Tag Archives: Society

A History of Warfare – John Keegan

“Future peacekeepers and peacemakers have much to learn from alternative military cultures, not only that of the Orient but of the primitive world also. There is a wisdom in the principles of intellectual restrain and even of symbolic ritual that needs to be rediscovered.”

Perhaps the best known dictum on military affairs is Clausewitz’s ‘War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.’ This, Keegan argues in History of Warfare, is nonsense. War is fundamentally shaped by many factors, most notably culture, and to ascribe its entire existence as an extension of policy is to confuse modern war with war itself.

To illustrate his point, Keegan surveys much of the history of warfare, from the Yanomamö in South America, who resolved minor disputes with a chest pounding duel (each participant took turns hitting the other on the chest until one surrendered) to Aztec flower wars (yearly wars intended to capture the highest possible rank of captive, who was then tortured to death) to medieval conflicts in which the two sides would agree beforehand how long a siege should last before the other side gave up and was permitted to leave.

Only modern wars, Keegan argues, have truly become about victory at all costs. The problem is that this is a very dangerous way to fight. Restraint, whether the influence of Buddhism on the Samurai or a cultural ethic among a group of tribes, can help limit the harm warriors can do to each other and war can do to the society that hosts it. Humanity needs warriors, he argues, because we all have the potentiality for violence, but we need armies that are disciplined, law-abiding, and moderate.

Military history has lost some of its shine in recent years, for what are probably good reasons. Keegan is one of the top modern military historians, however, known both for his broad, sweeping arguments and his command of the detail of military history. This book accomplishes exactly that: it provides both a great overview of military history in a number of contexts, and uses it to make a broader argument. My only criticism would be that he is not always easy to read: his sentences tend towards the complicated and the multi-clausal. If this is something you’re interested in, though, History of Warfare is the place to start.

 

Rome: An Empire’s Story – Greg Woolf

What, you might wonder, is the future fate of America? Americans, of course, consider their country different from any other, and with some justification. It was explicitly founded, however, in the shadow of an earlier empire: Rome. To understand the fate and evolution of empires, it pays to try to understand those that occurred in the past.

Rome: An Empire’s Story asks just that. How did the Roman empire survive so long, and do so well, and what lessons does it hold for other empires?

A few key lessons: hybridization is essential. Ideally, empires arise on the margins of another civilization, able to draw lessons from many places while forced to survive. Macedonia was on the edge of Greece: Rome at the margins of Etruscan land. Even the New World was on the fringes of the old. Rome’s key early advantage, though, was institutional: the novelty of imposing obligations on defeated enemies, and then expanding citizenship, helped consolidate their power. Citizens of Rome genuinely identified with Rome, in a way that our nationalist modern world struggles to understand – even after the fall of the West, societies we don’t typically identify with the Romans identified as such and sought to recreate the empire.

Woolf, though, doesn’t believe empires can still work. Constantine, he argued, adopted Christianity in an effort to hold the empire together: as ties to being Roman weakened, he thought adopting a single religion could provide an alternative. Unfortunately, it divided the empire even further, particularly given the incessant squabbling within Christianity. He thus points to the rise of universal religions as the end of the age of empire: it may not have destroyed Rome directly, but it made empires less feasible by creating a new tie to individual loyalty. IS, take note.

The story is not a new one: Gibbon would have agreed. It’s also almost certainly a vast oversimplification – Empires are complicated things, and trying to draw lessons from one for all empires is suspiciously close to anecdotal evidence. Religion and other ethnic, nationalist, and group loyalties do matter, though, and certainly play a role in events today, whether in the Middle East or Russia.

Empire’s Story alternates chapters about the history of Rome with thematic ones on things like slavery and empire, imperical ecology, and other topics. For that reason, it can be tough going unless you already have a background in Roman history: trying to cover so much content means he is necessarily brief on many issues. The issue of what led to the success and stability of the Roman Empire qua empire is an interesting one, but the book doesn’t always deliver on its promise.

College Disrupted – Ryan Craig

“We can no longer afford for higher education to be a slot machine with a few hitting the jackpot and most going home with less money in their pocket and no better off.”

Are you myopic about American higher education? To find out, see if you can name 50 universities in the U.S. that i) don’t have the name of a state in their name and ii) don’t have a division I football or basketball team. Remember that there are 6000 Title IV eligible colleges and universities in the US, so I’m asking you to name less than 1 in 100 of American schools.

