Books I Read in 2024

 

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Brief reports on books I read in 2024.  All are recommended unless noted otherwise.  Within each category, I usually list the books I liked the most first.

I have already posted about the Brontës and the Falklands War.

Non-Fiction

Politics and Current Events

Austin Frerick, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry (2024)

I picked this up because a high school classmate of my sister’s figures prominently.  I expected this to be nostalgia for the traditional family farm.  There is some of that, but Frerick mostly and effectively describes the real problems with our food system.  The main one is the concentration of economic power that increases prices, damages the environment, and undermines food safety.  This is a tale of oligopoly and regulatory capture.

Frerick tells the story by focusing on the dominant firm in each of seven sectors, while skillfully weaving that firm’s story into the larger picture. The sectors and companies profiled:

• Hog Barons, Iowa Select
• Grain Barons, Cargill
• Coffee Barons, JAB Holding
• Dairy Barons, Fair Oaks Farms
• Berry Barons, Driscoll’s
• Slaughter Barons, JBS
• Grocery Barons, Walmart

The nostalgia in this book is not so much for family farms as for old-fashioned business regulation.  The stakes are high.  “The idea that corporate consolidation threatens democracy is not a new one.  As US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it, ‘We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.’”

Barbara McQuade, Attack From Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America (2024)

McQuade, a former federal district attorney, marshals legions of facts to support her case that the radical right is using disinformation to undermine democracy and the rule of law in order to put (and keep) themselves in power.  She enumerates the techniques, tactics, and tools of disinformation, with examples from both the US and abroad.  She explains the psychology that makes disinformation effective, and why we in the US are particularly vulnerable.  Disinformation is already endangering the safety of minorities, and public officials from election workers and school officials to congress members.

At the end of the book, McQuade proposes solutions.  I agree with many of her proposed solutions, which include amending the infamous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and strengthening local journalism.  But we part ways at her bias toward prosecution and laws limiting speech. 

This extensively researched (1717 end notes!) book reads like a well-organized legal brief.  The writing may be a bit pedestrian, but it’s important and thought-provoking.

Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (2023)

Brown University historian Richardson recaps the “liberal consensus” that developed between the 1930s (the New Deal) to the 1960s (the Great Society), which resulted in the “great compression” of incomes, and the fairest and most equal society in American history.  She then covers the rise of Movement Conservatism and how, over the postwar period, it gradually ate away at the liberal consensus, resulting in an upward movement of wealth, a shrinking middle class, and skyrocketing inequality.  Since Movement Conservatism’s ideas are widely unpopular, its advocates must resort to misdirection: first, distract with race and immigration; when that stops working, turn to authoritarianism.  A historian, Professor Richardson puts current political trends in context, drawing parallels with America’s fitful progress toward (and frequent backsliding from) equality, in particular, the antebellum fights over slavery.  Readers of her blog and of her other books will have seen much of the material before, but here it’s organized into a coherent argument.

Law

John Paul Stevens, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution (2014)

After retiring from the Supreme Court, Justice Stevens wrote this to propose amendments to the Constitution. Most of them reflect his frustration with the court’s turn to the right in the later years of his long (1975-2010) service on the Court.  They are:

• Strengthen the Supremacy Clause to make it clear that it applies to all state officials, not just judges,
• Prohibit political gerrymandering,
• Reverse Citizens United to allow limits on campaign finance,
• Eliminate sovereign immunity,
• Abolish the death penalty, and
• Clarify that the Second Amendment does not confer an individual right to bear arms.

Stevens gives the historical background, including writings of the Founders, legislative history, and legal precedents on each of these issues, and clearly explains where he thinks the Supreme Court has gone wrong.  A short and surprisingly engaging read.

Biography & Memoir

Elizabeth Rush, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth (2023)

Rush, a journalist and teacher of creative nonfiction at Brown University, accompanied a research expedition aboard the R/V Nathaniel B Palmer in 2019 to Antarctica’s rarely visited Thwaites Glacier.  The trip forced her to put off her plans to have a child for a year.  The result is intertwined narratives of the trip and of her pregnancy and childbirth. (The title refers both to the quickening pace of Thwaites’ disintegration and her pregnancy.)   Good, sometimes poetic descriptions of the land, sea, and work, combined with meditations on climate change and feminist reflections on Antarctic exploration; but the book is really at its best illuminating the close-knit community of a research vessel on a two-month voyage.

