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Moral Mazes — Robert Jackall — 1988

A sociologist embeds with the managers of 80s corporate America, and studies their lives and worldviews. What do they value, what is their social reality? Our society runs under bureaucratic managerial logic and we participate in professional corporate culture, so what does that do to us?

The following quote may seem like an unreadable run-on sentence, but after reading this book I see a profound statement about American society, as if one fish grabbed the other and exclaimed “we’re living in water!”

Bureaucracy in large American corporations regularizes people’s experiences of time and indeed routinizes their lives by engaging them on a daily basis in rational, socially approved, purposive action; it brings them into daily proximity with and subordination to authority, creating in the process upward-looking stances that have decisive social and psychological consequences; it places a premium on a functionally rational, pragmatic habit of mind that seeks specific goals; and it creates subtle measures of prestige and an elaborate status hierarchy that, in addition to fostering an intense competition for status, also makes the rules, procedures, social contexts, and protocol of an organization paramount psychological and behavioral guides.

It then veers into very interesting chapters on the development of the field of public relations, so interesting indeed that I switched from the audiobook to the paperback so I could pen and highlight. The 2nd edition concludes with a very nice essay on the 2008 financial crisis that I couldn’t find online anywhere.

An excellent book, not too difficult to read, short, and very insightful.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson — Robert A. Caro — 1982, 1990, 2002, 2012

I found the story of the 1948 Senate Election in Texas so amazing that I memorised it and used to tell it to girls on first dates.

This ~3500 page series of books taught me an enormous amount about midcentury America and its political system, and I feel it generalises so that key parts of the functioning of the world have been demystified to me.

How does the senate work? How do people win elections? How do politicians turn power into money and back into more power? These problems really are so complicated they require months of mental immersion into the political world to understand, which these books granted me.

As always, Caro writes his characters and narratives so well that despite the ostensibly dry subject matter, it’s an easy read after the first few hundred pages as you get emotionally invested.

This series of four books were the logical continuation of The Power Broker, which was my highest rated book of last year.

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes — Tamim Ansary — 2009

The story of the founding of Islam is breathtaking, the story of the first four Imams interesting, and the slide into the corruption is tragic but obviously inevitable.

A repeating pattern: disaster comes to the Muslim world, millions flock to a conservative reactionary movement which promises a return to better days and moral purity, and the situation gets worse. I get it, the promise of Islam is intoxicating and incredible: Dar al-Islam, Sharia, the moral purity, the discipline, and the prayer. Unfortunately the grand Islamic project seems to consistently run head first into the base nature of humans.

After reading this book, talking to Muslims, visiting a mosque during prayer, it’s clear to me that Islam is overall a good thing, the many failures of Arab and that Muslim states don’t detract from Islam as a personal creed. And I respect all those who earnestly try to adhere to it, even if they fail. But those who pretend to be good Muslims on Friday evenings for the social benefits but do not practice any of the virtues, those I scorn.

The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944–1945 — Robert M. Citino — 2012

This book covers two things, an explanation for how is it that the Wehrmacht continued to put up such a fight even when the war was clearly lost for years, and an in depth look at the usually glossed over final year of the war (which is far more interesting than I thought).

Despite the German officer corps widespread understanding there was zero chance of victory and hadn’t been for years, the army kept piecing itself together into launching more hail mary counter-attacks until the bitter end.

How is this possible? How could they know it was pointless, yet still sacrifice their own lives and the lives of their soldiers to continue fighting? And after being thrown back and shattered yet again, why did the soldiers continue to serve? What lead to this absurd and horrible system? The answer lies in Prussian military tradition.

⭐⭐

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power — Daniel Yergin — 1990

A history of oil. The biggest lesson I learned is that oil has antigravity properties: it desires to rise up out the ground. No human effort can stop its march from the ground and into our engines.

Taught me a lot about Middle Eastern politics, how a leveraged buyout works, and oil’s relation to great power security. But despite its enormous length I feel like it was missing some deeper analysis, and was mostly a collection of interesting stories to do with oil.

Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II — Keith Lowe — 2012

The violence in Europe didn’t end with the war.

After peace, the continent experienced catstrophic collapse of its water, electrical, food, policing, legal, and political systems. It was anarchy and the only organisations capable of filling these vacuums were armies, i.e. millions of young men trained only in killing. They were not equipped to recover Europe, and the appetite for more funding and continued mobilization to police and stabilize europe was rapidly dwindling. And yet, all knew that to allow Europe to maintain in this savage state would invite further disaster down the line.

