Angela Ambroz
Marvelously written; non-fiction that reads like a spy thriller. Because, well, I guess it was.
So I had never heard of Kim Philby before picking up this book, but apparently he was a Big Deal during the Cold War, as the most infamous of double agents playing an extremely long con that lasted from WWII well into the early 60s. This book frames his epic deception with a super English, super non-emotive, super Colin Firth bromance between Philby and a BFF/MI6 colleague/eventual nemesis, Nick Elliott.
Much is made of Britishness and MI6 and that whole Cold War espionage culture that has been so well fossilized in James Bond and John le Carre novels. Fun fact: Ian Fleming and John le Carre knew all these people! Mixed with them! It's a culture that feels very remote now, and the author, Macintyre, is pretty damning about how the “one of us”/good old boy networking kept all those fancy Englishmen blind to the duplicitous Philby for so, so long (30+ years!?!).
Much is also made of the rampant alcoholism in this culture; I swear, Macintyre mentions “they were super drunk” at least once a paragraph, and it's kind of amazing these spy folks kept anything secret, or anything under control, really. Super livers, I guess?
Philby himself is an interesting character, and his life did indeed have some really high drama, which not many of us can say. Err, I won't spoil it, but the climax of the book is - oh wow - exciting. Also, his infinite charm, his endearing stammer, his tweedy jackets and good looks just BEG to be performed by Colin Firth in some movie. (Funnily enough, Colin Firth kinda did play a Philby-esque traitor in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.)
DNF @ 34%. This was the BBC radio production which was, oh gods, TERRIBLE. It has Derek Jacobi as Augustus (rather than Claudius) and is structured like so:
- An elderly Claudius narrating his biography (sounds of quill scratching)
- Bite-sized scenes from the past, featuring a wide cast of characters, doing some of the stuff he is talking about (lots of radio production values).
I got totally lost in all the different branches of the imperial Roman family, and ended up finding the bite-sized scenes frustrating, since I was like, WAIT WHO'S THIS NOW?! The actors were all wonderful - and I loved listening to it as a play - but the format of micro-flashbacks was just awful. I couldn't keep anything straight. If I just remembered, “Well, Livia probably murdered them”, that usually ended up being right like ~66% of the time, but the rest of the time, ????
Oh well. I need to get this on proper audiobook! Or just proper book!
Too short, but then, I guess it doesn't take long to establish and prove (or at least convince ME) the thesis: American women living in a post-second wave feminism world have absorbed “raunch” culture in a misguided attempt to “be one of the guys”. While Levy's criticisms sometimes seem overly generalized (but maybe I don't watch enough TV), it's still powerful and eviscerating.
I read three memoirs in short succession: this, Sum It Up (about the winningest NCAA basketball coach, Pat Summit), and Hillbilly Elegy (about marginalized, white Appalachian poor). It's hard not to compare, and this memoir - by New Yorker journalist and lifelong surfer, William Finnegan - is definitely the best-written, but also the most... indulgent? It's an artful, introspective look at a relatively easy life: while Finnegan does some “light war reporting” for the New Yorker, and things do get dicey there (though it's not really explored much), it's mostly about his various epic trips to far-flung surf spots (Fiji, Indonesia, a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic), and the sublime Zen of emerging from a wave's tube with dry hair.
I fetishize surfing, big time, so I gobble surf writing and surf photography up. I love the nature-ness of it, and the Zen-ness, and monotonous ritualism of it. And Finnegan writes about that stuff superbly. Just like The Wave, another surf book, many glorious passages are written about, basically, the same thing: dude rides wave. But I can never get enough! He also touches on the commercialization of surfing (bah!), and the fragility of our oceans (woe!).
