bloodygranuaile

I have been busy as all get-out so it took me way longer than I’d have liked to finish my April nonfiction commitment, Eric Jay Dolan’s Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America.

This book, as you can probably guess from the title, covers the fur trade on the North American continent, from the first European fur trappers (mainly the French) to start kicking around Canada as early as the 1500s, up through the beginning of the conservation movement in the late 19th century, once the near-extinction of the buffalo managed to shock even jingoistic American capitalist types into noticing what destruction they had wrought. Dolin brings his characteristic naturalist’s eye to this story, focusing on the ecological effects of the fur trade nearly as much as the political and cultural ones, and giving the fur animals themselves their due–beavers, buffalo, fur seals, and sea otters are nearly as well-developed characters here as the various humans.

Fur trading was often the “tip of the spear” for European colonization in North America, which lacked the huge and immediately findable gold and silver mines of Mexico and Peru, where the Spanish set up shop early in the 1500s. The history of the fur trade in what would become Canada, the U.S., and the northern parts of the Mexican territory is therefore basically synonymous with the history of European colonization of those parts, and many of the events recounted here were familiar to me from Alan Taylor’s American Colonies, including the complex trade relationships with Indian tribes, and the Russian colonization of Alaska (they did it to obtain fur seals after they’d basically wiped out sable in Siberia).

The story is tragic on basically every level: the fur trade massively upset the ecological balance that Indian nations who hunted fur-bearing animals had lived in pre-colonization, leading to devastation of the habitats and populations of the animals in question; it rendered the Indians dependent on European trade goods and simultaneously vulnerable to European-introduced diseases, gun violence, and alcohol abuse, which facilitated the seizure of their land; it led to the growth of big monopolistic fur companies that mistreated their workers and put them into debt peonage. Lots of human beings died in addition to the animals being hunted. Also, I’ve been watching Blue Planet II when I need some downtime, and have you seen sea otters? They’re so cute! How could you kill so many of these lil guys?

https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/globalassets/mba/images/animals/marine-mammals/sea-otter-327-surrogate-mother-toola-rw05-082.jpg?width=966&height=644&mode=crop&format=webp&quality=60

That said, it’s still quite a fascinating set of stories, and I certainly feel much more educated about stuff I didn’t really know much about before, like the settling of the Southwest and California. Someday I need to read a proper history of California.

Last night I went to see Nafis Hasan at Brookline Booksmith for an event for his book, Metastasis: The Rise of the Cancer-Industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care. I first met Nafis through DSA and had not seen him since he left Boston, so I was looking forward to the event very much. It is cool to know smart and talented people whomst write books! It also was a great talk. In personal triumphs, last weekend I took advantage of the bad weather and my girlfriend’s unfortunate work schedule to make sure that for once in my life I read the book before the event, so I could be prepared.

Metastasis is short but very information-dense, covering a wide range of cancer-related topics, with a focus on the political dimensions of science. We learn about the history of cancer research and specifically of funding for cancer research, and both the scientific and ideological histories of how cancer is understood and what lines of inquiry people expect to find results in. Nafis criticized the overfocus on finding a “cure” and specifically the overfocus on finding a cure via genetics, to the detriment of focus on environmental and occupational cancer risks, even though the biggest factor in reducing cancer mortality in the last few decades appears to have been the generational drop in smoking rates. He highlights the ideological reasons that individualist causes and solutions to cancer dominate the world of cancer research, and the history of the framing of cancer as a matter of militaristic conflict–i.e., the “War on Cancer,” which we’ve been fighting for 50 years now. There’s an infuriating walk through the finances of cancer drug development and pricing, and some interesting comparisons to the way other countries do it, particularly Cuba and Brazil. The most narrowly focused parts of the book explain the issues with Somatic Mutation Theory, which is the current dominant understanding of the causes of cancer; the subjects then expand steadily in scope to a discussion of Marxist biology and the changes in the class position of the working scientist over the past couple of decades.

