Picking Up Speed

The Junior Officers’ Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars by Patrick Hennessey is a memoir of a Grenadier Guards officer’s service in the British Army. The book includes his time at Sandhurst, duty with the palace guard in London as well as deployments to Balkans, Iraq and finally Afghanistan. Readers should be aware that Hennessey’s book is written in a kind of stream of consciousness style, which while emotionally powerful and evocative, can make it difficult for readers who are more comfortable with a coherent narrative. Another issue with the book is that none of the people in the book are really fleshed out as characters. We get occasional snippets about specific men but there really aren’t any fully realized. Despite these minor quibbles it was a very powerful book and an excellent read.

Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids: And Other Small Events That Changed History by Phil Mason is a series of anecdotes about minor occurrences that had an outsized impact. It was amusing, but history buffs will already know most of this stuff, and probably won’t care about the rest.

The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories by Connie Willis is an excellent collection of short stories ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. Favorites included Fire Watch and The Winds of Marble Arch but they were all good.

Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors by Peter Ackroyd was an outstanding history of England during the title period. The author does an excellent job of integrating the day to day lives of the people, the major events of the time, especially those that drove change, and the vestigial impacts of the past on today’s world. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and can’t wait to start on the second volume on the Tudors. Serious readers should be aware that this is very much an informal history, there are no footnotes or source notes and the bibliography is limited to suggestions for further reading.

The World’s Worst Warships: The Failures and Repercussions of Naval Design and Construction, 1860-2000 by Antony Preston was a fascinating study of warships that ranged from utter disasters, to “not quite there”. Preston lays out why each ship was a failure and describes the factors that caused it to be designed the way it was. Readers will be surprised to see several ships on this list including USS Monitor, HMS Hood and Bismarck, but he makes a decent case for each of them. I quite enjoyed it.
59 for the year

Two Disappointing Books

Disaster at D-Day by Peter Tsouras is a counterfactual account of the Normandy invasion where the Germans defeat the Allies. It was, I am afraid, rather unsatisfying, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. I think it maybe because it feels like it was written from an a priori perspective of “what would it take for the German’s to win”, rather than “what would have been the outcome if “x”, “y” and “z” had occurred (or not occurred). Throughout the book this mindset is evident. Many implausible departures from actual events are required to give the Germans victory.

Another complaint about the book is the more or less seamless blending of actual and fictitious events. Tsouras goes so far as to “invent” fake works of history so he can “footnote” the fictitious events. Anyway, I was looking for more discussion of the effects of counterfactual changes and bit less of a “stacked deck” for the desired outcome. YMMV

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi is about half of two different books, neither of which have anything much to do with the wealth gap. First is a blistering assessment of the fact that no one has yet been criminally charged in connection with the sub-prime meltdown and the relatively ineffectual way white collar crime is prosecuted in general. Taibbi believes that rather than regulators and the DOJ imposing large fines on the corporation for wrongdoing, they should criminally charge the executives responsible for the wrong doing.

The book is chock full of anecdotes describing people who acted in an egregiously unlawful manner, but the only result was the corporation they worked for paying a small, by the standards of their revenue, fine. On this topic the book doesn’t have much beyond the anecdotes. Certainly there’s no analysis of what the second order effects would of such prosecutions.

The other half of the book, interspersed between the chapters on white collar crime, is a similar collection of anecdotes of poor people’s brushes with the law. Illegal immigrants who can’t legally obtain licenses losing have their car seized when they’re caught driving illegally, disheveled looking men rousted by police in “stop & frisks” being charged with “resisting” when nothing is found on them, etc.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure how the two things are connected, and I also can’t fathom how they’re related to the changing distribution of wealth beyond “it sucks to be poor”, so I can recommend the book.

54 for the year.

Two More

Finished two more books since the last update and both were pretty good.

First was, 50 Mathematical Ideas You Really Need to Know by Tony Crilly, a fascinating survey of how math explains much of the world we live in. Each chapter presents one concept such as “Zero”, “Squares and square roots”, “Sets”, “Calculus” etc. which the author describes in a simple and accessible way. Then he explains why that particular concept is important, and finally, ends each chapter with a brief summary. Very nicely done.

Next was Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy by John Julius Norwich, which provides a concise account of each of the 265 men (up through Benedict XVI) who have sat in the chair of St Peter. Norwich provides a biography of each man before he is elected, describes his election and places his papacy in the context of developments in the Church and her influence in the temporal world of the time. He even provides a chapter on the legend of “Pope Joan”. The entire book was well-written and consistently engaging. I quite enjoyed the whole thing. As a cradle Catholic I have to tell you I was appalled at some of the men who have served the Church as Pope through the years. I recommend it very highly.

52 for the Year