Books I Finished in July (With One Podcast Series)
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I was off at a gaming convention all of last week, so I’m somewhat behind on things, but here are reviews of all the books I finished in July (with one podcast series). I started the month with:
The Blade Itself (1 of 3 First Law Trilogy)
By: Joe Abercrombie
560 pages
Format: Audiobook
Rating: A
Who should read this book?
If fantasy novels are your thing you should check out this series.
If you like George R. R. Martin’s a Song of Ice and Fire, and despair of it ever being completed this is a pretty good substitute.
Representative passage:
I’ve fought ten single combats and I won them all, but I fought on the wrong side and for all the wrong reasons. I’ve been ruthless, and brutal, and a coward. I’ve stabbed men in the back, burned them, drowned them, crushed them with rocks, killed them asleep, unarmed, or running away. I’ve run away myself more than once. I’ve pissed myself with fear. I’ve begged for my life. I’ve been wounded, often, and badly, and screamed and cried like a baby whose mother took her tit away. I’ve no doubt the world would be a better place if I’d been killed years ago, but I haven’t been, and I don’t know why.
He looked down at his hands, pink and clean on the stone. “There are few men with more blood on their hands than me. None, that I know of. The Bloody-Nine they call me, my enemies, and there’s a lot of ’em. Always more enemies, and fewer friends. Blood gets you nothing but more blood. It follows me now, always, like my shadow, and like my shadow I can never be free of it. I should never be free of it. I’ve earned it. I’ve deserved it. I’ve sought it out. Such is my punishment.
Thoughts
I quite enjoyed this book, it reminded me of all the reasons why I continue to read fiction, despite the fact that it doesn’t help me with my writing at all. In other words, most of my reasons for reading fiction are selfish, things like escapism and enjoyment, that said, I fancy there are some noble or at least productive reasons in there as well, they just escape me at the moment.
This novel inevitably gets compared to A Song of Ice and Fire, or more likely Game of Thrones, since that’s how most people refer to the series these days. I can entirely see why that is. It has a similar feel, though, at least in the first book, there is significantly less sex, and the violence is probably tamer as well. Outside of that though, it has the same great characterization of very flawed individuals set in a gritty fantasy world. I particularly like the character of Sand dan Glokta, the former dashing swordsman, who was captured and subsequently tortured during a previous war and is now crippled, and, perhaps ironically, a torturer himself.
It’s been quite a while since I read Game of Thrones (which is actually just the first book in George R. R. Martin’s, A Song of Ice and Fire series) so it’s hard to say which book I actually enjoyed more, probably Game of Thrones, but given that Martin is probably never going to finish his series and Abercrombie is already done with this one, I think I’d be more likely to recommend Abercrombie over Martin to someone who had read neither, even without having finished the second and third books.
And I guess as long as we’re on the subject I should stick in my George R. R. Martin rant…
Since time immemorial, when a book was being turned into a movie, or a tv show. You could read the book and be ahead of the game. Not only would you get to the end faster, but you almost certainly knew about things that would never get included in the screen translation. To be frank, by reading the book you were better than all those poor schlubs who only watched the TV show. And Martin, by allowing the TV show to get ahead of the books, has broken this sacred pact, a pact that has existed since the dawn of time. Now I’m sure HBO bears some responsibility for starting the show before the series was done (much to the detriment of the final season as I understand it) but mostly I blame Martin.
Criticisms
I don’t have a lot of criticisms, what I mostly have are worries. He introduces quite a few mysteries and hints at a far deeper world than what gets shown in this first book. Whenever you encounter something like this you hope that these mysteries are eventually explained, and that when that happens the explanation is satisfactory. While it’s pretty rare for there to be no attempt at an explanation, it’s very common for the explanation to be unsatisfactory. Star Wars is a great example of what I’m talking about, where an amazing and mysterious universe is hinted at in “A New Hope” only to be revealed as kind of lame and boring in the prequels. As far as this series, I guess we’ll have to see.
Books I would read before this one:
I’m always going to say that, if you haven’t already, you should read Tolkien before reading anything else in the fantasy genre. But beyond that this is a pretty good place to start if you’re interested in seeing what an epic fantasy series looks like.
Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War
By: Wilfred Reilly
256 pages
Format: Audiobook
Rating: B
Who should read this book?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most of the people who should read this book won’t. In particular I think college administrators should read definitely read this book.
Representative passage:
Probably the most famous Trump-related “hate crime” took place on December 1, 2016, when a young Muslim student claimed that she was attacked on a New York City subway train by “drunken, hate-spewing white men shouting, “Donald Trump!” As we have already seen, she made the whole thing up.
