Nonfiction
ETA: Hi, I need distraction. I wish I had something other to offer. I hope everyone is as well as they can be.
T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: Biography of a man at the heart of huge changes in American economics and therefore politics; he started with boats across the Hudson, became a steamship mogul, then ended life as a railroad mogul. Beginning as a critic of monopolies granted to the already-rich (and a prime mover in Gibbons v. Ogden!), Cornelius Vanderbilt ended life in support of monopolies, albeit ones assembled by new money. Stiles is kind of in awe of Vanderbilt for reasons that I find a little hard discern from his character, which seemed laser-focused on making money no matter what, but he does a great job setting Vanderbilt in his social and economic context. Also, I saw shades of Elon Musk in this Mark Twain quote about Vanderbilt in1869: “You seem to be the idol of only a crawling swarm of small souls, who love to glorify your most flagrant unworthiness in print or praise your vast possessions worshippingly; or sing of your unimportant private habits and sayings and doings, as if your millions gave them dignity.”
T.J. Stiles, Jesse James: Really fascinating biography, despite not having much documentary evidence from the man himself-Stiles instead explains how James was a product of the Confederacy. He shows how white Missouri was internally torn by the conflict that trained James in brutality-a young teen at the time, James learned to kill in cold blood and brutally executed people both during the war and after-but how Confederates managed to create a post-war narrative about invading Yankees, in which James was a populist/Robin Hood figure. Recommended.
Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology: A big book trying to categorize human societies in very broad terms, from status-based to capitalist and communist and, he hopes ultimately, socialist. There’s too much to summarize but one point I found quite interesting was Piketty’s argument that left parties across the world have moved from representing the working class to representing the educated class, usually to everyone’s detriment but the right’s.
Gregory A. Daddis, Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam: While I’m completely sympathetic to the argument that you can have a good strategy and still lose, this revisionist account doesn’t stick the landing. Daddis shows that there were people in the military, including in high places, who said that they needed to do things other than continue shoveling bodies in/killing enemies, but does not contrast them to the number or power level of the people who ensured that mostly it was shoveling/killing or do more than gesture at the fact that the killing parts interfered with the nation- and trust-building parts.
Kate Manne, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women: I really liked Manne’s previous Down Girl, despite not having much of an appetite for philosophical throat-clearing; Manne’s philosophical approach did illuminate important distinctions between sexism and misogyny (the enforcement arm of sexism, not requiring any particular sexist attitudes of enforcers) and the importance to misogyny of recognizing women’s humanity, but only as a servile humanity (despite comparisons to animals, misogyny regards women as distinctively owing men particular kinds of deference and service). Manne is also a witty writer with a weakness matching my own for chiasmus. Here, though, there’s not much you can’t get from any other feminist writer-if you haven’t read Down Girl, definitely do that instead. Manne writes about things like entitlement to sex-which can work well in a system that theoretically punishes rape harshly, because when it doesn’t punish many rapes at all, it demonstrates that the law and its enforcers regard victims as “cut-rate persons.”
Manne also discusses research such as that explored in Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women (also recommended). For example, she nicely explores the idea that men are reluctant to ask for help, especially medical help. This idea means that when they do complain, their complaints are taken more seriously, and it also means that women are assumed to seek help readily (and disregarded when they do), even though women may have very good reasons for their own reluctance to seek help except in the worst situations. So while male under-usage of health care is constructed as a social problem, we get a contrasting expectation that women overuse health care-without additional inquiry into whether that is true. At the same time, men and women overvalue male pain: crying infants are rated as experiencing more pain when observers think they are male. “Do we think men’s pain should be taken more seriously because we tend to regard them as more stoical? Or do we regard them as more stoical because, at least in many settings, we tend to take their pain more seriously?”
For another bit of infuriating research, Manne points to work on women in power. Women leaders who are perceived as just as competent as men are perceived as much less likeable. This perception can be fought if observers think the leader is caring and thoughtful for subordinates-but only, importantly, if they think it’s a character trait and not something done for instrumental reasons. And there’s the trap: many people think that anything a powerful woman does is inauthentic.
Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: A 1919 pandemic book: it came, it destroyed, it left. You know if it’s the kind of thing you want to read right now; it jumps in time and place a bit because the story is hard to tell worldwide in a synchronous way.
Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The short-lived Mormon experiment with building a city and controlling a polity not in Utah, but in Illinois. Initially politicians were sympathetic because of the violence they were fleeing and the votes they might deliver, but eventually the non-Mormons decided they were trying to take control of the state (they were) and responded with violence. Park emphasizes the agency of women as organizing some parts of Mormon practice, despite the (secret) emergence of polygamy at the same time.
Janine Barchas, The Lost Books of Jane Austen: Gorgeously illustrated book about different editions of Austen, mostly cheap and therefore uncollected by traditional institutions, punctuated by attempts to trace the history of the owners of specific books, like the girl who received a copy as a reward for good performance in her 19th century school and then died shortly thereafter of illness. It’s mostly an obsessive look into the different ways cheap books were published, along with some incredible covers as publishers tried to figure out how best to sell Austen-the Gothic, Harlequin-esque and trippy 60s covers are my favorites.
William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: How did a private company conquer a subcontinent? The British East India Company, not “Britain,” took over and extracted untold wealth from India, and it did so by taking advantage of political disunity and by delivering massive profits to its shareholders. It’s a stunning story of corporate power, a reminder that dystopia already came-and only went away provisionally and in some places.
Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America: In the first post-Revolutionary generation, Charity and Sylvia met each other-one after a few earlier love affairs, one apparently falling in love for the first time-and pretty immediately moved in together (cue jokes); they never left each other again. Their letters and even some public writing about them reveal that they spoke of each other using the same words opposite-sex spouses did; their families knew that they were to each other what spouses were supposed to be, although no one ever talked about sex. Cleves argues that they were tolerated and even respected because they made themselves helpful community members. Although there was gossip when they were young, when they were together and economically successful as trained seamstresses, the gossip subsided and they were pillars of the community.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: Biography of a man at the heart of huge changes in American economics and therefore politics; he started with boats across the Hudson, became a steamship mogul, then ended life as a railroad mogul. Beginning as a critic of monopolies granted to the already-rich (and a prime mover in Gibbons v. Ogden!), Cornelius Vanderbilt ended life in support of monopolies, albeit ones assembled by new money. Stiles is kind of in awe of Vanderbilt for reasons that I find a little hard discern from his character, which seemed laser-focused on making money no matter what, but he does a great job setting Vanderbilt in his social and economic context. Also, I saw shades of Elon Musk in this Mark Twain quote about Vanderbilt in1869: “You seem to be the idol of only a crawling swarm of small souls, who love to glorify your most flagrant unworthiness in print or praise your vast possessions worshippingly; or sing of your unimportant private habits and sayings and doings, as if your millions gave them dignity.”
T.J. Stiles, Jesse James: Really fascinating biography, despite not having much documentary evidence from the man himself-Stiles instead explains how James was a product of the Confederacy. He shows how white Missouri was internally torn by the conflict that trained James in brutality-a young teen at the time, James learned to kill in cold blood and brutally executed people both during the war and after-but how Confederates managed to create a post-war narrative about invading Yankees, in which James was a populist/Robin Hood figure. Recommended.
Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology: A big book trying to categorize human societies in very broad terms, from status-based to capitalist and communist and, he hopes ultimately, socialist. There’s too much to summarize but one point I found quite interesting was Piketty’s argument that left parties across the world have moved from representing the working class to representing the educated class, usually to everyone’s detriment but the right’s.
Gregory A. Daddis, Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam: While I’m completely sympathetic to the argument that you can have a good strategy and still lose, this revisionist account doesn’t stick the landing. Daddis shows that there were people in the military, including in high places, who said that they needed to do things other than continue shoveling bodies in/killing enemies, but does not contrast them to the number or power level of the people who ensured that mostly it was shoveling/killing or do more than gesture at the fact that the killing parts interfered with the nation- and trust-building parts.
