bloodygranuaile

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 a brief moment I was trying to plan a trip to Nantucket this month, before I had to concede defeat and realize that I had too much other stuff on my plate, including too much traveling, to squeeze it into this particular damp drizzly November of my soul and also the freakishly warm and drought-y November of the actual calendar. But before deciding to defer this trip I had already put a hold on Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which I had intended to be my ferry reading. Despite being tragically unable to read it on or while traveling to Nantucket, I had an absolutely great time reading this book, partly because I read much of it while taking time off work, and partly because it’s just that good.

The sinking of the Essex, a whaleship that sailed out of Nantucket in 1819, is now best known as being the real-life tragedy that inspired Herman Melville’s classic Moby-Dick, a book that I am, with the help of an enabling crew of terminally online boat gays, increasingly not normal about. In Moby-Dick the attack by the titular whale happens right at the end, and then Ishmael as the sole survivor is quickly picked up by another ship. So I was a bit surprised to find that that was not at all what happened with the Essex–most of the crew (or possibly the entire crew?) survived the initial sinking, and then most of them died over the next two months as the three whaleboats full of men wandered around the Pacific making bad decisions and eventually resorting to cannibalism, before they got close enough to the South American coast to be intercepted and rescued. (I probably shouldn’t have been surprised about a book about a shipwreck involving cannibalism, but I was, in part because my mother recommended the book to me and she does not usually go in for books full of fucked-up gross shit the way I do.)

Another difference between this book and Moby-Dick is that Moby-Dick is an extremely long book that takes me a long time to read (so far, four months for my first read and two years for my second), whereas In the Heart of the Sea clocks in at a tidy 250 pages or so and I ripped through it in like three days. If I didn’t have things to do in my life I could probably have read this in one sitting. It’s definitely a triumph of narrative nonfiction if speed of reading is any metric. It’s also really fun in how it engages with its source materials–the ship’s first mate, Owen Chase, wrote an account of his travails, which became a reasonably popular publication and which Melville read while out whaling in the Pacific. It turns out that the ship’s cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, also wrote a memoir about it, which nobody read or published for over a century, and which definitely challenges some of the things Chase wrote. Other accounts derived from interviews with the few other survivors, including the unlucky Captain Pollard, also exist, and I found it very interesting how each of these takes allocated responsibility for the various disasters and successes of the voyage.

Philbrick doesn’t shy away from discussing the more uncomfortable aspects of this trial, stressing that while it is a ripping good story and an impressive feat of not-capsizing-the-tiny-boats, it is not exactly a feel-good story of the indomitability of the human spirit in the face of adversity, either. A bunch of this adversity was self-inflicted due to plain old racist fearmongering about cannibals, and the pattern of deaths raise some uncomfortable questions about Nantucket clannishness vs. its self-congratulatory history as a bastion of Quaker abolitionism and therefore Definitely Not Racist. It’s not a story about heroes; it is for sure however a story about taking some guys and putting them in extreme situations, which is pretty much what I read boat books for. A+ boat book, a modern classic for a reason.

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

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

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

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

Overall I found this to be a thoroughly enjoyable read.

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

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

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

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

I 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.

For book club we decided to read When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, authored by respected Egyptologist Kara Cooney and published by National Geographic.

The premise of this book is, more or less, using ancient female pharaohs of Egypt as a lens to examine questions about women and power today. This is an interesting enough premise, and I figured I was braced for what seemed to me its most likely failure mode: girlboss feminism.

Unfortunately, this book had multiple failure modes. I went in prepared (I thought) for a certain amount of cheerleading female despots; what I was not prepared for was the muddiness of the argument. I spent most of this book really just confused about precisely what point Cooney was trying to make, sifting through what looked to me to be obvious contradictions, evidence that doesn’t fit the argument, undefined terminology, strangely defined terminology, and some truly disgusting gender essentialism, trying to figure out what the takeaway was supposed to be about Egypt’s attitude towards female rule.

To be scrupulously fair, maybe fairer than is deserved, I don’t know how much of this is wholly on Cooney and how much is on the publisher, given that the hands-down worst parts of the book are the introduction, the conclusion, and the marketing copy. It is clear that Cooney is using Ancient Egypt as her analytical lens to comment on modern attitudes about women and power because she’s an Egyptologist and Ancient Egypt is what she knows, but apparently “Ancient Egypt is a place we can look to to understand things about women and power because it is a place that had ruling queens and it’s the only subject I know anything about” isn’t a catchy enough hook, so it had to somehow become “Ancient Egypt is the place we should look to understand things about women and power because it was the only place that had some specific relationship to women and power” and I’m having trouble figuring out what she’s claiming that specific relationship was in a way that is both concrete enough to be falsifiable but is not just flatly false, and that is not shown to be false precisely by the evidence she marshals.