Woven through the wave stuff is Bill Finnegan growing up: from anxious young teen in Hawaii, to super obnoxious self-involved Orientalist 20something (oh Lord, do I know people like this) on his shoestring surf world tour, to settling down 30something in San Francisco, to aging reporter discovering a sweet surf spot in the Atlantic while battling an older bro's body. You definitely feel his character maturing, and that's quite a writerly achievement. At least, I couldn't stand his 20something self-importance in Fiji (I also lived in Fiji for 2 years, and felt very eye-rolly at his descriptions, and omg his douchey desire to bed some “exotic ladies” uggghh), but he seemed a lot more tolerable by his 50s as a dedicated NYC surfer. Kudos for being honest, I guess.
Disclaimer: I hadn't heard of Nasty Gal before picking this up. I just picked it up because it seemed fun and kinda about business and I like memoirs.
So, about 5%-10% of the book is about this lady's meteoric rise from eBay seller to fashion CEO person. That's pretty cool, I enjoyed that. The rest is a looooot of platitudinous platitudes, about how you have to follow your dreams and break the rules and wear stuff that makes you feel pretty and so on. There's a very early, studious distancing from hairy-armpitted, humorless FEMINISTS (cue horror music), perish the thought. There's a later admittance of a Halloween in 08 or 09 wherein the author went as a “blaxploitation actress”, complete with “Afro” and platform heels and so on. (She admits this was “politically incorrect” - hrrmmm, I might have used stronger language, but I guess I'm just being a humorless feminist about it, ho ho!) There's some stuff about “sigils” and magical thinking (which is strongly endorsed); as well as an assurance that the author's not into any of that “hippie dippie” New Age stuff (okay, very confusing, cuz the previous 500 words were about imbuing Internet passwords and necklace pedants with magic powers...).
You know those “how I got rich?” autobiographies by old rich white dudes, and how they talk a lot about making it via their own hard work and gumption? Working outside the system - mavericks, if you will? As if they operated in some sort of social vacuum? This is basically the fashion lady version of it. Lots of distancing from icky left wing ideals. Kind of a shallow take on, well, a lot of stuff. In the end, I found it grating and dull. shrug
Glorious. You can read this in a robot voice. What is the moral of this story? Who knows. Refreshingly amoral. A kid is a robot hug machine. The end.
So I may have fallen in love with Galileo a little bit. What a man! And what a book! This book was a rich, human, layered look at a really incredible life and deeply touching father-daughter bond.
I was inspired to get this as it was sitting in the Museo Galileo bookshop, and - boy - is that a fun museum! After gazing in wonder at a majestic, giant Ptolemic sphere, as well as the dried, leathery remains of Galileo's three fingers (!!!! yes, these exist and they're preserved in a weird-ass goblet thing in Room XI, visit as soon as you can, I highly recommend), I was like, hell yes I'd like to learn more.
Written in equal parts primary document, general Renaissance history lesson, and straight-up biography, this book is - in turn - equal parts deeply philosophical about the history and philosophy of empirical research and the scientific method, and deeply human about daily life in 16th century Italy (romantic music). I feel like Galileo's story is often framed as an iconoclastic religion vs. science show-down, featuring the honorable scientist pointing out the not-obvious-but-true (we're sitting on a spinning rock as it loops around a giant ball of fire) while shrill, shrieking forces of superstition and oppression (here embodied in the Catholic Church) violently shut him up. I was certain there was violence? But I guess I had conflated poor Giordano Bruno's story with Galileo's. There's no violence, except psychic violence and much bad feelings. And people get sick a lot, oh boy, do they - but I guess it was 400 years ago.
What's nice is that this book actually humanizes both sides of the Vatican vs. Galileo trial, and, in turn, brings out all the gritty nuances and complexities. Galileo, for example, seems eminently pragmatic, a brilliant man at the bleeding edge of a proto-scientific method, arguing with “philosophers” (which then meant both philosophers and mathematicians/scientists/etc) about the importance of using math in “natural philosophy” (i.e. physics; oh, but everything was jumbled up by then and not in these ridiculous academic divisions - a discussion for another book review, I suppose). He's also, un-paradoxically, deeply Catholic, and very quick to disavow any of that crazy Copernican (Earth-around-the-sun) stuff as soon as the Vatican leans on him. Yo, he was just playin'. The Vatican, for its part, and particularly Pope Urban-the-Roman-numeral, isn't so much shrill and regressive - so much as reacting against various internal and external pressures. Internal pressures from, it seems, other scientists with bruised egos trying to drag down Galileo, and external pressures in the form of a Lutheran revolution happening up north and everyone kinda laughin' at the Catholics/Italians. In short, it seems like Galileo definitely got the wrong end of the stick and was scapegoated. And it was definitely fascinating to see how insecure both Galileo and the Church felt about having this kerfuffle spectated by all the now-liberating-themselves Lutherans up north. “They're laughing at us!” etc etc.