Thoughts
Interestingly enough this book was evidently written and sent to the publisher before that most famous of all hate crime hoaxes, the Jussie Smollett hoax, but it does a great job of showing that Smollett is just the most famous of recent hoaxes, but not even close to being the first. In fact the list of hoaxes and their description is kind of insane, and you come away with two somewhat conflicting thoughts. First, that the perpetrators of these hoaxes should be punished more harshly, and second, that a significant number of them probably have severe mental problems.
For those who hang around certain corners of the internet the fact that there are hate hoaxes is not news (though if you get your news exclusively from the New York Times, it might be) but still the sheer number of hoaxes Reilly ended up covering was impressive. As you might imagine many of these hoaxes took place on college campuses, and one of the chief morals of the book would be that if some dramatic act of hate is reported on a college campus, you can be almost certain it’s a hoax, and that the perpetrator is either the person reporting it, or that it will turn out to be some kind of art installation. (That’s not a joke several of the hoaxes fall into that category.)
Looking at all reported hate crimes, Reilly estimates that probably 15-50% will turn out to be hoaxes. That’s a pretty big deal, and even at 15% it would make sense to start out skeptical anytime you hear about a reported hate crime. Particularly since it would seem (though there was no data on this specifically) that hate crimes you hear about are more likely to be hoaxes than the set of all reported hate crimes.
As I already said, I was familiar with the fact that many reported hate crimes end up being hoaxes. I was not familiar with how high the percentage was, or much variety there was, indeed the most interesting thing Reilly brought to my attention was that individuals on the right end of the political spectrum are getting in on the action as well. That despite the books subtitle, “How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War” increasingly both sides are selling a fake war. If anything this makes the subject more alarming. If it’s just one side then you would think it would be more easy to identify and counteract. If both sides are doing it, then it begins to appear that this is just the way the game is now being played. Which is not a good development
Criticisms
Reilly has kind of a snarky writing style, and that began to wear after a while. Additionally given that the subject is likely to be controversial, I feel like being snarky is going to give people an easy excuse to dismiss it out of hand as being unserious. This would be unfortunate, because it appears clear that it’s a very serious subject and a very serious trend.
Also, this is probably one of those books that could be a long article without losing very much. So much of the content is reciting the details of the individual hoaxes, and while these are titillating, after the first 10 or so, the utility of each additional description starts to go down. But perhaps it takes a mountain of evidence to overcome the default assumption that hate hoaxes are rare to non-existent.
If you were going to take only one thing from the book:
When you hear of some dramatic hate crime, with no witnesses other than the victim, it’s understandable, even rational to be suspicious that it might be a hoax.
The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
By: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
352 pages
Format: Audiobook
Rating: B+
Who should read this book?
If you’re at all interested in political science, you’ll definitely enjoy this deep dive into the mechanisms of power.
Moreover, if you’re just cynical in general this book is right up your alley.
Representative passage:
The czar fell once there was no one to stop the revolution. Louis XVI suffered much the same fate in the French Revolution. Successful leaders must learn the lesson of these examples and put raising revenue and paying supporters above all else. Consider Robert Mugabe’s success in staying on as Zimbabwe's president. The economy has collapsed in Zimbabwe thanks to Mugabe’s terrible policies. Starvation is common and epidemics of cholera regularly sweep the country. Mugabe “succeeds” because he understands that it does not matter what happens to the people provided that he makes sure to pay the army. And despite regular media speculation, so far he has always managed to do so and to keep himself in office well into his eighties. He has reduced a once thriving agricultural exporting nation into one that depends on foreign aid. Mugabe is certainly horrible for what he’s done to the people he rules, but he is a master of the rules to rule by. Where policy matters most, when it comes to paying off cronies, he has delivered. That is why no one has deposed him.
Thoughts
This book is basically a modern day version of Machiavelli. In The Prince, Machiavelli holds up Cesare Borgia as an excellent example of someone who embodies the principles he’s espousing. In The Dictator’s Handbook, as you can see from the passage I just quoted, they appear to offer up Robert Mugabe as one of the best examples of someone who understands their principles. Which is tragic, but no less an accurate description of the world, for all its tragedy. The question which follows from all this and which the book attempts to answer and also its subtitle: Why is bad behavior almost always good politics?
The framework which underpins their answer, and most of the book, consists of dividing people into three categories:
The nominal selectorate, or interchangeables: These are the people who in theory have some say in choosing the leader of a country. In the US it’s every person of voting age. And it ends up being a fairly large group in most countries, given that even fairly extreme dictators generally cloak things with an air of popular legitimacy. But this group only selects leaders in theory, in practice they’re mostly powerless.
