Warning: 5000 words. You may want to skim.
So here’s my 2018 in non-fiction. Usual disclaimer: these are books I read this year, not necessarily books that were written this year. Also, if you’ve not read any of my reviews before – I tend to read thematically. That is, I pick a few topics at the start of the year and load up on books in those areas, mainly because I find it makes reading more efficient (if you’re reading related stuff in a short period of time, you spot opportunities for skimming more quickly). Usually, those topics coincide with travel and since this year I spent a lot of time in Japan, with some interesting short trips to India, Russia and the Gulf, my reading list gets packed with history/politics books from those places. So, as with my fiction list, I’m mostly going to go through this year’s books geographically (excluding some of the more survey-level books like say The Oxford History of Britain vol. IV for which there is no earthly reason anyone who is not an obsessive completist would read), so it’ll be like a trip to Daunt Books (which is more or less heaven on earth, btw).
That said, I know this method of reading may seem odd so let me start with the more random, non-geographic stuff. I started the year reading Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life (and which I reviewed on my other blog here, and no I am not linking to the book itself). Lobster Boy’s book is maybe the misogynistic thing I’ve ever read, but contra some views, it’s no so alt-right as it is mid-nineteenth century reactionary conservative. Peterson would have been a good courtier of Metternich, for example. Much more interesting from a cultural commentary point of view was Peter Biskind’s The Sky is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism. The title pretty much encapsulates the reasonably compelling argument so I won’t go into too much depth here other than to say it’s a fun read if not necessarily a very substantial one. I cannot say the same for Cultural Evolution, which is a fairly plodding review of data from the World Values Survey by Ronald Inglehart. Not wrong or anything – just kind of meh.
Two interesting books from the US business world were Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carryrou and Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys Club of Silicon Valley. The first is about the moral cesspit of the medtech firm Theranos, and the latter is about the moral cesspit of basically every other company in the valley. Both are very good, the latter I is a masterclass in how to get a book written by composing eight long-form articles on related subjects and tying them into a single book. Getting paid twice for the same work is a valuable skill and Emily Chang shows exactly how it’s done in this book.
Three other books of note in this general category. Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life is a reasonably interesting examination of the world’s most alien intelligence and Plane Crash: The Forensics of Aviation Disasters, which is, well, a book about how planes crash. Warning: it’s not graphic or voyeuristic or anything, but there is a fair bit of physics in here. If you choose to read this on a plane, I recommend the kindle version, as the cover art probably won’t be appreciated by your fellow passengers. Finally there is Will Storr’s The Unpersuadables: Adventures With The Enemies of Science, which is both interesting and maddening. Sometimes, it’s an updating of Jon Ronson’s Them: Adventures With Extremists (one of the funniest books of the 2000s); sometimes, it actively takes the “believers” aside, playing skeptic to the skeptics – literally (the Amazing Randi gets a major going over in here). In the end, it comes to some reasonable (if kind of depressing) conclusions about why nearly everyone finds to difficult to be dispassionate about “evidence”, but Lord it takes an awfully meandering route to get there.
It was not a great year in the whole pop econ/policy world. There’s a lot of crap out there like Alissa Quart’s Squeezed: Why our Families Can’t Afford America, which is a deeply shallow and mostly economically illiterate look at the travails of the (mostly young) families of urban America, which contains all sorts of policy advice except on the one thing that would actually make a difference (BUILD. MORE. HOUSING. FFS.). There was Rachel Sherman’s Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence and the The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, which are both in their ways about the new affluent: the former is more ethnographic, and the latter is in some ways a riff on Andrew Potter’s works on authenticity and positional goods. If you have read Potter, a lot of this will feel familiar, but it puts just enough of an original spin on things to make it worth your time. On the more econ-y side, there was Michael Best’s How Growth Really Happens (not very interesting), Heiner Ridernmann’s Cognitive capitalism: Human Capital and the Well-Being of Nations (crap, avoid), and Production in the Innovation Economy from Richard Locke and Rachel Wellhausen, both part of the MIT group headed by Suzanne Berger which has put out some great stuff like Making in America (not bad for wonks but even so, read Berger instead).
There were a bunch of specifically American books: Joan C. Williams’ White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, which left me a bit cold in the way it condescended to people the author herself thought were condescending, and Robert Wuthnow’s The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America which I thought was a reasonable and nuanced ethnographic approach to middle-state cultural alienation. Best of all in this category was James and Deb Fallows’ Our Towns, which was a fascinating if sample-biased look at what makes successful American small towns successful. It’s a bit weird, because it’s 350 pages of reportage mixed with about 100 pages of the Fallows talking about their favourite hobby/means of transportation (ie flying around America in a single-engine plane); I found both books fascinating but I’m not convinced they actually belong in the same volume.
