Birx Book

 I've commented on it before.  Some bits:

• US has 574 Indian/Native American nations.
• Jared Kushner comes off as helpful and capable in this book, unlike other recent books where he and his young crew are mocked.
• Seema Verma is mentioned favorably.
• Birx doesn't come across as very flexible--she's focused on data, and keeps referring to the UP/CHop model, always emphasizing asymptomatic spreading. I don't know whether there any consensus has developed over the issue.
• She's down on CDC and portrays Redfield, the CDC head, as unable to move his bureaucracy in the directions she believes it should have gone, though he's one of the group of doctors (Fauci, Hahn, Redfield, and Birx who agreed to hang together). She thinks CDC should have people in the field with the state health departments (I didn't read her extensive set of recommendations at the end of the book).n
• She's no writer, so I did a lot of skimming in the last half. 
• She has an extensive list of recommendations, which I didn't study.  Now have Scott Gottlieb's book on the pandemic which seems also to look to the future. 

Kilcullen II

 I blogged previously about David Kilcullen's book.  Not done yet. 

Interesting discussion of the Russia military, particularly in light of their performance in the Ukraine.   One striking bit is the idea of "escalate to descalate"--fast, aggressive strikes to establish a position where resistance is unlikely.  

One example was the Georgian war.  It seems as if the original Russian plan for Ukraine 2022 was the same--a fast strike to decapitate Ukrainian leadership, take Kyviv before NATO could respond.  There's also the possible use of nuclear weapons--small nukes (300 ton TNT equivalent)--use them early betting that retaliation will be hindered by the need for an alliance to coordinate.

Kilcullen describes the evolution of the Russian military since the breakup of the Soviet Union, but might have been surprised that the reforms haven't been as effective in Ukraine as they were thought to be.

Reading "Useful Delusions" and Trump as Fighting Hero

 Anne Applebaum has a piece on Mr. Lindell at the Atlantic, which happens to tie in with my reading of Vedantam's Useful Illusions.

Vedantam analyzes the possible usefulness of illusions using evolutionary arguments. Because you can find illusions throughout human history, there must be a evolutionary reason humans are prone to such illusions.  He argues it's useful to form social links, whether in religion or nationalism, whether in fraternities or tribal conflicts, etc.

So why "Trump as Hero"? Possibly part of the illusion surrounding the Trump phenomena is heroism.  Trump is, or presents himself, as the embattled warrior, fighting against all odds, against the media, the Democrats, the bad people in the world such as immigrants or China, sometimes victorious, sometimes just surviving to fight another day, surrounded by dragons but always stalwart, wielding his magic sword of bluster and venom.  And his supporters, what of them?  They're critical to his battle, whether through their cheers or donations, a part of the grand effort.  By identifying with his fight and following his efforts they participate in a narrative of our time, one which rises above the humdrum. 

One Day

 Gene Weingarten, the humor columnist for the Post, wrote One Day describing events on one random day (Dec. 28, 1986 as it happened), specifically what some people did and what happened to people on that day, with the ramifications down the line.

The top two reviews on Amazon are 4 stars, which reflects the fact that in a group of stories, some will not appeal to some people, perhaps particularly the downers.

I'd give it 5 stars, just for the story telling and Weingarten's style. Because the stories are selected, they don't fit standard narratives--the wife-beating ends happily, for example.

To Start a War

 I like this book by Robert Draper.  A 3-star review on Amazon says there's no new stories in it, which may be true.  We know the outline of the decision to go to war, true enough.

I like these things:

• the book covers a broad area, but it doesn't sprawl.  Draper seems to do it by focusing each chapter on a key play so you get a balance of characters and narrative flow.
• Draper goes deeper into the bureaucracy than just the major players at the Cabinet and subcabinet level.  
• it comes off as a balanced appraisal, sympathetic to the players but appropriately critical.  (That means I don't see any intentional villains, just humans operating with their preconceptions and priorities which often led them astray.

Garrow on Obama

Just finished David Garrow's Rising Star.  It's only getting 3 stars on Amazon.  This piece gives a reasonable review.

It's the longest book I've read in a long time--1400+pages with footnotes and index, about 970 pages of text. Garrow seems to have talked to everyone who had significant dealings with Obama during his life up to 2004 and to everyone who remembered him. That means it's exhaustive and exhausting. Garrow vacuumed up everything, so he often reports fulsome compliments ("will be first Aftrican-American president") along with bitter feelings. After he's elected to the Senate the book speeds up a bit, ending with his election, with an epilogue which covers the presidency.

