Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland - Patrick Radden Keefe

I feel like I’m always forgetting where I hear about books. This is another one of those cases. I put a hold on Say Nothing at he library at some point, and by the time it came in, the specific impetus for doing so had vanished. In such cases, I tend to trust my past self’s judgement—we tend to have similar tastes—and I did so again here.

Say Nothing is a history of a large event and a mystery about a small event (small in global terms; to those involved it was devastating). The history concerns the Troubles, which roiled Northern Ireland from the late sixties until the late nineties. The mystery is what happened to a woman named Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten who, on a night in 1972, was abducted form her home and never seen again. That she was murdered was never seriously in question, but the absence of a body was an abscess in the minds of her children, a puckered wound in their hearts that refused to close and thereby seal the certainty of their mother’s demise.

The two stories intertwine, with McConville’s disappearance a thread singled out from the broader tapestry of the Troubles. Keefe does a good job juggling both subjects, giving a brisk but thorough summary of the causes that led to the troubles, the struggles of the paramilitaries with the authorities and each other, and the eventual peace process that brought the bloodshed to a halt while undermining its meaning, a decision that caused no shortage of resentment among the IRA faithful.

Keefe’s interest is clearly with people over events, and he frames much of the history though specific stories, including those of Dolours and Marian Price, sisters whose violent exploits made them IRA darlings and media fodder; Brendan Hughes, an IRA footsoldier and gifted tactician with an uncompromising view of Irish nationalism; and Gerry Adams, one of the heads of the Provisional IRA (though never admitting as much) whose pivot to politics with Sinn Fein brought peace to Northern Ireland while leaving those who fought feeling abandoned and bitter.

The focus of the book is clearly with the nationalists, as unionist voices are relegated to villainous bit parts, but this is more due to focus than polemics. Keefe paints the IRA neither as purely cold-blooded killers or revolutionary heroes, but as normal men and women whose convictions and circumstances led them to commit unlawful and occasionally violent acts. His final weighing of the fat of Jean McConville is not a stone cold certainty, but he presents a credible argument as to who killed her and why, and helps refute the claim that her “touting (or informing) was the cause. A good book.

The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin: Wood and Human Achievement - Marq de Villiers

“Do you respect wood?”

— Larry David

My wife signed up for a membership to the Sutherland Quarterly and as part of a promotion they let her pick a free book from their catalogue. She chose The Longbow, the Schooner and the Violin. I respect wood (much like Larry David), so I read it.

The book wasn’t what I expected. I thought it would be a cohesive argument about the central place these three items held in human history, likely because of the similar structure of the title compared to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. de Villiers does lay out a rough premise to this effect in the introduction, citing these three objects as pinnacles of their genre, but in terms of influencing human history, he really only makes a convincing case for the longbow, which changed the course of warfare in the Middle Ages. The schooner had impact on trade, but was not of singular importance among similar boats. The violin, while an impressive instrument, was also not seismic in the same way.

Instead of weaving a single argument, de Villiers gives histories of these objects as pieces of cultural importance in their time, interspersing them with chapters about pretty much anything he could think of involving wood. These essays range from inspired (his taxonomy of the origin of forest was genuinely interesting) to somewhat bewildering (several pages detailing the best woods for different purposes). It feels a bit grab bag, and I wondered if these essays had been publishing previously for some sort of nature periodical (Trees Monthly?) and collected here.

de Villiers’ writing is strong, weaving eloquent description with prosaic turns of phrase to good effect. I liked the book, but it’s such an odd assortment that I’d recommend it to someone who really likes wood or else doesn’t mind taking literary detours.

The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Tuchman

History is a study of patterns. Good historians don’t simply chronicle the past; they study the echoes of events and their resonance in other eras before and after. Such is the central mission of The March of Folly, in which Barbara Tuchman parses Western history in search of a recurring theme, which she calls folly. Simply defined, folly is an action undertaken by a government in which it pursues actions contrary to its own interests. Folly must be recognizable at the time, have no conceivable benefit and great costs.

Tuchman opens her book with a few quick snapshots of folly—the Spanish loss of Iberia to the Moors, the acquiescence of Montezuma and the Aztecs to Cortes, the German attacking of American ships in World War 1, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in World War 2—which she uses to lay out her premise and familiarize the reader. The bulk of the text, however, is dedicated to four distinct events: The fall of Troy, the loss of half of Christendom to the Renaissance popes, the British stoking of the American Revolution, and the America debacle in Vietnam.