But much of the drama did give me pause, and make me think of the cultural slot that science often needs to fit in, and also - oh - the majesty of empirics. The glory of creating things, of tinkering, or discovering and understanding! And - of course, in these days (hours!) of NASA's New Horizons passing Pluto - the gorgeous, mind-bending astronomy of it all!
So what about the titular daughter then? In Galileo's younger days, he had several illegitimate children with a nice Venetian woman who was not noble enough or something to marry. The eldest was a daughter and, since Galileo had no prospects of marrying her off (cuz illegitimate), he sent her to a convent when she was super young. And she grew up into, I guess, Maria von Trapp? i.e. Picture the best nun you can imagine. The nicest, sweetest, most loving, most Platonic ideal of a nun, and you have this woman, I guess. She really seemed great. And she and Galileo maintained a life-long correspondence about EVERYTHING. We've lost Galileo's letters (burned in the pits of Vatican, no doubt), but hers survive - and they're rich, funny, interesting insights into life back then. They're also a super-interesting way to contextualize Galileo's genius: here was a man who, when not working on his paradigm-shattering masterwork, had to worry about, among other things, (1) the donkey that was too stubborn to let the servant ride it, (2) many many sick nuns suffering various minor and major ailments, (3) how's the season's wine coming along?, (4) could you please send 20 scudi?, and, OK, (5) the Bubonic plague (fair).
What I'm saying is, the mix of the mundane with the magnificence was brilliantly done. It made you realize how buried genius can be. How it's so difficult to see the amazingness of what you're doing until many centuries pass. But not TOO difficult - the Vatican, after all, justifiably believed Galileo's ideas would be influential, widespread, and alter everything. And they were - immediately! As much as Galileo himself (vainly) tried to downplay and “j/k” everything.
tl;dr: Super good. Read it if you love science, a day in the life of the Renaissance, or space.
Rebecca Solnit is often credited with originating the now-popular term, “mansplaining”. I love using that word. It's a funny word. It captures an important social injustice/stupidity.
Anyway, I reeeeally disliked the only other book by Rebecca Solnit that I've read and, alas, beyond the first essay (on the dark hilarity of mansplainery), I really disliked this. Her writing just ain't for me. I find it so humorless (excepting the first essay), so self-important, so indulgent; pop intellectualism of the worst kind. I was also a little leery of her occasional notes about the awful fem injustices in those Other Lands. White privileged lady speaking for poor oppressed Arab ladies... gah. Or even worse: just ALLUDING to it, leaving us to fill the blank with our own stereotyped ideas. Gaaah.
An amusingly grotesque, bizarre and emotional epic about Henry (Frankenstein's monster?) and his detachable right hand.
This book is basically about not taking your close relationships for granted. The time that Henry and Hand spend separated, and live their separate lives, felt like something out of a rom com or drama. It felt like the argument in Marriage Story, only, you know, not harrowing and traumatic to behold.
My kid thought this was OK/good. I did not get any repeat requests.
After this, I force-kissed the palms of my kids' hands and they squirmed away in horror, screaming NO NO.
Meh. If I want a comix about decaying superheroes against a background of general moral decline (a genre I don't really like to begin with), then I'd go for the grim rage of Frank Miller. At least in Miller's work, like Martha Washington or Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, you feel a sense of a man's general life philosophy. Sure, misanthropic, kinda misogynistic and myopic (the “moral decline” sometimes seems to be equated with the loss of power among old white dudes), but at least it's kind of a system of thought. There was some meditating/brooding which created these stories!