The real selectorate, or influentials: In the US this is the people who actually vote rather than just being eligible to vote. In China it’s all the voting members of the Communist party. In some countries it’s more fuzzy and frequently shifts.
The winning coalition, or the essentials: This is the minimum number of people the leader needs to stay in power. In the US it’s pretty big, though as we’ve seen it often ends up being less than a majority. In dictatorships where the only thing required to maintain power is to keep a few high level military leaders happy, the essentials may consist of only a small handful of people.
This is a fairly simple framework but from it, all sorts of bad behavior can be described. I can only scratch the surface, but one of the most common examples is the bad behavior enabled by a large supply of natural resources. The Handbook points out that if you have abundant natural resources, it's easy to extract the money necessary to keep your essentials happy, and you can therefore keep the number of truly essential people small. On the other hand, if you don’t have a source of money that you can easily control you still need money to keep the essentials happy, but in this case you have to resort to taxation, which means you have to have a productive populace, and this is best accomplished by giving them a certain amount of freedom. Accordingly market reforms often happen not because a dictator is particularly enlightened, but because there’s no other way for him to get the money necessary to keep the essentials happy.
This framework is pretty powerful, and as I said, it’s only possible to scratch the surface, particularly in a blog post, but I would argue that, despite writing a whole book about the model, the authors ignore some of its implications, particularly as it applies to modern democracies. Which takes me to the next section.
Criticisms
Having a framework for understanding why dictators behave badly was useful, but mostly in an academic sense, given that you already know they’re going to behave badly even without understanding why. It’s when the framework is applied to our current situation that I think it becomes interesting. As one example, Democrats and liberals are adamant in claiming that they support immigration and oppose voter ID laws for entirely moral reasons, but after reading Dictator’s Handbook it seems more likely that they’re doing it to shift the percentage of “influentials” in a way that favors them. Republicans are fighting these things for exactly the same reason, only they’re trying to protect the percentage of influentials currently in their camp.
Despite that fact that the underlying motivation for both parties is to say in power, the Democrats have, cleverly, made their motives seem pure and altruistic while the Republicans have ended up being labeled as horrible racists.
If you were going to take only one thing from the book:
People in power don’t care about ruling well they care about staying in power.
Fall of Civilizations (Podcast)
Hosted By: I’m actually not sure
8 hours (so far)
Format: Podcast
Rating: A
Who should listen to this podcast?
Given the importance of the subject material I honestly think everyone should listen to it. Plus it’s fascinating.
Beyond that if you like tales of disaster and collapse, and imagining the end of civilizations, this is a great podcast.
Representative passage:
A cascading failure can occur in any system of interconnected parts when one part of the system fails. Other pieces of the system must compensate and this in turn overloads them. Nodes throughout the system fail one after another. Until the whole infrastructure grinds to a halt. One bridge leading into the temple complex of Angkor Thom tells a chilling story of what must have happened during that time. The first thing we notice is that this bridge appears to have been hastily constructed. With none of the refinement of the nearby constructions and when we look closer we see that it was built out of building material, recycled from nearby temples. Some of its stones show the intricate carvings of a temple wall, but mismatched and jumbled in this new structure. The fact that the Khmer people had to hastily build this bridge shows that something had gone terribly wrong with their water control system and the fact that they had to reuse stones from their most sacred and revered buildings shows that the situation was desperate.
Thoughts
Thus far the podcast has covered six civilizations. I’ll just briefly talk about the first two:
Roman Britain: I think a lot of people are familiar with the basic outline of this collapse, but it’s a story with a fair amount of surprises. Perhaps the biggest thing people are unaware of is how gradual the collapse was, but then how deep it went before things started turning around. My question is, at what point did people realize that they were on a downward trend, one that was going to last for hundreds of years? I assume that at some point they did, but that it was well after the collapse had started.
The Late Bronze Age Collapse: This happened around 1100 BC, and if you haven’t heard about it, it’s one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. If you were only going to listen to one episode it should probably be this one. The historical record is tantalizingly thin, we know there was a massive invasion by the “sea people” but why they invaded, and from where continues to prove elusive. But at the time these invasions caused the complete collapse of every nation existing at the time except for two, Assyria and Egypt, and Egypt was badly weakened.
Beyond these first two the podcast has so far covered:
The Mayan Collapse
The Greenland Vikings
The Khmer Empire
Easter Island (here he says there was no collapse they were just devastated by European contact.)