I am not particularly close to the world of cancer research and found myself a little surprised at the degree to which the, for lack of a better term, official world of Knowing Stuff About Cancer is so closely focused on genetics. I certainly knew that it was accepted that genetics were considered a risk factor, but I don’t think I’d quite realized the degree to which, after telling us all to wear sunscreen and never start smoking, the environmental factors seem to be considered officially cleaned up and all that anyone is researching is genes. I feel like outside the halls of power, especially in the realms of ordinary people, the understanding is alive and well that stuff can give you cancer. This all still seems to stick with a very individualist lifestyle bent, from the ordinary admonitions to wear sunscreen to the more anti-Big-Pharma-to-the-point-of-crankery admonitions to simply go through modern life without interacting with any chemicals whatsoever, which is… sort of a tall order. But the problems with various shady chemicals in our society are very real, and I have to wonder at the relationship between the neglect of Big Pharma/Big Business-Funded Research/Big Lobbyists for Small FDA and anti-science, pseudo-naturalistic “wellness” lifestyle peddling. How am I supposed to know who’s being a crank and who’s not when they tell me “Stay away from that, it’ll give you cancer” when “that” can be basically anything? Idk, maybe I’m surrounded by too many crunchy weirdos of both the left and right flavors that I had stone cold forgotten that I too used to see all the newspaper articles that were like “We are mapping the human genome, and with that we are going to Cure All Cancer Forever,” and it’s been itching my brain all week.

Anyway, that’s my own digression. This book has different digressions! One is on the scientific community’s response to the Republican party’s outright anti-science turn, and the way this both has and has not changed many scientists’ views of science as apolitical (or at least as *supposed* to be apolitical), and the political divide between the centrist inclinations of many scientists who consider themselves non-ideological, and the sort of left insurgency of a high-education, low-wage, mostly younger cohort of a scientific workforce that has been steadily proletarianizing. Another is about America’s fucked-up stupid health insurance system and what aspects of it would and would not be fixed by implementing Medicare for All. There was also a really wild history lesson about Nazi Germany’s research into the links between smoking and lung cancer, and what happened (or, more properly, did not happen) to that research after the war. If this is making it sound like the book is disjointed I can assure you it is not; its topics flow very logically from one another; they start very narrowly and broaden in scope as the book builds its arguments. Also, while I wouldn’t exactly call it easy reading, Nafis is very good about defining his terms so that readers who are not already familiar with the literature of either cancer research or Marxist theory (or both) don’t get lost among terms like “cancer-industrial complex” and “dialectical biology.”

Final verdict is that this is a highly informative, deeply researched, and thought-provoking book that provides a much-needed critique of the state of medical research from a pro-science, pro-patient, pro-organizing point of view. Read it and let it radicalize you.

My March assigned nonfiction read was Eric Jay Dolin’s When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail. This is, broadly, a history of US trade with China, which started approximately five minutes after the US was established, and continues to today, although the President is doing his damndest to stop it because he doesn’t know anything about economics. The book doesn’t get to that point both because it was published in 2012 and also because, as the subtitle suggests, it only goes through the end of the Age of Sail.

Much of early America’s trade with China involved triangulating with the English, and less often the French. China’s system of foreign trade at the time was something called the Canton System, where foreign traders basically were only allowed to go to Canton, where they each had to have a little embassy-type trading house called a factory, from which they engaged in complex trade negotiations with the hong merchants who interfaced between the foreigners and the Chinese consumer base. This was all very complicated but for a while it mostly did its job of keeping the foreigners relatively quarantined so they didn’t disrupt life in China and a minimal sector of the Chinese population was exposed to their bad behavior.

The British were really the big egos here that got everyone into trouble with the Chinese. China, an empire that had been going for about two thousand years, considered itself the most advanced civilization on Earth, and basically acted like it was doing everyone else a big favor by trading with them. Mostly everyone else agreed that China was pretty ancient and advanced and cultured, and in America particularly everyone was quite mad for Chinese fashions. However, this sort of cultural admiration could only go so far, and eventually the Chinese view of imperial China as self-evidently the greatest civilization on earth would end up butting heads with the English view of the British Empire as self-evidently the greatest civilization on Earth. The Americans, in their pre-Manifest Destiny fashion, just wanted to make a buck.