This, instead, felt like a superficial adaptation of that sort of “the world's on fire!”/”where have all the superheroes gone?” thing. It was kinda tone deaf to, er, anything after WWII and the “Golden Era” (= era of good ol' boys), since it had this Indiana Jones thing going on in the flashback scenes, and then had this reeeally cheesy sex, drugs and rock and roll thing in the modern stuff. Think The Matrix. Also, oh man, were the ladies objectified. I think only 50% had pants on. Sorry, but if you just introduced a bunch of lady characters, and ALL of them were either moms, sex objects, or drugged-out naifs, you lose my interest.
The end is nigh, and our tech will bring it. In the same vein as Feed (sooooooo good) and The Machine Stops (the ur-tech dystopia). You should probably just bite the bullet and delete your Facebook account already.
An okay, but not great, pop philosophy book from Alain de Botton, premiere pop philosopher for the posh. I always kinda enjoy, kinda get exasperated by de Botton's books: he has some inspired moments of interpreting philosophy for contemporary audiences. He also has a bunch of moments that feel like a pile o' privileged, naive bricks.
This book is, well, like the others. First, to his credit, he wrote this Before The Madness (i.e. before fake news was accused of ruining American democracy ho ho), and so much of the book feels like it was beamed from an alternative universe of pastoral English innocence. But that ain't his fault. Second, to his detriment, the book's a bit blathery - with the final chapters feeling rushed and even a bit half-assed. I have higher standards than this!
Maybe the best chapter was the bit about ‘received wisdom'; he lists some of Flaubert's annoyances at newspaper-driven ‘received wisdom' (which were all REALLY GOOD), and then speculated on some modern received wisdom too. All of them felt incisive and true.
Crucial. Hyper-crucial. Should be required reading in all American high schools. What better lesson is there in civil disobedience, civic engagement, balancing security against liberties and privacy? What better lesson in the fourth (and fifth?) estates, and the importance of a free media? Also, how much more timely can you get?
In addition to that, it's an amazing human story, though Greenwald writes it with sobriety, clarity and modesty.
I'm generally sympathetic to Easterly's ideas about development, but I found this book uneven, even unfocused, and had trouble getting through it.
The main message is that the Development Industry (embodied by the World Bank, consultants, and big donors) is flawed - even guaranteed ineffective - by design. Certain characteristics have been embedded in development since its beginnings (and Easterly has some things to say about when “development” began - mainly, 1920s China, rather than the more popular birthday of 1945). These characteristics are, broadly, a willful ignorance towards the political/institutional aspect of development; and a naive reliance on technocratic solutions, when technocrats have neither the political nor economic incentives to “get it right”. Put bluntly, no one elects World Bank economists, and the World Bank doesn't have to worry about being financially sustainable - so, basically, nothing changes for the Bank even if the Bank seriously screws up. And Easterly cites some pretty damning examples of epic Bank fails, full of perpetuating repression and authoritarian violence. Damn.
Easterly's solution is to readjust the focus of development onto increasing the rights for the poor: this means everything from promoting democracy to loosening migration restrictions to laying off all that technocratic paternalism stuff and just letting people do what they do. And, obviously, not indirectly funding dictators or white-washing repressive regimes.
That's all fine and well, and I'm down with that. I think the more we critically examine the structural incentives of development, both on the part of the “helpers” (World Bank, etc.) and the “helpees” (developing country governments), and the more we think critically - even cynically! - about the (inevitable?) politicization of development and aid, the better off we'll all be.
However! I often felt that this book's better points had already been made (and with more skill) in Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail, a book Easterly cites often. Similarly, the works cited made me hungry to read more from the excellent CGD people - Nancy Birdsall, Michael Clemens, Lant Pritchett. These researchers offer great “bird's eye view” perspectives on development.