Mensun Bound, The Ship Beneath the Ice: The Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance (2022)

A day-by-day diary of Bound’s search for the Endurance, interspersed with the story of Shackleton’s failed expedition.  I bought this for our Antarctic cruise.  It failed Nancy Pearl’s 50-page test.  Perhaps Elizabeth Rush spoiled me for more conventional books about Antarctica.

Loren Grush, The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts (2023)

Biographies of the six women selected as part of the first class of shuttle astronauts in 1978, ending with the loss of one of them, Judy Resnick, in the Challenger accident.  A short postscript details what they’ve done since.  Good coverage of the sexism they encountered in NASA and (especially) from the press.  Grush, a journalist who specializes in the space program, writes in a straightforward journalistic style with few technical errors.

Mike Mullane, Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut (2006)

Mike Mullane was also in the astronaut class of 1978.  A self-confessed sexist native of Planet Arrested Development, he had to be convinced that civilians, and especially women, had the right stuff to be real astronauts.  They converted him.  Mullane flew three times, then went on to write the most emotionally honest (and laugh-out-loud funniest) of the astronaut autobiographies.  Mullane is very open about the joys, terrors, office politics, and close relationships that astronauts experience, and how hard it all was on their families.  This surprisingly well-written book (no ghost writer!) is highly recommended.

Deborah Pickman Clifford, Crusader for Freedom: A Life of Lydia Maria Child (1991)

The now mostly forgotten Child (1802-1880) was a well-known and influential abolitionist and Native American rights crusader in her time.  Not a joiner, Child wielded influence primarily through her fiction and non-fiction writings; scholars credit her An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) with converting more men and women to abolitionism than any other publication.  Her views were surprisingly advanced for her time; when many abolitionists were advocating returning freed slaves to Africa, her writings seemed to be preparing the public for interracial marriage.  She also called out what we now call “blaming the victim.”  She maintained a single-minded focus on race issues to the end of her life: after emancipation she worked on the education and well-being of freedmen.  Exhaustively researched, reasonably engaging.

Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (2009)

This readable and engaging biography presents a balanced view of a pioneering feminist.  She was about much more than woman suffrage, writing and lecturing extensively on abolition, women’s property rights, divorce reform, and the evils of organized Christianity.  Her faults were many, including elitism and racism.  She also wasn’t a team player.  She hated organizational work because, as the representative of an organization, she had to self-censor.  And Stanton “was never, not once, shy about saying what was on her ever-adventuring mind.”  So, she left the organizational work to her lifelong friend, Susan B. Anthony.  For that reason and Stanton's deep radicalism, Anthony got the coin and the primary place in popular memory.

Timothy Cotton, The Detective in the Dooryard: Reflections of a Maine Cop (2020), Got Warrants? Dispatches from the Dooryard (2021)

In 2014, Cotton found himself in charge of the Bangor Police Department’s Facebook page.  His humorous recounting of the life of a Bangor cop eventually collected 300,000 followers and earned Cotton numerous awards and a book contract.  Reflections is a mix of essays and material that originally appeared on the Facebook page.  Most of the pieces are quite short, generally 1-3 pages.  Got Warrants? continues in the same vein.  It is entirely short pieces (1-3 pages) describing specific incidents, all of which appear to be copied straight from the website. These are excellent books to pick up to read a couple stories to brighten your day.  Many are humorous, some touching, all revealing of a gentle soul that has not been hardened by police work. 

Technology

Matthew H. Hersch, Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle (2023)

The standard explanation for the fatal shuttle accidents lays the blame on culture and management failures at NASA.  Hersch disagrees.  He posits that the primary cause was the fundamentally flawed design of the shuttle itself.  To sell the program to a reluctant Richard Nixon, NASA promised that the shuttle would be all things to all people.  In fact, it was impossible to meet the conflicting goals of reliability, safety, low cost, and winged flight.  The result was a design that no amount of engineering fixes and process work could fix.  (In this respect, it strikes me as similar to the F-111, V-22, and F-35.)  Hersch further points out that the shuttle accidents weren’t merely predictable; they were predicted.  NASA continued to fly a vehicle they knew to be unsafe because it felt it had no other choice.  I suspect both this book and Diane Vaughan’s classic Challenger Launch Decision have pieces of the truth.  Both are recommended.

