Nonfiction
Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty: The authors argue that national success or failure (disintegration, revolution, civil war) depends on two correlated factors, economically extractive class relations and political openness. Extractive economies where the few reap the rewards of the efforts of the many can’t stay democratic very long; economically open societies that protect property rights have trouble staying politically repressive because economically successful people seek enough political representation to prevent all the cream being skimmed from their efforts. What it means to protect property rights is never fully defined, which is a weakness of the book, but at a minimum it seems to mean protecting property from uncompensated expropriation and transfer to another private party; it’s not clear if the property has to be held legitimately in the first place to meet their standards. This isn’t The End of History because (1) the authors acknowledge the effects of contingency and luck that create path-dependent outcomes, such as slight differences between medieval England and Russia that turned into huge differences, and (2) the authors argue that nothing is guaranteed-both forms can flip if a great imbalance develops, particularly if an economic imbalance develops. Their confidence that the American South got rid of segregation (economically extractive) and became democratic seems overblown given Ferguson and the industrial-prison complex, but the South still fits their model pretty well, it seems to me. Interesting read; they don’t think democracy in China is inevitable, but they think that’s because the elites will be motivated to choke off growth to preserve their own power as has happened in other countries, primarily in Africa. It’s impossible to tell whether those elites will succeed but it’s definitely not enough to be confident that economic growth will inevitably lead to democracy. Combined with Piketty, it’s pretty darn depressing.
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century: I know, I know. I actually read Bowling Alone in its entirety too, and had a similar reaction: you can get a pretty good understanding of his thesis from a good review, and it’s not clear that the details add enough to be worth the full read unless you’re in the field. And why should they? I’m not the first to observe that this is a weird hit, heavy on lists and numbers tracking wealth over the centuries and carefully qualified to make sure we never forget that all the numbers are just estimates that probably undercount just how wealthy the wealthiest 1% in the West are and have been since records have been kept. (The partial exception is the post-WWI and WWII eras when so much wealth at the top had been destroyed that they didn’t get much more than half of total wealth.) Piketty contends that there are various structural reasons that wealth from capital-from owning land, machines, and intellectual property-produces greater pretax returns than labor does in almost all historical circumstances, and therefore the rich will get richer in the absence of aggressively progressive taxation. Or, he occasionally suggests, violent revolution, another way that societies have eventually said “enough!” to overconcentration of wealth.
Even though anything that can’t go on forever won’t, he suggests, the richest can soak up so much of a society’s wealth for so long that the rest of us are immiserated, and the existence of a “middle class” is a historical anomaly produced by the great destruction of capital in the world wars-including the destruction involved in decolonization-as well as progressive taxation; now that both of those are over, the ideology of meritocracy is inducing us to ignore massively increasing inequality, now greater in the US than in most other countries and than it has been since records were kept. The twist, such as it is, is that it’s now possible to generate huge fortunes not just from returns on capital but also from what we would call “labor”-athletes and actors, though, generally can’t rise to the highest levels of wealth, though financiers can. The use of novels such as Jane Austen’s to examine what wealth meant in previous periods is fun, but it isn’t exactly a peppy read.
Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction, ed. Isiah Lavender: Free review copy. Collection of pieces mostly about American sf. I liked Gerry Canavan’s piece on Samuel R. Delaney, which includes an extended discussion of Commander Sisko, especially the episode “Far Beyond the Stars” in which he’s the dream of a black sf writer in the twentieth century. Given Star Trek’s limits to diversity, the writer “looks something like Star Trek’s bad conscience or its hidden truth.” Canavan reads Delaney’s works as evoking the “psychic deformation caused by racial difference …. To be privileged when others are not-and to embrace that privilege without compunction or regret-is, in some basic sense, to be fundamentally inhuman.” No one is unmarred by racism, even if those at the top are socially constructed as free and unlimited. The best part, I thought, was in a footnote: Delaney spoke of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers as a foundational text for him because the hero was nonwhite, but that was a non-issue only mentioned glancingly. While that helped Delaney see himself in sf, “Delaney’s memory of the book’s inclusivity seems to have shifted significantly in the retelling; some of the most radically inclusive gestures he describes are not actually in Starship Troopers but appear to exist only in his memory of it.” That’s an awesome example of taking a mixed/problematic text and getting a positive message from it-I have similar memories of the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman, where I took in the empowerment and none of the dismissiveness.