Also, Easterly started to lose me with the increasingly long and increasingly tangential digressions: his explanation of basic economic principles, like the market's “invisible hand” or comparative advantage, felt too long and - sorry for this - having some seriously diminishing marginal returns. Similarly, his use of the Greene Street block example to chart the history of America's development since 1830 was, sure, a pretty neat research project in and of itself, but often felt very beside the point. Especially when we get down into the weeds about that one 19th century family with the many kids and the many buildings, and did you know that So-and-so, son of So-and-so, actually died in a carriage accident? Yeah, he was the nephew of This-and-that. And that sort of child mortality is something you don't see nowadays - except in poor countries in Africa! Also Friedrich Hayek gets a bad rap!
See what I mean?
The Greene Street example's only small redemption was its nice payoff - for this reader at least - via its vindication of Jane Jacobs. YEAH. Of course Jane Jacobs is wonderful and knows a thing or two about the Dangers of Planning.
Anyhoo. tl;dr: Easterly is great, this book isn't his best. It does have some likable crankiness (some LOLs were had), and the ultimate message is, I think, very important and true. And, okay, it did get me thinking BIG THINGS about development and arguing back at the book - always a good sign. But would I recommend it to others? For dev professionals, yes. For interested general readers who are not actively in the biz, I'd point you to The White Man's Burden or The Elusive Quest for Growth.
Aaaand I'd recommend watching his debate with the Center for Global Development's Owen Barder from earlier this year.
I came into the Commander Hadfield craze a bit late, mostly hearing from other people about this guitar-playing, tweeting, mustachioed astronaut. And I think some of the magic of the book may work better if you'd ridden along with him on his adventures in the International Space Station (ISS). As such, it's still pretty magical, but much less familiar.
Ostensibly an autobiography, it provides a very short, whirlwind overview of Hadfield's first 50 years, dips persistently into Dale Carnegie-style Tips On Living, and then spends a looong time going into gritty details about his last ISS mission. It's incredibly readable, with breezy, simple language that made me think it'd be useful also as an “introductory” text for younger readers (e.g. middle school, high school).
Inevitably, it made me think of Red Mars, which is a wonderful, realist look at a long mission to Mars. Hadfield's personality - disciplined but good-humored, intelligent but not intellectual - rang true, both in terms of the Air Force people I have met and the characters in Red Mars and other “hard” sci fi books.
Meh. A short fiction piece with the barest touch of pretty pedestrian fantasy. Protagonist is a lady pirate mom, which - as a lady pirate myself - I appreciate. But the world-building felt flat, and the plot overly straightforward. Given how completely insane short speculative fiction can get (e.g. Ted Chiang!), this was pretty blah.
DNF fairly early - 15%. But it was kind of already a slog. Very middle-grade sci fi. I enjoyed Naomi Kritzer's short story collection (Cat Pictures, Please), but I didn't LOVE it. I thought it was fine/good. This was the same. And meh... I am ruthless with my DNFing these days.
Oh Lord. A wretched story of endless heartache, poverty and migration. This dense classic follows the Joad family as they get “tractored” off their Dust Bowl Oklahoma farm in 1930-something, and then cobble together everything they have to pile onto a dilapidated truck (a “jalopy”) to head west (AT THIRTY-FIVE MILES AN HOUR, IS NOTHING EASY FOR THESE PEOPLE AGHH) - to California, the land of milk and honey and lots of fruit picking, the land of their hopes and dreams. It's hard going all the way there, with bigotry and death and genuine fears that they'll break down in the desert, and - of course - it's awful when they do get there, since 300,000 other people had the same idea. This story basically watches this family get squished under the heel of the Great Depression; slowly coming apart, with no good options, constantly on the move, chasing tiny tendrils of hope before despair slowly swallows them up, one by one.
Honestly, this made me feel awful to read. And it was startling how much I had detached “Americanness” from poverty of this kind: this felt like the stories of wretched poverty and migration during India and Pakistan's Partition; it felt like a version of this is what Syrian refugee families are going through. It felt “foreign”, and yet - this was pre-WWII America. Amazing. It sort of gives you a perverse sense of hope: of what transformative changes could happen in other places.
