Nonfiction, as I said in the intro a bigger part of my reading this year than usual. Which may be a sign that I'm getting old?
I've not included a few purely technical books I spent a lot of time with here, because I didn't do anything like read them cover-to-cover, but dipped in to the bits I found useful or interesting.
My fiction post is relatively apolitical. This one is... not. One of the most useful things about the study of history is that it serves as a jumping off point for understanding why things happened the way they did, how they might have happened differently, and what that says about our contemporary situation.
A lot of these books are opportunistic: things I ran into that piqued my interest and turned out to be interesting enough to finish. Some are more reflective of long-term interests, like the English Civil war.
My knowledge of the history of science and discovery started the year with a hole in it the size and shape of Alexander von Humboldt, whom I knew of mostly from stuff named after him, like the penguin and the current. The scope that just those two things cover suggests he was a polymath, and the description of his life and work in Andrea Wulf's "The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World" tends to confirm that suspicion.
The sheer tenacity of these late-18th/early-19th century travellers is something to behold. Humboldt managed to drag glass instruments most of the way around the world, through jungles and over mountains, and still kept one of them intact! He was also staunchly anti-slavery, which is a nice change from a good many of his compatriots in science.
Not just a traveller, he was also a popularizer, publishing multiple lavishly illustrated volumes about things he had seen and trying to unify our knowledge of the world under one wide sky. This is the "invention of nature" of the book's title: the idea that nature was something more than just "untamed land" or "wild beasts", more than just "dangerous" and more than just "waiting to be exploited", but a thing of value in and of itself, separate from us, underpinning all we do.
One can't but wish his ideas had had more traction over the past two hundred years, and it's worth reflecting on why they have failed to do so.
This is a missing step in a lot of people's thinking about history. I recently saw an essay trying to rehabilitate the Luddites as skilled craftspeople who wanted a piece of the action when it came to profits from new technology, and it failed to put the most important fact about them front and centre: they failed.
I see the same problem with people who insist the union model is the only viable way to organize labour, despite Germany having shown us a better way: they still have unions, but they also have labour representation within corporate management, all the way up to the boardrooms of large corporations.
Since the union model quite famously failed in North America over the past half-century to sustain worker's standard of living, the last thing anyone should want to do is recapitulate it. And yet people say that's what we should do. Weird, eh?
Captain James Cook was a traveller who lived and died somewhat earlier the Humboldt, and whose influence was probably even greater. "The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook" by Hampton Sides covers his last voyage, which included the European discovery--and introduction of venereal disease to, despite Cook's best efforts--the Hawaiian islands.
You'll notice--maybe--that I'm using "traveller" here rather than "explorer", because in the context we now have but which did not exist at the time the world was already inhabited, and we don't usually talk about people who travel to Paris, say, as "explorers". That would be weird, wouldn't it? Antarctica was discovered and explored. Most of the rest of what Europeans did was travel, although their feats of travel were--especially in their reproducibility--quite remarkable.
Cook found Polynesia in an interesting state, where its own explorers had filled out the full range of their maps and settled down to a sustainable mode of life on their islands. The Maori in New Zealand had been there for several hundred years by the time of Cook's arrival, and the Hawaiian peoples were at least that long in residence, although even more isolated from their homelands.
The goal of Cook's expedition was to investigate the Northwest Passage from the western end, so his journey through the Pacific was just a prelude. It was kind of interesting to read about his travels up the coast of Vancouver Island, which the author describes as somewhere exotic and mysterious. For those of us for whom it is just "home", this is an interesting perspective.
Cook didn't survive his travels. Venereal disease in Hawaii did.
"The Yellow Cross: the story of the last Cathars 1290 - 1329" by René Weis is a study of the rump of a heretical movement that flourished in the south of France during the High Middle Ages. The ideology of the Cathars was a muddled mess but was broadly aimed against the power of the Inquisition. The core of the movement had been violently suppressed in the mid-to-late 1200s, but a few die-hards survived in the Lang D'Oc, along the border with Catalonia and to a lesser extent Aragon.
The author spent a lot of time in the region, reconstructing village layouts, and at times the book is a walking tour of specific events within the largely unchanged overall geography of the area. At times this works well. At others it gets a bit tedious.
The sociology of Cathar society is only lightly touched upon, but it's clear it's driven by a mix of genuine belief and opportunities for sexual license, especially on that part of--to no one's great surprise--senior men within the movement. One of the central figures is a Cathar "Perfect", as they called their anointed, who was also--to no one's great surprise--was also a member of the Inquisition. Since neurotypical people only care about power and status and money--for themselves or for their gang--it is inevitable that any movement that is not subjected to the most extreme kind of democratic or market discipline will almost instantly be colonized by men and the odd woman who are driven primarily by a desire for power etc.
The book was interesting for the glimpses into daily life in Southern Europe just before the plague wiped out the relatively secure, prosperous society of the time. Inquisition records are good for this. We see shepherds making deals to mind this flock or that, and so on. But otherwise the detail becomes overwhelming and the story depressing.
"The Great Rebellion: 1642-1660" by Ivan Roots is a good general history of the English Civil War. As is almost always the case, the lead-up to the Protectorate is more interesting than the years under the Lord Protector are, in part because there is a sense of possibility there. If any number of decisions had been made slightly differently, Charles I might still be on the throne today.