Most people can’t. And most people, when they picture a college, think of an 18-22 year old at Harvard. Yet only 29% of America’s students are 18-22 year-olds attending a four year college full time. By comparison, 43% are over 25.

This, says Craig, is symptomatic of a problem in American higher education: that people think that the Ivy Leagues have discovered the only way to teach, and that everywhere else is just an inferior version trying to be like them. Leaving aside whether a school with no endowment can emulate one with $30 billion in the bank, it is this illusion that means many students drop out, take out loans they regret, and are otherwise disappointed by the system. In the top 50 schools, graduation rates are near 90%: for four year colleges overall, they’re 55%, and for 2 year colleges they are 29%.

College Disrupted looks at a range of modern trends in higher education, from technology to unbundling to internationalization, and looks at what education can and should look like in response. The book is choc-full of fascinating ideas and insights, and if some of his predictions are almost certainly wrong, they are all worth thinking about.

His final suggestion is that, appalling as the idea may initially sound, the American education system learn to value diversity, and establish a two-tier system: Harvard and its ilk for the elite students, and cheaper, online and technology-rich credentials for the rest. Not an ideal system, but a more honest one, in which students can get what they pay for, instead of paying enormous tuitions to support faculty who do not benefit them and buildings that do not enhance their learning.

I can’t possibly cover all the interesting ideas College Disrupted does, and I’m not going to try. There are a lot. My only criticism would be the book can sometimes feel disorganized, and a bit hard to take concise lessons away from. Since that’s also true of higher education sometimes, perhaps that’s unsurprising. Regardless, a fascinating and educational book, and well worth the read.

Disclosure: I read College Disrupted as an advance reader copy. You can see Amazon’s reviews of College Disrupted here.

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

“The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.”

“Where men cant [sic] live gods fare no better.”

How do you keep hope when there is little left to hope for? Worse yet, how do you convince others to hope when you are unsure if you have any hope left? Do you lie? Would that make it worse when they found out? Do you honestly confess your own doubts, risking making the other’s worse?

How encouraging to be when things are going badly is always tricky, whether to a friend who lost their job or a child trying a new sport. The extreme, though, is expertly painted by McCarthy in The Road. A post-apocalyptic father and son journey South in the hope of finding a warmer climate. The timid son is confronted by a reality that had his mother abandon them without hope years past, while his father does his best to keep the fire alive. They strike bargains: the son demands his father not give him a larger share of the food they find, for if he is dishonest in small things, how can he be trusted in large things? They face a world in which killing themselves might be merciful, rather than cruel: the father wonders this for himself, but cannot face the reality of doing the same to his son. Given his own doubts, however, how can he keep his son going?

The Road has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer, and has also been turned into a relatively successful movie. McCarthy himself has had a series of bestselling books, including All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men, which in its movie version won Best Picture. He is also often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Road is not an uplifting read, but it is an important read, and like all the best fiction, gives the reader a better understanding of his fellow humans and even himself.

The Perfect Swarm – Len Fisher

“Simple rules, patterns and formulae can often help us steer our way through, but in the end it is the complexity that rules. OK?”

The world is pretty complicated these days. How, you might wonder, should you best navigate in a world that seems overwhelming? Perfect Swarm argues that we can use simple rules to defeat and exploit complexity. Locusts, for example, have tremendously large swarms – the largest can be 513,000 km2 and contain 12.5 million insects – but their wings are delicate, and if they collide in midair they might die. Fortunately, no ESP is needed to guide the swarm: instead, they individually follow simple rules of avoidance, alignment, and attraction to create a seemingly chaotic mass out of order. Fish, bees, birds, and many other animals do the same.

What does this mean for humans? One fascinating implication for leadership is that if most people are just swarming, even if only a very few members of the group have a clear direction, the entire group will move that way. Charisma, dignity, etc., might all help, but in the end as long as you have a goal and other members of the group don’t, everyone will follow you there. This has even been rather charmingly demonstrated in a room of students asked to wander randomly but not get too far from other students: adding a couple students with a destination to the mix means all the students end up at that destination!

To achieve clarity, the book trades a lot of elegance and detail, and it can sometimes feel oversimplified. The later chapters of the book focus on heuristics (simple rules for decision-making), and perhaps it’s because it is my field, but for me the section felt so simplified as to be hard to extrapolate from. If you’re looking for a fairly simple introduction to chaos theory and how different disciplines have attempted to resolve the problem, though, as well as some personally applicable insights on how to move through a crowd or decide between multiple options, Perfect Swarm can certainly provide.