Roma Agrawal, Nuts & Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (In a Big Way), (2023)

The seven inventions are the nail, wheel, spring, magnet, lens, string, and pump.  Agrawal, a structural engineer who specializes in bridges, briefly gives the history of each, explores variations and elaborations, and discusses the social impact, with special attention to oppression.  For example, the wheel apparently started out as a potter’s wheel, then for grinding grain, and only after someone came up with the idea of an axle was it applied to transportation, which she traces from carts to bicycles to autos, followed by a diversion into the history of the automatic dishwasher and the gyroscope.  Finally, she looks at the social impact of the invention, such as how wheeled transportation has completely transformed our cities and the dishwasher frees up women’s time.  Not all impacts are positive; Agarwal pays attention to how inventions have been used for oppression, too (e.g., the central role of the spring in weaponry.)  She also explores variations, e.g., looking into the ubiquity of all things round.

History

Derek Leebaert, Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made (2023)

The lieutenants of the title are Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, and Harry Hopkins.  Roosevelt, himself a deeply wounded person and a devious manipulator of the people around him, exploited the four’s wounds to bind them to him.  All stayed with the administration for the full twelve years, all served multiple major roles, and all were so indispensable that Leebaert asks us to consider “how much of FDR’s greatness was due to them.”  Leebaert makes a good case in this well-written and thoroughly researched book.

Monys A. Hagen, The Worldly Game: The Story of Baseball in the Amana Colonies (2024)

The Bruderrat, the council of elders that ran the Community of True Inspiration, did not approve of baseball.  They did not approve of frivolous recreation, and they especially didn’t like the outside influence baseball represented.  And so men and boys played in secret, in clearings cropped by sheep, using homemade balls and bats.  In the long run, the power of baseball was too strong for the elders.  In 1928, they approved an intra-community league, in which teams representing the seven Amana villages played each other.  After the Amanas abandoned religious communism in 1932, Amana boys began playing against teams in southeast Iowa, including eternal rival, nemesis, and frequent state champion Norway.  Baseball at all levels thrived in Amana into the 1960s and then declined as other sports and activities arose and competed with it.  In 1989 the school district consolidated, the town team folded, and (eventually) the baseball diamond was converted to a soccer pitch.  Baseball was done in by the very worldly influences it helped to bring to the Amanas.  Monys Hagen’s surprisingly engaging book tells the story of baseball against the backdrop of a community with a unique religious history and the baseball-mad nation around it. 

I admit this one is of limited interest.  I picked this up because my ancestors have a loose connection with the Amana Colonies.  My Mom grew up in Norway, Iowa, and remembered visiting the Amanas and eating in the communal food halls.  I imagine it would be of interest to cultural historians (Hagen is Professor Emerita of History, Metropolitan State University of Denver).  Sociologists would appreciate its granular history of the interactions between sports and the community that supports it.  But, honestly, anyone who grew up in a small town will smile in recognition of this portrayal of life and religion.

John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants (1958, 1964, 2008, 2016)

In the late 1950’s, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) asked a young senator with presidential ambitions to write a book on immigration policy.  John Kennedy rose to the challenge. 

Kennedy spends five chapters detailing the history of immigration from colonial times to the present and extolling the contributions of immigrants.  This part of the text reads as if it was campaign material written by a research assistant.

At the time, immigration policy was still based on national quotas, as set by the 1924 Wagner Act.  In the final two chapters of this short work, Kennedy argues for the abolition of these national quotas and a liberalized immigration system based on skills and family ties.  He submitted a bill implementing this proposal in 1963; it closely parallels the 1965 immigration act pushed through Congress by Lyndon Johnson.

Originally published 1958, this version of the text includes revisions Kennedy made shortly before his death and published posthumously in 1964.  Includes introduction to 2008 edition by Senator Edward Kennedy; introduction to 2018 edition by Congressman Joe Kennedy III, and Foreword by Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL.  There are multiple appendices, on a variety of topics.  A particularly useful appendix is one on the history of immigration policy from the founding, which has been updated to include events from 1963-2018.

It would be nice if this book were merely a historical curiosity.  Unfortunately, it isn’t.  Recommended as an antidote to today's toxic immigration debates.

Desmond Seward, The Hundred Years War: The English in France, 1337-1453 (1978)

In 1346, after years of rising tension and occasional battles, Edward III invaded Normandy to push his claim to the French throne.  It started a season of pillage that ended with an English victory over a superior French force at Crécy.  The English established garrisons and took their plunder.

