Recent Reading

 Some selected books from recent months:

I learned about The Trigger by Tim Butcher while listening to the Rest is History podcast on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the spark that ignited the first World War in 1914.  Butcher was a correspondent in Bosnia during the Bosnian War of 1992-5.  In the trigger revisits Bosnia in 2012, going to the isolated village where the assassin Gavrilo Princip was born and raised.  He mostly walks as he retraces Princip's footsteps to Sarajevo, where he went to school, and then on to Belgrade in Serbia and his return journey to the fateful rendezvous with Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.  Along the way, Butcher discovers some previously unknown documentation on Princip.  But this book is more than about 1914.  Butcher draws the common threads between Princip's motivation for the shooting and what he witnessed in the 1990s, along with reflecting on the scars still visible on the land and in the people when he returned in 2012.  Butcher is a terrific writer, very perceptive and thoughtful.  Highly recommended.

In a August post I referenced TG Otte's July Crisis, also discovered listening to the Rest is History, covering the period from the assassination to the outbreak of the war.  A detailed blow by blow account, a bit drier than Butcher's book but good reading about appalling events in which some duplicitous diplomats deserve blame for the tragic outcome.  My description of those weeks from the earlier post:

The period from the morning of June 28 to July 31 leaves one with the same feeling as watching a "by the numbers" horror movie where find yourself thinking "don't open that door!", "don't go in that room!!", and "splitting up is a really bad strategy!!!", yet the characters proceed to go ahead, nonetheless.

Twilight at Monticello by Allen Pell Crawford covers Thomas Jefferson's 17 year retirement beginning in 1809 when he left the presidency.  Fascinating reading of what seems like a time of much sadness for Jefferson.  A famous figure, deluged by letters and visitors, but seeing Monticello in continuing financial distress, with quarrels breaking out within his family, failing to address slavery at the most personal level (unlike George Washington), and plagued by increasingly poor health.

The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government by Fergus Bordwich is the first book I've read about the inner workings of the House, Senate, and Executive Branch from 1789-91.  As the title says, they were inventing everything, making it up as they went along, guided by the often vague language of the Constitution.  The first problem was how hard it was to get the new representatives and senators to even show up, as it took weeks after the the official start of the government to reach a quorum.  The Supreme Court held its opening session and then disbanded for months because it had no cases to hear.  And Washington felt his way into his new role.  Lots of depth to the research and I learned quite a lot.

Moving ahead to the Second World War, we have The Washington War: FDR's Inner Circle and the Politics of Power That Won World War II by James Lacey.   This was an uneven book; the best parts on the little known White House and sub-cabinet officers who had to mobilize America's industrial base to produce the staggering amount of armaments to win the war and the bureaucratic infighting along the way.  Other parts are a rehash of military and high policy issues that I was already familiar with.  A mixed verdict but worth it for the best parts.

The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, The Cold War, and the World on the Brink by William Inboden is a masterpiece.  The book focuses exclusively on Reagan's foreign policy.  Inboden grew up with a generally unfavorable view of Reagan which he revised after doing the research for the book.  Reagan was at his best with his large strategic view and his adherence to it, throughout his administration.  He did win the Cold War with a very different view of it than his predecessors.  His assessment of the Soviet Union's financial stability proved more accurate than that of the intelligence and academic communities.(1) Although portrayed as dunce by the media and Democrats, he actually did read his briefing books (unlike some other presidents), while also horrifying a large number of conservatives when they realized he wanted to abolish nuclear weapons and began making deals with Gorbachev, over whom he'd attained psychological dominance.

The book is not a hagiography, going into the president's failures in Lebanon and in Iran-Contra, and pointing out that while a superb strategist and mobilizer of public opinion through his eloquence, he was a terrible day to day manager which created its own set of problems.  The book also conveys what it was like to make decisions given the enormous pressures and uncertainties faced by those in the administration.  Whether the decisions proved good or bad we understand how they looked to those making them at the time.  A big book but worth the investment of time to understand how the world changed so dramatically in his administration.