Kate Manne, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women: I really liked Manne’s previous Down Girl, despite not having much of an appetite for philosophical throat-clearing; Manne’s philosophical approach did illuminate important distinctions between sexism and misogyny (the enforcement arm of sexism, not requiring any particular sexist attitudes of enforcers) and the importance to misogyny of recognizing women’s humanity, but only as a servile humanity (despite comparisons to animals, misogyny regards women as distinctively owing men particular kinds of deference and service). Manne is also a witty writer with a weakness matching my own for chiasmus. Here, though, there’s not much you can’t get from any other feminist writer-if you haven’t read Down Girl, definitely do that instead. Manne writes about things like entitlement to sex-which can work well in a system that theoretically punishes rape harshly, because when it doesn’t punish many rapes at all, it demonstrates that the law and its enforcers regard victims as “cut-rate persons.”
Manne also discusses research such as that explored in Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women (also recommended). For example, she nicely explores the idea that men are reluctant to ask for help, especially medical help. This idea means that when they do complain, their complaints are taken more seriously, and it also means that women are assumed to seek help readily (and disregarded when they do), even though women may have very good reasons for their own reluctance to seek help except in the worst situations. So while male under-usage of health care is constructed as a social problem, we get a contrasting expectation that women overuse health care-without additional inquiry into whether that is true. At the same time, men and women overvalue male pain: crying infants are rated as experiencing more pain when observers think they are male. “Do we think men’s pain should be taken more seriously because we tend to regard them as more stoical? Or do we regard them as more stoical because, at least in many settings, we tend to take their pain more seriously?”
For another bit of infuriating research, Manne points to work on women in power. Women leaders who are perceived as just as competent as men are perceived as much less likeable. This perception can be fought if observers think the leader is caring and thoughtful for subordinates-but only, importantly, if they think it’s a character trait and not something done for instrumental reasons. And there’s the trap: many people think that anything a powerful woman does is inauthentic.
Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: A 1919 pandemic book: it came, it destroyed, it left. You know if it’s the kind of thing you want to read right now; it jumps in time and place a bit because the story is hard to tell worldwide in a synchronous way.
Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The short-lived Mormon experiment with building a city and controlling a polity not in Utah, but in Illinois. Initially politicians were sympathetic because of the violence they were fleeing and the votes they might deliver, but eventually the non-Mormons decided they were trying to take control of the state (they were) and responded with violence. Park emphasizes the agency of women as organizing some parts of Mormon practice, despite the (secret) emergence of polygamy at the same time.
Janine Barchas, The Lost Books of Jane Austen: Gorgeously illustrated book about different editions of Austen, mostly cheap and therefore uncollected by traditional institutions, punctuated by attempts to trace the history of the owners of specific books, like the girl who received a copy as a reward for good performance in her 19th century school and then died shortly thereafter of illness. It’s mostly an obsessive look into the different ways cheap books were published, along with some incredible covers as publishers tried to figure out how best to sell Austen-the Gothic, Harlequin-esque and trippy 60s covers are my favorites.
William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: How did a private company conquer a subcontinent? The British East India Company, not “Britain,” took over and extracted untold wealth from India, and it did so by taking advantage of political disunity and by delivering massive profits to its shareholders. It’s a stunning story of corporate power, a reminder that dystopia already came-and only went away provisionally and in some places.
Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America: In the first post-Revolutionary generation, Charity and Sylvia met each other-one after a few earlier love affairs, one apparently falling in love for the first time-and pretty immediately moved in together (cue jokes); they never left each other again. Their letters and even some public writing about them reveal that they spoke of each other using the same words opposite-sex spouses did; their families knew that they were to each other what spouses were supposed to be, although no one ever talked about sex. Cleves argues that they were tolerated and even respected because they made themselves helpful community members. Although there was gossip when they were young, when they were together and economically successful as trained seamstresses, the gossip subsided and they were pillars of the community.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.