May’s book club pick was a book I’d vaguely intended to read back when it was published when I was in college and I simply have never gotten around to: Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. I remember when this book came out and I’m pretty sure I read excerpts in magazines or interviews with the authors or such other press coverage at the time it was published, although now that I think about it I also think it was a hot enough subject in the years immediately following its publication that I read some excerpts or summaries or something multiple times when I was reviewing various social science textbooks for Pearson in 2011-2013 or so.

As a result, the main ideas in this book weren’t brand new to me–I was already familiar with basic psychological concepts like the fundamental attribution error, and terms like “cognitive dissonance.” It was probably a good refresher to go over what they mean, and there was a lot of interesting stuff in the details. I was also at least sort of familiar with some of the problems with police interrogation and general magical thinking in the criminal justice system, though I think that going over the specifics was quite valuable. The scandals around “recovered memories” I knew less about, although I am pretty sure I have read a little bit about it before (I read a lot of psych 101 textbooks when I was working for Pearson, OK?) and knew that “recovered memories” were hokum (dangerous hokum).

This is not all to say that I am so smart or the book is soooo basic or whatever but this is a longstanding area of at least some measure of interest; I’ve always been interested in questions of perception and self-perception and why otherwise apparently normal people are Like That, and the past almost-decade of time spent in activist spaces laboriously trying to establish halfway decent social norms in the face of people who are always super gung-ho for other people to Take Accountability but are all special pleading when it comes to their own behavior has not exactly made the subject any less relevant.

The chapter about conflicts of interest in science funding seems uhh very important and relevant to the various scandals and such contributing to our current “crisis of authority” and general anti-intellectualism/epistemological fuckery going on in society at large. Let us, in fact, compromise the science! This will surely have no bad downstream effects in terms of how much the public trusts science and scientists! Hey, why are all these people rejecting science? Don’t they know we are smart and objective? It’s bad news.

If I have one critique of the book it’s that by the end of it, the examples get so wide-ranging that it starts to feel a little One Weird Trick About All of Human Existence-y, even though the authors are careful not to actually say that and are in fact doing exactly what they set out to do, which is to look at this specific facet of human psychology at work in a range of situations that, you know, humans find themselves in. It’s not that I think they are wrong it’s just that it feels fundamentally weird to read like “This thing that is why these two people’s marriage fell apart is also what was going on in the Iran hostage crisis”; like, this is just an insane set of things put next to each other, even though I suppose it is in fact true that nobody saw themselves as the bad guys in the Iran hostage crisis either. It’s not that the book is necessarily weak when discussing politics–it’s pretty strong in many parts–so much as it is weak when it is zooming around too much instead of making a sober case study of, for example, George W. Bush’s inability to admit that the war in Iraq was a) going poorly and b) based on lies, or the idiotic things the Western imperial powers say when they do torture while also seeing themselves as great defenders of human rights.

A good chunk of the book examines self-justification in family dramas, especially marriages, which is probably more immediately relevant to the average reader than self-justification around doing war crimes. I hope. At any rate, it effectively conveys that this is a basic part of everyday psychology that we could all benefit from developing more self-awareness about. As some of my comrades once said in a training about using the chapter Slack: If you think this isn’t about you, then it’s definitely about you.

In conclusion, it is important to Know Thyself, and also don’t talk to cops–they’re legally allowed to lie to you.

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.

This past weekend I attended a Lá Gaeilge and, as I was having library hold fatigue, decided to take a break from my library books and read one of the books I had picked up at the last La Gaeilge in January: Darach O’Seaghdha’s Motherfoclóir: Dispatches from a Not-So-Dead Language. Darach is perhaps best known for running the theirishfor account on Twitter back when Twitter was still a) Twitter and b) sort of usable.

This was an odd little grab bag of a book but it did what it was supposed to do, which was be fun. Irish has a reputation in Ireland of not being fun, or at least it did until quite recently, when the Second Gaelic Revival started, of which Darach’s Twitter account and his podcast, also called Motherfoclóir, have been important parts. Kneecap is another part of it which is why this book paired so well with rewatching the Kneecap movie on Saturday. Anyway, the book has some commentary and linguistic history of the language itself, some personal essays about Darach’s relationship with it as a child with Gaelgeoir parents back during the Celtic Tiger years when the language was deeply uncool, and a lot of vocabulary lists in various degrees of utility. (They are not intended to be useful; they are intended to be interesting.) I don’t know if this book made my Irish any better (I have other books for that, which I should use more) but I certainly enjoyed reading this and it was a nice break from both Duolingo and the self-imposed tyranny of my reading schedule. It makes me want to relisten to the whole Motherfoclóir podcast back catalog.

