Welcome back!
It was never my idea for this to become a newsletter published on an annual cycle, but that’s life for you. When I started this I was a freelancer with a lot of time on my hands, now I have a real job where I write about the economics of climate change and the energy transition (subscribe to Heatmap!) and a seven month week! old.
The latter is actually good for my true loves (tweeting and watching movies, both of which can be done while he feeds or naps), but does not leave much room for longform, somewhat random newsletters. But I can still give you a list of books I read.
Like last year, the number of books read dwindles and the fiction portion has declined. Here I can chalk it up to more specific factors than “being male” and “getting older.” Namely that with the baby, I actually can find a decent amount of time to read, but almost exclusively on my phone. This makes following any type of fiction narrative almost impossible in my experience, both because digital interfaces seem to wreak havoc on retention and because of the stop-and-start nature of childrearing in these early weeks.
With nonfiction, however, things tend to be told straightforwardly and it all actually happened, which means plot points can be looked up or refreshed pretty easily. I’ve also fully embraced the audiobook revolution, with a lot of “reading” happening in the car or in the throes of childcare, and which only intensifies the fiction-aversion of non-paper-and-ink text consumption.
Inasmuch as there’s a content theme here, there’s a fair amount of stuff about the movie industry, genre/detective fiction, the Middle East, and espionage. As you can tell, I tend to read in chunks: finance in the early part of the year, surfing in the spring and summer, and then the Middle East and 20th century history in the fall. The “real world” referents for these should be, for the most part, rather obvious.
Many of these books are well known and you could probably figure out if you would like them or not, the one I would like to spotlight is Naples ‘44 by Norman Lewis. The book is a chronicle of Lewis’s time as an intelligence officer in Allied-occupied Naples following the invasion of Italy in 1943. The country is still divided, with the Germans having occupied Rome and points Northward following the Italian armistice with the allies.
In Naples, however, the British find themselves trying to make sense of the peace, and work with local notables, many of whom were either mafiosi, former fascist officials or both.
But the real problem isn’t one of politics or military might, but of food. The area, always poor even by Italian standards, has become desperately so, with endemic hunger and lack of access to any type of basic supplies (a frequent problem is theft of copper wires). This only supercharges the corruption the area is known for (some local notables can be bribed with — and I’m not joking here — mozzarella) along with an epidemic of prostitution and prostitution-adjacent activity.
One of Lewis’s jobs is approving marriages between local women (often teenagers) and occupying soldiers, where who exactly is taking advantage of whom is not always clear.
In other cases it is, as when Lewis move to a rural town and finds a 12 year old girl at the police office asking for her blanket. After some investigating, Lewis finds out that his Canadian predecessor had been exchange sex for blankets that the orphaned girl would take back to where she lived, “under a house.” These blankets are actually in high demand as any type of textile industry had long since collapsed in the area, making allied Army blankets worth “a low-grade factory worker’s weekly wage.”
It’s in this transaction that we can see the full spectrum of the horrors of total war. Not just in the deaths suffered on the battlefield, but in the full committment of resources, both material and human, towards something other than the normal functioning of society. Trade often ceases, blockades are implemented and production becomes narrow and largely channeled towards the front.
For the losing side, the result is often hunger and economic collapse (at best, Italy was something of an ambiguous loser of the second World War and was able to avoid some, but by no means all, of the novel deliberate mass killing of civilians that the war pioneered) and even the winners often experience a decline in their material circumstances thanks to exigencies of wartime economics.
Black markets reign and households, with their typical economic arrangments disrupted, earn what they can, how they can, which often for women and girls means sex work. Normal civilian life does not simply return when the fighting stops, but instead there is often a yearslong interregnum as political arrangments work themselves into shape. Even if rapid economic recovery occurs, entire generations can be scarred by the years of hunger war can bring.
There’s no real point here beyond “war is bad” and “read Norman Lewis’s book,” except, I guess, a reminder that “reducing” great questions of war and politics to economics can sometimes be a great way of illuminating exactly why any of this stuff matters.
Here’s the full list of books, with asterisks marking the ones I thought were quite good or that I want to spotlight for my readers.
The Chinese Question, Mae Ngai*
Money Men, Dan McCrum*
The Big Short, Michael Lewis
The Bond King, Mary Childs*
Fed Unbound, Lev Menand
The New Lombard Street, Perry Mehrling
Fooled by Randomness, Nicholas Nassim Talib
Caesars Palace Coup, Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes*
Whittaker Chambers, Sam Tanenhaus*
Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone, Jeff Hulbert and Stewart Purvis
Traffic, Ben Smith*
The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick
Savages, Don Winslow
The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, Corey Robin*
Chasing the Light, Oliver Stone*
Pirata, Patrick Hasburgh
The Dawn Patrol, Don Winslow*
Breath, Tim Winton
Number Go Up, Zeke Faux*
To Start A War, Robert Draper*
Crossing the Mandelbaum Gate, Kai Bird
Meir Kahane, Shaul Magid*
Erasure, Percival Everett*
Naples '44, Norman Lewis*
A Covert Life, Ted Morgan*
Bismarck, AJP Taylor
Under Siege, Rashid Khalidi
A Thread of Violence, Mark O’Connell*
Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarantino*
I’ve definitely also noticed it’s very hard to read fiction on my phone. Pretty much the only way I can do it is if I also have the physical copy, where I do most of the reading, and then just read the ebook when I’m out and about.