The Reading List - May 23rd 2021
Hello everyone -
In Twenty Six, I promised to share what I’ve been reading and thinking about over the last few weeks. Here is part I of that promise.
Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze
Tooze’s first major work is an inspired revision to the history of Nazi Germany and WWII by studying the financial and material constraints and conditions of the German economy. He illustrates the full decision space available to the Nazis, stripped of their propaganda and the later unreflective repetition of such narratives (what his friend David Edgerton has called booster history). Far from excusing their actions or choices as ‘economic necessity’ or inevitability, Tooze’s careful examination of their possible choices allows him to demonstrate the malignity of their voluntarism in a new light.
Last Lion II: Alone 1932-1940 by William Manchester
William Manchester’s second volume on Winston Churchill is an engaging, knowledgeable, but predictable biography of the crucial years of the Churchill legend: the lonely stand against the appeasers, the early tirades against the threat of Hitler, and the commitment to rearmament when it was politically impossible. Like any good biographer of WSC, Manchester identifies a little too closely with the great man and revels a bit too much in the astonishing failures of judgment by men like Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. Nevertheless, the period in question were among the darkest days of our cultural past, and Churchill deserves all the credit he has garnered for being outstandingly Right on the historical issue of the day. Like Churchill himself, Manchester sees History as a struggle between Heroes and Villains, and his entertaining, politically insightful book provides this in spades.
Crossing to Safety and Sound of Mountain Water by Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner’s final novel looks back over the long, interwoven lives of two couples, the Morgans (based on himself and his wife) and the Langs. It is a beautiful elegy to their particular friends and to Cicero’s amicitia, which, as CS Lewis wrote, is one of those perfectly useless things which make life worth living.
Sound of Mountain Water is a small collection of Stegner’s essays on naturalism, conservation, Western literature, and the development of the West, of which he was both eye-witness and opinion-shaping participant. As Timothy Egan wrote elsewhere, there are “rivers undammed, desert vistas unspoiled, and forests uncut in the wondrous West because of Stegner’s pen”. Reading the testaments of his deep affinity with this arid American land, it is humbling to think what a magnificent tribute that is. Would that each of us can accomplish so much for something we love.
Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon
William Cronon is an economic and environmental historian, and this book could be viewed as a travelogue of the borderlands between those two forces and disciplines. He seeks to merge the usually bifurcated history of the cities and markets and the countryside and settlers, showing how the demands of one influenced the development (or ransacking) of the other. By focusing on Chicago and the Western hinterland it commanded - perhaps the greatest virgin economic hinterland in the history of the world - he dispels persistent historical myths and brings new understanding to the past and present of the American continent.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke:
Susanna Clarke’s second novel is among the best-crafted works of fiction I have ever read. Piranesi lives within the House, a hermetic, tripartite world of floods, tides, clouds and statues. He fishes for food in the lower rooms, explores the distant Halls, leaves gifts for his favored Statues, and keeps his daily and yearly journals. But despite the austere, dreamlike coherence of the House, the reader begins to feel a creeping doubt about the fissures of its edifice… I won’t say more. Her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, is excellent as well.
True Believer by Eric Hoffer
This 1950 classic is an incisive collection of aphorisms on the mindset, motivations, and propensities of the “frustrated” who make up mass movements, and the kinds of men who can lead them. It is fascinating not only for the ideas Hoffer expresses, but also their provenance: a lifelong laborer and nighttime scholar, Hoffer combines close quarters observations of human nature with reflections on his favorite classic authors, from Montaigne and Pascal to the Gospels, as well as plenty of twentieth-century thinkers.
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiesen
This multilayered novel gradually unravels the life and legend of Ed Watson, a charismatic, ambitious, unpredictable South Carolinian, killed by his neighbors after a hurricane one evening in 1910. The three movements of this novel, each revisiting the same events, comprise interviews with his Ten Thousand Island neighbors, the quest of his son Lucius to understand his downfall, and finally the firsthand account of the frustrated, bloodstained, possibly-great man himself. Peter Matthiessen expands his legend from the tale of a real man and a real incident in a remote backwater into an allegory of the stifled ambitions and tragic possibilities when the virtues and values that the 19th century claimed to embody run into a rapidly closing frontier.
Visions of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell
This is a polemic against the mindset of enlightened elitism, of seeing the world around you through the ‘vision of the anointed’ and therefore feeling qualified to dictate terms to other people about their own lives because ‘you know best’. It is also a criticism of political efforts that focus on normative (in Sowell’s phrase, ‘cosmic’) judgments instead of tradeoffs and incentives. Some parts of his critique work better than others, but I was struck by the egalitarian force of viewing political issues as tradeoffs between interests and never as ‘cosmic’ issues of abstract righteousness, and his desire to respect other individuals’ agency in their own affairs, as we’d all like to be respected in our own.
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
This was my first exposure to Cather, and her prose is magnificent. Death Comes is an evocative novel of the nascent American Southwest, imagining the life and times of the first bishop to the new territory in the mid 19th century. I cherished her descriptions of the land, of interacting Anglo, Mexican, and Indian residents, of civilized, intellectual men of faith in a barbaric place, and of distance and isolation as it will never be experienced by we moderns.
Lavinia by Ursula K LeGuin
In Ursula K LeGuin’s final novel, she gives a voice to a literary figure who has never had one: Aeneas’s Latin bride in Virgil’s Aeneid. Lavinia is introduced only as a source of war, because she favors marriage to Aeneas in accordance with an oracle over the claim of local prince Pallas. She speaks no lines, commits no other actions. Through an imaginative combination of mythical, oracular, and fantastic elements, and a special attention to the archeological details of that pre-Roman ancient past, LeGuin crafts a rich story, and provides a new layer of interpretation to one of our culture’s oldest tales.
In this part-memoir, part-essay, Zena Hitz champions the particular kind of intellectual and spiritual life that she aspires to. Throughout this work she insists on the life of the mind as a font of dignity available to every human being, regardless of race, creed, or circumstance. She serves as an articulate defender of the humanities and ‘liberal arts’, arguing for their innate value as one of the highest realms of human flourishing.
Catastrophe and other Stories by Dino Buzzati
I already teased this superb set of stories in the last Links post I shared, but Dino Buzzati’s fables deserve another mention here. This entire collection felt like the work of a talented writer who, after passing an afternoon reading Borges, started to pick up on the little cracks in reality as he went about his life… What if we got on the train just as some news was breaking over the city, and we could only watch as they panicked and we departed? What if you were sent to report on a horrible landslide, but no one in the town knew what you were talking about? What if you are at a theater gala and the rumor of a coup begins circulating? Each of the Buzzati’s catastrophes invites the reader to consider their own slim protection from a host of disquieting possibilities.
That’s the list! Thank you for reading. Stay tuned for a missing month’s worth my favorite finds from around the internet in the coming days.
Alex
These books, and those from previous lists, can be viewed or purchased here.
Some of my other writing can be found here.
If you’d like to receive an email like this every month, please subscribe.