Let’s look at the jacket copy, to start. The thesis is usually there, right?

“Throughout human history, powerful women have been called many things: bitches, witches, regents, and seductresses.”

OK, before we even get to the thesis: One of these things is not like the other! Bitch, witch, and seductress are pretty widely understood to be sexist terms of abuse, nominally with definitions but mainly just meaning “bad women.” “Regent,” on the other hand, is a specific role within a monarchy, wherein an adult rules on behalf of a child monarch until the child monarch comes of age. It’s not a gendered term, and a ruler is either a regent or not, depending on if there’s a child monarch in the picture. If there is a demonstrated pattern of female regents being treated like they don’t really “count” as rulers in a way that male regents are able to avoid–which is plausible!--then Cooney needs to make that argument and back it up with Literally Anything At All Whatsoever. It is not obvious to me as a general lay reader that “regent” is a term of dismissal. It is obvious to me as a lay reader who is reasonably familiar with the concept of “monarchy” that “regent” is the term for an adult ruling on behalf of a child monarch; Cooney apparently doesn’t think that readers know this, since she does define the objective meaning of “regency” for us–as “a word Egyptologists use” to describe this particular situation. Frankly, this framing made me wonder if she thinks it’s an Egypt-specific concept. It wouldn’t be the only time the book made me doubt her grasp of things outside her specific area of expertise.

Anyway, sentence two and three of the jacket copy: “Female rulers–revered and respected–are a rare phenomenon. Except in Ancient Egypt, where they governed regularly, repeatedly, and with impunity.”

To be clear, this book is about six–count ‘em, six–female kings of Egypt over the span of THREE THOUSAND years, four of whom ruled for less than five years, one of whom it is not actually definitive that she ruled once her husband died at all (although the case as portrayed does make it seem pretty likely). I would need some fairly concrete number-crunching to make the case that this constituted a “regular” phenomenon. Instead, we get a weird note in the Notes section acknowledging that “This might cause some to caution against seeing it as something of a norm,” and then just sort of… asserts that this is wrong by bending the terms of the argument a bunch? Cooney writes that “In the rest of the world, female power continues to be an isolated circumstance; the odd woman president or prime minister is voted into power, while a few other women find their way to political rule through assassinations, civil wars, or outside threats to their menfolk.” Six in 3,000 years still sounds pretty “isolated circumstance” to me; the biggest difference here is that the “odd woman president or prime minister” is the result of voting. Absolutely nothing in the body of the book that chronicles these six women’s rise to power seems to me like it would somehow not constitute “the occasional woman finding her way to political rule,” especially given that at least two of the six women profiled are in fact suspected of assassination (at least, Tawosret is suspected; Cleopatra I think is just known to have done so); Tawosret rose to power while Egypt was split between two rival kings; and Merneith was chosen as her son’s queen regent apparently because people were worried that appointing an uncle could lead to a destabilizing power grab. Like, the body of the book is openly six stories of women winding up on the throne because the assumed king-to-son succession structure had gone off-script. Cooney’s attempts to spin this as Egypt “embracing” female rule “in times of crisis” because the ancients in their wisdom revered women’s crisis management skills, rings really tortured and hollow–Neferusobek wound up on the throne because her dynasty straight-up just ran out of men to put there, and the fact that the dynasty bought itself four more years of existence by allowing a woman to reign, rather than commit political suicide before it had to, doesn’t seem like an “embrace” of anything or even an exercise in “prudence” to me. It seems like a last-ditch attempt to cling to power for a little longer, which is basically what I’d expect of any ruling family anywhere unless they were strong-armed out of it.

So, yeah. What are we claiming Egypt did differently, and where is Cooney getting the idea that the stories she’s telling us constitute doing things differently, other than that she’d already decided that? I genuinely have no idea and it is annoying me IMMENSELY.

