At 17 titles read, January has the year off to a running start, and there’s more in-bound, with some fun titles in the works — on fighting, creating better streets and places, and radical libertarian women. Science and the TBR project both had solid starts, though classics were a nonstarter. I still have four unreviewed titles for Jan and am steadily working to distill my thoughts on them.
SCIENCE SURVEY (Base Goal: 12 books) Bitch: On the Female of the Species, Lucy Cooke Nuclear Awakening, James McHaffey. StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Classics Club Strikes Back, Year II (Base Goal: 10 Books)
(crickets)
Readin’ Dixie (Base Goal: One Book Per Month) Alabama Footprints Exploration
Climbing Mount Doom (Base Goal: Read/Discard One TBR Book Per Week) Week 1: Discarded a library discard on hurricane history. Week 2: Read Live Not by Lies Week 3: Read Nuclear Awakening and Star Talk Week 4: Read The Secret Life of Groceries
February Plans: Ida Elizabeth, for CC. TBR shellacking will continue, dovetailing with science survey, plus the aforementioned Christmas/birthday haul.
In 2005, James Howard Kunstler penned The Long Emergency, building on his earlier work as a critic of American urbanism to argue that in addition to being economically ruinous, the suburban experiment has placed the United States in a uniquely bad spot for the converging problems ahead, chiefly peak oil, climate change, and financial upheaval. When the housing bubble burst and Americans continued plowing along, he warned against the dangers of ‘technological narcissism’ and connected the Great Recession with his Long Emergency thinking. In Living in the Long Emergency, Kunstler responds to the apparent rout of peak oil theorists by fracking, and interviews people throughout the United States who have begun changing their lives (as he has) in anticipation of future trouble. Living marks a shift in Kunstler’s writing; Kunstler appears to no longer believe that Americans can respond to the threat as a nation, and has shifted his focus to individuals who are willing and able to adapt at the level of their own lives. As a book, Living in the Long Emergency doesn’t fully live up to its promise, as only a few of the interviewed individuals are overtly planning for collapse. Kunstler nevertheless proves worth the reading, however, especially in his endcap section in which he excoriates both wings of the political elite.
In Too Much Magic, I commented that Kunstler’s works have built one upon another much like a train: the preceding arguments are still there, but they’re followed and strengthened by additional, interconnected concerns. Kunstler’s introduction and ending here continue that trend, though not to the same scale: Kunstler summarizes his preceding arguments and then comments at length on the sad farce that passes for politics these days, as both parties are fully in the grips of unreality. Kunstler used to advocate for change at the national level, urging better uses of capital that would ameliorate the chaos to come — like accepting nuclear energy, for instance, instead of wasting money on short-lived wind farms that can’t support a base load. Now he doesn’t bother, seeing his estranged party (the Democrats) having descended to the level of Jacobins, more interested in destroying those who disagree with them and waging war on the past than preparing intelligently for the future. And Republicans? The portion of their party with energy is moored to the same vision of Happy Motoring that Kunstler condemned decades ago. The United States is a truck hurtling into the abyss with two tweeting, vainglorious idiots fighting for who gets to drive. What interests Kunstler now is people who have bailed from business as usual and started altering their lives in preparation, and it’s these people who he focuses on in the heart of Living. These interviews include an interesting range of individuals, from Alaska to Vermont. Several have created their own homesteads, where they grown much of their own foodstuffs and at the same time create products to sell outside, like liquor or bread. This isn’t a series of interviews with survivalists, though: what unites the guests is their disconnection from mass society, their belief that the future will be worse than the present, and their willingness to find ways to adapt to it. For some, that’s growing their own food; for others, it’s learning practical skills they can sell. A couple of the interviews seem out of place, though they’re no less interesting: a couple of extremely race-conscious men are interviewed, one black and one white. They both comment on the disintegration of culture, on growing consumer-passivity that sets people and their communities up for failure.
Living in the Long Emergency is a minor addition to Kunstler’s line of argument that also examines ways those who follow Kunstler’s arguments are taking them seriously. This includes Kunstler himself, who for the last decade has lived on a farm in upstate New York, keeping chickens a few minutes walk from a small village. There’s not as much of the long emergency adaptation as readers would want, but if you can’t get enough of Kunstler excoriating modernity, it’s here for the reading.