I was disappointed in the most recent installments of two of my favorite fiction series; The Waiting by Michael Connelly and Martin Walker's A Grave In The Woods.  I've always enjoyed the setting, Dordogne, and the characters in Walker's series on Bruno, a local police chief and the charming cast of characters revolving around him, but the plots have gotten increasingly outlandish and the writing sloppier.  I will continue to read the books because of my past enjoyment but would only recommend the first ten to new readers.  Connelly is a better writer than Walker and his Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller novels are great reads, well plotted and compellingly written.  But Bosch has gotten older, retired, and only appears as a bit player in his new novel which centers on LAPD's Renee Ballard, who is just not as interesting a character as Bosch or Haller.

Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History by Nellie Bowles is the tale of a journey.  A journalist of the progressive persuasion, she joined the New York Times.  She eventually left the Times for two reasons.  She started dating Bari Weiss, another progressive working as an editor at the Times.  Because Weiss believed in platforming views that occasionally dissented from progressive thought she came under constant assault from her fellow journalists.  Bowles recounts being out to dinner with her editor and colleagues, when the editor, in all seriousness, questioned why Nellie was dating Bari, saying of her, "She's a Nazi. She's a fucking Nazi.", to which all her colleagues eagerly agreed.

The other reason was what she saw in her reporting.  In her words:

When I started this, I was a little angry.  After I wrote some of these chapters, I quit the paper. . . . I traveled to Portland's late-night Antifa rallies and spent days in the no-cop autonomous zones of Seattle and Minneapolis, looking for utopia.  I looked at the attempts to atone for our collective sins, visiting homeless encampments run by BMW-driving socialists and taking courses led by America's leading anti-racist educators, who happen to be mostly middle=aged white women.  When the revolution made a turn from race to gender, I followed it, exploring why so many children were being born into the wrong bodies, their genders so far from their flesh. 

The book is best suited for readers who don't know already know the truth about the stories Bowles covered.  Since I already did, I found of most interest the earliest sections which recount the inside working of the New York Times, another of our once-great institutions that has self-destructed.

The good news is that after Weiss was expelled as a heretic from the Times, and Bowles resigned, they started a new social media company, The Free Press, which is thriving, both as journalism and financially because it turned out there was a mass audience for journalism not designed to push predetermined narratives.

The Morning After ends with on a cautionary note, writing that the first phase of the revolution was ending as she finished her book:

Black Lives Matter was in disgrace.  All the autonomous zones had shuttered.  The police were re-funded.  The Tavistock pediatric gender clinic in England where children would be assessed and begin their transitions?  That's shutting down.  

But did the quieter streets mean it was done? Hardly.  The ideas became the operating principle of big business, the tech company handbook, the head of HR, the statement you have to write to get a job in a university.(2)  The movement fell apart because of how fully it succeeded.  It didn't need to announce itself so loudly anymore.  We didn't need to notice it anymore.  . . .  There are a thousand tiny changes we've just grown accustomed to.

On my Kindle awaiting reading:

Chasing Bright Medusas, a biography of Willa Cather, of whom I became a fan after recently reading Death Comes for the Archbishop and My Antonia.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.  I anticipate a challenging read.  Hope it is worth the effort.

The Line of Splendor by Salina Baker.  A historical novel about Nathanael Greene, the outstanding and little known Revolutionary War general who saved the South from the British.

The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution by Timothy Tacket.  How a bunch of mild-mannered reformers ended up chopping off heads, including their own.

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(1) Ah, if only we could have had some brave bureaucratic soul like Alexander Vindman become a whistle blower to Congress, denouncing the President for defying "the consensus" of the foreign policy establishment. 

(2) And these ideas became the top domestic priority of the Biden administration, implemented through two Executive Order, embedding them throughout the federal government and even looking ahead to require that any AI used by the government must embed within the racial and general biases of this ideology.