Walking on the Moon

I read 22 books in 2019. (Off-by-one error). Here are the books I strongly recommended:

• Second Founding
• How To Hide An Empire
• War Dances
• In Patagonia
• Operation: Mincemeat
• The Apocalypse Codex
• The Half Has Never Been Told
• The Library Book

I enjoy Eric Foner’s work both because he is interested in the US Reconstruction and because he writes lucidly and thoughtfully about it. The Reconstruction informs the current form and slant of American society at the same time that the content of the story we tell ourselves about it varies completely with who is telling it. This is an exploration of the time that citizens imbue the national government with new powers and new roles at the same time that people begin making the myths that will continue to inform the discussions about them. In Second Founding, Foner frames those struggles inside the bounds of the constitutional amendments that people enact and interpret.

People often interpret the past as being more unanimous than it was. In thinking about the reconstruction amendments – 13, 14, and 15 – I’d bet that most people imagine a pretty unified support for the general ideas that recognize formerly enslaved people as citizens. Foner does an excellent job drawing out the various competing positions and the compromises that create the amendments and their interpretation.

Depending on what one believes – and the Reconstruction narrative they know – current discussions about the ability of the federal government to override state laws to protect voting rights or civil rights can be completely opaque. The false uniformity makes current actions feel like unethical exploitation of established law. If one’s mythology includes the idea that the 14th amendment recognizes rights of citizens and declares that the federal government must act to protect them, the 20th century has a flavor of betrayal to it. If one’s mythology views that amendment as a mechanism to secure a lasting voting bloc that supports moneyed interests, the 20th century looks more like a replay of a domestic power grab that hade been beaten back at the end of the 19th. Founding strips such false consensus away and opens a door to talk.

The reality, as Foner explains, is that the amendments were the results of a compromises between at least the 247 congressmen who wrangled over them. Some were pretty clearly motivated by ideals; some were pretty clearly motivated by power politics. Some were motivated by the financial interests of patrons. Some were driven by what state legislatures were willing to approve – a process that includes how the amendments will tilt powers and representation of states in the future. Most balanced combinations of those motivations.

Many of the arguments the representatives and pundits published at that time took root as the basis of the mythology of the emerging post-Civil-War central government. There are few arguments about these amendments that don’t date from their creation.

Foner chronicles the arguments and resulting language that defines them. He also holds the various interpretations of the arguments’ expression and resulting clauses up and connects them. He has a definite bias, but presents more than enough information to understand the process.

He then goes one step further and explores how the Supreme Court interprets the amendments. It is oddly comforting to see that political appointments and hidebound jurists are nothing new. Foner argues compellingly that the justices of the day did interpret the law conservatively – and commercially. (And President Johnson’s influence was considerable as well.)

Overall this is a clear and informed exploration of these Amendments and the people and stories around them.

Strongly Recommended.

This is another joy from the work of Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei on the brilliant Throughline podcast that NPR supports. They credit Daniel Immerwahr’s How To Hide An Empire significantly in their Puerto Rico episode. I recommend that episode.

Empire itself is a strong history of the United States’ adventures acquiring and administering territory in the 19th century and the sea changes that WWII brings to that Empire. The two phases are fascinating in their own rights. The strange happenstances of expansion by a democratic yet slave-holding state before the war are fundamentally refined by changes in technology and geopolitics worked on and by the US. The US becomes a worldwide distributor of influence, goods, and arms and our foreign holdings reflect that in ways that surprised me.

The first half of Empire shows how the US’s Manifest Destiny mythology drives conquest and land acquisition, modulated – as always – by the internal struggles between Northern financial and manufacturing interests against Southern slave-driven interests. The expansion of the empire is also influenced by our best ideals. The geopolitics of the world also plays a role. Unlike European powers that were wresting land and resources from largely indigenous people, the US was largely wresting land from other colonizers. The interplay between the promises one makes to the colony and the improvements that appear when the uprising is over reveals a lot about human nature.

After World War II, the US needs foreign holdings less to pull in resources like rubber and guano (yes, guano) than to project influence and products. The underlying changes that drove those changes and what that means for the people in the colonies are fascinating. The trade-off between exerting influence based on democratic ideals and holding colonists in varying piecemeal states of rights and protections produces some remarkable verbal tap-dancing and outright doublethink.

One hopes this sort of history can make citizens think more deeply about how we act. Empire is a clear and accessible place to start.

Strongly recommended.

Edward Luce is one of the co-conspirators over at Deep State Radio, a concern I support with some reservations. I picked this up reluctantly. Luce is not my favorite speaker on DSR – that’s probably Rosa Brooks or Kori Schake – and I was concerned that his book would be similarly dry to me. I’m delighted to find him much more sparkling on the page.

Retreat illuminates the state of the world for me in two ways I find useful. It is a powerful and intelligible summation of facts and motivations of liberal ideas in the sense of the sorts of ideas that motivated the creation of the United Nations and other national cooperative bodies (NATO, Marshall Plan). Western leaders planted these after World War II to promote specific values. Luce explicates what these institutions are and what specific ideals the leaders tried to embody in them. The ideals are key to me. We can and should argue about the details of these institutions and how they are implemented, but holding up the motivations and principles that they are intended to promote lets one focus on whether those are worthwhile outside the details of who is behind on their UN dues.