Cooney argues that King’s Mothers were preferred for regents over uncles or other non-parent relatives because the Egyptians figured that a mother was less likely to steal the throne from her son than an uncle would to his nephew. This is used as proof that Egyptians were wiser than moderns in their appreciation of female power. However, not all queens regent were mothers; when we get to the chapter on Hatshepsut, she was named regent over Thutmose III, her nephew. Hatshepsut then proceeded to do exactly the Villainous Uncle thing and got herself coronated, continuing to sideline Thutmose III even as he got older, demoting him from king to co-king. I am personally not inclined to either “celebrate” this as a triumph of female rule-breaking power-exercising girlbossitude or denounce it as taking a throne that is not “rightfully” hers, because I am not a monarchist so I do not really think any method of acquiring a throne has more or less actual moral legitimacy than another (other than maybe “how much murder was involved”). But I do think it is interesting that Cooney portrays Hatshepsut’s acquisition of her nephew’s throne as “a woman taking power for herself” and not as “exactly the thing the elites in the earlier chapter were worried an uncle would do,” and chalks up the only possible objection anyone could have to this maneuvering as “fear of female power” and not, like, fear of destabilization resulting from relatives yoinking their nephew’s thrones (as established a bare 100 pages previously), or even a genuine belief that the usual rules of succession should be followed. The word “usurper” does not show up–not in the Hatshepsut bit of the book, anyway. A few generations later, when the advisor Ay gets himself named regent over Nefertiti’s daughter Ankhesenamun, Cooney doesn’t mince words about his “hubris” and “taking what is not rightfully his” and all other kinds of line-of-succession-respecting stuff. Personally, I think we can be impressed by the amount of skilled politicking Hatshepsut had to do to gain and keep her throne without necessarily “celebrating” it, and I don’t think that Hatshepsut out-politicking everyone around her is somehow more “fair” than Ay out-politicking everyone around him (not without a hell of a lot more info about how they did it, at least). Cooney, however, seems to think the rules of succession are for breaking when it’s women who break them and for respecting when it’s non-royal men who do, which is about the level of classism I expect from professional-class white women who have no familiarity with feminist theory but think they do.

And I’m really not trying to no-true-Scotsman feminism when I say that. But it’s really, really clear that Cooney’s background is in studying Egyptology, and is absolutely not in studying anything that isn’t Egyptology, even to a well-read-layperson level. Her political analysis about modern events, to the degree that she says anything more specific than “misogyny still exists,” is painful. Her “essential reading/works cited list” includes Mary Beard’s Women and Power: A Manifesto, a work by another ancient history person with a similar premise to this book and a similarly poor grasp of anything outside Beard’s research area (it also includes a review of a book about the failures of evo psych, but not the book itself). Coming from a field in which information is scarce and information about people’s inner thoughts is nonexistent, she clearly doesn’t have the background in mass media/communications, modern political science, sociology, or any other field related to analyzing our present moment to parse the absolute deluge of every rando’s passing thought in current political discourse. The introduction at one point laments that Elizabeth Warren, among a random assortment of other female political leaders, has been “discredited.” Discredited how? By whom? There have certainly been controversies and negative news cycles about Warren over the course of her career, and it’s trivially easy to go online and find someone talking shit about her, but she’s still a sitting U.S. Senator, she won her last re-election with like 75% of the vote, YouGov currently names her the 9th most popular Democrat and 12th most popular politician in the country, and she’s still a regular voice in the mainstream political discourse and goes on TV a bunch and stuff. Obviously people who supported her Presidential bid think she got short shrift in that she didn’t win it, but I can’t think of any reasonable metric by which you could claim that she is overall discredited. Cooney claims in the same sentence that former U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May has also been discredited, and I think you could probably back that up a bit more, but it’s weird to frame that in just List of Female Politicians rather than noting that she’s part of a run of Tory politicians who pushed Brexit who have all been disgraced since Brexit turned out to be a total clusterfuck. Now, someone with any relevant background or skills in political analysis could possibly look at the way May was treated in the media an in the U.K. government in relation to the male Tory Brexiteers and see if it seems like she got a different flavor of bad treatment or got scapegoated/left holding the bag somehow, but this book doesn’t go there. It just kind of laments that “Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Theresa May, Margaret Thatcher, and Elizabeth Warren” have all “been discredited” with a bunch of negative stereotypes. (Also, it’s not misogynistic stereotyping to call Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher evil, for the very simple reason that she was British Reagan.) You could probably write honestly about how people have tried to discredit all of these women with the same tired misogynistic tropes regardless of their very different politics and achievements (and degrees of actually sucking) but trying to do something and succeeding at it are not the same thing and should not be used interchangeably, especially in a discourse where conflating those two is a deliberate rhetorical trick of many of our worst political actors.