Probably the most important stuff here for your average miseducated American to learn about is the Opium Wars! There were two of them, and the extremely short version is that they cracked Imperial China open like an egg to allow British (and other foreign, but mainly British) merchants to flood China with opium because if it wasn’t illegal in England, then clearly it had no business being illegal anywhere else; who did these Chinese think they were? A sovereign country?

Overall I found this a fun read despite the occasionally dark subject matter; there’s lots of cool stuff about boats and murder trials and tea, and it’s an area of world history that I didn’t know very much about, so I feel all edified and stuff. I definitely need to learn more Asian history but this was a decent start.

For the politics/current events book club, we decided to read Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conways’ The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. It tells the very interesting story of the decades-long propaganda campaign that is market fundamentalism, which somehow made it “common sense” in America that any government action (except killing brown people) is tyrannical and too Big, while companies can never be too Big and the invisible hand of the free market can solve all our problems as long as we give it completely free rein to do whatever it wants and do not anger it by attempting to put any checks on the behavior of Big Business (which does not exist), lest it smite us, this is definitely science and not religion.

You might think that if I said I had trouble getting into this book it would be because the content about far-right libertarian bullshit was too upsetting to focus on for long periods of time. This would be incorrect! I had a hard time getting into this book initially for a few reasons, but honestly, once I got past then and well into the far-right libertarian bullshit, I got much more engaged.

The first stumbling block for me was just that this book is 500 fucking pages long, and I have way too much assigned reading this year. This is entirely my own fault, as I am doing my yearly longread, Whale Weekly, the Monday history class, one Vorkosigan Saga book each month, and the Year of Erics, in addition to whatever book we pick each month for this book club. As a result I have discovered the limits of my tolerance for assigned reading projects and am starting to get resentful that I have no fucking time to just browse my own bookshelves and make impulsive decisions about what to read next. This is not actually a problem with the book itself. For the past eight years of this book club I have usually been the one getting excited about reading big 500-page-plus chonkers about upsetting things; it is unusual that I have put myself in a spot where the idea of reading anything for this book club that’s more than 200 pages long has me glaring balefully at my TBR shelves that I cannot squeeze in the time for.

The second stumbling block is that this book is very carefully aimed at a specific audience, which is moderate American liberals who may or may not consider themselves progressive but are at least open to the idea that “progressive” is a normal and legitimate political position for an American to hold, but anything further left that than would self-evidently be Too Far. So a lot of the book, especially right in the beginning, is devoted to covering its flank from right criticism by assuring the reader repeatedly that they’re not socialists, none of what they’re advocating is socialism, the right wing made them up, the socialists probably aren’t real and can’t hurt you. A fair amount of this is factually correct in that there is indeed a lot of room between far-right anarcho-capitalism and total central planning, and that for at least the last 30 years nearly the entirety of human politics has existed in that vast middle ground. But the constant assurances of Not Being Socialist and the obvious veneration for finding Reasonable Middle Grounds is just really fucking annoying as a reader who actually is a socialist.

Anyway, once we get past all the fucking framing, the content is very interesting. The book is very long because there is quite a lot of information there, some of which I was sort of familiar with, and some of which was not. I found the most interesting stuff to be the development of basically the right-wing version of “vulgar Marxism,” where American goons took the at least somewhat nuanced writings of folks like Hayek and Adam Smith and wrote “condensed” or “study” versions that conveniently left out all the bits where these writers acknowledged that market failure were ever real or that there was ever a role for government in doing anything about it. The chapter about Rose Wilder Lane and her hand in editing the Little House on the Prairie books–plus her own writing, which was much less successful because it was mostly just psychotically hard-right polemic–was also fascinating as someone who read the Little House on the Prairie books and reasonably enjoyed them but never got super into them the way I got into, say, American Girl or Dear America.