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.

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.

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!

The last book in my Ben MacIntyre mini-marathon for 2024 was Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal. This one brings us back to the ‘40s and World War II espionage stories, aka the good stuff. It is the story of Eddie Chapman, a career criminal turned spy turned double agent, and the general chaos he wreaked.

Eddie Chapman grew up at loose ends, was in the Coldstream Guards for a hot minute that he spent mostly being disciplined, started hanging out in Soho doing check forgery and other petty thievery, joined a gang of cat burglars called the Jelly Gang (so called because they used gelignite to break safes), and was eventually imprisoned in Jersey in the Channel Islands. During his imprisonment, Jersey was occupied by the Germans. Eddie and his buddy Tony Faramus, a hairdresser and petty criminal from Jersey, both ended up in a German prison in occupied France, where they offered to spy for the Germans as a means of getting out. The Germans took Eddie up on the offer, but not Tony, who disappeared deeper into the German concentration camp system over the years and was eventually liberated from Mauthausen-Gusen in Austria.

Eddie Chapman was then trained in spy stuff by a rogue’s gallery of Abwehr officials, the least monstrous of whom were old-fashioned German aristocratic snobs who thought Hitler was uncouth, and some of the rest of whom were fanatical Nazis. None of these people had the goddamn moral courage to actually resist Hitler’s regime, of course, no matter how much they seemed to want credit for finding it tacky. At any rate, Eddie developed what seems to have been a genuine friendship with his immediate spymaster, a highborn broke layabout named von Groning, although Chapman knew him only as Dr. Graumann. This friendship did not even a little bit prevent Eddie from spying on his spymaster as best he knew how, and running immediately to MI5 the second he was parachuted into England. From there he was carefully coached in transmitting all sorts of interesting disinformation mixed with harmless real information to the Abwehr. He had predominantly been tasked with blowing up a factory that manufactured Mosquito bomber planes, and with MI5’s help, was able to stage a fake explosion that successfully tricked the German reconnaissance planes into thinking the factory was toast and the Brits would start running short on Mosquitos any day now. Eventually he took an adventure-filled route back to Axis territory, spent some time in occupied Norway, got parachuted back to England, and fed his German masters more interesting disinformation. Unfortunately for Eddie, he eventually ran into that one thing that almost no person with a job is able to indefinitely withstand: a manager that really has it out for you. When Ronnie Reed was sent to liaise with the Americans, Chapman’s new casemaster had it out for him from Day 1. It took a while to maneuver Eddie into a situation where the rest of MI5 would go along with closing the case, but the little prig did, eventually, get Eddie sacked, at which point the war was nearly over and Chapman promptly returned to a life of crime and general shady business.

While this is certainly one of those books in which everyone seems sort of insufferable, it is no doubt grade A spy shenanigans.

The November installment of my end-of-2024 Ben MacIntyre marathon was The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, about the double agent Olev Gordievsky.

Oleg Gordievsy was the son of a KGB officer, and his older brother was also a KGB officer. His first wife was a KGB officer, and his second wife was also from a KGB family. The KGB employed quite a lot of people.

Gordievsky had a couple of serious political experiences that eventually pushed him toward double-agenting on behalf of the West, such as witnessing the construction of the Berlin Wall, but largely he was just also a cultural dissident who like such decadent bourgeois illegal stuff like listening to classical music, which was apparently not allowed in the USSR, which for some reason I find particularly illustrative of how badly they had lost the plot.

Gordievsky and his first wife got posted to the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark. From what I understand, if you’re trying to make the capitalist West look like a great option, the Scandinavian social democracies are the place to do it. While he was in Copenhagen, his marriage fell apart, he started having an affair with a nice young secretary, and the Prague Spring happened, which further convinced him that the Soviet Union was not where it was at and he should throw in his lot with the folks that at least let you listen to whatever music you wanted. This is about when he started working with MI6.

Gordievsky’s career with M16 had approximately four phases. The first was his posting in Denmark, which was pretty fruitful for M16 in terms of learning about the inner workings of the Soviet embassy and the KGB. The second phase was a period of a few years when Gordievsky basically went dark–his posting over, he went back to Russia, where due to his divorce his career stalled out for a few years. He kept his head down, tried to have as normal-looking a family as possible with his second wife, learned English, and started very slowly working his way into consideration for a posting to London. When he finally got it, he read all of the files he could find on KGB operations in Great Britain, purely for the purposes of being better prepared for his job, of course. The third phase was his London posting, where he gave M16 truly enormous amounts of information collected during the years he was in Russia and what he was learning in the embassy in London. In return for this service, M16 gave him “contacts” and information he could bring back to the embassy to make it look like he was doing his day job without actually giving the Soviets any information it was too dangerous for them to know.