The biggest area what I disagree with Cooney that she is doing a feminism is the matter of gender essentialism. It’s a reasonably basic tenet of most schools of feminism that all this pink brain/blue brain shit is pretty bogus and the gender differences that actually do come into existence (rather than being “seen” via confirmation bias) are produced (and co-produced and re-produced) through social/cultural processes. The state of the “brain-based gender differences” field is extremely sad; I would recommend Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender for a readable look at the state of the field as of 2010.

Cooney, on the other hand, appears to be a deeply committed gender essentialist, to the point of point-blank instructing us to discount the claims about the women she profiles that she herself has just put in front of our faces. (She also can’t get the name of the pink-brain-blue-brain-studies field right, referencing “evolutionary biology” instead of evolutionary psychology.) She claims that women are inherently less violent, right after profiling the assassination-happy Ptolemies, a snake pit of a family where it sounds like the women gave as good as they got, at least on the murdering-their-siblings front. Hatshepsut ordered imperial “expeditions” to plunder Punt to refill her treasury after she’d bought off all the people she had to buy off in order to build support for her bid to the throne; this is framed in terms of basically like “how sad that Hatshepsut had to do so much expensive politicking to build support instead of being given support for cheaper, due to how misogynistic everyone was” (but Egypt was also a bastion of wisely revering female rule, simultaneously) instead of just straightforwardly acknowledging that, whatever the reasons, this too does factually constitute imperialist warmongering. “Women are less warmongery” is also an interesting take in a book that was apparently written primarily to process the author’s feelings about Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 election. Clinton has faced a lot of weird sexist conspiracy theories over the course of her political career, but the idea that she’s supported basically every military intervention put on the table since 1992 is not one of them; that’s just her actual foreign policy record. We’re left in a weird muddled no-man’s-land of an argument where we should support female rule because women don’t go to war because their inherently peaceful lady-brains make the wars that they do wage not count. Again, we return to “what point is Cooney actually trying to illustrate?”

Overall, this book has a lot of interesting information about Ancient Egypt, a fascinating culture that was very different from ours and from which we have no insight into any of its high-ranking power brokers’ inner lives. This clashes horrendously with the framing, which is about psychologically profiling these same people to claim that absolutely 1950’s-ass stereotypes about women’s emotionality prove that we should let more women be ruthless autocrats, like the Egyptians consistently and happily did on these few rare occasions when they had no other choice. I’m going to cry with frustration (instead of whacking the table, because I am a lady reader and not a man reader, and ladies cry when they’re upset instead of whacking the table, and the ancient Egyptians knew that, which is why they put Mernieth on the throne in 3000 BC).

It’s very disappointing, because I liked The Woman Who Would Be King (probably because, if I recall correctly, that book is actually primarily about Hatshepsut, not about Hillary Clinton by way of Hatshepsut). I don’t mind the “perhaps”es and even the “probably”s; I mind the “must have”s, and this book had a lot of “must have”s that tell me more about Cooney’s personal biases about universal human psychology than anything else, and I don’t think Cooney’s grasp of psychology is very strong.

Lord knows how many years ago I acquired two books, titled simply Witches and Werewolves, that were about exactly what they sound like and were part of the same little series of slim black hardbacks that also contained a third book, Vampires. Though the third of these was obviously the most relevant to my interests, it nonetheless sat on my Amazon wish list for several years without my actually buying it. This is largely because, while the books are incredibly cute and fun and look great sitting on my occult shelf, they are not particularly good.

Well, having recently moved into my tiny little witch cottage here in Spookytown, I decided it was well past time to shell out the five dollars or whatever to fill out the series so that it would look nice and complete on my now-much-fancier occult shelf.

Much like Witches and Werewolves, Nigel Suckling’s Vampires is fun and cute but not particularly good. It contains a scattershot bunch of Vampire Facts divvied up roughly into old myths/folklore, historical figures around whom vampire legends have grown, and literary vampires. By this point in my life, I already know most of the stories and persons referenced in here, often in greater depth from some other, less shoddy publication (the exception here is Countess Bathory; I’ve never read a real book on her). However, it’s still quite an enjoyable little read, with black-and-white illustrations and lots of nice red accents on the page (the paragraphs are separated by tiny little red bat icons. Darling!). I can’t get mad about the shallowness of the research since I don’t think the book is meant to be taken too seriously in the first place; the verso across from the title page contains the epigraph “Any book without a mistake in it has had too much money spent on it” (from the publisher Sir William Collins, founder of what would eventually become HarperCollins).

