective than another thing” or “here is some information you may not have previously considered” or even “the behavior you engaged in harmed someone else and you are not the sole wronged party in this situation.”

The timing of this read was interesting for me personally because I read it as an immediate precursor to Vince Bevins’ If We Burn, which covers mass protests from 2010 to 2020, and I think it’s useful to see how the advice in the two books compare. I think they dovetail fairly nicely, even though the Bevins book is focused mainly on one type of action and Let This Radicalize You is careful to survey a wide range of types of actions (lesson: you gotta have more than one tool in your toolbox).

It is very likely I won’t end up rereading this because I’m not nearly as good at rereading things as I ought to be, but I am nonetheless glad that I bought a copy of this instead of getting it from the library because I ought to reread it and I ought to be able to lend it out to other people. We’ll see how that goes.
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As part of my project to slowly re-integrate into chapter life by doing reading groups, I joined the reading group for Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World. As you can probably tell from the subtitle, this is not a lighthearted or uplifting book.

If you are involved in the U.S. left you are probably at least somewhat aware that the U.S. has done a lot of coups; the ones that I see discussed (or at least posted about) the most tend to be Chile and Iran, and I was aware that there were several more–in the dozens–but I didn’t know anything about any of them in particular. I knew some of them had to do with bananas, and I knew some of them had to do with oil reserves. I remember when Elliot Abrams resurfaced in public life and there was a big controversy about whether it was somehow Going Too Far or whatever to say that he shouldn’t be allowed to show his face in respectable society ever again given that his prior claim to fame was running PR for death squads in El Salvador. But what information I had about the CIA’s bad behavior for the rest of the 20th century after World War II ended was all in bits and pieces; I’d never really sat down and read a whole book about it before.

Well, I have now been enlightened, and as is generally the case upon digesting a large load of political enlightenment on the left, I feel punchy and awful and distracted. Everything around me feels very dumb and I want to go pick a fight with someone. I’ll feel better soon when I have actual concrete, useful things to do, but for right now I feel like I’ve eaten an entire rotten watermelon and I want to puke it back up all over Henry Kissinger.

This is probably not a great way to start off this review, given that the main thing I have to say about this book is that I think everybody should read it. It’s fantastically done–incredibly engaging, information-dense, easy to read, full of both paradigm-shifting historical context and illuminating interviews with individual survivors of anticommunist massacres, which serve to humanize the effects of US policy. It addresses both the outright lies that the US public has been told, and a number of the false assumptions about the Third World that we are quietly encouraged to not examine.

A constant and infuriating thread in the U.S.’ actions is that we treat the rest of the world as if they are dumb babies, and when they do something insufficiently babyish, we are very threatened and throw a big tantrum and knock all their toys over, then immediately hide-slash-forget that we did that, and just see this other country sitting in a big mess and conclude that they probably had the tantrum themselves and this just proves that they’re dumb babies who need us to tell them what to do… and the cycle continues. These days it is fashionable among mainstream liberals to look at the various repressive, right-wing governments in Third World countries around the world and lament at the backwardness that allows such right-wing dictators to thrive, maybe the U.S. should intervene and establish a democracy? In every case, the right-wing dictatorship was brutally installed by U.S. forces after we deliberately destroyed the postwar democracies. This book barely touches on the right-wing regimes that we “humanitarianly intervened” with in my lifetime–the Taliban, who we armed in Operation Cyclone, and Saddam Hussein, who we helped take power in 1963. This is not to say that the book ignores them, just that there are too many overthrowings of democratically elected leaders, installations of military dictatorships, providing of arms and training and kill lists, and other such crimes against humanity to give them all the in-depth treatment. The countries we spend the most time reading about, and the ones that Bevins posits are the most influential, are Brazil and Indonesia.

Indonesia gets to be the title country here for several reasons, one of which is that it seems to be the least known despite possibly having the highest body count of all the mass murder programs the CIA backed in the postwar period. In the twenty years following the end of WWII, Indonesia had the largest unarmed Communist party in the world. The PKI, as it was known, did all the things people lament those stupid modern leftists don’t have the sense to do–they participated in normal parliamentary politics, stood elections, built support by carrying out their campaign promises and meeting regular people’s needs, developed a reputation for not engaging in corruption, played nicely with the other parties–including supporting the immensely popular non-Communist president, Sukarno–and otherwise were an active and well-respected political party, full of normal people who also were Marxists, doing normal politics from a Marxist perspective.