Garrow found a new lover--in addition to the two previous biographers had already identified, one from Obama's days as an organizer in Chicago.  He seems to have had a steady if not necessarily totally monogamous relationship at Occidental, in New York City, and then in Chicago before law school, before finally meeting and marrying Michelle after law school. As far as Garrow can tell he's been a faithful husband, surprisingly so in light of the atmosphere in Springfield, IL when he was a state senator.

Obama seems to have evolved into a person who greatly impressed most people he met and worked with, antagonizing a few along the way and leaving in his wake some more with ambivalence. Garrow sees the mature Obama as very ambitious and very private, rarely allowing people to see his core, sometimes leaving them with the feeling of being used or abandoned.  As his biographer Garrow doesn't penetrate that far, never resolving the apparent conflict between Obama's famous "cool" and his nicotine addiction.

Garrow''s extensive research turns up no skeletons in the closet, at most some evidence of of a toe or two of clay.  He does debunk anti-Obama stories popular on the right, not so much explicitly but by laying out the detailed sequence: these include the relationships with Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, with Rev. Wright, and developer Tony Rezko.  As his fame grew, he minimized his ties to all of these.  Garrow notes the shading of the truth, but doesn't frame it as hiding lurid secrets, just a politician doing a hedge.

Garrow won a Pulitzer for his bio of M. L. King; he didn't win another for this book.

Walter Raleigh

Walter Raleigh, Architect of Empire, was a Christmas present.  It's academic history, for which I've a smaller appetite these days.  I understand there are limited sources for his biography,which has to be considered. Anyhow, I just finished it:  Some things which struck me:

• a lot of parallels between the treatment of Ireland and America (i.e.,Virginia). In both cases England was dealing with natives and trying to "plant" colonists. In the case of Virginia there was much ignorance and little attention to logistics.
• the English thought of their efforts in America as different and more enlightened than those of the Spanish, partly because the Spanish were Catholic and England's adversary, partly from learning about the Spanish conquest and rule.
• while dealing with the monarch was much like dealing with our current President, requiring much flattery etc. Queen Elizabeth I and King James I had the Tower and eventually the executioner's axe.
• government was very fluid and not well defined; the most obvious example is the ease with which government resources were used for privacy.
• 
  

Caldwell's Age of Enlightenment

As a thinker, Christopher Caldwell is a good writer.  His words flow, and you ride with them, until suddenly there's a problem.

Bpttomline--I don't like his style--

I'll pick out one paragraph in his final chapter

"Those who lost most from the new rights-based politics were white men.  The laws of the 1960's may not have been designed explicity to harm them, but they were gradually altered to help evceryone but them, which is the same thing.  Whites suffered because they occupied this uniquely disadvantaged status under the civil rights laws, because their strongest asset in the constitutional system--their overwhelming preponderance in the electorate--was slowly shrinking, because their electoral victories could be overruled in courtrooms and by regulatory boards where necessary, and because the moral narratives of civil rights required that they be cast as the villains of their country's history. They fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races."

page 276

Notice what he does there.  In the first sentence the losers are "white men".  By the end of the paragraph "they", who are the bottom rung, are "whites". To me that's sloppy thought. Somehow the advances women have made since the 1960's are ignored. To be consistent he'd have to discuss an ethnic/gender  hierarchy, but that would complicate his argument.  He'd have to recognize that white women have gained during the period.

He's also playing games with the causes.  Assume that white voters were the "overwhelming preponderance" of the electorate in the 1960' in part because of the denial of the right to vote in the South.  The civil rights laws were passed by that overwhelming preponderance (85 percent in 1960). Whites still maintain their preponderance and will for another 20 years or so. The Republicans have had a majority on the Supreme Court since Nixon.  Give Caldwell credit though--he doesn't name a villain to account for the changes other than the sleepiness of whites.

There's an interesting book to be written discussing the last 60 years, paying attention to what was lost and what was gained, but it isn't this book.

How Statesmanship Works

In a word, there's a lot of Murphy's Law involved and even more luck..  That's true of the lead in to World War I and, according to Adam Tooze's The Deluge, it's true of the conclusion of the war and, I expect (because I'm not quite halfway through), of the rest of the 1920's up to 1931.

The book covers the eight big powers: UK, US, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, China, Japan from 1916 to 1931.  It's well written and has changed my perspective on that period.  I hadn't known the chances for an armistice before Nov. 11, 1918, based on internal politics in Germany, Russia, and the UK, but missed because the initiatives from each nation didn't find a positive response at the right time.       