Criticisms
This is one of those rare cases where I kind of wish it was longer. Also he seems to mostly be going for an overarching theme that civilizations collapse because of climate change, I would prefer that he either make it less a morality fable about modern problems or that he go in the other direction and make as many connections between the past and now as possible.
If you were going to take only one thing from the podcast:
As civilizations advance they accumulate complexity, and eventually that complexity is their undoing.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
By: Marie Kondō
224 pages
Format: Hardback
Rating: B
Who should read this book?
If you’ve heard of Mario Kondō or the Konmari method, and wanted to try it, but need an inspirational speech before you do, this is that speech.
If you want to see what all the fuss is about you should also read this book.
Representative passage:
One of the homework assignments I give my clients is to appreciate their belongs. For example, I urge them to try saying, “Thank you for keeping me warm all day,” when they hang up their clothes after returning home. Or, when removing their accessories, I suggest they say, “Thank you for making me beautiful,” and when putting their bag in the closet, to say, “It’s thanks to you that I got so much work done today.” Express your appreciation to every item that supported you during the day. If you find this hard to do daily, then at least do it whenever you can.
Thoughts
I’d be a little bit surprised if you hadn’t heard of this book. It’s been quite the phenomenon, and I’m not sure what I can add to the discussion at this point. Personally I enjoyed the book, but for me reading it was less about learning how the system worked and more about being talked into trying the system out. And indeed the system itself is pretty simple. 1) Gather everything you have in a particular category. 2) examine each item in turn, if the item doesn’t give you a feeling of joy, get rid of it. The rest of the book consists of cheerleading for the system. Which takes me to...
Criticisms
This is another book which probably could have been shorter. As I pointed out the actual system is pretty simple, and the rest of the book is taken up with long passages of minutiae, interspersed with bits that essentially describe Kondo’s spirituality. The top review on Amazon describes it pretty well:
Here's what the book says: touch every item in your home and if you "love it" then keep it. If you don't get that warm and fuzzy feeling of love, throw it away. There. Now you don't have to read it. Seriously, de-cluttering and organizing can have a huge positive impact on life. But the way this book approaches the topic is so silly and juvenile that I don't understand why it's a best seller. People: use your common sense and toss the things you don't use that are cluttering up your life. Ok?
I wouldn’t be that harsh, and I would replace the word “silly” with “simple” and the word “juvenile” with the word “spiritualistic” but beyond that, it’s a decent summary.
If you were going to take only one thing from the book:
Organization and tidying work best when you do everything in a category all at once.
Wild at Heart Revised and Updated: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul (Religious)
By: John Eldredge
272 pages
Format: Audiobook
Rating: B+
Who should read this book?
If people frequently describe you as a nice guy, and you think that might be a bad thing, but you’re not sure what to do instead, then this would probably be a good book for you.
If you’re a Christian male, looking for advice on being a better man, this is a pretty good place to get that advice.
Representative passage:
One more thing, don’t even think about going into battle alone. Don’t even try to take the masculine journey without at least one man by your side. Yes, there are times a man must face the battle alone in the wee hours of the morn, and fight with all he’s got, but don’t make that a lifestyle of isolation. This may be our weakest point. As David Smith points out in the Friendless American Male, “One serious problem is the friendless condition of the average American male. Men find it hard to accept that they need the fellowship of other men.” Thanks to the men’s movement the church understands now that a man needs other men, but what we’ve offered is another two dimensional solution: accountability groups, or partners. Uh! That sounds so old covenant, you’re really a fool and you’re just waiting to rush into sin so we’d better post a guard by you to keep you in line.
We don’t need accountability groups. We need fellow warriors, someone to fight alongside, someone to watch our back! A young man just stopped me on the street to say, “I feel surrounded by enemies and I’m all alone.” The whole crisis in masculinity today, has come because we no longer have a warrior culture, a place for men to learn to fight, like men. We don’t need a meeting a really nice guys. We need a gathering of really dangerous men!
Thoughts
It seems like everyone agrees that men have a problem. But beyond that the two diagnoses seem to end up drawing exactly opposite conclusions: One side thinks there’s too much masculinity in the world and one side thinks there’s too little. This book is firmly on the side of there being too little, and if you’re not ready to at least entertain the idea that this is in fact the case, you should definitely not read this book. For myself I am not only willing to entertain the idea, I actually embrace it, particularly when it comes to the importance of fathers.
Beyond that the book says that men need three things:
A battle to fight
An adventure to live
A beauty to rescue
Toss in a strong dose of Christianity, and that’s pretty much the whole book. I imagine most people are either going to love it or hate it.