In 1965, in the weeks following the 30 September Movement, as it became known, the PKI was completely obliterated from the face of the Earth. Over the course of about half a year, the Indonesian army, trained and backed by the U.S., murdered somewhere between half a million and a million Indonesian civilians for suspected previously-entirely-legal ties to the PKI, and put another million or so in concentration camps. Targets were picked in part from kill lists that the CIA supplied to the military death squads in full knowledge of what was going on. From 1966 onward, Indonesia has been a quiet and compliant ally state of the U.S., and basically no one in the U.S. has had any reason to think about it in fifty years, unless they are planning a scenic beach vacation to the killing fields of Bali. Apparently, no one except the locals, who still sometimes find skulls and bones in the sand, have any idea that the swanky tourist resorts of Bali are built on the sites of some of the largest mass killings of the 20th century.

The Indonesian coup was so spectacularly successful that the CIA would use it as a playbook for all of its post-1965 coups in Latin America, with the added twist that right-wing forces in Chile etc. started using “Jakarta is coming” as a threat, much the way modern fash use helicopter imagery as a threat.

Anyway, if you ever wondered if maybe Martin Luther King Jr. was exaggerating a little bit when he said that the U.S. was the largest purveyor of violence in the world today (the today in question being the ‘60s), be assured that he was not. You can read all about it here. And then, as Anthony Bourdain once said, you will never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.
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For book club, after extensive suggesting from a regular, we decided to read James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, a book about suburban sprawl, and specifically about how cars have ruined the geography of American life, leaving us a nation full of un-walkable, car-centric residential tracts full of ugly buildings that isolate us from our neighbors. It’s got a very old man rant vibe, but frankly, I agree with enough of the old man ranting that I’m pretty happy to go along with it (except for side-eyeing a couple of invocations about “traditional values”), plus I got to learn things about architecture and urban planning that allow me to be more informed-ly judgmental when I’m going around towns looking at people’s houses, which is an activity I like very much (see also: McMansion Hell).

This book was written in 1993 and thus some parts of it are pretty dated, but it makes a great perspective on 1993. The Big Dig had barely started; the North End was still choked off from the rest of Boston. White flight had left our major cities as the most undesirable real estate in the country, before rich people decided to “fix” them in the most unaffordable ways. The train meme group on Facebook (you know the one I’m talking about) didn’t exist yet (neither did Facebook). It’s easy to look back on in from 30 years later and be like “The ‘90s were a bleak time, man,” but frankly most of the postwar infrastructure and bad architectural trends are still with us, at least in a lot of the country, and some of them have even metastasized into worse things (see again: the properties profiled on McMansion Hell), while in other areas of public life, some corrections have been made. This book also gave me many thoughts on evaluating five-over-ones (or, as I call them, cappy blocks), and the ways they are following some of Kunstler’s recommendations but not others.

The absolute high point of the judgmental rantiness of this book was the savaging of Le Corbusier, which doesn’t go quite into the same depth as the takedown in Seeing Like a State, mainly for reasons of length (The Geography of Nowhere is a much shorter book, clocking in at a compact 250 pages), but is nonetheless extremely satisfying. In a book that’s largely about wide social trends–like how our entire postwar society was built on cheap oil and being the only country left that wasn’t economically wrecked–it’s nice to have some individual villains we can point to. Robert Moses is also named and eviscerated as a bad guy, which is fun because for all the cranky-old-man-thirty-years-ago vibes of this book, hating on Robert Moses has become quite fashionable amongst the young’uns struggling to make rent in the city (I believe Mr. Moses is also the big bad in one of Dimension 20’s campaigns, but I haven’t watched that one yet). It seems a little weird that Jane Jacobs is never mentioned, given that she is apparently Robert Moses’ most high-profile ideological enemy, even though Kunstler is unapologetically a Town Guy and not a City Guy (personally, I’m a city bitch, even though I moved to the kind of small city that to me feels like a town).