Anyway, this book could probably have gotten down to 400 pages if it was just the content and not all the framing and argumentation so much, and I personally would have enjoyed it better that way, but that is also not how books are structured, especially not ones where you are specifically attempting to advance an argument for political purposes and not just dump info on people. I would have preferred the infodump because I am slightly out of range of the audience for this book, but there are probably more people within the intended audience for this book than there are people like me, so fair play to the authors, I guess, but this is my review and I get to complain about the bits I didn’t like. Socialism is a scare word used in deeply dishonest ways by the right wing but it is also a real political project and people should be more normal about actual socialists existing and even being correct about stuff, thanks so much.

The February entry in my Year of Reading Erics was Eric Jay Dolin’s Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution. In November I had gone to a talk by the author about this same subject, and it was a lot of fun, even if I was the youngest person in the audience.

My thoughts on this book are a little scattered and I can’t tell if it’s because the content, while a lot of fun, actually is a little bit disjointed, or if it just seems that way to me because I read it in two- and three-page spurts at random times and kept getting interrupted, because I had the February from Hell, and somehow it took me upwards of ten days to read this even though it’s not very long and I’m sure if I had read it, like, by the lake in the summer, it’d have taken me one day, max. But anyway, it’s largely exactly what it says on the tin, which is a bunch of information about privateering in the American Revolution, and that is a very fun subject that is not usually talked about much, in my experience of people talking about the American Revolution, which does happen quite a bit when you spend your entire adult life in the immediate environs of Boston.

Some of the moral framing that is used in the marketing for this book annoys me, because it’ll be like “Some people think that privateers are basically pirates or war profiteers, but they were actually instrumental in winning the American Revolution,” even though the two parts of that sentence don’t contradict each other. The moral assumptions about piracy, war profiteering, and the American Revolution contradict each other, so the sentence only makes sense if you read it as “Some people think that privateers are [bad] but they are actually [good]” and this type of talk where people use words as if their only meaning is their moral connotation and their actual denotative meaning simply doesn’t exist drives me batty in the extreme. Fortunately, the moral assumptions made in this book only descend to this level of illiterate idiocy in the marketing; the rest of the book takes a pretty standard level of sympathy for the American Revolution and its ideals, as one would expect from an American author writing for an American audience, but nothing out of the ordinary and certainly not to the point of forgetting what words mean. My own understanding of the morals of the American Revolution is a bit more complicated than your standard American propaganda but only when talking about the American side; the few things in this world that can make me feel patriotism include sentences like “This annoyed the English considerably.”

Anyway. Privateering! The first of the rebelling colonies to legalize privateering and start issuing letters of marque was my own dear Massachusetts, a state full of little coastal trading ports and inhabited by very intense people. Salem, being a much more economically important place then than it is now, features fairly heavily; we sent out a lot of privateers. Eventually the fledgling US started sending out privateers as a country in addition to the ones being sent out under state flags; this was largely to supplement the just-founded US Navy, which was having a bad time getting off the ground. The new American privateers were pretty successful, wreaking havoc on British shipping and bringing badly needed commodities into the colonies, and making a pretty profit at the same time. The practice has its naysayers but mostly people thought this was a fantastic way to stick it to the English and men signed up for them in droves.

Disposing of the ships after they were captured added a whole other level of politicking, with Americans conspiring with the French and other supposedly neutral nations to turn prizes into cash at foreign ports, in defiance of various treaties with England. The English were big mad about it, and eventually started trying to do a bit of privateering back, although they never caught up to the Americans.

There is also a chapter on what happened to privateersmen when they got captured, which is pretty sobering. Some of them got sent to regular jails on land in England, which wasn’t fun but seems to have been humane enough by the standards of the time. Others got stuck on prison ships, including the notorious Jersey, a pestilential, overcrowded hulk in the Long Island Sound where the only way to get off the packed ship for even a little bit was to go bury corpses on the nearby beach.

Overall, I liked this book! I think! I’m glad I read it but I wish I’d gotten to read it… better? I was not at the top of my reading game lately and I wish I had been able to read it in big relaxed chunks on Derby Wharf, but alas, sometimes February happens. We’ll see how March’s reading fares in comparison.