Shopping for Votes: How politicians choose us and we choose them – Susan Delacourt

“Where politicians once made church basements the fixture of their campaign road trips, the refreshment-stop of choice is no the ubiquitous Tim Hortons…Canadian politics no longer bears much resemblance to the church (except maybe the occasional sermon) but our marketing politicians seem right at home among sales posters, advertising and cash registers.”

Reading the newspaper, it would be easy to believe that politicians make judgments based on polls: 42% support for X, 27% support for Y. The truth, argues Shopping for Votes, is significantly more complicated.

As technology has improved and politicians have gotten better at identifying individual voters, the ability of political parties to target messages more precisely has also increased. Parties now divide voters into archetypes: Zoe, the yoga-loving left wing younger condo owner, or Dougie, a single tradesman who liked to hunt (both archetypes are drawn from the 2006 Conservative strategy in Canada). Zoe would never vote for the Conservatives, so could be safely ignored – Dougie was a potential supporter, and so a key target. In the event, the Conservatives managed to identify 500,000 individual voters they needed to convince to vote Conservative: the millions of others were either already voting Conservative, unlikely to ever vote Conservative, or in non-marginal constituencies. National polls of average support become totally irrelevant, even if everyday voters follow them closely.

The danger, argues Delacourt, is that as a result politics is more polarized than ever. Politicians don’t look for broad, uniting policies: they look for ones that will target their key groups, ignoring the impact or effect on others. The result is that as consumers increasingly shop for the best party, choosing not to identify with any one group, parties also shop for the right voters, offering finely tuned products to different groups. The government is no longer the home of bold national projects or grand ideas, but rather small, carefully targeted ones. As a result, creating a national brand often falls to the private sector. In Canada, that has mean Tim Hortons and Molson ad campaigns are responsible for nationalism, not the government.

It’s a powerful – and interesting – message, and one that I suspect resonates with a lot of voters. The book is a great insight into how political hacks, as opposed to voters, think about elections, and how elections are being changed by trends like big data and better econometrics. An important and useful read, and if nominally targeted towards Canada, relevant to most electoral systems.

The Almost Nearly Perfect People: The Truth About the Nordic Miracle by Michael Booth – Michael Booth

“Denmark was the happiest place in the world. The happiest? This dark, wet, dull, flat little country made up of one peninsula, Jutland, and a handful of islands to its east with its handful of stoic, sensible people and the highest taxes in the world? The United States was twenty-third on the list. But a man at a university had said it, so it must be true.”

Scandinavia is often referred to as some sort of paradise, where all is well and everyone is happy. Michael Booth, a Brit living in Denmark, tries to understand whether that reputation is deserved, and if so why. To spoil the ending, he believes we have much to learn from those countries, including their priorities, how they handle their wealth, and how they balance work and play while educating themselves and supporting each other. He also has serious concerns, about increasing fissures around race and social equality, alcoholism, a vast public service that is funded with an ever increasing share of total income, and – particularly in Denmark – a debt to income ratio that is double that of Spain and quadruple that of Italy.

The strength of the book, though, is in his witty, clever, and curmudgeonly perspective on it all. Booth is a funny and entertaining writer, and it makes the whole book work, part travel guide and part documentary. If you want a serious analysis of why Finland’s education system is one of the best in the world, why the suicides rates in Scandinavia are so high, or why Sweden is the 8th largest arms exporter in the world, this isn’t the book for you. If you are planning on visiting the countries, though, or better yet moving there, The Almost Nearly Perfect People can teach you to avoid sitting next to the host at a party in Sweden unless you want to make a speech; give you advice on how to socialize with the remarkably taciturn Finns; and above all, make you laugh.

Disclosure: I read this as a Advance Reader Copy. You can get it on Amazon: Almost Nearly Perfect People.

The Economist Best Books 2014

Something like a quarter of all book sales are made in the month before Christmas each year – it’s a popular gift! I thought, therefore, it might useful to take a look at some 2014 book lists.

The Economist released their list in the most recent edition – I’ve included the summaries of some but not all. One in particular stands out to me: Pinker’s The Sense of Style – highly recommended, and you can read my review at the link!

For a focus on non-fiction in particular, you could also look at Tyler Cowen’s recommendations.

Politics and current affairs

The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. By Louisa Lim. Oxford University Press; 248 pages; $24.95 and £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
Twenty-five years after the bloodshed in Beijing, new details keep emerging. This reconstruction, by a correspondent for America’s National Public Radio, is as important for Western readers as it is for the new Chinese generation that has grown up since 1989 and knows little of what happened.