Isaiah Lavender III writes about Octavia Butler’s story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” which is ostensibly about an illness that makes people harm themselves (and sometimes others) but he argues also serves as a metaphor for race, for example by depicting the effects that segregation has on both the healthy and the ill (driven to self-destruction). I didn’t know that Butler resisted readings of “Bloodchild” as being about masters and slaves; as Lavender points out, it is obviously “at least” about masters and slaves, as well as other things-love, coming of age, or pregnant men.
Patrick B. Sharp’s piece on Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony argues that it’s actually science fiction, set in the past. By setting her story on an Indian reservation with a nuclear waste dump, he contends, Silko challenges the conventional idea that the US has yet to experience a nuclear catastrophe. Matthew Goodwin reads several narratives about Mexico/the Mexican-American border, including the film Sleep Dealer, arguing that they challenge the coloniality of the “frontier” in sf. Traditional dystopian fiction involves a privileged protagonist who loses that privilege (e.g., Orwell’s 1984 or Bradbury’s Farhrenheit 451), but the protagonists in these narratives are already “maquiladora workers, minorities, and migrant laborers.” There’s also a reprint of an older piece by Edward James, as well as his subsequent reflections on that piece (where he points out, for example, that he talked about general assumptions of sf writers when he should have added in “white”). The older piece examines sf’s common implication that racial problems have been solved, somehow, by the disappearance of minority groups. Prejudice is for rural folk, not the city of the future; aliens sometimes operate as metaphors of race without the awkward intrusion of actual nonwhites, or if nonwhites do appear they instruct us that prejudice is over. Because of this desire to promote tolerance within an assimilationist framework, James suggests, much sf is only ambiguously “about” race even as it deals with the alien. In some sense, like the economist who assumes a can opener, white American sf has posed an easier problem for itself and then tried to solve that.
José Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond: Free review copy. The basic argument is that Silver Age superheroes engaged with American masculine relations to death and disability, along with everything else. Superpowers sprung from and erased disability, often literalizing the “supercrip” stereotype that let society individualize disability rather than recognize it as socially constructed (we don’t build our buildings with the assumption that everyone can stretch their limbs out twenty feet as necessary). But the disabled alter ego would persistently return, showing the instability of such a solution. Highlights/lowlights included a story, “The Case of the Disabled Justice League,” where the JLA tried to make a group of children with disabilities feel better, got various disabilities themselves, and then found the courage to “overcome” them in order to provide a good example for the children-thus reinforcing the message that disability was an individual issue to be overcome by persistence and cheerfulness. The comics also occasionally pointed to that social construction, at least for those who were looking. For example, the Thing’s experiences often made clear the way that the city was not built for people with non-normative bodies-he could create destruction just trying to make his way across town in good faith. At the same time, the Thing was the member of the Fantastic Four most likely to turn on the others; his recurring depression tied into narratives about people with disabilities as bitter and vengeful, “foisting unreasonable demands on society” and thus earning them deserved retribution.
She-Thing is the one female superhero Alaniz considers in any detail (apparently because Barbara Gordon’s paralysis isn’t a Silver Age thing, though he does go later for some of the other heroes), and he argues that her femininity is persistently shown as something that makes her disability much more wounding and much more grotesque. Alaniz also covers Cyborg as an African-American disabled superhero whose cyborg consciousness offers a case study in assimilation and moderation.
I found the section of the book on death and superheroes less novel. As Alaniz points out, the multiverse concept provides an “elegant” solution to the otherwise intractable problem of character stasis. The market demands the return of the repressed/slaughtered, so the superheroes we care about, by definition, can’t be killed. Alaniz reads this as a version of death denial-the Freudian cape instead of the Freudian slip. (I did quite like his point that the superhero narrative also demands unchangeable deaths-pearls scattering in a rainy alleyway; a red sun exploding. The origin story starts with death. (Except Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman defies convention!))
Overall, Alaniz argues, the tactics of the superhero story-its conventions and cliches-served as strategies to contain threats to American male dominance, but the inevitability of death and non-normative bodies led to “paradoxes, absurd compromises, disavowals, and bad-faith ‘resolutions.’” Despite moments of challenge, like Ben Grimm’s story or The Death of Captain Marvel, comics more often participated in dehumanizing people with disabilities. This isn’t a reception study, so it’s Alaniz’s readings; I would love a book that looked more at readers’ reception.