I picked up A. R. Vishny’s Night Owls at a very bookish wedding because I thought it sounded like fun, even though it’s YA and I’m not finding myself to really enjoy a lot of YA anymore. (I think I am too old and stuff written for today’s teens does not resonate with me.) But this one promised queer Jewish owl-vampires and a lot of old New York lore and some shenanigans with dead people, so I figured it could be fun.

And it was! I am not super familiar with Jewish folklore, so for me as a reader, the estries were a fairly novel take on vampires, a subject upon which I am otherwise very familiar (possibly too familiar). I also learned a lot about late nineteenth and early twentieth century Yiddish theater, a subject upon which I am again not familiar. I don’t think I am the primary target audience for this book, in that the author is Jewish and seems to want to write about Jewish things for other Jewish people, but I enjoyed it very much all the same–it’s YA, so it’s an easy enough read and willing to explain all but the most obvious stuff to its adolescent characters, and I’ve read enough hundreds of variously warmed-over Christian-derived monster books over the past three decades that it was really great to get something else.

The setup is as such: Clara and Molly appear to be in their late teens but are in fact each well over 100 years old because they are estries. They are the curators and inhabitants of an old Yiddish theater called the Grand Dame, which has been revived as an indie cinema. They rent this building from the prince of demons in exchange for pictures of faces, because how else are you going to get affordable rent in Manhattan when you look like a permanent 18-year-old.

The shenanigans really kick off when Anat, Molly’s current human girlfriend, gets possessed by the ghost of what might be Molly’s first human girlfriend, Lena, who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Other strange things are happening, too. Initially unbeknownst to Molly and Clara, their hot mess of a box office assistant, Boaz, is also dealing with supernatural stuff, because his family is cursed to be able to talk to ghosts, and the ghosts are getting bolder and pushier. In order to save Anat, and save the world from the demon prince’s machinations, all our main characters will have to come clean about their supernatural secrets and start being able to trust each other for long enough to piece together what is actually going on–which is difficult both because they’re all long used to keeping this stuff secret, and because in true paranormal romance fashion, they are all full of inconvenient feelings. This all builds up to a beautifully chaotic climax involving the space between worlds–the world of the living and that of the dead–manifesting as all sorts of stage and movie sets and places from the characters’ pasts, as various ghosts and demons try to kidnap our characters, steal the family heirloom that Boaz’ Aunt Hila uses to do medium-ing, and generally overrun the world of the living.

Trying to thwart ancient demons isn’t particularly easy–they are clever and have had a lot of time to practice being shady–so the tension remains pleasantly high as characters are crossed and double-crossed, especially in the second half of the book where saving Anat/the world gets quite time-sensitive and poor anxious Boaz is getting hassled by strong-willed secondary characters left and right. Overall I found this book to just be really cute and fun–it’s a pretty quick read, and I got through it over the course of one snowstorm. There’s teenage angst and demons with bird feet and a bunch of wish-fulfillment-y nerd shit about old movies; what else do you need from a YA fantasy?

For Christmas I bought my girlfriend a copy of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, both because it is generally delightful and because I remembered specifically that the worldbuilding and use of dramatic irony was incredible and thought it might be appealing from a gamemaster/game designer perspective. Then my weightlifting Discord server decided to start a book club and it was chosen as the first book, so I had to borrow my own gift in order to reread it, since it has been a long time and I didn’t remember much except the general vibes and the mental image of the House.

The vibes are, as they say, immaculate; both the dreamy, old-fashioned tone of the writing and the images of the House it conjures up are beautiful, suffused with both childlike wonder and a melancholy loneliness. A few things are clear to the reader right off the bat–our narrator has forgotten his own backstory, though he is in denial that he has forgotten anything; the Other is clearly a douchebag, though the narrator insists they are good friends–but this doesn’t make it any less satisfying as the story comes together, the narrator finding bits and pieces of the puzzle and putting them together even as they upend everything he thought he knew about himself, the Other, and the World he has been so meticulously researching.

Even though this was, in theory, a reread (sometimes I am as forgetful as the narrator about books I have read), I found it just as unputdownable as I had the first time I read it. It is good that it is short because otherwise I would find myself canceling stuff left and right to finish it. As it is, I once again read the whole thing in less than 24 hours. I got into bed at 8:30 last night so I could be sure I had at least a good two hours of bedtime reading in which to get properly into it.