The English did amazingly well at first, at one point controlling the northern third of modern France plus their historic holdings in Guyenne.  This was because of internal divisions in France and the superiority of the English longbow over the French crossbow.  The French turned it around starting around 1435 when the country unified and developed superior field artillery.  Ultimately, the French kicked the English off the continent for good.

The war was brutal, featuring repeated English raids to loot the French countryside.  The English government may not have profited from the war, but the English nobility and many commoners got rich from the plunder.  The long-term geopolitical effects of the war were an increase of parliamentary power, the birth of a unified France, and lasting French hatred of England.

This short book (its 260 pages of main text work out to about 2 ¼ pages per year) summarizes the main campaigns and battles, introduces us to the major characters, and summarizes the scholarship. As seems to always be the case, the strategic and battle maps were inadequate.  Particularly irritating: the text frequently mentions towns not on any map.  Still, a good introduction to the subject.

Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (1999)

A gripping account of the 1900 Galveston hurricane, which devastated the city and may have taken 6,000 lives.  “Isaac” is Isaac Monroe Cline, head of the Weather Bureau’s Galveston station, who missed the signs of the oncoming storm.  Larson is always good and this book is no exception; richly drawn through extensive research in archival sources, combined with our modern understanding of weather.

World War I

B.H. Liddell Hart, The Real War: 1914-1918 (1930)

This is an account and analysis of the “Great War” by a noted military historian.  To say that Liddell Hart’s analysis was vindicated by World War II is an understatement.  I was astonished at how well Liddell Hart’s analysis has held up.  He is probably most famous for his early understanding of the significance of tanks and how to properly use them.  (The Germans, it turned out, paid a lot more attention to his theories than anybody else.)  But he also called out the evils of divided command (Churchill paid attention to that one!); noted that military strategy must not be allowed to dominate political policy; agrees that the Brits botched the Dardanelles; and noted that the Germans were justified in feeling betrayed by Versailles (and all but predicted a new war before the rise of Hitler).  There are even occasional “management lessons,” such as the importance of open discussion, flexibility, and empowering subordinates.

The Real War concentrates mostly on the British fronts. The book structured by year, with an overview of the year’s events, followed by short “scenes” covering individual battles or topics.  The whole thing is leavened with doses of humor.  Well-written, a joy to read.  Highly recommended.

Martin Gilbert, Atlas of The First World War (1970)

With introduction by Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.  Cartography by Arthur Banks.

I pulled this from my bookshelf to use as a reference while reading Liddell Hart.  I found it to contain far more than the battlefield maps I had expected.  There are maps of the strategic situation, war goals of each side, planned partitions of Africa and the Middle East, plans from secret treaties, maps of the post-war rearrangement of Europe, locations of ship sinkings and air raids, and much more.  There are even maps showing where Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill spent the war.  Text boxes on the maps provide context.  And yes, it does include maps of the major battlefields.

Miscellaneous

Erika Nesvold, Off-Earth: Ethical Questions and Quandaries for Living in Outer Space (2023) and Making New Worlds: Exploring the Ethics of Human Settlement in Space (podcast, 2017-18)

As an aerospace engineer, I was interested in the technology of space travel and settlement.  But there are many other things to consider.  Who gets to go?  How are colonists to be governed?  How do we allocate scarce medical care?  How do we avoid repeating the sad history of labor exploitation in difficult-to-reach (and return from) colonies?  If everyone’s labor is essential to the colony, what do we do with those who commit crime?  Nesvold explores these issues and more in this relatively short, thought-provoking, and enjoyable book.  I also recommend the podcast in which she originally explored these issues.

Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (2023)

“Hail Mary full of grace, help me find a parking space.”  Who hasn’t wasted time and gasoline searching for parking?  It makes us all sure that there isn’t enough parking.  In fact, as Grabar’s book shows us, there’s plenty; it’s just poorly managed.

Grabar, in this quirky and informative book, goes way beyond poor management to show the pervasive effects of parking, most of them bad.  Parking literally shapes our cities; up to ¼ of the surface area of cities is devoted to parking.  Minimum parking requirements act like dark energy, powering the expansion of cities into endless expanses of low-slung buildings surrounded by huge lots.  Free parking powered the growth of suburbs by making it easier to drive downtown to shop and work.  Parking has been shown to increase miles driven, and therefore CO2 emissions.  Parking increases congestion, which further increases CO2.  Parking minimums are the reason for the virtual disappearance of affordable housing.

