The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder

     This was such a good book. Once I got to the point where they crossed Cape Horn, I couldn't put it down and I finished in a day. There are just so many good facts and so many good stories. Like how "A captain might creep up in the fog and steal his opponent's wind by blocking his sails. Or he might feign distress before springing an attack. Or pretend to be a friend, perhaps by beckoning in a foreign language, in order to get within point-blank range." Or press gangs, groups that went and found sailors to impress into service. They would look for sailors out in town based on tattoos, clothing, or tar-stained skin, and basically just arrest them and force them onto a ship. And then they might be on that ship for months if not years.

    The parts about crossing Cape Horn were insane. Grann talks about the pulverizing funnel known as the Drake Passage, with the longest-running, strongest currents on Earth. At the same time, the seabed suddenly shallows from 13,000 feet to just 300, increasing the magnitude of the current further. Waves can reach 90 feet high, and the collision of cold fronts and warm fronts in the area produces "an endless cycle of rain, fog, sleet and snow, thunder and lightning." As the sailors crossed through to the Pacific, they were struck by scurvy, which seemed to kill about a third of the ships' crews. Scurvy was a vitamin deficiency that would cause the body to stop producing collagen, the fiber that holds tissues and joints together. The result was the opening of old scars, with sailors' bodies just falling apart.

    Once the shipwreck occurred, the surviving sailors (about 140) of The Wager lived drama after drama, encountering Kaweskar Indians, battling amongst themselves, and starving the whole time. When about a hundred remained, 80 set out, of whom 29 would survive the journey back around the Cape to Brazil. Another group ventured on to Chile, taking many months longer, with only a handful surviving out of 20 who departed.

    The book culminates in an anti-climactic court-martial, which investigates merely the cause of the sinking and not the chaos that ensued. Even after the court-martial, another group of survivors arrived. I'm not writing a ton about this book, but I'll just finish by saying it was an amazing read.

Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City by Andrew J. Diamond

    I was really surprised at how good this book was. I went in just expecting a basic survey of Chicago's history. What I got was a narrative of the social history of Chicago in the 20th century, mostly from a racial and ethnic perspective. The author sort of describes what the book is all about in the introduction, stating that the only thing that rivals segregation as a distinguishing feature of the city's history is the long rule of Mayors Richard J. and Richard M. Daley, who dominated the city's politics from 1955 to 2011, with only a relatively short gap for other mayors. The author also identifies two more things that are unique about Chicago: first, Chicago was the first major city to adopt the free market neoliberalism that swept through the country by the 1980s. In Chicago, it started in the 1950s. Second, Chicago was the last major American city where machine politics survived, continuing under Richard J. Daley well into the 1970s.

    The story begins in the early 20th century in a city filled with immigrants from Europe. In 1910, the foreign born and their children made up almost 80 percent of Chicago's population. But with the Great Migration of black southerners, these Europeans slowly started to put aside the differences between Irish, Polish, Italian, etc. and begin to unify against the new black migrants. This was aided by the Catholic Church, which worked against ethnic parishes and unified Catholic groups. Between July 1, 1917, and July 27, 1919, whites in neighborhoods next to Chicago's Black Belt bombed twenty-four black homes and stoned or vandalized many others. This was all before the 1919 race riots broke out. In 1917, the Chicago Real Estate Board declared a block-by-block policy of racial segregation, and promoted homeowners' associations and racially restrictive covenants to prevent residents from selling or leasing homes to blacks. The racial boundaries drawn in the 1910s would be a battle in the 20s, with racial consolidation occurring in the 30s. By 1940, these restrictions would cover 80 percent of Chicago. Street gangs would also police the racial boundaries.

    The 1940s brought a "Second Great Migration," which lasted into the 1960s. This made the majority of the American black population into urban dwellers, and led to confrontations in every city that Chicago had already been dealing with for decades. White racism was felt most in neighborhoods and on housing, much more so than at work. Whites and blacks worked together in factories in the 1940s, but neighborhoods became more segregated. The racism meant to keep blacks in white neighborhoods, and between 1944 and 1946, fifty homes in Chicago were firebombed, stoned, or vandalized, killing three occupants. But despite this, Chicago's Democratic machine remained strong and maintained enough patronage positions for Black Chicagoans to keep winning elections.

    Richard J. Daley was the perfect product of the Chicago machine. He was essentially without ideology. He maintained his position as Chairman of the Democratic Party while serving as mayor. Daley had the power not only to disburse city funds, but party campaign funds, and to select the party's ballot each election. Daley also turned the city council into a "rubber-stamp advisory board" by changing procedures to transfer responsibility for budget formation to his own hands. During his time as mayor, segregation worsened because it was popular among the majority of Chicagoans. He ended up building ghettos with federal money, because without a strong leader supporting integration, racists would be able to push their agenda.