Then Rick Ames happened, which catapulted Oleg into phase 4.

Rick Ames was also a double agent although not from any motives as noble as wanting to listen to classical music all day. Ames, in an extremely American capitalist sort of way, was simply running out of money. He was a middlingly paid, middlingly talented CIA agent with a bit of a drinking problem who was not rising in the bureaucratic ranks as fast as he felt entitled to, although he did end up as an officer in Soviet counterintelligence. He also had an expensive wife. So he made the very American decision to fuck up anyone he needed to fuck up to get more money. In this case, it meant approaching the KGB via the Soviet embassy in DC and offering to pass on the identities of American and allied spies. This list included Olev Gordievsky, whose identity M16 had not in fact revealed to the CIA at any point. But Ames’ boss, in a fit of typically American entitlement to know everything, had at one point assigned Ames to trawl through a bajillion pages of data and figure out who the Brits’ most prized spy could possibly be, simply because it was vaguely intolerable to him to not know something. This feeling is one I have much sympathy for, but the unfortunate result is that Ames did the assignment correctly, and then told his new friends about in exchange for several thousand dollars.

Gordievsky, having maneuvered his bosses out of the way and gotten himself appointed head of the London embassy, was now recalled to Moscow on a quick work trip and told he’d be back in a few weeks. Instead he was entered into a labyrinthine bunch of bureaucratic wrangling where his bosses were unwilling to actually execute him until they caught him red-handed doing something double-agenty, so he was instead interrogated and spied on and generally dicked around for several weeks while he went slowly insane. Eventually, Gordievsky took the risk of sending the signal to activate the highly improbably and elaborate escape plan he had put in place with M16, and the last third or so of the book is a minute-by-minute recounting of this brazenly insane exfiltration scheme that basically nobody thought was going to really work. Fortunately for Gordievsky, it did, and while the diplomatic fallout was pretty nasty because the KGB was, quite understandably, absolutely infuriated that they had been made fools of, and after being so restrained and modern as to not just shoot Gordievsky the minute they had suspicions about him, like they used to do in Stalin’s time, too.

The exfiltration is absolutely riveting thriller stuff and I stayed up too late reading it. Overall I don’t think this is MacIntyre’s strongest book, and while I feel like I understand exactly why Gordievsky did what he did and do not think it was wrong, at the end of the day I simply cannot get that stoked about any take as un-nuanced as “Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were On The Side of Freedom And Democracy,” even if this is really secondary to the main storyline. Most of the book does deal in much more interesting, concrete details, that paint a picture that is interestingly nuanced even if MacIntyre’s occasional pronouncements that the Soviet Union was Bad and Britain was Good are not. But it is still squarely within the realm of Fun And Exciting Real-Life Spy Shenanigans, which is after all what I read MacIntyre for.

After some lobbying I persuaded the politics book club to read Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin’s Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. This is a sort of case study in the labor and other organizing of Black auto workers in Detroit in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, focusing mostly on the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), the spinoff RUMs at other plants, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, although plenty of other orgs come into and out of the picture at different times.

This is a really nuts-and-bolts study of organizing and many of the concepts explored and debates had by the people involved will be familiar to anyone who has done socialist or labor organizing–the uses and limitations of the media, of art, of the court system, of electoral politics, of student organizing. What does it mean to believe in revolution? How much of following its own stated rules will the system “allow,” and when and how will it play dirty in the face of its own contradictions? What is the most effective way to talk to people, and what are the limitations on the effectiveness of talking, anyway? I would not go so far as to say these questions are definitively solved, but it’s helpful to look at how they played out in concrete ways in the past.

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying does not really cohere into a single narrative with main characters and all that; it’s the history of a time and place in organizing, not of a single person or even group of people. This occasionally made it hard for me to remember who was being talked about. On the chapter level it tended to be a little easier, as there were usually just a handful of key organizers doing any one project, such as taking over the student newspaper at Wayne State University and turning it into a radical community paper. There is also one extremely interesting chapter that does focus on just one guy–“Mr. Justin Ravitz, Marxist Judge of Recorder’s Court.” This is an excellent look at how much of a ruckus you can cause in the legal system merely by taking the things it says about itself seriously, although it also looks at the limitations of the time and attention it takes to do so–and the ways in which the people who didn’t want Ravitz to take the Bill of Rights seriously started to counter-organize.

Other very useful chapters for current-day organizers include the one whose chapter title I am not going to repeat but which is about automation (real and fake) and work speed-ups, and “Finally Got the News,” about the one good feature film they made before everyone got too excited about films and came up with a thousand half-baked ideas they were never able to follow up on.