Jim Newton, Eisenhower: Very positive biography of a stolid Republican who had a temper and loved golf, and delegated a lot of important decisions to his subordinates. Weirdly, the book spends essentially no time on Ike as general: if I were to say “he oversaw D-Day,” I’d only be spending about a paragraph less than the book on the actual details of what he did/decided. I know it's called "The White House Years," but actually the book takes half its time getting there, and it could've used more on Eisenhower's war experiences and whether they affected him at all as president. Newton takes the position that Eisenhower was basically indifferent to racial discrimination (despite his famous comment to Earl Warren about how white girls shouldn’t have to sit next to black boys, which Newton concludes probably did occur) and thought that “both sides” were too aggressive, but sent federal troops to Little Rock to preserve the power of the federal government when directly challenged. Ike also oversaw what was, at the time, a “successful” covert operation against the government of Iran, and unfortunately we took the wrong lessons from that, trying to replicate it across the developing world where we wanted to win proxy battles with the Soviets by hook or by crook.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century: I know, I know. I actually read Bowling Alone in its entirety too, and had a similar reaction: you can get a pretty good understanding of his thesis from a good review, and it’s not clear that the details add enough to be worth the full read unless you’re in the field. And why should they? I’m not the first to observe that this is a weird hit, heavy on lists and numbers tracking wealth over the centuries and carefully qualified to make sure we never forget that all the numbers are just estimates that probably undercount just how wealthy the wealthiest 1% in the West are and have been since records have been kept. (The partial exception is the post-WWI and WWII eras when so much wealth at the top had been destroyed that they didn’t get much more than half of total wealth.) Piketty contends that there are various structural reasons that wealth from capital-from owning land, machines, and intellectual property-produces greater pretax returns than labor does in almost all historical circumstances, and therefore the rich will get richer in the absence of aggressively progressive taxation. Or, he occasionally suggests, violent revolution, another way that societies have eventually said “enough!” to overconcentration of wealth.
Even though anything that can’t go on forever won’t, he suggests, the richest can soak up so much of a society’s wealth for so long that the rest of us are immiserated, and the existence of a “middle class” is a historical anomaly produced by the great destruction of capital in the world wars-including the destruction involved in decolonization-as well as progressive taxation; now that both of those are over, the ideology of meritocracy is inducing us to ignore massively increasing inequality, now greater in the US than in most other countries and than it has been since records were kept. The twist, such as it is, is that it’s now possible to generate huge fortunes not just from returns on capital but also from what we would call “labor”-athletes and actors, though, generally can’t rise to the highest levels of wealth, though financiers can. The use of novels such as Jane Austen’s to examine what wealth meant in previous periods is fun, but it isn’t exactly a peppy read.
Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction, ed. Isiah Lavender: Free review copy. Collection of pieces mostly about American sf. I liked Gerry Canavan’s piece on Samuel R. Delaney, which includes an extended discussion of Commander Sisko, especially the episode “Far Beyond the Stars” in which he’s the dream of a black sf writer in the twentieth century. Given Star Trek’s limits to diversity, the writer “looks something like Star Trek’s bad conscience or its hidden truth.” Canavan reads Delaney’s works as evoking the “psychic deformation caused by racial difference …. To be privileged when others are not-and to embrace that privilege without compunction or regret-is, in some basic sense, to be fundamentally inhuman.” No one is unmarred by racism, even if those at the top are socially constructed as free and unlimited. The best part, I thought, was in a footnote: Delaney spoke of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers as a foundational text for him because the hero was nonwhite, but that was a non-issue only mentioned glancingly. While that helped Delaney see himself in sf, “Delaney’s memory of the book’s inclusivity seems to have shifted significantly in the retelling; some of the most radically inclusive gestures he describes are not actually in Starship Troopers but appear to exist only in his memory of it.” That’s an awesome example of taking a mixed/problematic text and getting a positive message from it-I have similar memories of the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman, where I took in the empowerment and none of the dismissiveness.
Isaiah Lavender III writes about Octavia Butler’s story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” which is ostensibly about an illness that makes people harm themselves (and sometimes others) but he argues also serves as a metaphor for race, for example by depicting the effects that segregation has on both the healthy and the ill (driven to self-destruction). I didn’t know that Butler resisted readings of “Bloodchild” as being about masters and slaves; as Lavender points out, it is obviously “at least” about masters and slaves, as well as other things-love, coming of age, or pregnant men.