My actual biggest criticism of this book is that I think it could have used some photos. Preferably lots of photos. I spent a good chunk of time looking up buildings and stuff on my phone, which then meant I was on my phone, and when I read I would rather minimize the amount of time I spend on my phone (and I have enough trouble with that already). It’s one thing to look up words I don’t know or whatever, but I generally think books about art, architecture, aesthetics, and other such visuals ought to provide at least some of the visuals so that the reader can follow along more easily. That said, I looked up the Fagus Werk and I do in fact hate it; I went to a school that actually was built to be easily converted into a shoe factory if the whole school thing flopped, but because it was built in 1889 it doesn’t look nearly as factorylike. Anyway, I *did* like that Kunstler specifically called out the bullshit moralizing of the Modernists and post-Modernists, and their over-reliance on political narrative to silence the aesthetic observation that some of these buildings are fugly. (I have fairly trad aesthetic tastes and I’m a little oversensitive to any implication that objecting to our corporate overlords’ Apple-store-ification of everything is somehow politically regressive. Sometimes, new things are also bad!)

Anyway, I think we’re going to have a real rich conversation about places we’ve lived, and what we did and didn’t like about them, and how to fix cities and towns, and how little of the U.S. I have actually seen, and Things My Next House Will Have (a front porch, mainly). I’m looking forward to it!
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The brief late-spring flush of glory that was “my spiderwort and day lilies actually blooming” has passed and I have instead lately been going around town enviously eyeing everyone else’s day lilies that are still somehow in full bloom (I’m sure the “somehow” is “their soil is less depleted than mine”). After a tragic weed-whacking incident with the Virginia creeper I’d established by the garden shed (it’s not dead, it’s just not creeping again yet), I decided it was time to get more serious about learning what the hell to do to prep the garden for fall and try to de-upfuck as much as I could with what’s left of the summer. Some of this involved having Dad and Melissa come down from Maine to help me figure out a lawn-mowing solution and give some expert (or at least actually-experienced-hobbyist) advice on what to move around and how to maintain stuff, which resulted in me becoming the proud owner of a shiny new battery-operated string trimmer (the gas mower got picked up yesterday. So long, enormous fussy machine that’s nearly a quarter of the size of the lawn anyway!). I also decided to read An Actual Book that wasn’t just a plant directory, so, on the recommendation of a website with a bunch of gardening articles that looked decent (thanks, gardendesign.com!) I requested a library copy of Daryl Beyers’ The New Gardener’s Handbook: Grow a Beautiful & Bountiful Garden. It’s not a native planting guide, which is fine, although it does contain a decent amount of advice on the benefits of native planting. Some of this stuff is clearly way out of my league for right now, either in terms of skill or in terms of the space involved (I don’t have anywhere indoors to keep seed trays, unless I like, set up shop in the creepy basement or something?), but it also contains a lot of key Gardening for Dummies information that I really needed, like diagrams of how to dig up a plant and move it somewhere else, and an explainer on what the whole deal is with mulch. It is obviously too soon to say how successful I will be at applying this information, and how it will pan out when I do, but I feel much more prepared to take on this weekend’s gardening tasks and maybe even ones further out.
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In my current drive to Learn About Plants I visited the Garden in the Woods in Framingham with my kind and indulgent girlfriend (who is not into plants). Because I am me, when I was there I picked up a copy of The Northeast Native Plant Primer by Uli Lorimer, partly because it seemed like a useful reference but also partly because it makes a pretty coffee table book (there were lots of useful-looking references and I had to narrow it down somehow).

This book is not really a plant identification guide, or a care and keeping manual of the plants listed. It’s basically a getting-started list–each of the 235 plants identified has 1 picture, or occasionally 2, and a paragraph of copy, and a couple bits of key information (size, how much sun/shade it needs, what types of pollinators it attracts, and Latin and common names) (oddly, not it’s hardiness zones). It’s good for getting ideas to then follow up on later, and it’s very pretty.

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