With the new year, Biden settling into the White House, and the vaccines rolling out, my reading pace has picked up from its previous pandemic low.
So rather than work up longer individual reviews of the books I've gone through, I thought I'd do a quick breakdown of them, all at once, in reverse order (so, the most recent book I finished this month is listed first).
Here we go!
Not All Dead White Men, by Donna Zuckerberg
A frustrating read. Zuckerberg (yes, the Facebook founder is her brother) provides a detailed, anthropological study of how the denizens of the manosphere wield Classical authors to promote their racist, misogynist views. What she doesn't cover is any way to counter these arguments. If anything, she comes down on their side, agreeing that yes, the Classical tradition contains lots of misogyny (Though no racism, since race as a concept wasn't invented till the modern period. Which makes it weird that she would fall into the right-wing trap of assigning Whiteness to the Mediterranean authors of the Classical tradition? But I digress).
The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy, by Michael Lewis
A set of separately-published essays stitched together in book form. It works, because each essays illuminates a different side of the central question: What happened when an administration scornful of expertise took control of the nation's experts?
This was published in 2018, and already Lewis could see -- via his interviews and investigation -- that disaster was coming. We've got a lot to rebuild.
The Mongol Art of War, by Timothy May
Discovered this via military historian Bret Devereux's excellent series of blog posts about the historical accuracy of the Dothraki in A Song of Ice and Fire (narrator: there is none).
It's a fairly quick read, giving a detailed look -- well, as detailed as we can get, given the reliability of our historical sources -- at how the Mongol army was able to conquer so much of Asia and Europe in such a short period of time. Goes through command structure, tactics, even some detailed logistics. For example, did you know Mongols preferred riding mares on campaign, because they could drink the milk provided (and thus not need to bring as much food along)? Or that the Mongols built a navy from scratch (with Korean assistance) just so they could conquer southern China? Fascinating stuff.
Lost Art of Finding Our Way, by John Edward Huth
This is one I'm going to be reading and re-reading. It's basically a manual of all the different navigation techniques used by humans before the invention of GPS. How did the Pacific Islanders sail thousands of miles across open ocean to settle so many islands? Why did the Atlantic triangle trade develop the way it did (hint: it was the prevailing winds)? What sequence of clouds denotes an oncoming storm?
Simply wondrous. Made me look at the world around me in an entirely new way.
Reaganland, by Rick Perlstein
The final volume in Perlstein's excellent series on the rise of the Right in the United States. This one covers 1976-1980, and it's absolutely riveting. All of the techniques we've seen from the GOP under Trump -- misinformation, distortion, and deliberate hyperbole -- got their start in this time period, and coalesced around Reagan as their standard-bearer. His election cemented the shift to the Right that we've been suffering from for the last forty years.
I consider this book essential reading, if you want to understand how we got to this point in American politics.