This really is just a wonderful little jewel of a book, even if Rafael is a police officer.

For Black History Month, the politics book club decided to read Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. I had read this back in college as part of a survey course of early American literature, and while “enjoyed” seems maybe not quite the right word for the experience of reading a slavery narrative, I did think it was very good and–well, frankly, I did enjoy reading it, because it was a tense and dramatic story, and things that make good reading are different from things that I approve of.

Like all slave narratives of the time, this was an explicitly abolitionist text. It is bookended with a lot of testimonials vouching for its veracity, and its clearly stated purpose is to let people know about how bad slavery is so that they will be moved to oppose it. Only the names have been changed, to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.

Jacobs is very clear to emphasize that, as far as slaves go, she didn’t even have it too bad. She was a house slave, not a field slave, and her grandmother was free, so she had some relatives who had some measure of rights, and who weren’t entirely under the power of her owner. This relative privilege is also part of how she learned to read well enough to be able to also eventually be able to write an entire book, and she is careful to stress the importance of education and the ways in which denying slaves literacy is a method of control.

Being in the house, however, puts Jacobs squarely in the line of fire for years of sexual harassment from her owner–or more specifically, her owner’s father, since she is owned by a small child. The father, therefore, is the one with power over her, although he very conveniently remembers that he’s not her actual owner only when one of Jacobs’ friends or family is attempting to buy her out of his household, at which point his hands are tied because she’s totally his daughter’s and is not his to sell, sorry guys.

After many years of creatively attempting to avoid incessant sexual harassment from Dr. Flint, Jacobs–in the story, going by the pseudonym Linda Brent–decides to escape, and concocts a brilliantly counterintuitive, though very dangerous, plan to do so. This plan sees her living in a small, poorly insulated garret in the garden shed at her grandmother’s house for seven years, watching her two children grow up via a peephole the size of a coin, while Dr. Flint makes multiple trips to New York to try and hunt her down. There are a few close shaves where Linda/Harriet is almost found out, but her hiding-place holds, and eventually she is presented with an opportunity to take a boat to Philadelphia with another female runaway. She eventually does wind up in New York, where she navigates the different style of racism in the North and works to secure herself and her children away from their Southern owners. This eventually involves one of Linda’s abolitionist friends buying her, in New York, which is not really supposed to happen, but I guess the sale was legal on the part of the seller but not legal on the part of the buyer, thus leaving her un-owned? The legal details were not entirely clear to me.

Jacobs is careful to tell not just her own story, but also the stories of as many friends, family members, and acquaintances as she can, especially those of slaves who are illiterate and thus would never be in a place to publish their own experiences. There is an interesting style choice here, where the dialogue of Linda and her immediate family is written in standard English, but the speech of other slaves is written in eye-dialect, highlighting how nonstandard their speech is. I am sure someone somewhere has written an analysis of this but for right now I just think it is interesting and notable.

Moral degradation is a big theme here, for what I hope are obvious reasons. Jacobs tackles head-on the moral charges levied against Black people and especially enslaved Black people, illustrating how the dire circumstances they are in force them to become cunning, dishonest towards their masters, and even–the biggest horror to her nineteenth-century readership–unchaste. She also illustrates, with some pity, the moral degradation of the mistresses of slave-holding households, and the way in which their husbands’ practices of sexually assaulting female slaves leads them to enact their rage and jealousy upon all the other people in the household that they do have power over, instead of upon their husbands, the one person they generally don’t. And of course, the self-centered, contradictory, always-having-it-both-ways moral reasoning of men like Dr. Flint is repeatedly put on display and carefully dissected for both its inconsistency and its general moral repugnance.

Overall this book is both must-read education about life under slavery, and a genuinely great memoir. Highly recommended, especially if you find yourself ever, under any circumstances, in a position where you are even thinking about opening your mouth about American slavery.