Troy is an interesting choice of antecedent, given that it is more myth than history. Tuchman makes no effort to parse truth from fiction, freely recounting the actions of gods in her summary. She instead uses Troy to demonstrate how deeply folly is imbedded in the human psyche, and pulls out key components than will resonate in future eras (for instance, the ignored warning of poor Cassandra).

The other three sections follow a similar pattern, providing details descriptions of the prevailing attitudes and responses to events and explaining how they went contrary to the government’s interests. A certain level of knowledge is assumed, and key events (The 95 Theses and Diet of Worms, the Boston Massacre, the Tet Offensive) are spoken of without much description. Clearly Tuchman’s target audience had a certain level of historical fluency (I’m pleased to note there wasn’t very much I needed to look up). The history presented is very much a history of policy, examining the undergirding structures that addressed—or, often, exacerbated—major events.

Tuchman’s writing is solid, academic without being too dry. She sometimes goes a little overboard with subordinate clauses, making sentences into grammatical Matryoshka dolls, but overall she is very readable considering the heft of the subject matter. I wouldn’t rate March of Folly quite as high as The Guns of August, which remains a seminal book on the history of World War One. But it’s well-written and compellingly argued, and worth checking out for those interested in how human folly shapes history.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari

I put a hold on Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind about half a year ago, after reading the first few pages of my father-in-law’s copy. Based on that sampling, I’d assumed the book was a work of popular anthropology, and would focus on the rise of Sapiens alongside the other Homo species alive in prehistoric times.

It turns out that is only the first chapter.

Sapiens is, in fact, a much broader and more ambitious book than I’d expected. Its goal is no less than to present an encapluated history of the whole of humanity, describing a few touchstone events, but focusing at its core of the nature of what a human first was ,what it is now, and what it might one day become.

I’ve read that academics have criticized the book as unserious and lightly sourced. There is some truth to this, but Sapiens doesn’t present itself as a detailed accounting of human history—how could it? there’s an awful lot of it for one book—but instead invites the reader to question a lot of basic assumptions about what humans are, and how they have become the dominant species on earth. One part I found particularly interesting was his suggestion of why Europe, and not the economically and numerically superior China, went on to conquer the world through empire (he suggests it was the scientific revolution, which was underpinned by the European midset that huamn knowledge is incomplete, and the shift to capitalist doctrine that celebrated growth).

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the book is that Harari’s writing is in no way strident. He sees humanity neither as a divine being nor pestilential evil. He simply recounts things as the yhappened, and draws no moral conclusions (with the slight exception of animal rights, where he shows his cards a bit).

One critic likened the book to dorm room chatter, and while I can see where he’s coming from, this is chatter form a very bright student indeed. Sapiens is well-written and it made me think. I can’t as kfor much more than that in a non-fiction book.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life - Bill Bryson

I’m on another Bill Bryson kick, and recently reread A Short History of Nearly Everything and A Walk in the Woods as well, but I don’t have much to say about those other than that they’re both great, so I’m going to focus on At Home: A Short History of Private Life.

At Home’s conceit might be the stragest of all of Bryson’s work. It is generally described as a history of domestic life, an encapsulation that is ostensibly accurate, but also a lot tidier and more constrained than the actual work. Essentially, Bryson takes readers on a narrated tour of his home, an 18th century rectory in rural England, and uses each room as a jumping off point to discuss related themes. Some rooms lend themselves to these themes more directly than others—the bathroom leads pretty obviously to sanitation and hygiene—but it is the odder offshoots that are probably the most rewarding. The Hall, for example, seems liek a pretty drab subject for a history, but it is actually among the most fascinating in the book, detailing as it does the rise of the modern house as we now know it. This is because early houses were essentially nothing but halls, with private rooms coming to be alongside a shift in human ideas of domesticity and privacy.

The book can have a bit of an odd sock drawer flavour at times, and Bryson isn’t afraid to go off on tangents, expounding on the lives of dust mites or regailing us with such underestimated household dangers as staircases and paint, but on rereading I was struck by how well the whole thing holds together. As he did later in his work One Summer: America 1927, Bryson weaves together disparate strands into a rich and diverse tapsetry, one that highlights the texture of individual fibres without undercutting the harmony of the whole. His trademar kwit and humour is evident throughout.