Two final books of note: first, Radical Help, by Hillary Cottam. Cottam is – if I understand her bio correctly both a policy wonk and a social entrepreneur of sorts; her firm basically designs and runs sets testable experiments in social policy. This book her describing a particular series of pilot projects she has conducted in the UK over the past few years. Her main insights are basically: one, the UK welfare state is meant to manage cases not solve problems; two, that these cases are organized according to the functional needs of bureaucracies (police, health, welfare, child services, etc) rather than dealing holistically with individuals and families, and three, most of the problems people face really come down to problems of networking and informal support which – while not easy to design in a non-paternalistic way – can still be done in a cheaper and vastly more effective than the current welfare state. Kind of fascinating. The other notable book was Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism, which was very intriguing and in a number of ways the best book in this category which I read this year. The one irritating thing about it though, was its weird caricature of “the left” as being more interested in the welfare of foreign populations than in that of its own citizens. This echoes the right/left “somewheres vs. anywheres” dichotomy that David Goodhart first posited a few months ago (and which Stephen Harper’s recent book also used). I can’t, offhand though, think of any left-wing parties during the recent downturn who haven’t tried to increase the welfare of their citizens through higher social payments of some sort. YMMV on whether these approaches actually work, but the idea that any left party actively ignored itsown citizens in favour of foreign ones is mystifying.
Going back to the other end of history, I read quite a bit of stuff on Rome. Some of it were single-Emperor-reign histories like Emperor Alexander Severus, Caligula: A Biography, etc. These are usually not all that interesting but they have the benefit of being cheap (for the last couple of weeks Amazon has been selling these types of books from the publisher Pen and Sword for $1.34 apiece which is hard to beat) and you at least get some sense of the flow of events. Peter Heather books are usually fun but I thought The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders kind of dragged (though I thought the portrait of Theodosius was good). My favourite Rome book by far this year was Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of Empire. If you’re into comparative ancient history, Michael Scott’s Ancient Worlds: A Global History of Antiquity (basically, Greece/Rome v. India v. China from about 300 BC to 400 AD) is worth a read, too.
Closer to the present day in Europe, I read “city biographies” of both London (Stephen Inwood’s A History of London) and Paris (Colin Jones’ Paris, The Biography of a City). The former is way too long, the second was damn near perfect – everything you want in a book to read while you are in a city. Oliver Hilmes’ Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August is a tremendous read. It’s not strictly speaking about the Olympic Games (though its proceedings drive the narrative); rather, it is about daily life in Nazi Germany, both among the people and the elite. Bracing. Another excellent read was the new reprint of Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free, which is an American’s account of a year’s worth of chats with the residents of a smallish German village about how they lived under Naziism. The conclusions are fairly disturbing, to modern eyes. And they certainly make you understand whey so many people were freaked out about German re-armament in the 1950s. That of course is a major concern of Odd Arne Westad’s The Cold War: A Global History which got some good press at the start of the year though I have to say it left me pretty cold (har har). If you don’t remember the Cold War at all, it might be interesting, but I found it a pretty dry and not particularly insightful recitation of events. The opposite is true of Benn Steil’s The Marshall Plan which is a fantastic blow-by-blow account of the period 1945-1949 in Germany specifically but also Europe generally. In particular, the Marshall Plan and the Berlin blockade are usually presented as two consecutive events at the outset of the cold war – Steil shows why they were really one long contest for mastery over central Europe. Excellent stuff.
I made a resolution last year to read more about Latin America, which I totally blew (the only Latin American stuff I read was fiction). I wasn’t much better on Africa– Jacques Pauw’s The President’s Keepers was a bracing, no-holds barred account of the incredible extent to which South Africa was corrupted by the Zuma regime, and The Quest for Socialist Utopia was maybe my most on-brand read for 2018, a history of Ethiopian student/revolutionary in the years leading to the overthrow of the Emperor (and no, I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone without a serious interest in the subject). I did a little better on the Middle East, but probably only because I actually went there. Mehran Kamarava’s Inside the Arab State is a reasonably well-nuanced study of how and why the Arab Spring played out so differently in different countries. Rory Miller’s Desert Kingdoms to Global Powers is OK as a kind of 50-year history of the Gulf, but it reads (as I think a lot of books on the region do) like the author is pulling his punches because if he doesn’t none of the governments in the region will give him an entrance visa, which more or less kills his future work. Christopher Davidson’s Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle covers similar ground over a wider set of countries – all of the middle east rather than just the Gulf – it does not pull punches at all, but the author does seem unusually inclined to conspiracy theories where the western fight against ISIS is concerned (maybe phrased a bit more delicately, I get the impression Davidson understands Arab politics better than he understands American ones). Best book in this category? Hands down, Alex von Tunzelmann’s Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace. It genuinely made me rethink my periodization of history – in some ways, Suez was more like the last gasp of a Euro-centic colonialist period dating back to the 17th century rather than part of a modern post-war period and that the main dividing line of our century was actually 1956 not 1945.
