2013 Notes
History of Shit
Notes:
A clever analysis of waste and modernity. Makes some interesting arguments about how we conceptualize waste in a culture of (supposedly) growing abundance, and what our relationship to the state and each other becomes when we are constantly vigilant for the appearance of disorder. The author clearly relished writing this book, and there are lots of jokes about human feces scattered throughout. It is very much of a time and place (french academia in the 1970s), so be prepared for some rather dense prose.
Yellow Blue Tibia
Notes:
A very clever piece of science fiction, disguised as a cold war memoir. The main character is a Soviet science fiction writer and veteran of WWII, who is called to a remote farm with other science fiction writers by Josef Stalin. He tasks them with concocting a believable story of an alien invasion, in order to inspire the Soviet people to mobilize. The authors get to work, and just as they are about finished, one of Stalin’s lieutenants appears and orders them to stop, return to their homes, and forget about this project.
Fast forward by 40 years, and the narrator is living in Moscow, serving as an English interpreter, and generally spending his elder years miserable. But he begins to suspect that the story he and his fellow writers concocted decades earlier is coming true, and with a strange assortment of conspiracy theorists, scientologists, cab drivers, and KGB agents, he tries to figure out what is going on. Adam Roberts has given us a wonderfully realized, and hilarious narrator in the aged Skvorecky. I found myself laughing out loud in various places at his commentary on the people around him, and on life in 1980s Moscow in general. He’s a misanthrope, but reveals his romantic side throughout the book, and in a way that isn’t dopey or maudlin.
I am still not sure if I found the book satisfying. There is a continual ambiguity about whether the book is science fiction or a political thriller, which is not really resolved until the very end. But in some ways, that tension wasn’t fun to sit with. Maybe its just me (it usually is) but I wanted a little more clarity about what was going on, a little earlier than the last few pages. Without giving anything away, it felt too much like a deus ex machina, and the richly detailed characters and story set up by the rest of the book seemed a little cheated by the ending. Having said that, the science fiction elements of the book are fascinating, and Roberts ends up using the supposed alien invasion to ask interesting questions about the subjective nature of truth and memory, the role of love and other powerful emotions in connecting those two together.
The Age of Extremes
Notes:
A kind of coda to Hobsbawm’s celebrated 3-volume history of the 19th century, this book is moving, tragic, and incredibly insightful. He writes about the 20th century with his usual combination of rich detail, passionate prose, and broad sweep of subjects.
It breaks the 20th century up into three periods–the age of catastrophe (1914-1944), the golden age (1945-1973) and the crisis decades (1973-1991). In the first period, all of the great institutions and processes that were built in the 19th century, which he described so well in his trilogy, fell apart or became unstable–this includes capitalism, the nation-states of Europe, and the cultural and social principles which reverberated from those two concepts. In the second period, Hobsbawm charts how individuals and groups picked up the pieces from that catastrophe, and rebuilt the world using the lessons it taught. Finally, in the third period, Hobsbawm sees signs of crisis returning, particularly as neoliberal capitalism dismantles national boundaries in favor of transnational institutions and corporations and its cultural framework (postmodernism) dismantles the intellectual and social categories that rely on nation-states. Along the way, Hobsbawm takes up the alternatively inspiring, tragic, and horrific story of the Soviet Union and its impact, the colonial revolutions of the mid-century, and the scientific and artistic breakthroughs that paralled these great transformations.
It’s quite long (over 700 pages) but I actually found that it read pretty quickly, thanks largely to Hobsbawm writing style, which is lively and fairly easy to follow. There were moments where I wanted more detail about some specific event or person, but Hobsbawm generously provides a bibliographic essay at the end of the book where he lists the sources that he drew on to write it.
Inventing Western Civilization
Notes:
A short, concise history of the concept of “civilization” and how it has been deployed to bolster and rationalize inequality, over the last 500 years or so. Patterson (an archaeologist of ancient civilizations, by training) draws on a breathtaking range of historical sources to find individuals at various times creating an idea called “civilization” that distinguished them socially, culturally, economically, and politically from people whom they were oppressing. It also has a great concluding chapter in which Patterson shows how oppressed people have “talked back” against the concept of civilization, and seen through the attempts at rationalizing social inequality. Lest this sounds a little overwhelming, the book is quite short and readable. It’s written in an easy style, and brings up plenty of contemporary examples that parallels the arguments being made.
The Great Divergence
Notes:
A brilliant, if somewhat overwhelming synthesis of recent scholarship on the modern world economy. Pomerantz demolishes the idea that what we think of as modern capitalism was created internally in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Rather, Pomerantz, drawing on a breath-taking amount of historical and anthropological scholarship, shows how Western Europe’s long historical relationships with China, South Asia, Japan, and Eastern Europe structured and conditioned the various historical circumstances that led to the modern economy. He especially re-locates China as a driver of European production and expansion, and suggests that we understand this relationship much better than we currently do, if we want to make sense of the world economy.
Pomerantz’s book is especially groundbreaking in that it is the kind of ““big history”” that is often not written these days. It is comparative, broad in scope and scale, and draws on a wide variety of historical data to make its case. This is a welcome corrective to much of the trends in micro-history and suggests that anthropologists, historians, and economists have much more in common than they do apart.