Of particular interest to me were the retrospectives from the second edition added to the end of the main text–at “thirty years later,” they are now themselves nearly 20 years old, and it is sobering to read what has and hasn’t (mostly hasn’t) changed since then. They are also interesting because they stick with one person’s perspective longer than is usually the case in the body of the book, and there’s an interesting contrast of perspectives.

Highly recommended for organizers of all stripes, just don’t expect to zip through it in one sitting. This book is for studying a chapter at a time.

In lieu of spooky movies, this year’s Halloween viewing was the first season of AMC’s The Terror, a lightly supernatural, heavily researched historical fiction horror series about the lost Franklin expedition, in which the ships Terror and Erebus sailed into the Arctic circle in search of the fabled Northwest Passage and never re-emerged. This was a very big deal at the time and, as the wrecks of the ships were only discovered in 2014 and 2016, continues to be a fairly big deal in certain circles as grisly new pieces of evidence about the fate of expedition emerges, like the confirmation that they are Captain James Fitzjames’ face.

In light of my newfound interest in ill-fated polar expeditions, a friend lent me a copy of Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, with the essay “My Odd Shelf” bookmarked. “My Odd Shelf” is about Fadiman’s collection of polar exploration literature, which consists of 64 volumes. As a newbie to polar exploration, I found this short essay to be packed full of interesting new information about it, even though the purpose of the essay was more to explain the concept of the Odd Shelf. (I don’t know what my Odd Shelf is, actually; maybe several of my shelves are odd.) I also did find the concept of the Odd Shelf interesting, and Fadiman’s musings on hers, her husband’s, and various polar explorers’ Odd Shelves to be endearing. After reading this charming essay I decided to read the other ones.

These are very personal essays, and as such it must be said that it was abundantly clear to me that, despite our mutual bibliophilia, Fadiman and I are clearly very different people. In addition to the obvious stuff–she’s married, has children, is a couple of decades older than I am, and lives in a loft in Manhattan–we also have some stark differences in the particular flavor of Book People that we are. Fadiman and her family don’t seem to be big genre readers–apart from one offhand mention of her father’s collection of science fiction novels as “junk,” there are no mentions whatsoever of anything that could be classed as speculative fiction. In “The Joy of Sesquipidalians,” an essay about long, rare, and obsolete words, Fadiman lists grimoire alongside words like adapertile and apozemical as one she’d reached adulthood never hearing and that nobody else in her extremely erudite circle of professional word nerds had either. As someone whose entire social circle, even the less literarily inclined ones, consists of fantasy nerds and gamers, I found this very discordant. Who doesn’t know what a grimoire is? (Someone who’d rather read a Toyota Corolla user’s manual than learn that fantasy novels even exist, I suppose.) I don’t even remember where I did learn the term; it shows up in all sorts of goofy witch books for children I read when I was nine.

The Fadimans–all of them, apparently–are also the sorts of physically active readers who like to make annotations, dog-ear pages, and leave books open facedown on their bedside tables, and I am not. While I have spilled my fair share of tea on my fair share of pages, I like fancy leatherbound paperbacks and complete matching sets, and am increasingly only purchasing books if they will make a nice objet d’art on my shelves; otherwise, why pass up the two twenty-minute walks through historic downtown Salem that come with getting it from the library? (I also get the sense that Fadiman, being from an older and more financially stable generation, did not run the gauntlet of frequent apartment moves that marked my early adulthood, and has thus forced me to be more selective in the books that I have retained ownership of than I will ever be quite happy with. What on Earth possessed me to give away my Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles novels, honestly.)

That said, there was still much here that was indeed Relevant To My Interests. The urgency of buying very specific old books in secondhand shops, and the stark contrast with the commodified reliability of buying new books in normal bookstores, was very relatable to me, as a person who is trying to save space in her tiny condo and get more steps in by getting all her normal books from the public library like a responsible public-minded member of the community and not a greedy cave-dwelling book dragon. The essay on William Gladstone’s invention of rolling compact shelving, “The P.M.’s Empire of Books,” was also fascinating for just that reason. The essays on reading books in the places they were written or are about, and on eating while reading, both appealed to me as a similar type of atmospheric reader, although Fadiman does not render any opinion on reading books by seasonality, which is the kind of atmospherics I find myself indulging in the most (probably because I can’t afford to travel a lot to read all the books that take place outside New England).

Despite being a bit dated, and the wholesale snub to the existence of the fantasy genre, I did end up liking this book quite a lot, and made sure to photograph the list of sesquipidalians from that essay so I can make sure I commit them all (except grimoire, for which there is no need) to memory.