The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech. By Flemming Rose. Cato Institute; 240 pages; $24.95. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
The culture editor of the Danish newspaper that published cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 offers a personal account of the ensuing controversy and what it means for democracy.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy. By Francis Fukuyama. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 658 pages; $35. Profile; £25. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
A superstar academic, who in 1992 tried to persuade people that they had got to the end of history, returns admitting that things are more complicated than he imagined. China has adopted a mixture of state capitalism and authoritarianism, and democratisation has failed in Russia and most of the Middle East. What is needed are high-quality political institutions; not an easy thing to build.

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China.

Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923.

The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia.

Indonesia Etc: Exploring the Improbable Nation.

China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa.

Biography and memoir

Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Concise Life. By John Röhl. Cambridge University Press; 240 pages; $24.99 and £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
Scholarship and authority shine through this short version of John Röhl’s 4,000-page, multi-volume life of Kaiser Wilhelm, an emotionally needy, bombastic, choleric and hypersensitive man quite ill-suited to run the most powerful country in Europe.

 Napoleon: A Life. By Andrew Roberts. Viking; 976 pages; $45. Allen Lane; £30. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
A British historian makes full use of the treasure trove of Napoleon’s 33,000-odd letters and concludes that the French emperor was a tactical military genius who made some serious strategic mistakes and was far from being a brilliant statesman.

H is for Hawk. By Helen Macdonald. Jonathan Cape; 300 pages; £14.99. To be published in America by Grove Atlantic in March 2015. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
A bird’s-eye view of love and loss, this meditation on nature, raptors, grief and the strange life of T.H. White—English author of “The Goshawk”—was the discovery of the season. Winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.

E.E. Cummings: A Life. By Susan Cheever. Pantheon; 213 pages; $26.95. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
Inward-looking and now unfashionable, E.E. Cummings is a tricky poet to understand. With boundless new detail gathered through meticulous research, Susan Cheever succeeds where most other biographers have failed.

Faisal I of Iraq.

Little Failure: A Memoir.

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery.

History

The English and Their History. By Robert Tombs. Allen Lane; 1,012 pages; £35. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
A British academic shows how being a historian of France helped him recognise that his fellow Englishmen and women have embraced pluralism and immigration for at least 1,300 years, he concludes, and they should not give it up as it is a characteristic strength.

Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648. By Mark Greengrass. Viking; 752 pages; $45. Allen Lane; £30. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
A magisterial account of the birth of modern Europe, from the Reformation, which broke the dominance of the Roman Catholic church, to the Peace of Westphalia, which entrenched the idea of the nation-state.

The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. By Kevin Birmingham. Penguin Press; 417 pages; $29.95. Head of Zeus; £20. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
A gripping account of how a banned masterpiece, James Joyc’s “Ulysses”, was published in instalments in small literary magazines and then in private, limited print runs by dedicated patrons (most of them women) who had to smuggle copies into America and Britain.

Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin and Sadat at Camp David.

Why Homer Matters.

The Reckoning: Death and Intrigue in the Promised Land.

Economics and business

Capital in the Twenty-First Century. 

The Forgotten Depression, 1921: The Crash that Cured Itself.

Science and technology

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. By Elizabeth Kolbert. Henry Holt; 302 pages; $28. Bloomsbury; £20. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
Five previous extinctions wiped out plant and animal life on a huge scale; now a sixth is upon us. Is life resilient enough to withstand mankind?

The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. By Nina Teicholz. Simon & Schuster; 479 pages; $27.99. Scribe; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
A historical study of how fat came to be demonised, especially in America, by a mix of academics, government officials and food companies, and how the few sceptics who dared take on the fat orthodoxy have been much disparaged for their pains. Detailed in its research and eloquent in its argument, this is the year’s most surprising diet book.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. By Atul Gawande. Metropolitan Books; 282 pages; $26. Profile; £15.99. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
A thoughtful American doctor, who gave the 2014 Reith lectures, recounts how many of his patients spend their final hours hooked up to machines, under fluorescent lights, surrounded by strangers. Far better to think through the implications and plan for the end you really want.

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology.

Culture, society and travel

Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family. By June Carbone and Naomi Cahn. Oxford University Press; 272 pages; $29.95 and £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
Asking why fewer people marry, two American legal academics show how, over the decades, economic inequality has undermined the rationality of marriage for many and weakened the family.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. By Steven Pinker. Viking; 359 pages; $27.95. Allen Lane; £20. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
With gentle good humour, the Harvard psycholinguist explains that a good piece of writing is like the perfect soufflé appearing in a spotless kitchen at the end of a cooking show: “The messy work has been done beforehand and behind the scenes.” A good read for all ages.

Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools. By Joel Klein. Harper; 320 pages; $27.99. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
The former chancellor of New York’s department of education knows at first hand how much a child’s education is linked to his or her success in life. He has much to say about his nine-year campaign to improve the city’s school system and how it could become a blueprint for reform of America’s education system.

Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism and Road Revolt in Saudi Arabia.

The Reef, A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change.

Germany: Memories of a Nation.

Fiction

The Narrow Road to the Deep North. By Richard Flanagan. Knopf; 352 pages; $26.95. Chatto & Windus; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
A journey of loss and discovery set among the prisoners of war who were sent to build the “Death Railway” between Thailand and Burma during the second world war. Winner of the 2014 Man Booker prize for fiction and replete with scenes that stay with the reader long after the final page, this is the book that Richard Flanagan was born to write.

Lila. By Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 272 pages; $26. Virago; £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
The third of Marilynne Robinson’s novels to be set in Gilead, Iowa, and featuring John Ames, a Congregationalist preacher, turns to the story of Ames’s late-in-life wife. A former prostitute and cleaner, Lila, in her new incarnation, learns about grace, joy and love, lessons that are imparted with no trace of soppiness. By one of the finest writers in America.

Decoded. By Mai Jia. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 315 pages; $26. Allen Lane; £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk
At last, a fine Chinese novel that holds its own as a work that book-lovers with no special knowledge of China will relish. By a former member of the intelligence services, “Decoded” stands out for its pace and for the sheer novelty of the tale it tells.

Arctic Summer.

Orfeo.

No Man’s Land: Fiction from a World at War.

Thirty Girls: A Novel.

Family Life: A Novel.

Fourth of July Creek.

Uncertain Glory.

Strange Pilgrims – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“He sat on a wooden bench under the yellow leaves in the deserted park, contemplating the dusty swans with both his hands resting on the silver handle of his cane, and thinking about death.”

Strange Pilgrims is a lightning tour of Europe, from wind-swept towns in Portugal and Spain to snow-clad Geneva and Paris. The central theme is of Latin Americans adrift in Europe, and many of the stories also involve death, either directly or as a motif. The focus is on what it is to be in a strange land, perhaps reflecting some of Marquez’s time as a virtual exile from Columbia. Might be valuable reading for UKIP or the Fronte Nationale, if they were looking to understand immigrants a bit better.

The name, somewhat obscurely, comes from the fact that it has taken Marquez years to write the stories (originally drafted in the 70s, they were published in 92): they have been pilgrims from the wastebasket to his desk and back multiple times, before finally emerging in their final – or at least current – form.

As is usual with Marquez, his stories are visually stimulating, creating whole pictures in your mind leavened with moments of humour. Several stories also feature magic realism, for which he is best known. Some are terrifying (one in particular, “I only came to use the phone”), and others are touching or inspiring. The line above opens the first of the 12 stories, a particularly good one about a former president trapped in Geneva by medical problems he cannot afford to have treated, nothing left but his dignity. In another, a newly-married couple travels to Europe only to find themselves trapped apart by a language and custom they do not understand, to a tragic end. All are worthwhile, and all bear Marquez’s classic stamp of humour mixed with stunning imagery and emotion.

Dangling Man – Saul Bellow

“Trouble, like physical pain, makes us actively aware that we are living, and when there is little in the life we lead to hold and draw and stir us, we seek and cherish it, preferring embarrassment or pain to indifference.”

Saul Bellow is a Canadian-born Pulizter Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature winner. In the words of the Nobel Committee, his writing possesses a “subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting.” Dangling Man was his first book.

Dangling Man is a study of a man who cannot find his place in the world, who finds freedom a burden from which he cannot escape. He finds himself growing violent, angry, anything to escape the isolation and monotony of days he cannot seem to fill: he joins the army in order to achieve some blessed regimentation, to eliminate the need for individuality and reflection.

The book is hardly a cheerful one: I would go so far as to call it depressing, painting a picture of the human spirit I do not relish. It’s beautifully written, but as happens with some novels, more interesting after you’ve read it than enjoyable as you do. In a modern world that places an enormous weight on freedom, the idea that freedom might be undesirable presents a dilemma not easily solved. Bellow doesn’t answer the question, but then he doesn’t try to: he paints a vivid portrait of a man trapped in the four walls of his room, not because he cannot leave, but because he doesn’t why he should.