Some quotes:
“I am part of the most useless generation that’s ever existed in human history. Millennials know how to do less for themselves than anyone that’s ever existed on the planet Earth. [….] And most people who are under the age of forty don’t have a clue about where to even begin with that kind of stuff. We have been completely separated from any life of productivity, any knowledge of how to make anything or do anything. ” (From an interview with a Millennial turned farmer)
“In case you haven’t been paying attention to the hijinks on campus—the attacks on reason, fairness, and common decency, the kangaroo courts, diversity tribunals, assaults on public speech and speakers themselves, the denunciation of science—here is the key takeaway: It’s not about ideas or ideologies anymore. Instead, it’s purely about the pleasures of coercion, of pushing other people around, of telling them what to think and how to act.”
“A casual survey around America these days reveals shocking degrees of neuroticism, delusion, dishonesty, and functional failure in culture. The result is a political dwelling place that looks more and more like Kafka’s Castle, a techno-bureaucratic update of a particular kind of solipsistic Hell. The economically stranded former working class has devolved into a tribe of tattooed savages sunk in anomie. Those a rung up in the middle middle class are not far behind them, as vocations and incomes disappear, debts mount, and desperation creeps over the scene. Obesity and its by-product, diabetes, run at record levels thanks to “innovations” in the food-processing industry (another racket), and the absence of other traditional social satisfactions that have been destroyed by television and smartphones. Opiate addiction and suicide are the new normal in the flyover states. The triumphant completion of suburbia has produced yawning ugliness on the landscape, an epidemic of loneliness, family dysfunction, and a dismal cavalcade of mass shootings in public schools. Meanwhile, the upper rungs of society are enfogged in a contrived obsessive moral panic over race and sexual relations. Can a people recover from such an excursion into unreality?”
The Secret Life of Groceries opens at a fish counter and invites the reader to consider how much labor, creativity, money, pain, and devotion are required to fill its pans with fish for our grills. But this isn’t just a book about fish, or even about the logistics of aquaculture and food; instead, the author uses them to reflect, with the reader, on how we create meaning for ourselves through what and how we consume.
I never fail to be interested in microhistories, or in books that shed light on how a given industry or service works: human action and the world it creates continually awes me. The Secret Lifeof Groceries more than delivers in that area, as Lorr begins at the fish counter and then explores what happens before. How are food products conceived, marketed, and sold? What are the stories behind how fish, shrimp, and other goods come to market? The book originally began as a journalistic effort to understand the unique appeal of Trader Joes, but then grew into a larger examination of the grocery market. Separate chapter focus on the harried life of just-in-time trucking, where turnover can be as high as 112% in a given year, to the expensive and crushing battle of small entrepreneurs to get their products onto grocery shelves – and if they’re not tired of bleeding money, we also see what it takes for a product to be ‘certified’, for extra appeal to market niches. After considering brands and how we use the spaces of grocery stores, we then move to the high seas – -where Burmese slaves, trapped on trawlers that never dock because they offload their goods to support transports — gather the junk fish that keep the shrimp industry fed. Although this and the chapter on trucking are harrowing, this is not a Fast Food Nation esque expose to make the reader feel guilty about eating shrimp salad. We are reminded that cheapness comes at a price – to quality, to human lives — but we’re also warned that the wealthy western obsession with certified food products (“organic”, “free-range”, “fair trade”) creates its own distortions, and that to a degree conscious consumers are merely engaging in a modern kind of simony, paying extra prices to absolve themselves from perceived sins.
Lorr’s theme throughout Secret Life, inspired possibly by Trader Joe’s deliberate cultivation of itself — selling unique brands and experiences rather than doing a poor imitation of Walmart — is how people exercise their individuality and pursue meaning through what we buy, and the effect that has on the world around us. Our stories are all interconnected; the shrimper, the trucker, the woman spending her life pitching a combination of salsa and coleslaw (“It’s SLAWSOME!”). Some people try to consume ethically, and others are more interested in original experiences, in finding ‘authentic’ products that don’t seem so mass-produced. This took Secret Life into far more thoughtful territory than say,The American Way of Eating orGrocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, two similar works. This is easily one of the most fascinating books on food market I’ve read, possibly the most fascinating — but it’s been a decade since I first read Fast Food Nation orThe Omnivore’s Dilemma, so I don’t want to judge hastily.