Etymology of "Quarters"

Speculation based on the first chapter of  the Lyndal Roper book: "Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet".  My logic:

• towns tend to be located at the intersection of trails/paths/roads.
• most such intersections are of two roads
• most such intersections divide the town into "quarters"
• hence "quarter" originally referred to one of four areas of the town in which one lived.

Posting this here because this website wouldn't allow me to contribute my 2 cents.

The book promises to be good, BTW.

Book Recommendation: Rosa Brooks

The book is "How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon", the author is Rosa Brooks, the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich, the leftish foodie and writer.  Interestingly, Brooks is now married to a colonel in the Special Forces, having spent time in the bureaucracies of the State Department (Bill Clinton admin) and Pentagon (Obama admin) as a human rights/law of war lawyer. 

The book is a little diffuse, but it gets blurbs from Gen. McChrystal and Anne-Marie Slaughter, former policy wonk in the State Department.  Brooks acknowledges her experiences have changed and undermined her inherited preconceptions, though you still get the idealism of the former human rights activist. To me, of course, the most interesting bits reflected the bureaucracies of DOD and State, and the tension between them, but Brooks' thesis is that the old paradigms of war and peace no longer work, we need to pay attention to the in-between, particularly as impacted by technology, and fashion new rules of law and social structures to deal with social conflict.   I was struck by her thoughts about the individualization of war--we can track and kill individuals now--what does that do to "war", which used to be anonymous mass versus anonymous mass?

Book Review--General

I've occasionally written about different books--Pollan, Kingsolver, et.al. Now I want to try something a little more formal--a book review tagged as such. By calling it a "review" I give more prominence to it in my mind, which is important, because things in my mind slip slide away.

Book Review--This Republic of Suffering

Just completed "This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War", the new and well-reviewed book by the new President of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust. Briefly, she writes of how Americans, both North and South, grappled with the issues raised by the half million dead soldiers of the war. The issues ranged from trying to have the "good death", where the dying person affirms the state of his soul in the lap of his family; the trauma of violating the commandment against killing; the ways in which the dead were, or were not, buried; the problems of identifying the dead with names; the burden on the bereaved of "realizing" the death, as well as dealing with the unknown fate of so many thousands; the meaning of the war, if any--the impacts on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, Ambrose Bierce, and Emily Dickinson; accounting for the casualties and eventually memorializing them.

I enjoyed the book, which fit well with my past reading and interests. Faust writes clearly and with a minimum of academic jargon. I noticed a little, but that may be due more to my age than to her use of academese. What struck me? her description of the good death and the idea that Swedenborg (Henry James Sr. was an adherent) had changed the way Americans thought of the afterlife. By 1860 it had become much more real and physical, with family and friends around--even the possibility of communication from the beyond. Resurrection of the body had become more important, which was challenged by the mutilations and disintegration of the war. The idea that military cemeteries were new--the fallen weren't buried in a family plot amongst their ancestors but in geometric military order with their fellow soldiers (but not their foes and not those of another race).

As a bureaucrat I was particularly struck when she noted the absence of bureaucracies (to count soldiers, give them dog tags, track their fate, bury their bodies, notify the next of kin, care for cemeteries). The war caused some bureaucracies to be created, simply as a result of the mass of casualties (think of Clara Barton, Sanitary Commission, etc.). Of course, the Civil War has long been regarded as the first "modern" war, and much of the book carries that theme to subjects which we don't normally consider.

What would I criticize? Nothing much. I do think she missed one long-term result of the war--she has the data but doesn't draw out the implications: The North had the advantage of the established military bureaucracy, such as it was, when the war began. The South could re-create it. So far, so good. But at the end of the war, the North's efforts to account for the Union dead, to bury them properly, and honor them worked through the military and expanded its bureaucracy, while in the south the same emotional impulses had to be undertaken by private organizations, mostly women's groups. I'd suggest the effect was partially to increase the North's comfort with government and bureaucracy, while the South had no such experience. (She does note the Skocpol book which saw the need to provide pensions for the veterans, widows, and orphans as a major spur to developing the American welfare state.) So while the North experienced the government as something that could perform, the South experienced it as irrelevant to their concerns and as unfair (using customs duties they paid to set up cemeteries for Union war dead). That helps to account for the long-term difference in attitudes towards government between the sections.