Luce presents those institutions and ideas in the world outside our window, full of mistakes, compromise, and players who don’t believe in either the institutions or the ideals. People who believe in a simplistic world of simple good and evil are woefully unprepared to deal with those very real forces and people. Luce is persuasively and clearly realistic about how the ideas that the WWII winners tried to plant in the ground operate and fail to. He lives in a world where outcomes are not inevitable and invites us to join him.

Beyond that, he writes with clarity, wit, and charm that I was not expecting. While I’m happy to defend that evaluation of his writing, I suspect readers who are less sympathetic to his support of the international institutions will find his style more grating.

Recommended.

Yeah, I really read this. It’s a novel about DevSecOps. Really.

Intellectually, I understand what Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford are up to. They believe in this management and software develop methodology and are trying to evangelize it. What surprised me is that they to spread the word in long form narrative fiction. Evidently they hypothesize that there’s a market for fiction about a Hero’s Journey through software development management.

I pretty much had to read it.

As literature, it’s a total potboiler. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Our hero is thrown into a job he can’t refuse in a department full of underappreciated characters who mistrust him. There are high-level schemers working against his goals and the goals of his company. The security manager takes apparent glee in undermining the smooth operations of systems to defeat imagined foes. Fortunately there’s a guru/guardian angel who embodies nearly every cliche of the misunderstood Silicon Valley genius to take our hero under his wing.

Along the way, our hero quits in frustration, only to be literally begged to come back by the CEO. The security manager walks out, drinks himself into oblivion and comes back to the good side through application of DevSecOps principles. Our hero wins the loyalty of his team, frees his company from the prison of hidebound operating principles and leads it to the Nirvana of market penetration. If you know what I mean, and I think you do.

It’s an advertisement dressed up as an airport novel, executed perfectly competently. For that matter, I learned a few things about DevSecOps management principles that were worth thinking about.

I can’t recommend it, but it’s exactly what it says on the tin.

I think Caitlin Doughty makes the world a better place by telling folks what she knows about dying and funeral practices from her perspective as a Funeral Director. She’s admittedly something of a radical and activist director, but I think it’s a fun world in which one can be those things. At her core, she holds death and the rituals and services around it up to the light and tells people how they work. She tells the truth about the nuts and bolts of funerals and burial while respecting the beliefs that drive them.

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? is part of that straight talk campaign. Specifically, she collects questions from children who attend her various appearances, read her books, or encounter her in her day job. In Eyeballs she answers the ones she finds most common, interesting, illuminating, or some combination thereof. I learned a bunch from her answers, and I already knew some about the topics.

She writes clearly, but a little bombastically for my tastes. I do think this is a matter of taste. I feel like she’s performing on paper as much as writing. Words on a page dance different steps than words on a video or podcast. The odd steps never seem more than a mild distraction to me, though. She’s clear and engaging.

Recommended.

I heard a strong recommendation for John Helyar’s Lords of the Realm from an excellent baseball commentator, so I grabbed it. I did so with some trepidation. The subject is primarily off-field games – contract negotiations and labor relations – which is usually dead boring to me. I like to sit in the stands and bullshit, not compare player salaries.

I’m pleasantly surprised to report that Helyar brings the evolution of baseball’s labor situation to life very well. He manages to both animate the owners, union founders and leaders, and players. There is plenty of negotiation that feels specific to baseball. He also explains the labor issues clearly and insightfully. Whether you’re like me and love the game more, or a student of the finances, Lords is worth your time.

Recommended.

In Patagonia is a book that, like Desert Solitaire, captures a place but is not a travel book. Bruce Chatwin has written an ode to a people and place that he found himself drawn into.

Chatwin’s Patagonia is a desolate, supernatural place inhabited by loners, discards, and outlaws to which he was drawn by a possibly fictitious brontosaurous skin. The inhabitants are simultaneously historical, fictional, and contemporaneous giving the place a timelessness that few places can claim. The result is to place a real location outside into a magical realm.

It’s a beautiful and unique work.

Strongly recommended.

I really enjoy and appreciate Sherman Alexie’s poetry and short work that I’ve read. War Dances feels much the same as The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in all the right ways.

I don’t have much else to say.

Strongly Recommended.

Private Empire is a well-reported history of ExxonMobil’s history between the Exxon Valdez disaster and the first term of the Obama administration. Steve Coll does a fairly even-handed job of both documenting the corporate actions and animating them with the personalities who drive them.

One cannot approach the history of a corporation that acts on the scale of a nation in without some bias, but Coll is even handed enough that I believe that I got a clearer sense of the motivations of the players in the corporation. I came away with two insights: ExxonMobil policy is driven as much by the personalities of the executives who steer it as by the structure of the industry and market it exists in.

The corporation projects the economic mass of a nation channeled by a single industry and market. The industry leads the corporation to search into places with oil that one can get at. Getting at oil includes at least geology, changing technology, the government (or other organization) that controls the legal claims to that geology, and the public relations of getting access to it and selling it. As complex as the problem is, that is much more constrained than what drives nations. Under those constraints oil companies act in a pretty broad range of ways.

Coll argues that the personalites of the executives steer those actions. Over this period ExxonMobil was headed by basically two people: Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson. Their mix of aggressive drive and Boy Scout upbringing led to more nuanced responses to their problems. The company’s expansion (including merging with Mobil) and geopolitical adventures (including responding to kidnappings and pulling a legal heist on the nation of Venezuela) are surprising in ways I approve and disapprove of. I understand them better having read this.

Seeing Tillerson as a cross between Boy Scout and Robber Baron makes his tenure as Secretary of State pretty surreal.

Recommended.