A friend of mine died this morning. He’d lived in Selma for twenty years and devoted that time to not only restoring the Harmony Club– a Jewish social club from the turn of the last century that had been dormant for a half-century — but to trying his damndest to revive Water Avenue along Selma’s waterfront. He doggedly kept his block clean, he hosted restaurants and bars in his building, and he maintained a weekend sidewalk salon (of which I was a regular member) for years. He knew architecture and the value of Place. He was a passionate artist, a unique mind, and a genuine character. His death leaves his friends and Selma all the worse.
Photo credit: Rural Southwest Alabama. This is an older photo. These days the truck out front is white….
Tribute from a mutual friend:
I’ve never been more happy that this video exists. Rest in peace, Dave. May your castle in the sky be one in need of restoration, with room for your unique tastes to be put to work.
When I began exploring politics and forging my own ideas, I steered leftward out of hatred for the war on terror and Bush’s burgeoning police state. I soon discovered, however, that not only were most progressives more partisan than principled (the antiwar/civil liberties crowd vanished into thin air when Obama continued Bush’s same policies), but that there had existed and still existed, conservative resistance and outcry against the war state. Murray Rothbard offers a history of how the Old Right, typified by its contempt for the establishment and its full-throated support of individualism, was fractured and corrupted into neocons, typified by their embrace of the corporate-military complex. Unpublished until after Rothbard’s death, Betrayal is at the same time a history of modern Individualist-Libertarian thought, and an intellectual biography of Rothbard, who came of age during World War 2, formed unique alliances with the left, and kept the torch of liberty alight during the darkest years of the 1950s. Rothbard’s review of political thought and literature throughout the early 20th century turns convention on its head, and makes for compelling reading.
Rothbard’s narrative begins in the late 19th century, when DC’s nascent imperialism in the Philippines and Cuba, and the growing influence of corporate titans on its policies, inspired resistance from right and left alike, who defended the individual and looked askance at government collusion with the powers of big business. There were no shortage of stalwart voices active in this time: H.L. Mencken, Lysander Spooner, and Albert Jay Nock’s works feature prominently. They scoffed at the mob, argued that the state was guilty of breaking the laws it claimed to enforce, and cried foul whenever tycoons attempted to put the government to work for them. The downfall began with the Great War, as some left-individualists were attracted by Wilson’s crusade for ‘democracy’ (nevermind the fact that the hypocrite Wilson was imprisoning war protestors), and was made permanent by the arrival of the New Deal. Although individualists made some common cause with the powers of business then — including Hoover, who was once decried as a cartelist but who was now attacking FDR — the onset of war saw that momentary alliance destroyed immediately, as Eastern money saw in the growing military-industrial complex their income for life. Increasingly isolated, dismissed as Hitlerites if they dared criticize DC, individualists of this time were no less active: John T. Flynn wrote a prescient work amid World War 2, for instance, called As We Go Marching, which posited that the United States had become a militarized, imperialist state in its mission to destroy Hitler, and that after the war it would seek to surpass Great Britain in being a global hegemon. Flynn was prophetic: DC immediately assumed responsibility for all of creation, seeking out the Red Menace to destroy — throwing away money and then later the lives of young men across the world, most notably in Korea and Vietnam. In this time of perpetual war and McCarthyism came William F. Buckley and the National Review, which completed the work of persuading those with individualist sympathies that the threat posed by Moscow should override their concerns about the growth of the state and its effect on individual liberty — and if it didn’t, they were no-good god-hating commies.