People don’t even like this situation.  Those who can afford it are moving to walkable neighborhoods that aren’t built around cars and their parking requirements.  When streets were closed off and turned over to other uses during the pandemic, people flocked to them.

There are solutions, but they aren’t popular.  Charge what the market will bear for the best parking.  Abolish parking minimums, perhaps replacing them with maximums.  Break garage rents apart from apartment rents, so as not to discriminate against carless tenants.  Let different uses share parking.

Grabar’s points are backed by data and enlivened by stories and profiles. Highly recommended.

Fiction

General Fiction

Percival Everett, James (2024)

A powerful re-imagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.  It starts off as great fun, more or less following Twain’s plot, but eventually turns dark as James and Huck encounter the horrors of slavery.  It deserves all of the awards it’s gotten. Highly recommended.

Tom Hanks, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (2023)

In this novel, Tom Hanks takes us through the creation of a superhero action film.  It is a fun read in which he weaves together the backgrounds of the characters, the origin of the story, and the details of how a movie is made.  A good beach read.

Daniel Mason, North Woods (2023)

Set in western Massachusetts, North Woods  consists of a series of linked stories tied to a building site, starting with lovers running away from a Puritan settlement who build a shack there, through the present day and into the future.  Engaging and, at times, beautifully written.

Historical Fiction

Dan Jones, Essex Dogs (2022)

Popular historian Jones tries his hand at fiction with this historical novel of a company of freebooters who take part in Edward III’s invasion of France early in the Hundred Years’ War.  Not a whole lot of history here beyond the routes and the major battles. Rather too much bloody detail for me.  This first book of a trilogy was good, but not good enough to motivate me to read the other two.  Mostly this book motivated me to finally read Seward’s Hundred Years War (see above).

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2014)

Engrossing novel set in a post-apocalyptic Earth in which 99+% of humanity was quickly wiped out in a flu pandemic.  Mandel jumps back in forth in time, gradually bringing the various threads and characters together.  Station Eleven follows the Traveling Symphony as it makes its living touring settlements around the Great Lakes giving concerts and performing Shakespeare.  Like Brooks-Dalton’s The Light Pirate, the book ends with a hopeful glimpse of the future.

Lily Brooks-Dalton, Good Morning, Midnight (2016)

The end of the world causes Augustine, a successful astrophysicist and failed human being, to re-evaluate his life.  Meanwhile, Mission Specialist Sullivan and her crewmates, aboard a ship returning from Jupiter, wonder at the sudden silence from Earth and what they will find and do when they get back. The writing is good, but the book is real downer.  The Netflix movie Midnight Sky is based on this book and follows it pretty well.

Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (2022)

Queer science fiction in subject, refreshingly old-fashioned science fiction in form.  These short books present an idealized society that lives in ecological balance with respect and tolerance of both human diversity and non-human intelligence.  Chambers reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke: the characters aren’t deep and the plot is straightforward.  But unlike Clarke, this novel examines the structure of society and discusses philosophical issues.  Much more fun to read than Brooks-Dalton.

Thrillers

Richard North Patterson, Trial (2023)

A young black, son of a well-known civil rights activist, is accused of murdering a white cop in rural southeast Georgia.  The accused turns out to also be the unacknowledged son of a liberal northern white congressman.  The trial attracts white supremacists from across the country. Novelist and journalist Patterson has written a page-turning legal thriller that does an excellent job of capturing the class, political, and racial tensions of southwest Georgia.

Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994) and O Jerusalem (2009)

In 1915, gawky, fifteen-year-old Mary Russell, literally stumbles on an odd 60ish gentleman on the moors of Sussex.  He turns out to be Sherlock Holmes, retired to the country and raising bees.  He recognizes Mary’s genius and trains her in his methods.  A friendship blossoms as they go on a series of increasingly hazardous cases in which Mary shows both her detecting skills and coolness under pressure.  This first book of the (quite long) Mary Russell series is a delightful extension of the Holmes canon.

Though not written until many years later, O Jerusalem fills in a gap in the timeline of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice.  While hiding out in the Holy Land in 1919, the intrepid duo of Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell stumble on a plot to literally blow up the Dome of the Rock, along with the heads of three major religions, along with General Allenby, the head of the new British occupation.  The aim: to avenge the recently ousted Turks, trigger a holy war, and wreck the British protectorate.  The stakes are high but never fear, our heroes are up to the task!