This year has sucked, and I’ve been stuck writing syllabi (one to go!) and trying to get some freelance work done before the year finishes out. Somehow, in the midst of all this, I managed to read some good books. And one or two disappointing ones.

Let’s get to it. Links, where applicable, go to our Bookshop storefront — buying through this bypasses Amazon, supports local bookstores, and they give us a small kickback. Even if you don’t get your books through us, I think buying through them is probably the best way to get books online.

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

For four years, democrats masqueraded as leftists, and produced a number of books that will be interesting artifacts in the future to analyze what the hell was going on in America at the start of this century, which I fear may be considered about as notable as the first gilded age (interesting to those who know what’s going on, ignored by everyone else.)

This book traces the psychological, sexual, and political movements of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Muammar Gaddafi, with occasional points of comparison to the prior president. The author, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, isn’t really a bad writer, but she selects very narrow examples, largely owing – I would imagine – to her historical specialization in Italian history (which would explain the focus on Mussolini and Gaddafi.) The theoretic description of Strongman leaders isn’t bad, necessarily, but I feel like it doesn’t really cover much that isn’t covered by other descriptions of fascist and “strongman” type leaders. Also, I feel that it suffers from a certain amount of cherry-picking, looking at only four examples, and ignoring such individuals also described by this label as Stalin, Mao, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Juan Perón.

The narrow focus is good for laying out information, but I think that assuming some knowledge on the part of the readers and going with a wider sample to help establish the traits in question would have made it stronger. In all, it was a somewhat disappointing read: maybe worthwhile if you have a particualr interest in this topic, but in need of some additional work.

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

Reviewed by Edgar here. A solid read – generally speaking, superhero fiction works much better in a visual medium, but Hench is a fairly cerebral take on the genre. Looking at things from the perspective of an individual that lacks powers for the majority of the book (the central character doesn’t actually have powers for any important sequence in the book – it’s just discussed near the end that she does, but they don’t really effect anything.)

The upshot here is that Edgar’s book recommendations are a goldmine. I cosign what they wrote there.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

I read this book as a sort of “eat your vegetables” thing. I’d had the Propaganda Model explained to me previously, and it’s a perfectly sensible way of understanding the media, but I thought that the book would go into greater depth on it.

For those unaware, the Propaganda Model of communication is as follows: while the United States lacks a top-down command of communication, it does propagandize to its citizens through the use of an emergent, bottom-up approach. This is achieved through the use of “filters” that determine not what is said, but who is allowed to speak. This means that, even though the people who address the public are doing so with the best of intentions, the fact that only they are structurally allowed to speak limits the message that can get out. These filters are:

Profit Orientation: the news agencies are businesses, and their owners generally have a constellation of interests. To maintain license to speak, it is necessary for those who would speak not to upset these interests.
Advertising Support: Similar to the above, the way that media enterprises work is that they sell advertising. What this means is that the advertisers can enforce their will by buying or not buying ads. Taken with the prior, this means that the news is going to avoid critiquing capitalism and will do its best to avoid offending the wealthy.
Access: sources have the right to give or withhold access to newsworthy information, and often become regular sources. What this boils down to is that the police, or the military, are generally given a good deal of trust because the news – at least news relating to law enforcement or military couldn’t happen without them. This means that the interests of these powerful sources will be reflected in the narrative of the news.
Flak: backlash from above takes the form of “flak”, negative responses pushed by interest groups such as political parties, political action committees, and the government, which harms perception in the eyes of the public.
Anti-Communism/Anti-Terrorism: Anything that diverges from the standard anti-communist/pro-war-on-terror line is de facto considered unacceptable, and is more likely to be stopped or receive flak.

The book presents this in the first chapter, and then proceeds to exhaustively prove it by examining a number of events – largely in Latin America – that illustrate it. Both portions (this first chapter, and the examination) are useful, but they’re not exactly coherent in a traditional fashion.

The City Born Great by N.K. Jemisin

We’re a big fan of Jemisin — she does excellent work. Essentially just the prologue to The City We Became, which reminded me how much I like N.K. Jemisin’s work. It was free on audible, and I needed something to listen to while doing yard work for my parents one afternoon.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Wengrow and David Graeber

One of two real stand-outs in this set of reads. I’m a big fan of David Graeber, as longtime readers might know, and this read is an extremely worthwhile one, proceeding from a very important insight: if human beings are able to imagine things politically, and imagine counterfactual arrangements of society and structures of power, why do we assume that everything before the founding of the first cities proceeded identically all across the world?

Fundamentally, the idea is that we have this mythic structure that we assume all of human societies follow, and this structure is not one supported by evidence observed in the world. Moreover, there was a time when we knew this: the “indigenous critique” of the European societies is suggested by this text to have kicked off the enlightenment, and to have jump-started the course of modernity – to the point where modern liberal-democratic civilizations have more in common with the attitudes of the indigenous peoples of the Americas than with the late-medieval Europeans who came into contact with them. While I have some difficulty with that thought (after all, the somewhat rosy picture painted of the Native American societies described in the book doesn’t much resemble modern Americans – with the potential exception of the peoples of the California Coast that are a partial focus of the fifth chapter.)