Probably the most useful thing about the book, as with so many other gifty little primer type books, is the recommendation list of movies and books. I’ve read almost all of the classic literary books mentioned but I still have some to catch up on in terms of vampire scholarship (I will read In Search of Dracula one day, I swear…), and I’ve seen fewer of the movies than I realized. Maybe I’ll fix that this spooky season.

The book that initially won my “big book to read over the course of the year” poll was Magnus Magnusson’s Scotland: The Story of a Nation, a 700-page tome that I picked up at a Harvard Book Store Warehouse sale in 2015. Much like with last year’s Sagas of the Icelanders, I took this as a challenge to read it over the week between Christmas and New Years, so I could start the New Year off already having logged a deceptive number of pages, and read a different book in the poll for the year (this year I’m doing Capital, Volume 1). Unfortunately for me I only got about 300 pages through the book at the time the New Year started, so I’m 10 days and 2 other books in and have just finished it. I could knock out 100 pages a day on the days I had literally nothing else to do, but January hasn’t had very many of those.

The book is in most ways a pretty traditional big old history of wars and kings and parliaments told in chronological order, starting in prehistory to the best of its ability, with most of the page time going to the medieval and early modern periods. One fun thing it does is use a different history of Scotland as a framing device, walking us through the comparison between modern historical understandings of Scotland and that displayed in Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, a very popular and romanticized account that became an instant classic, shaping young Scots’ understandings of their own history for most of the past two centuries.

I know a decent amount of English history and a decent amount of Irish history, but very little about Scottish history except what winds up being peripherally important to English and Irish history, plus a little highly dramatized nonsense about the 1745 Jacobite uprising. So I was very happy to have a “survey course” type book to give an overview of the whole thing, or at least the whole thing up through Sir Walter Scott’s life, and then a lengthy epilogue covering from the 1830s all the way up through the establishment of the devolved Scottish parliament in 1999. I honestly think this should have just been a regular chapter–the bumbling but nevertheless successful heist of the Stone of Scone from Westminster in the 1950s has no business being stuck in an epilogue–but other than that it’s a very straightforwardly organized read. Magnusson also mostly brings a good authorial sensibility to it; there’s not too much editorializing, but he brings the occasional bit of dry humor, and a bit of a personal touch as someone who’s personally been involved in a lot of Scottish heritage work (apparently he was also a well-known TV commentator; in one footnote he notes that he was banned from political commentating on the BBC for a year after he got a little too excited about an upset SNC by-election win in 1967).

I’m not quite sure what to say about Scottish history itself except that in true history fashion it is often quite bonkers. People really have always been getting up to some shenanigans. Scotland also has a number of very funny place-names, some of which is because those names have then become the names of other things (like the river Tweed), but some just because that’s what you get when you goofily Anglicize Gaelic names, or when Scots words wind up identical to English words but meaning something different (I’m not sure what kind of geographical feature a “law” is but it makes Such-and-such Law a weird place-name). And do not get me started on the Stone of Scone (or, for that matter, the Scone of Stone).

It must also be said that in the past handful of centuries or so, Scotland seems to have had quite a cinematic run of bad luck–its being smaller and less populated and less wealthy than its English neighbor obvious had quite a bit to do with its inevitable subsumation under the English–sorry, British–crown, but there are also quite a number of key instances where they could have come out on top if only something hadn’t gone oddly wrong.

Much like Iceland, Scotland is also a good country to read big fat books about in the dead of winter when everything is cold and gray and unpleasant, but you’re inside and have books and whiskey (or something else, if you’re doing Dry January) and like, oatmeal. Maybe I’ll make oatmeal scones next weekend.

It’s September, which means it is the beginning of spooky season, which means I figured I’d better get onto my spooky season reading before I accidentally found myself halfway through October desperately trying to fit in an appropriate couple of books around whatever else I’d found myself bogged down in. For my first spooky season read I decided to finally tackle Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1692, as various circumstances have found me flitting in and out of Witch City on several occasions lately. Also, it’s been sitting on my shelf since 2018 and I am on a mission to knock out at least a certain number of books acquired before this year so they don’t just sit around forever while shiny new releases jump to the front of the line.