Powerful, amazing. I thought I “understood” the Depression, but I really, really didn't until I read this.
A capitalist entry into the Froggy series.
Incompetent and bumbling Froggy decides he needs to earn some sweet, sweet cash. He will do this by selling lemonade. But - as they say - never get high on your own supply! After drinking all his lemonade before his first customer arrives, he is driven to desperate attempts at bartering: how about this broken saxophone instead? You have to admire his entrepreneurial spirit? Or something.
In the end, no money is made.
I really hate these books. My kid loves them.
Brilliant, brutal, teen spec fic. Alien invasion stories are generally pretty great, and this was no exception. Also loved the David Cronenberg-style finish. Plus: apparently, we carry around 3lbs of bacteria in our gut anyway, and only 10% of our cells are “us” (and not bacteria), and these gut bacteria apparently affect moods, so... yeah, an “alien in your gut” premise doesn't seem so farfetched. (FWIW, there's an excellent bacteria essay in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011.)
A survey of humanity in the Studs Terkel vein. So, it's Studsian in that you laugh, you cry, you're inspired, and you can't believe the lives people have had. Letters of Note is actually a website, one of those wonderful late-2000s novelty tumblrs that actually tumbled onto a GENIUS IDEA and turned that into a wonderful book (other lesser tumblrs of this genre are Awesome People Hanging Out Together, Everybody Reading Books, Nerd Boyfriend, Brokers With Hands On Their Faces, the women and salads one, the animals talking in all caps one, etc etc. JUST GOOGLE IT YOSELF JEEZ).
Anyway, Letters of Note was one of the more intellectual ones - and one of the ones with truly incredible content. This is all due, I imagine, to the blog owner/editor, Shaun Usher, who's granular passion for both the medium (he has a blog on letterheads as well) and history is the driving force. How does this man find these things?! Where does he dig them up?! They are mostly incredible. They are also often tending to an overrepresentation of 19th century stuff, and mid-20th century, but that is - like - a tiny sliver (maybe 10%) of a star. This is still a five-star experience.
My faves:
- Mary Stuart's letter the night before she was to be executed (a perfect Wolf Hall chaser!)
- Iggy Pop's hopeful letter to a despairing young fan
- A letter from one of the early producers of Monty Python's Life of Brian, freaking out about the script
- One of the Titanic's “Help, we're sinking” telegrams
- A letter from Gandhi to Hitler (!)
- A letter from Hitler's nephew, Patrick Hitler (!), trying to get into the US army
- Two replies from two separate former slaves who both get asked by their former owners to come back to the plantation, please (these replies are wonderfully scathing)
- A form apology letter to be sent when you're embarrassed about getting too drunk at last night's dinner party (from 1,000 years ago in China!)
I think my absolute favorite, maybe, was a rejection letter Gertrude Stein received from a London publisher. It's very, very funny.
All of these, I imagine, you can just google or find on the website. Several of them had gone viral a few years ago; and so I knew them already. But it's still worth getting the book, both as a beautiful artifact and convenience (we can't leave everything to those google servers, ey!), and to support Usher's wonderful labors. Argh, see, now I'm talking like him! LABORS?!
This one I was LOVIN' but it's going on ice, since I now own it as a used physical book - i.e. a book that I will only get to on digital sabbaths (which are rare these days). But some day. SOME DAY.
A fun, informative pop research book about a very interesting topic (the sociological history of religion), written in a language that I love (randomized control trials! natural experiments! the Dictator Game!). The main thesis is that religions that feature supernatural morality monitors - i.e. Big Gods - enabled proto-agricultural settlements to grow beyond the confines of immediate social boundaries. In other words, Big Gods make sure that strangers can cooperate. Hence, you get towns! And then eventually states. Definitely a book for fans of Acemoglu and Robinson, or James C. Scott. Except - unlike Acemoglu+Robinson or Scott - this book's academic density is leavened by occasional moments of real, laugh out loud wit.