  • Europeans returned to their homes and found them occupied, and were told it was a shame the Nazis hadn’t killed them.
  • During the war those who used to live side by side had been racialised by the Nazis, once the war was over pogroms, civil wars, and state-sponsored population transfers led to their seperation into ethnically homogenous nation states.
  • The Polish took over a Nazi concentration camp and used it re-enact a revenge against Germans.
  • The Germans quickly convinced themselves that they too were victims of the war, victims of a dictatorship and the Soviets.

Anyways I was going to write up all these interesting things I learned, but the main thing is to cover this quite interesting period of history that teaches us quite a bit about what happens to civilized people when their civilization collapses around them. It’s not good.

Penguin Great Ideas: Civilization and Its Discontents — Sigmund Freud — 1930

We all have base instincts and desires. To do whatever we want, to kill, to cheat, to litter, to steal. But society — civilization — demands the constant and severe repression of these instincts. This creates resentment and discontentment. Sounds simple, but it’s pretty profound.

I see this in the form of Germany and Japan being very good at this kind of civilizational repression, but it comes out in their high rate of strange fetishes. And woke was another attempt of societal mass repression for prosocial causes, but it caused immense discontent. I dunno, writing this out it seems pretty simple, but really you got to read the original words.

But it’s filled with Freud’s strange theories and is kind of hard to read, so two stars.

Diaspora — Greg Egan — 1997

A very interesting sci-fi book. Heavy on the ideas, weak on the plot and characters. To be honest, the first three or so chapters are the most interesting part, the main plot was boring.

Touching the Void — Joe Simpson — 1988

A great story of a mountaineering expedition gone horribly wrong. Easy to read, gripping, and short.

Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 — Robert M. Citino — 2007

An interesting book for a WWII nerd, but not quite as interesting as The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand.

This Is China: The First 5,000 Years — Berkshire Pub Group — 2021

A very short 120 page book covering five thousand years of Chinese history. I recommend it, mostly as a way to whet your appetite.

Penguin Great Ideas: On the Suffering of the World — Arthur Schopenhauer — 1851

A short collection of excerpts by Schopenhauer. Gotta say, this guy was a genius. Very clear eyed about many things. I don’t remember what I read in this one, but I’m sure the thoughts he introduced have stuck with me.

Penguin Great Ideas: Why I Write — George Orwell — 1946

Orwell writes well and enjoyably. Another one where I’m not quite sure I remember what he wrote about, but I remember it was a great read at the time.

The Soul of a New Machine — Tracy Kidder — 1981

A decent story about an early computer startup.

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir - 2021

A scifi book for engineers, fun problem solving. I liked it, couldn’t put it down once I got into it.

Fine Structure — qntm — 2017

I really enjoyed this despite the plot holes and some incoherence, it was still very interesting and tense.

⭐

Penguin Great Ideas: On Friendship — Michel de Montaigne — 1580

Mainly this book taught me that people in the past could be really f—king smart. Guy was two centuries ahead of his time.

Meditations — Marcus Aurelius — 180

To be honest, not sure how much I got out of this.

Mickey 7 - Edward Ashton - 2022

Beach read. Not bad, just, not great.

Penguin Great Ideas:A Room of One’s Own — Virginia Woolf — 1929

A small collection of works by Woolf. I don’t remember what I read in this one.

The Last Policeman — Ben H. Winters — 2012

A well researched sci-fi book about what happens to society when we find out an enormous meteor will strike the earth in six months.

The plot and characters aren’t interesting, but the worldbuilding is decent.

Hyperion & The Fall of Hyperion — Dan Simmons — 1989, 1990

Very frustrating books. The first one is amazingly written, until it gets to the completely moronic ballbuster cliffhanger ending. The author might as well have added a postscript saying “buy the next book to find out what happens next!”. And so I did, and I feel he came so close to pulling of something incredible, but right at the end the pieces don’t come together right and they all fall apart.

A Farewell to Arms — Ernest Hemingway — 1929

An easy to read book, but I’m not sure what I was supposed to learn from this one. Hemingway’s a good writer in a technical sense, but I’m starting to wonder if he maybe wasn’t that bright.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea — Yukio Mishima — 1963

Well-written, but this book is just Mishima’s fetishistic fantasies about sailors and death. I was very unhappy after reading this. Especially after reading Confessions of a Mask, this was a huge dissapointment.