I have had a copy of Dan Jones’ The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England sitting on ye olde TBR shelf for… probably ten years now? Anyway, I was chatting with one of the bartenders at East Reg who said he was reading it and was having a great time, so I bumped it up the priority list and started reading it last week. It’s about 500 pages long, so I wasn’t able to crank my way through it before I got un-sick enough that I had to start getting out of bed and doing things besides read, but it was very fun and fast-paced, so I did spend a few evenings last week staying up a little too late reading it.

I did not know a whole lot about the Plantagenets before going into this. I had heard the name, but my knowledge of pre-Tudor rulers of England is very spotty, and I had no sense of what order any of it went into. I knew there were way too many Henrys and I didn’t know anything about any of them except the seventh and eighth. I knew Richard the Lionheart was the king when the Robin Hood stories take place and that he was off on crusade sometimes. I knew Eleanor of Aquitaine was kind of a big deal but I couldn’t have told you how she was related to anybody.

As a result, this was a very good book for me! The blurbs on it frame it as basically a “primer” on the Plantagenet dynasty, and that was exactly what I needed. It walks us through the 300 or so years of history from the reign of Henry II through the deposition of Richard II and into the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses with the ascension of Henry IV. I have another book on the Wars of the Roses that I am now interested in reading quite soon, although it is not the one by this author, who seems to have written quite a number of popular medieval histories and also hosted a TV show I’m now watching on Netflix called The Secrets of Great British Castles, which is exactly what it sounds like and perfect edutainment content for me.

The main narrative throughline in this book in terms of trying to tie it all together into an argument for historical importance is the relationship between Plantagenet monarchs and the rest of the English political community. We all learned at least a little bit about the Magna Carta at school but other than that, US kids don’t get all that much in the way of lessons about UK civics; hell, in a lot of places we barely learn about US civics. Here, Jones walks us through the changing relationships between the Plantagenet kings and their barons, knights, and occasionally the commons, and the increasingly sophisticated system of charters, parliaments, courts, and other administrative apparatus that governed England as it chugged slowly and unknowingly toward the modern era. Disputes over the taxes to finance the endless wars with France, Scotland, Wales, the Holy Land, and occasionally Ireland and Spain bring together military and financial history in a way that’s fun and easy to follow even if you are the sort of person who usually likes the military history more than the financial history (I do like financial history but I can recognize that it’s sometimes dry. This is not dry).

There are probably more scholarly books on the Plantagenets you can read if you want to be really serious about it–Jones provides a pretty intriguing “further reading” list at the back. But if you are just like “I can name all six of Henry VIII’s wives and what happened to them, but I couldn’t tell you if Prince John from Robin Hood and King John from Shakespeare’s King John are the same person or not if you put a gun to my head,” then this is certainly the book for you (they are indeed the same person). A few years ago I read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and when Merricat’s list of things she liked included “Richard Plantagenet” I was vaguely embarrassed that I wasn’t sure who that was other than that it probably wasn’t Richard III because nobody liked him. I am now no longer embarrassed because even though there are two Richard Plantagenets I now know enough about them to be pretty confident that it’s the first one because nobody liked Richard II, either. I am also very pleased to be confident that if I ever have to watch another adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV I will be able to at least sort of tell some of the Henrys in it apart.

Sometimes when I am having a bad time I like to read about people having an even worse time, so it is fortunate for me that my hold on Eric Jay Dolin’s Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the End of the World came in right before I fell sick last week.

Dolin lets us know right off the bat that this is not a story of far-reaching historical importance; instead, it is merely a really wild tale that he wanted to rescue from oblivion because of how nuts it is.

There are a couple of main parties in this story, which takes place during the War of 1812. Party 1 is the crew of the Nanina, an American ship on a sealing voyage to the Falklands, which had sailed out of New York right before war officially broke out. They were hoping to spend a year or so sealing and then sail back when the war had blown over. This didn’t quite work out for them. It is important to note, however, that the Nanina was in the Falklands on purpose and was not shipwrecked. The Falklands were otherwise uninhabited at the time, the Spanish settlement having been abandoned a year or two earlier.