Criticisms
As you may or may not have gathered, I’m fairly Christian myself, though of a different denomination (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints vs. evangelical) than the author, and despite that I came away feeling that the book may have benefitted from fewer overt references to theology and the devil, but some of that may be because of the differences between my theology and the author’s.
If you were going to take only one thing from the book:
The modern world is at war with masculinity, and that’s a bad thing.
A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History
By: Nicholas Wade
288 pages
Format: Audio w/ physical book for reference
Rating: A-
Who should read this book?
If you genuinely have an open mind, I think you would benefit from reading this book.
Representative passage:
...On the basis of Pinker’s vast compilation of evidence, natural selection seems to have acted incessantly to soften the human temperament, from the earliest times until the most recent date for which there is meaningful data.
This is the conclusion that Pinker signals strongly to his readers. He notes that mice can be bread to be more aggressive in just five generations, evidence that the reverse process could occur just as speedily. He describes the human genes, such as the violence-promiting MAO-A mutation mentioned in chapter 3, that could easily be modulated so as to reduce aggressiveness. He mentions that violence is quite heritable, on the evidence from studies of twins, and so must have a genetic basis. He states that “nothing rules out the possibility that human populations have undergone some degree of biological evolution in recent millennia, or even centuries, long after races, ethnic groups, and nations diverged.”
But at the last moment, Pinker veers away from the conclusion… since many other traits have evolved more recently than that, why should human behavior be any exception? Well, says Pinker, it would be terribly inconvenient politically if this were so…
Thoughts
This is one of those books that you can get in trouble for reading, and definitely get in trouble for writing. (Just ask Charles Murray.) Accordingly, I'm not going to go into a lot of detail. Briefly, this is one of those books that posits a genetic component to racial differences in intelligence. It’s a book that is very critical of the idea that race is a social construct. Beyond that Wade goes even farther to theorize that much of culture is genetically based. Which is not that crazy of an idea if you also accept his assertion that evolution has been recent, copious and regional. But this leads to the distressing conclusion (among many distressing conclusions) that it’s possible that some ethnic groups may be genetically better at things like democracy and the rule of law than other ethnic groups. In just a few sentences I’ve assembled a whole bucket of fairly incendiary claims, so I’ll leave it at that.
Criticisms
I don’t have a lot of criticisms of this book, I’m glad it was written. It was, perhaps, a little dry, but also it’s yet one more work, where I felt it actually could have benefited from being longer, particularly given how controversial the subject is. But for those inclined to criticize it, I doubt even a thousand more pages would make much of a difference.
If you were going to take only one thing from the book:
Evolution has been recent, copious and regional. Also race is real.
The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumphs
By: Ryan Holiday
224 pages
Format: Kindle
Rating: B+
Who should read this book?
If you’re looking for an introduction to Stoicism, you could do a lot worse.
If you believe in the power of books to change your attitude and you need a better attitude, this book might do exactly that.
Representative passage:
Our perceptions determine, to an incredibly large degree, what we are and are not capable of. In many ways, they determine reality itself. When we believe in the obstacle more than in the goal, which will inevitably triumph?
Thoughts
From where I stand these days stoicism seems to be very much back in vogue, and Ryan Holiday has managed to maneuver himself into a position of being its chief evangelist. There’s a reason for this, he writes very compellingly on the subject. Also, while I imagine that Holiday, himself, might recommend going to the original sources first, like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Holiday is probably nearly as effective, and a whole lot more accessible.
Criticisms
All of the above aside, you get the feeling that most of the things Holiday talks about have been well known for quite a while, and appeared in a lot of past self-help books. I think you’d be hard pressed to find something Holiday talks about which wasn’t also touched on in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It just wasn’t specifically labeled as stoicism. All of which is to say that I think what’s going through a surge in popularity is the stoic label, but that stoic philosophy has never really been out of fashion. And that most of the stuff Holiday advocates is less revolutionary than people might think.
Also while the numerous anecdotes are nice, and a good way of imparting principles, I think the book leaned a little too much on the anecdotes, and could have done more to illustrate how someone today would apply stoic principles. I’m a big advocate of the position that ancient philosophy is still useful, but it may not always be immediately apparent how to make use of it in a modern context.
If you were going to take only one thing from the book:
Life is full of difficulties and we can only learn how to overcome those difficulties if we confront them and master them. Avoiding difficulties is the worst way to solve them.
Having tried this experiment for a few months I think going forward I’ll just review some of the books I read each month, rather than trying to review all of them. Also I may play with the formatting as well. If you disagree with this decision, let me know, And if you really disagree with the decision consider donating.