Rothbard’s recounts this not as a historian who can only see in the rearview, but as someone who was an active participant. Coming of age in the late forties and fifties, he was invigorated by New York’s holding of anarchist-libertarian literature, attended lectures from Mises, and worked in numerous organizations defending individualism, attacking the state’s usurpation, and advancing economic education. When an entire body of thought disappeared, reduced to a superficial part of Buckley’s new Conservatism, Inc, Rothbard sought out allies on the left. While the likes of SDS proved too self-destructive for that to last, the experience made him rethink the spectrum of political thought: he concludes the book by arguing that if the individual-libertarian position is an extreme left position, then Buckley and Kirk’s throne-and-altar conservatism is an extreme right position, and socialism is a muddled in-between, aspiring for emancipation from the state but embracing its worst practices and doomed by its internal contradictions. Rothbard also throws Russell Kirk into the Buckley camp, which is a disservice to Kirk given his deep distrust of the war state and loathing of ideology. Having read a fair bit of Kirk, I don’t think Rothbard had more than a cursory appreciation of his work. Although the history of the right’s full takeover by the neo-con movement of Cheney and Bush is only complete up to the 1970s, Rothbard’s personal participation in so many of the events gives this book an unexpected perspective.
This Tuesday, we’re looking at authors who we discovered in 2021 and will be reading more of!
Robert Ruark. A contributor to Field and Stream for decades, Ruark was an accomplished hunter, fisherman, and outdoorsman. His Old Man and the Boy recollects his childhood growing up mentored by his grandfather, who taught him not only how to live off the land, but how to do it responsibly — as a good steward, and not a reckless consumer who destroyed what he loved.
F. Van Wynck Mason. An author of historical fiction, I read a Revolutionary War-era piece of his starring a Quaker woman whose dead Brit boyfriend put her in the family way. I have several more works by him and plan on continuing.
Sue Ward. Her social history of Victorian London lured me into buying several other books by her on London’s history.
Lysander Spooner. His No Treason argues the case for anarchism, but Spooner wasn’t just another theorist: he actively rebelled against the government by creating a letter-delivery service to resist the state’s postal arm (they read your mail for free and deliver it for a fee) .
Ben Kane. Another author of historical fiction, particularly classical-era novels. I was very impressed with his Eagles at War.
Jason Riley. The author of a book on policy blowback (Please Stop Helping Us), he’s also written a biography of Thomas Sowell, economist, social critic, and standard-bearer of black conservatism.
Ayn Rand. I began reading Rand’s fiction years ago, but 2021 marked my entry into her nonfiction. I’m two volumes away from finishing her published nonfiction, the outstanding titles being The Romantic Manifesto and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham’s Razor’s Edge was one of my favorite novels of 2021, and I’m eager to see what else he’s writen.
This week has seen the fall of two TBR titles that double as my first science reads for 2022.
StarTalk Radio is a podcast hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and features interviews with prominent scientists, policy makers, etc, along with a rotating panel of guest hosts who are described as comedians*. StarTalk draws on the shows, particularly the “Cosmic Queries” segments devoted to listener questions, to offer a smattering of information on both astronomy and Earth science. Each chapter is based on an episode of the show, and uses listener questions as a jumping-off point into a broader subject. It’s very much a coffee table book, largely proportioned and very visually-appealing. Text-wise, it’s very busy, with multiple sidebars and quotes per page surrounding a paragraph of two of the actual narrative. The section subjects run all over the place and leave the domain of science towards the end, with chapters on futuristic speculation. This is a great book to look at and glean quick information from, but it’s not a satisfying read.
* Tastes vary, but I find most of the comedians to be more inane than entertaining.
Regular readers here know that I regard nuclear energy as the practical approach to move beyond the fossil fuel economy, given its ability to provide a steady base load that does not depend on fickle things like wind and cloud cover. I purchased Atomic Awakening back in 2016 to learn more about the nuclear power industry. Although the cover describes it as being about the past and future of nuclear energy, this is thoroughly a history, first of science and then of technological enterprise. The book’s first third is devoted to the line of studies that began with the mysteries of X-rays, and then revealed radioactivity and the structure of the atom, before shifting to the United States’ full-steam-ahead effort to weaponize the atom before Germany could. Following the close of World War 2, the author then shifts to the growth of atomic power in the postwar era, from military applications (nuclear submarines, attempts at a nuclear airplane), civilian development (nuclear energy and wildly irresponsible construction proposals) and the origin of radiotherapy, as well as speculation about nuclear-powered spacecraft. Although the author is a nuclear proponent, he doesn’t shy away from covering nuclear accidents (both in the labs and in application, with sections on the Demon Core that killed two scientists in two separate incidents, and the accidents at Windscale, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl). His coverage of modern reactors is surprisingly nonexistant, aside from commenting that rising concerns about peak oil and climate change have prompted a resurrection of interest in expanding the nuclear contribution to nations’ power grids. Unfortunately, the Fukushima affair (despite its lack of injuries or deaths) has had another chilling effect, for a reason that the author comments on in his text: appearances matter more than substance. Although I wanted more information on the likes of molten salt reactors, Atomic Awakening proved incredibly interesting given the variety of applications it reviewed for nuclear power.