But once Cromwell held supreme power he was stuck. He refused kingship. We know this because he did not become king, and anyone who wanted to become king in his position would have done so. There was nothing--and no one--to stop him. Napoleon, famously, said that of course he declared himself king, or emperor: anyone in his position would do the same.
Except two men didn't: Cromwell, and then a bit more than a century later, Washington.
But in refusing to become a monarch, he necessarily became a nothing much. The world didn't have a concept for what he was, and neither Cromwell nor those surrounding him had the imagination or energy required to construct a new edifice of government. Like the Assyrians, and the Sumerians before them, finding themselves in charge of a new type of government was too much for the men who won on the battlefield, first against the king, then against Parliament.
I've enjoyed a number of Erik Larson's histories, but I have to say that "Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania" made almost no impression on me. I read it and enjoyed it, but like the lightweight summer read I guess it was, I don't remember it. Checking the author's website, I do recall it from the description, and it was quite clever, but it read more like a novel than history. This is not a criticism.
"Checkmate Berlin" by Giles Milton, on the other hand, reads like a thriller, and is quite memorable. I can't do the book justice in a paragraph or two. It really brought home to me the extent to which the aftermath of the war in Europe could have gone differently, in multiple ways.
The Marshall Plan was not at all the first choice of the Allied powers, who really wanted a remake: "Versailles II: Versailles Harder". The US government in particular was bent on punishing Germany, but the obvious and increasing threat of the Soviet stranglehold on Eastern Europe made it clear that an economically strong, militarily weak West Germany was vital to halting Soviet expansion.
"West Germany" was a new concept in government in the second half of the nineteen forties just as much as "Lord Protector" was a new concept in government in the sixteen fifties. In some ways there was more room for error, as the US was in a position of power and could try something else if the first attempt failed, but on the other hand, one sufficiently bad mistake would see Soviet tanks in Paris.
The Americans and British in particular rose to the challenge, forced the Soviets into a stalemate via the Berlin Airlift, and produced thirty years of Cold War that ended in the brief but not total victory of liberal democracy over authoritarian powers.
We can only hope that round two goes as well, in the end, as round one did. So far it's not looking great, but books like this remind us that it very often didn't look good then, either. We kept fighting. We won.
On the theme of keeping fighting, for no particular reason I read three histories or memoirs related to the French Resistances, which really should be a plural: there were multiple different resistance movements, some of them at least as antagonistic to each other as they were to the fascist occupiers.
"A Schoolmaster's War" by Harry Rée and "The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground: A Memoir Hardcover" by Justus Rosenberg are both by the way of memoirs, although structured very differently and from very different perspectives. Rée was a British schoolmaster who became part of Churchill's Special Operations Executive, who were responsible for infiltration into occupied France and rendering aid as and when they could, with airdrop support from home. They died in droves, but put many spokes in the wheels of war.
"The Art of Resistance" is a more formal memoir of a German Jew who escaped to France and lived precariously during the Occupation, taking enormous risks and putting the Germans--and their French collaborators--to considerable inconvenience.
"Fighters in the Shadows" by Robert Gildea, on the other hand, is a comprehensive history, reassessing the narratives of resistance with the perspective of a little more distance than had hitherto been possible. The diversity of resistors is front and centre, from Gaulists to local leftists to Bolsheviks who only have eyes for Moscow. The Bolsheviks were on the side of the Occupation forces until the collapse of the Hitler-Stalin pact, at which point they "just happened" to become anti-German. Like good little leftists everywhere they followed the Party line, regardless of what the Party really (and very obviously) was.
Growing up in the latter half of the Cold War it was easy to see that most of the self-declared "socialists" around me were parroting Soviet propaganda without having a clue where they were getting their talking points from. Useful idiots have always been useful. And idiots. I have no doubt we will see the same this time around.
As well as histories of resistance to fascist occupiers, I also just happened to read "The Great Influenza" by John M. Barry, which is a so-so account of the 1918 flu. The book's first half, which covers the rise of supposedly (not actually) "scientific medicine" in the US is quite good. The chapters covering the influenza itself are depressing and full of political familiarity, as reactive, wait and see, "we are watching closely" stupidity became the norm, instead of pro-active engineering mitigations and control.
Physicians are not competent to give advice on public health, because other than vaccination, public health happens outside the body, and physicians have none of the scientific training required, either in general or in specific fields, to address the questions that arise there. They know nothing about fluid mechanics or general dynamics. They couldn't solve a second order ordinary differential equation if their life depended no it, much less a partial. And so on. Yet by putting them in charge of public health we are asking them to do these things and more, and when they fail to do them, and refuse to admit they can't, or that these skills are even relevant, people die.
We--scientists and engineers--are in the midst of putting a stop to that now, and we'll win this one the way we won that battles for water treatment and sewage treatment over a century ago. But in the meantime, people will die. People we could have saved.
That was it for this year's non-fiction.
Next year I have more reading on pandemics lined up, some thermodynamics and statistical physics, more James C Scott (I'm currently reading "Seeing Like a State") and probably a bunch of stuff I'll pick up opportunistically along the way.