Speaking of re-periodization, there is a lot of that going on in Russian history these days. Masha Gessen sort of hinted at it last year in her book The Future is History, but I saw it a lot more clearly in Stephen Kotkin’s Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000. Basically, we’re getting a re-think about how important 1991 actually was as a key year in Russia. High Brezhnevism was a thing, and the Putin Era is a thing, but it’s becoming less clear when the latter actually ended and where do we call the in-between period? Certainly if you read Black Wind, White Snow, abut the rise of “Eurasianism” in Russian thought, you will wonder a lot about just how early Russia started on its present course and a quick flip through the opening pages of The Oligarchs by David Hoffman makes you realise the state had more or less lost control of large chunks of the economy to criminals well before 1991. Andrei Kovalev’s Russia’s Dead End adheres to a more normal periodization and mostly treads well-worn ground about how Putin is all tactics and no strategy, but the chapter’s on his years as a Senior diplomat under Gorbachev are fascinating mainly because of the way it shows how ossified and incompetent the State had become by the late 1980s and how policy entrepreneurs like himself could drive a lot of internal political change simply by telling people “we signed an international agreement on X, so you have to do Y”.
Three books stood out for me in the Russia category this year. Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy forensically examines Putin’s record from his St. Petersburg days and follows the clique that surrounded him then up to the present day. It’s not a fun read, by any means, but it’s an important act of scholarship (and you will probably never look at Gerhard Schroeder favourably again). Svetlana Alexeievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War, an oral history of women who fought for the Red Army against Germany is unbelievably good, but then it’s Alexeievich and everything she does is unbelievably good so no surprise there. And finally, there is Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom, which is an absolutely brilliant and terrifying 250 page dissection of Putin’s ideological twists and tacks since 2011 or so (in many ways answering all the questions Masha Gessen left unanswered last year), with an unfortunate 60-page essay on Trump tacked onto the end which is not wrong in any particular as far as I can tell but still feels somewhat contrived. Still a fantastic book everyone should read.
Over to Asia, where most of my reading was travel-driven. There is, it would appear, no genuinely good books about history of the Malay Peninsula/Singapore, though if you’re going to pick a workhorse single-volume it would probably be Jim Baker’s Crossroads: A Popular History of Malaysia and Singapore (note: not actually a popular history). Michael Vatikiotis’ Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Southeast Asia and Joe Studwell’s Asian Godfathers are two good books for thinking through why Southeast Asia (defined here minus the former French colonies of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) such a disaster politically while having (superficially at least) such success economically. The most pleasant read of the bunch though, was Singapore/Singapura by Nicholas Walton, in which the author walks across the country in one day and about 250 pages, and manages to drop a wonderful amount of info on the city’s history, culture and society in the process. If you’re heading to the country, this is the one to read.
I only really dipped my toes into works about india when I was there in October/November. Vijay Joshi’s India’s Long Road is like 300 pages of Economist articles of the wonkier sort on India’s economic prospects, Adam Roberts’ Superfast Primetime Ultimate Nation is also 300 pages of Economist articles, but of the breezier sort (maybe half of which would end up in 1843) on its social and political prospects. How the BJP Wins by Prashant Jha contains a lot of nuances and Indian English which is beyond my ken but its thoughts on modern political management should be of interest to political hacks well beyond the sub-continent. I also read a few China books, most unmemorable, but What is China by Zhaoguang Ge is an excellent read both helps you think more clearly about what people mean by “China” (the concept is a lot more contested than you might think), and also what the political and historiographic faultlines of each of these conceptions of China are.