Related: A Bright Future, an argument for nuclear energy as a keystone of combating climate change Command and Control, Eric Schlosser. A history of accidents involving nuclear weaponry.
I began the year by returning to a favorite subject of mine: horses! The Equine Legacy is a history of not only horses in America, but donkeys and mules, from the Age of Discovery to just after the Great War. Having read works likeThe Horse at Work and The Horse and the City, I was familiar with the wide uses of horses in industry, agriculture, and transportation. The information on mules and donkeys was fresh, though, and I was interested to find out how much of America’s early mule population owed its life to George Washington, who first created a distinct donkey breed (the American Mammoth Jackstock) and then engaged his prize specimens as studs to create particularly strong work mules throughout the States. Mules were particularly valuable in mines, as they weren’t as nervous as horses and were intelligent enough to be trained in behaviors that allowed them to survive the mine’s dangerous conditions. The author comments on the terrible losses horses suffered during the Civil War (over a million were killed or died from disease/overwork), and even offers a chapter on horses’ engagement with canals.
One of my longstanding ambitions has been to buy land in the country, with no neighbors save deer and far from the noise of highways and boomboxes. That’s not something that will happen anytime soon, given my current medical challenge, but I was actively working towards it last year before I became sick: it’s the reason I’d started a side job. I know so little about the practicalities and background requirements for investing in land, though, so I decided to do a little background reading. The Country Property Buyer’s Guide is extremely functional, with large sections on the vagaries of rural financing, and the importance of understanding one’s septic and water systems. There’s some smaller chapters on being a good rural neighbor (i.e. don’t let your cows and dogs roam all over other people’s property), but most of the content was on the practical/technical side, which recommends it.
Lastly, I read a Kindle Unlimited title called Alabama Footprints Exploration: Lost and Forgotten Stories, which proved to be excerpts from older histories, chiefly Albert J. Pickett’s 1851 History of Alabama and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi from the Earliest Period. The author sometimes compares the facts of the retellings against other narratives, but this isn’t a critical evaluation of the original narrative, just a passing-on of it in more accessible language. Enjoyable enough; it’s part of a series and I may continue in it as time allows, but TBR takes priority.
I’m currently plowing through The Real Anthony Fauci, giving The Oil Kings the odd despairing look, and just starting a TBR/science twofer.
In 2016, John Grisham introduced readers to the fictional Board of Judicial Conduct, a political organization in Florida providing oversight for Florida’s judges, fining them for showing up to work drunk or talking about current cases at Rotary Club meetings. The Whistler had an interesting premise, involving a corrupt judge in bed with a criminal organization, skimming money from an Indian casino, and John Grisham apparently liked his main character a lot more than I did, because he wrote a sequel. An anxious young woman approaches the BJC with the fruits of her own investigation, two decades in the making: one of their sitting judges is a serial killer, and she’s scared that she may become his next target if she goes to the police. What follows is fairly typical Grisham fare these days, with a tolerable-at-best main character, lots of nondescript dialogue, numerous very convenient plot developments, and an unsatisfying ending Even the serial killer was boring, armed as he was with a NCIS-esque Magic Computer that can do anything, and only the bizarre antics of his accuser (who begins mailing him poems, taunting him) which result in her being kidnapped add any drama. The Pelican Brief it ain’t, but if you’re stuck at the doctor’s office or on an airplane, it will keep you from having to watch the TV, so that’s…..something.