The contents of The Witches weren’t as new to me as they would have been had I read the book in a more timely fashion upon purchasing it, as it covers a good amount of the same ground as the first season of the podcast Unobscured; if I recall correctly, Schiff was interviewed fairly extensively for the podcast. However, given that I don’t always retain information super well when it’s delivered in audio, and that it was a couple of years ago, I found it quite worthwhile to revisit the same information in book form, especially the stuff that didn’t make it into the accounts of the witchcraft trials that I learned in my more formative years--the relationship between Massachusetts and the Maine frontier never made it into my high school discussions of The Crucible, neither did the fallout from the various Indian wars and the high number of refugees among the afflicted.

Looking at some of the other reviews of this book on Goodreads, I am in the somewhat peculiar position of not always having liked it, but coming from the opposite direction of everyone else about why. I loved the wealth of details, the digging into the minutiae of life in a stifling, hardscrabble New England Puritan settlement town, the squabbles and gossip of a small and ideologically fanatical community. I liked reading about everyone’s financial stakes and political ties that may have motivated various key figures’ reasoning; I even enjoyed the psychological speculation and found it fairly believable (it helps that I have some familiarity with gossipy and ideologically driven New England communities; I’m in one or two). In short, I already knew the basics, I’ve already seen the fictional dramatized versions, I was reading this specifically because I wished to be beaten over the head with court transcripts and whiny letters and ancient op-eds and other stuff documenting what happened and what people thought about it, and I was pleased when I got that.

What I did not enjoy was the attempts to make the book more exciting and readable for non-academic audiences, to live up to the promises of “an oppressive, forensic, psychological thriller” made on the front cover and “a work of riveting storytelling” on the back cover. The first chapter is a lot of atmospheric stage-setting that doesn’t tell you much in the way of actual historical context type of stage-setting, or at least not as much as I wanted. The end also winds up with more editorializing than I really cared about, although it does also contain some fun information about the sharply divergent legacies of Salem town and the town of Danvers, formerly Salem village. While I have more patience than a lot of modern readers for overwritten atmospherics in my fictional Gothics, I find I have less patience than a lot of other people for attempts to make nonfiction hip and spicy; I would like my nonfiction to be either straightforward quick reads, accessible and short on fluff, or I would like them to be as dense as they need to be to say the things they need to say to a serious, adult reader. I don’t really need footnotes with pop culture references to make an intermediate-level lay history book accessible; I am perfectly content reading about what a self-important douchebag Cotton Mather was.

The middle chapters were fascinating to me, however; they focused a lot more than much of my previous exposure to the witchcraft trials on the judges and magistrates, and on their political backgrounds and other conflicts of interest/possible sources of motivated reasoning, whereas I feel like I’m used to hearing mostly about either the bewitched girls or the hanged witches (and Giles Corey, of course).

So, overall: Glad I read it, learned a bit, mostly enjoyed it but not quite as much as I was expecting to. Definitely recommended if you’ve already been interested in the witch trials and want to delve a little deeper than whatever you covered in high school or on a walking tour in Salem, but if you prefer podcasts to reading you can get basically all the same information (with bonus Massachusetts accents) from Unobscured.

In one of those Haymarket sale book-buying fugue states a few months ago I picked up a copy of Stuart Easterling’s The Mexican Revolution: A Short History, 1910-1920 on the basis that I didn’t know anything about the Mexican Revolution and I probably should. I packed it on my last Maine trip because I’d already started reading Mexican Gothic, which had mentioned the Revolution a few times and put it back at the top of my mind that I don’t know anything about the Mexican Revolution and probably should.

This book does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, which is to provide a very short, readable overview of the major factions and figures and things that happened in that time period and why, thereby making the debates over its legacy somewhat more comprehensible to people like myself who have very little background in this. It’s not always the most thrilling reading, since it zips through things pretty quickly, but as it is neither particularly dense nor jargony, it’s at least quite easy to read. I think it will provide me a useful framework for where in my head to house additional information about the Mexican Revolution I may run into should I decide to read more in-depth stuff about specific aspects/elements of it, which I might, or if I read more pulpy Gothic novels set in Mexico, which I definitely will if I can find them.

My biggest critique here is that I probably didn’t need to own this book and could well have gotten it out of the library, so if anyone else is like “The Mexican Revolution… what was that about? I have no idea, probably I should know this” I will be happy to just give you my copy.