In addition, I think that the other major weakness of the book is that, by “indigenous”, they tend to mean “Indigenous American” – referring to the peoples of the Americas (who have been given a short shrift by historians and anthropologists. I do not object at all to the amount I learned about Cahokia and Poverty Point in this text.) There is almost no attention given to the Aboriginal people of Australia, or to critiques leveled by African thinkers, which would have greatly extended the book, but would have been a welcome addition.

Perhaps, had he lived longer, Graeber would have addressed these gaps. Unfortunately, the task now falls to someone else.

Wind/Pinball: Two Novels by Haruki Murakami

This audiobook contains the first two novels written by Haruki Murakami. I’m not sure this has come across at any point, but I’m a very big fan of Murakami. While some of his later works are not exactly my bag, I do think that his work is (generally) extremely good. Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are two early novels of his, forming the first two thirds of the four-part “trilogy of the Rat”, which concludes with A Wild Sheep Chase and continues beyond its bounds into Dance, Dance, Dance.

Both are lightly magically realist, largely concerned with a nameless protagonist and his close friend, a young man known only as the Rat. They are set in a small town some distance outside Tokyo in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and deal largely with the fallout of the Japanese student protests that happened some time before the period in which they’re set: there’s a pervasive sense of anomie that suffuses the novellas.

It would be a mistake to consider these novels juvenalia: Murakami was already a small business owner at this point, a cafe owner who received a burst of revelation while watching a baseball game (part of me wonders if this event corresponds in any way to Phillip K. Dick’s incident with the pink lasers from God; researching this is beyond the scope of this piece, and I’m not exactly sure what to make of it if it is.) However, it is interesting to see later themes and symbols that are developed by Murakami’s work coming out in a larval form – cats, wells, beautiful women with flat affect, all show up in these novellas – and beginning to adopt their significance. It feels somewhat like finding the first mirror, the first tiger, that appears in a Borges short story.

Generally speaking, I recommend Murakami. These novels feel somewhat like those pearlescent hours in summer when the sky is still bright, but the sun has fallen below the horizon and the landscape has slid into darkness: if that matches what you want, then you should pick them up post-haste.

The Gaslighting of the Millennial Generation: How to Succeed in a Society That Blames You for Everything Gone Wrong (Boomers & Millennials) by Caitlin Fisher

The second disappointing book I read. I was looking for more of a sociological take on things – much like the last generation-focused book that I reviewed – but this one was more of a memoir/self-help read. It wasn’t bad necessarily, but it emphasized personal responsibility as an answer to our current predicament and I have to say I don’t really feel that’s the right answer to things.

As mentioned, it’s not bad, but I just can’t really recommend it.

Shadow Captain (Revenger, #2) by Alastair Reynolds

The sequel to Revenger by Alastair Reynolds, picks up where the previous story leaves off. The world-building in this series is exceptional, and Reynolds is quite good at slowly playing out the portions of a mystery in an engaging fashion.

In this book, narration duties shift from one sister – Fura – to the other – Adrana – as the two are now reunited and trying to make use of the captured “nightjammer” on which Adrana had been kept prisoner. The two young women have been psychologically damaged by their prior adventure, both taking on traits of the terrifying pirate Bosa Sennen, who had an obsession with capturing and hiding the treasured “quoins” that their civilization uses as currency. Understanding this obsession – and the strange behavior of these quoins – forms the cornerstone of the plot.

I imagine that third book, Bone Silence, answers more, but I think I’m going to take a break before tracking that one down. I recommend this series.

This series is eminently recommendable: it moves fast, as one expects and wants from a YA book, and features Reynolds’s trademark attention to scientific detail. In addition to this, the characters are fairly well-observed, which is more than one could really ask from “YA space opera designed to fit into the laws of physics as we understand them,” but here we are.

The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy by Murray Bookchin

Finishing strong. I’ve been trying to find a copy of Murray Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom for a long time now, and it was a fascinating read. Occasionally (such as on our own website,) you find people refer to a period of time as the “long” such and such (the long 1960s, for example.) I feel like this book, published in 1982, is perhaps an example a text from a “long 1970s” that no one but Bookchin and a few isolated thinkers experienced.

In this book, three forms of society are described: “Organic Societies”, which existed for millennia and are best typified by indigenous and peasant societies, “Industrial” civilizations (actually, I’m not sure that this is the term that he uses. I’ll have to go back through the text. Expect me to write more on this, I’ll correct my error then.) such as the one in which we now live, and a projected future “Ecological Society”, a dialectical synthesis of the organic and industrial that manages its affairs through direct democracy and takes up the mantle of being the conscious and moral portion of nature.

There is much to talk about here, so I won’t spend too much time on it, and save much of my discussion for later. I would encourage everyone who can, though, to track down a copy and consume it with haste.

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Cameron’s Book Reviews: Closing out 2021