The second main party is the crew and passengers of the Isabella, a British ship inbound from Australia. The captain of the Isabella is not the greatest at his job and manages to wreck the ship on one of the outer islands in the Falklands. The resourceful Aussies are able to set up a little camp on their spit of land that keeps them all alive, although not quite in the style they are accustomed to. They send some guys out in a longboat on a hail Mary trip to South America to try to get help.

While the guys in the longboat are on their way to Rio, the American sealers discover the stranded British Australians. Though the two countries are at war, the Americans figure that’s not really the top priority here outside of what they would have considered civilization. The Americans agree to cut their sealing voyage short and give the stranded Brits a ride back to the mainland.

Unbeknownst to them, the hail Mary longboat trip works out! While the Nanina is preparing to house its own crew and the folks from the Isabella, the head of British naval operations in Buenos Aires sends out his subordinate, William D’Arada, out to rescue his fellow countrymen in a rickety tub called the Nancy. D’Arada, upon arriving in the Falklands, is delighted to find not only the folks he was sent to rescue, but also a bunch of Americans! He promptly, and somewhat illegally, takes the Nanina as a prize and its crew as prisoners. His fellow Brits find this pretty ungallant but don’t do much about it. D’Arada sends the Nanina off to England under his prize master and then sails the Nancy back to Buenos Aires with the rescues from the Isabella.

Unfortunately, while D’Arada was upsetting all their plans, a hunting party of five men–mixed American and British–had separated from the main group to get food. When they returned to the main camp, everyone else had departed. Again, some of the Isabella passengers thought this was pretty douchey of D’Arada, but nobody really had the standing to mess with him, nor did they try too hard.

Thus, in the second half of the book, our cast of characters is drastically reduced, from two or three ships’ worth of people to merely five, plus a dog. These five guys (and their dog) have an eventful but, fortunately, never fatal eighteen months of Robinson Crusoe-ing it up in the Falklands, having interpersonal falling-outs, at least one mutiny, numerous attempts at conflict resolution in different levels of success, trips to hunt seals, hogs, and penguin and albatross eggs, and other such shenanigans as they wonder if anyone will ever come to get them. Navigating around the Falklands in their little shallop is dangerous enough that sailing to Rio or wherever seems to be out of the question, although if I recall correctly they do try once and basically can’t get the little boat out of the Falklands in one piece. Meanwhile, back in Buenos Aires, and then New York, and then London, legal and press machinations are afoot, and eventually, the Americans who had made it back to America–after some time as British prisoners of war–are able to send a brig out to the Falklands to rescue the five men. It takes some of them a whole other relay race of shipping voyages to get their arses back home again, but at least in the meantime they got to see some other people. One of the stranded men, Captain Charles Barnard (the original captain of the Nanina), eventually writes a rather pompous memoir about his adventures, which sells moderately well for the time and then fades into obscurity, until apparently one day Eric Jay Dolin found it and was like “This is nuts; I gotta tell people about this” and wrote Left for Dead.

This was overall a very fun read. I’m not sure it quite reaches the “masterpiece of narrative nonfiction” level of something like The Wager but I’d still definitely recommend it for fans of The Wager because it tells a similar type of story, and is very fast-paced and readable. Dolin goes to great pains to avoid moralizing about things like the ethics of sealing or basically anything other than D’Aranda’s personal conduct, which pretty much everyone except D’Aranda agrees was shitty. The book has lots of pictures, which I thought was great, and lots of footnotes, which were informative but interrupted the flow a little. There is plenty of interesting historical context to flesh out what the world was like for the people involved, which I think is valuable even if there’s simply no case to be made that this event had any particular far-reaching impact on history writ large. It’s an excellent addition to the “putting dudes in Situations” canon of maritime literature. Those dudes were for sure in a Situation! In fact, the Situations kept compounding into new and worse Situations, for quite a while! None of these Situations devolved into cannibalism, which was frankly a lucky break for these guys, but there weren’t too many other people around to eat anyway, so instead we get interesting lessons in how to hunt all the weird fauna that was hanging out in the Falklands around 1813 or so, and several near-death experiences with elephant seals. Exciting!