Where I did the most reading this year was on Japan, where I spent a couple of weeks in May which included a lot of sumo with the nine-year old. I did my best to get interested in late medieval Japan but frankly there isn’t a lot out there of use. Mary Elizabeth Barry’s biography of Hideoyoshi is ok but not great, A.L. Sadler’s Shogun: the Life of Tokygawa Ieyasu is practically unreadable, and Jonathan Clements Christ’s Samurai, which is the story of an early 17th-century rebellion in Kyushi is an interesting 80-page story entombed in a 200-page book. Getting to the 20th Century, John Toland’s massive The Rising Sun is still, 40 years after its publication, pretty much the standard English-language account of the Japanese side of the Pacific War (worth it, but you have to care about the subjectin the first place). Robert Whiting’s Tokyo Underworld is a pretty rollicking trip through the city in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s; William Andrews’ Dissenting Japan is an interesting look at left-wing radicalism from the 1950s onwards (very much an antidote to endless works on Japanese conformity and good background reading for Japanese fiction set in the 60s, such as Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter and Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood). Alex Kerr’s Lost Japan is many things – including an interesting primer on Japanese culture over the last millennium – but it is also an interesting look back at how much of old Japan still existed in the 1960s and 1970s and how it had nearly been obliterated today.
A lot of “books to read on Japan” will include a series of books on the Japanese character. Traditionally it includes books like Takeo Doi’s Anatomy of Dependence or maybe David Matsumoto’s The New Japan: Debunking Seven Social Stereotypes. The former is a little too heavy on the Freudian mumbo-jumbo for my taste, and the latter, even if it is correct about trends, uses a lot of bad data to get there. Actually, I quite enjoyed two very slim cultural primers (and I mean slim, they take about an hour each to read) – called The Japanese Mind and Japanese Culture, both by Roger J Davies. It’s not the kind of book from which you can glean fascinating anecdotes, but they get the job done quickly (and I learned some stuff, too). There’s also the “whither Japan” genre: David Pilling’s Bending Adversity is pretty typical of the post-Fukushima variety of these books. Not a terrible starting point for learning about modern Japan but not a brilliant one either. And in the “understanding how Tokyo got to be Tokyo” category, there was Stephen Mansfield’s Tokyo: a Biography which is a decent point for the subject though it does not hold a candle to Edward Seidenstricker’s Tokyo from Edo to Showa, 1867-1989 (which I read a few years ago when I knew far too little about Japan to truly appreciate).
I spent a bunch of time in the US again this year, the best part of which was a weekend in Atlanta watching TFC with my son. This made me read Frederick Allen’s Atlanta Rising and Gary Pomeranz’s Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: the former is good, the latter is excellent, and certainly helps you understand what on the surface feels like a very weird city. Andrew Zimmerman’s Alabama in Africa was another mind-bending book about the south, which explains (not sure I can do this justice) how late nineteenth century American and German views on race overlapped to the point that the Germans decided that what their new colony in Togo really needed were “ideal” Negroes like those being trained at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, to come over and teach their new Africa subjects how to grow and pick cotton (Washington said yes to the proposal). Deeply weird, as was Oscar Arvie Kinchen’s Confederate Operations in Canada and the North, which is a frankly hilarious account of inept Confederate agents trying to use Canada as a base to incite mayhem in the North in 1864-5 (though as this is a recommendation post, gonna say read Zimmerman, not Kinchen). Rounding out the southern theme was James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of the Republic, which is the volume of the Oxford History of the United States dealing with the period 1848-1865. It is extraordinarily good, though maybe not as good as What Hath God Wrought, the volume dealing with 1815-48. I have decided to read the entire series now.
Inevitably, because it’s 2018, I read both Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and Bob Woodward’s Fear, both of which were mostly crap (the good stuff was all serialized in newspapers anyway) but were also unmissable. The only long term damage either book will do will be to Woodward’s reputation if in fact his view that “Mueller has nothing on Trump” turns out to be bullshit.
I loathed Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. It’s not terrible at the beginning, but My God it falls off quickly and by the end is almost unreadable, almost a parody of a leftist critique of power. But the three other books on US history I read were all pretty excellent. Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom is an interesting look at how the notion of Liberty was interpreted by southern slaveowners (and yeah, that’s as trippy as you’d expect). Peter Guardino’s The Dead March, a history of the Mexican-American War, is a fantastic tale of what is maybe America’s most consequential but least remembered conflict (Canadian aside: the reason British Columbia has the borders it does largely come down to the fact that President Polk didn’t want to fight both Mexico and the British Empire at the same time and so declined to push claims that the Oregon Territory extended to 54’40.) And finally, there was Lawrence O’Donnell’s Playing With Fire: the 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics. A great read, I finally understand why Bobby Kennedy has the rep he does, and the allegations that the Nixon campaign co-ordinated with the North Vietnamese to prevent LBJ pulling off a peace accords in the campaign’s dying days and that LBJ knew about it but declined to do anything about it because it would tear the country apart is…well…more familiar-seeming now than it would have been two-and-a-half years ago.