Patrick B. Sharp’s piece on Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony argues that it’s actually science fiction, set in the past. By setting her story on an Indian reservation with a nuclear waste dump, he contends, Silko challenges the conventional idea that the US has yet to experience a nuclear catastrophe. Matthew Goodwin reads several narratives about Mexico/the Mexican-American border, including the film Sleep Dealer, arguing that they challenge the coloniality of the “frontier” in sf. Traditional dystopian fiction involves a privileged protagonist who loses that privilege (e.g., Orwell’s 1984 or Bradbury’s Farhrenheit 451), but the protagonists in these narratives are already “maquiladora workers, minorities, and migrant laborers.” There’s also a reprint of an older piece by Edward James, as well as his subsequent reflections on that piece (where he points out, for example, that he talked about general assumptions of sf writers when he should have added in “white”). The older piece examines sf’s common implication that racial problems have been solved, somehow, by the disappearance of minority groups. Prejudice is for rural folk, not the city of the future; aliens sometimes operate as metaphors of race without the awkward intrusion of actual nonwhites, or if nonwhites do appear they instruct us that prejudice is over. Because of this desire to promote tolerance within an assimilationist framework, James suggests, much sf is only ambiguously “about” race even as it deals with the alien. In some sense, like the economist who assumes a can opener, white American sf has posed an easier problem for itself and then tried to solve that.
José Alaniz, Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond: Free review copy. The basic argument is that Silver Age superheroes engaged with American masculine relations to death and disability, along with everything else. Superpowers sprung from and erased disability, often literalizing the “supercrip” stereotype that let society individualize disability rather than recognize it as socially constructed (we don’t build our buildings with the assumption that everyone can stretch their limbs out twenty feet as necessary). But the disabled alter ego would persistently return, showing the instability of such a solution. Highlights/lowlights included a story, “The Case of the Disabled Justice League,” where the JLA tried to make a group of children with disabilities feel better, got various disabilities themselves, and then found the courage to “overcome” them in order to provide a good example for the children-thus reinforcing the message that disability was an individual issue to be overcome by persistence and cheerfulness. The comics also occasionally pointed to that social construction, at least for those who were looking. For example, the Thing’s experiences often made clear the way that the city was not built for people with non-normative bodies-he could create destruction just trying to make his way across town in good faith. At the same time, the Thing was the member of the Fantastic Four most likely to turn on the others; his recurring depression tied into narratives about people with disabilities as bitter and vengeful, “foisting unreasonable demands on society” and thus earning them deserved retribution.
She-Thing is the one female superhero Alaniz considers in any detail (apparently because Barbara Gordon’s paralysis isn’t a Silver Age thing, though he does go later for some of the other heroes), and he argues that her femininity is persistently shown as something that makes her disability much more wounding and much more grotesque. Alaniz also covers Cyborg as an African-American disabled superhero whose cyborg consciousness offers a case study in assimilation and moderation.
I found the section of the book on death and superheroes less novel. As Alaniz points out, the multiverse concept provides an “elegant” solution to the otherwise intractable problem of character stasis. The market demands the return of the repressed/slaughtered, so the superheroes we care about, by definition, can’t be killed. Alaniz reads this as a version of death denial-the Freudian cape instead of the Freudian slip. (I did quite like his point that the superhero narrative also demands unchangeable deaths-pearls scattering in a rainy alleyway; a red sun exploding. The origin story starts with death. (Except Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman defies convention!))
Overall, Alaniz argues, the tactics of the superhero story-its conventions and cliches-served as strategies to contain threats to American male dominance, but the inevitability of death and non-normative bodies led to “paradoxes, absurd compromises, disavowals, and bad-faith ‘resolutions.’” Despite moments of challenge, like Ben Grimm’s story or The Death of Captain Marvel, comics more often participated in dehumanizing people with disabilities. This isn’t a reception study, so it’s Alaniz’s readings; I would love a book that looked more at readers’ reception.
Jim Newton, Eisenhower: Very positive biography of a stolid Republican who had a temper and loved golf, and delegated a lot of important decisions to his subordinates. Weirdly, the book spends essentially no time on Ike as general: if I were to say “he oversaw D-Day,” I’d only be spending about a paragraph less than the book on the actual details of what he did/decided. I know it's called "The White House Years," but actually the book takes half its time getting there, and it could've used more on Eisenhower's war experiences and whether they affected him at all as president. Newton takes the position that Eisenhower was basically indifferent to racial discrimination (despite his famous comment to Earl Warren about how white girls shouldn’t have to sit next to black boys, which Newton concludes probably did occur) and thought that “both sides” were too aggressive, but sent federal troops to Little Rock to preserve the power of the federal government when directly challenged. Ike also oversaw what was, at the time, a “successful” covert operation against the government of Iran, and unfortunately we took the wrong lessons from that, trying to replicate it across the developing world where we wanted to win proxy battles with the Soviets by hook or by crook.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.