Though arguably one of his more forgotten books, At Home is by no means Lesser Bryson. It’s an excellent piece of work, and well worth a read.

King Leopold's Ghost

In King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild chronicles the “discovery” and conquest of the Congo Free State, a massive expanse of central Africa that fell und the dominion of King Leopold of Belgium. Unlike most of the colonies obtained before and during the scramble for Africa, the Congo was not colonized by a country or empire, but by a single man. This state of affairs is made more bizarre by the fact that King Leopold never set foot in his colony, nor did he care much about it besides as a source of money and prestige.

There's no question that Leopold was an awful man, even by the standards of his day, but he was by no means a stupid one. The book describes the deft maneuverings that allowed a single man--a king, yes, but a king from a parliamentary democracy who's power was dwarfed by those of evenother royals whose rule was mostly ceremonial--to acquire a tract of land nearly half the size of Euripe over which he exerted absolute power.

The book has it's heroes, too. Chief among them us E.D. Morel, a shipping clerk who, after casually observing the flow of goods in and out of the Congo, deduced the presence of slavery in the colony and devoted his life, almost on a whim, to the wholesale elimination of this odious practice. The book is no hagiography, and Hochschild openly describes some of Morel's faults, but he remains a remarkable and principled man.

The book's perspective is predominantly European, resulting from the indifference to local African voices at the time the events, but Hochschild makes a good effort to include them where he can. His prose is sleek and engaging, and he paints rich pictures of the many characters in his story.

The Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman

I checked out The Guns of August expecting a history of World War I, but the book actually views the ocnflict throug ha much narrower lens. First, it provides a brief outline of the geopolitical history of Europe leading up to the war. Next, it gives a detailed accounting of the political maneuvering of the variosu combatants, as a cavalcade of treaties and alliances nudged them—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—into armed conflict. Lastly, it provided a detailed military history of the war’s first thirty days or so—the titual Guns of August, so obvious in retrospect—leading up to the Battle of the Marne, where the Allies denied Germany a desicive victory over France, and the war descended into the four stagnant years of trench warfare for which it is most notorious.

In its focus on negotiations, planning, and other minutae of governanc,e it reminded of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a book far large and scope but with a similar emphasis on the tiny, almost clerical decisions on which nations turn and tumble. This wash of detail can get a little overwhelming at times, but is carried along smoothly enough by Tuchman’s deft prose. Likewise, the battles are described using the common convention of military history, in which the movement of each formation is discussed. There is an audience for this sort of thing, and while I’m not exactly part of it, I’m interested enough in the subject matter to play along and enjoy it for what it is (though I’ll never truly be able to read those maps of battle maneuvers with anything like fluency).

The book was good overall, though its strongest passage was probably its first, where Tuchman uses the event of King Edward’s funeral as a fitting prelude to the carnage that would follow a few short years in his wake. She makes no claim to greater causality, but rather seizes on the event as a rich symbol for what was lost in those final years of European peace, and a meditation on how long and bloody the road to regaining it would ultimately be.

Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present - Max Boot

I picked this book up unsure whether I was going to commit to it. I like Max Boot, as I’ve said before, but I’m not a huge fan of military history, which can be a little on the dry side. Luckily, Boot doesn’t bog down his prose with tactical descriptions of battles (I can never follow these anyway), but instead offers a higher level view of overall campaigns.

Invisible Armies is a book about guerrillas. The subtitle pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Though it follows a loose chronology, beginning with ancient Mesopotamia and Rome and ending with modern-day Iraq and Afghanistan, the book’s structure is primarily by theme, rather than time period. Boot covers liberal uprisings of the 18th century, anarchists of the late 19th, communists of the early 20th, through to the Islamic rebels of today. He makes a useful distinction between guerrillas and terrorists, with the former encompassing loose military units that fight largely military targets, while terrorists are smaller and primarily target civilians.

I was disappointed that he didn’t talk about Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who was the man, but despite this omission he covers a lot of ground. There were several people who I’d heard of very vaguely and appreciated learning more about—T.E. Lawrence, Yasser Arafat— as well as I people I hadn’t heard of at all (Massoud). The spreadsheet at the end was a nice little bit of wonkiness. I wonder if he lets people download it as an excel file.