So I shouldn’t say this was all the books I read on America because I also had a fling with books on American indigenous peoples. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ An Indigenous People’s History of the United States – a shorter, snappier and inevitably somewhat shallower version of Olive Dickason’s Canada’s First Nations: A History of the Founding Peoples from the Earliest Times, which I also got through this year. Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region 1660-1815 was fascinating, although in retrospect, it could have been a lot clearer about how various First Nations themselves were organized and how that organization changed in the face of refugees (not to say it entirely avoids the topic, but let’s just say I felt I understood the process of inter-tribal assimilation a lot better after reading James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed, which covers the same process in southeast Asia). Pekka Hamalainen’s The Comanche Empire was a brilliant book, covering about two hundred years of western American history in a way completely different from any I’d ever seen. John Sugden’s Tecumseh: A Life was similar in the sense that it covers an era where solidarity across geographically-disparate Indian populations made a serious – if short-lived – effective stand against westward White expansion (although, again, Canadian aside: it is depressing to see how quick Canada has been since the beginning to toss Indian allies aside as soon as convenient). Also, I enjoyed Jill St. Germain’s Indian Treaty-Making in the United States and Canada 1867-77, which explained a lot of things I had not previously understood about the way the west was settled (basically, the state trailed settlers in the US but came ahead of them in Canada, which changed dynamics enormously). Finally there was Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Tragedy 1846-1873. Impeccably documented. Sickening. The word genocide gets thrown around a lot around with respect to colonization, but there can be few instances where it is as obviously deserved as what happened in California.
This brings me to Canada which I mostly avoided except for books by people I know: Ian Brodie’s At the Centre of Government, which was frankly fascinating (Paul Wells’ review of it in the LRC was pretty much dead on so I’ll just link to it here), James Stewart’s Being Prime Minister which was a fun dart through the daily lives of our Chief Ministers, and my Dad, who wrote Joey Jacobson’s War about our cousin Joey who died in a bomber crash in Holland in 1942 but left behind an extraordinary set of diaries and letters (many to his good friend Monty Berger, great-uncle to Joey Berger whom some of you will know). Bias forbids a rational review, but you know, go buy it. Apart from that there was just the Shaw/Zussman book A Matter of Confidence, which was about the last couple of years of the BC Liberal Government. One of those books you appreciate in the sense that it’s good someone is doing first drafts of history in each province but man, this kind of work doesn’t even travel well inside Canada.
Anything else? A couple of books on sports I guess. A couple on sumo, including a very good beginner’s guide called Discovering Sumo by an ex-Yobidashi (the dudes with the fans and who carry the flags and sweep the dohyo) – it’s only available in Japan but if you’re over there and interested in one of the greatest sports on Earth, pick up a copy. Sebastian Abbott’s The Away Game is an interesting take on the ASPIRE academy in Doha, which was billed when it opened over a decade ago as having the world’s largest football scouting system, and designed to develop the world’s (although in practice Africa’s) best talent into…well, this was never clear exactly. The core of a new Qatar team, ready for 2022? FIFA put the kibosh on that idea pretty quickly. In any case, the book suffers from the fact that after building up your sympathy for the various discoverees for 100 pages there is a sudden, massive reveal which kind of blows up the whole narrative (not telling what it is, go read it yourself). Joshua Kloke’s Come on You Reds is a must for Toronto FC fans who want to re-live seven years of unremitting horror followed by the most glorious year of 2017, but while it recounts the history in a cover-the-bases kind of way, true fans may be disappointed it doesn’t actually get behind the scenes at some of the most perplexing junctions of the team’s history (it does a bit with respect to the Carver era, which is probably the best bit, but otherwise no). And of course, I read Alou: My Baseball Journey. I loved Felipe for what he did for my Expos; I loved him more after reading it for the way he stood up for Latin American players in the 1960s, Your mileage may vary, of course, but I loved every second of this.
So anyway, that’s it. Not quite every non-fiction book I read, but near all of them. So which ones come at the top of the list? In my honorable mention category, I would probably include: Vatikiotis – Blood and Silk, Harper – The Fate of Rome, Hilmes – Berlin 1936, Pomerantz – Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, McPherson – Battle Cry of the Republic, Hamalainen – The Comanche Empire, Madley – An American Genocide and Fallows & Fallows – Our Towns.
My must-read list would be: Alexeievich – The Unwomanly Art of War, von Tunzelmann – Blood and Sand, Steil – The Marshall Plan, Jones Paris: the Biography of a City, O’Donnell – Playing With Fire and Guardino – The Dead March.
But the top book? Hands Down, Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom. Brilliant and essential.
See you all next year!
So Many Books To Read 