    Daley's highway plans reinforced segregation. The Dan Ryan Expressway makes two sharp turns after crossing the Chicago River today because it was originally planned to bisect Bridgeport, Mayor Daley's old neighborhood. Instead, he diverted it to run along Wentworth Avenue, the old dividing line between the black and Irish neighborhoods that Daley's youth group/gang used to enforce in his younger days. Moreover, Garfield Park and North Lawndale were cut off from the Loop, and turned into ghettos. North Lawndale transformed from 97 percent white (mostly middle-class Jews, Poles, and Czechs) to 91 percent black between 1950 and 1960. In the 1980s, the neighborhood had just one bank and one supermarket for a population of 66,000, but 99 bars and liquor stores and 48 lottery vendors. The highways really feel to me like a late-stage New Deal problem of decadence that caused very justified NIMBYism for years afterward.

    The 1950s and 60s were a boom and bust period in Chicago, in which jobs tended to leave the city even as the numbers of job-seekers increased. Black Chicagoans increased from 14 percent of the population to 25 percent from 1950 to 1962. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans also started migrating to Chicago, with numbers of Mexicans in the city increasing from 24,000 to 108,000. The overall Spanish-speaking population went up from 35,000 to 247,000, while the total population dropped from 3,600,000 to 3,300,000. Chicago's west side became a more mixed "mosaic of black, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and white neighborhoods." 

    I'm getting bored of writing this now, so I'm gonna stop. There was more and it was a good book!

Miscellaneous Facts:

• By 1930, the University of Chicago had trained more than half of the world's sociologists.
• Chicago's "L" doubled in size from 35 miles to 70 miles from 1900 to 1914, making it one of the longest metropolitan railways in the world at the time.
• 
  

The Question of Palestine by Edward Said

     The Question of Palestine felt like an important read after October 7 and the ensuing Israeli action in Gaza. Looking back on all the books I've read there are obviously quite a few about Israel-Palestine, but I wanted to read something by Edward Said since I never had. This book was an interesting read at the current time. One aspect of it is classic, that "Two things are certain: the Jews of Israel will remain; the Palestinians will also remain." But because of the date of its publication (originally 1979, my edition 1992) there are aspects that feel very dated. For example, the first edition of the book came out before Hamas or Hezbollah existed, and before the First Intifada. My edition was released before Oslo, Rabin's Assassination, and the Second Intifada. All of this, of course, before October 7. I think that since Said's writing, the conflict has become much more religious and fundamentalist in nature, and it feels like things were much more resolvable when the book was written since it was a more secular conflict.

    Said is also a more or less fair writer. He acknowledges the Jewish claim to Palestine, something that seems unlikely to hear today from those on the Palestinian side. But he is still a fervent pro-Palestinian. He also conspicuously starts his history of the region with, "Palestine became a predominantly Arab and Islamic country by the end of the seventh century." It goes without saying that it is more than a little dishonest to ignore the two thousand years of Jewish history on the land that preceded it, let alone the centuries of Christian history.

    A critical argument of Said's, which later became accepted, was that the PLO should be treated as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. I can see why this was so important at the time. It is important to the development of national identity to have a national government, and until 1967, the Arabs of Palestine were divided between Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. It would help to have one government. And for exactly that reason, Israel was very reluctant to treat with anyone claiming to be the representative of "Palestine," since that might concede that "Palestinians" exist.

    The central point of the book is a true one. It is that

Much of the despair and pessimism that one feels at the whole Palestinian-Zionist conflict is each side's failure in a sense to reckon with the existential power and presence of another people with its land, its emotional and political investment in that land, and worse, to pretend that the Other is a temporary nuisance that given time and effort (and punitive violence from time to time), will finally go away.

He goes on to say that, "even so, one must be able to discriminate between an invading, dispossessing, and displacing political presence and the presence it invades, displaces, and dispossesses." There I would say Said strays from truth and enters polemic. And he even contradicts himself, as he has moments of much clearer thought in which he acknowledges that it is not so simple, and that there is a big difference between the conflict in Palestine and the "uncomplicated" conflict in South Africa. It is unavoidable that the Jews returned to Israel as refugees, just as it is unavoidable that plenty of people were already living there. He even understands that Palestinians may feel antiracist, but struggle since their opponents are the "greatest victims of racism in history."

    Said proposes that the better way to analyze the situation is from a "human rights view of their common situation, as opposed to a strictly national perspective on it." While I agree that a strictly national perspective is not ideal, I find myself more convinced that rights are better protected by nations, in the vein of the Hannah Arendt I've read recently. And in Israel and Palestine, I see very little desire from anyone to protect another's rights as a human, but instead to protect them as a matter of their membership in the larger group.

    I also sense a contradiction in Said's Palestinian nationalism and sympathies towards Pan-Arabism. It feels sometimes that Said would rather have a perfect world in which all Arabs were united in a Nasserist vision. Maybe that is not actually his position, but I detect some excitement about that in his brief allusions to it. Yet in the present, he was an active Palestinian nationalist, which would further fracture the Arab world. Israel, of course, faces a similar dilemma. It is in the Israeli interest that Palestinians consider themselves Arabs, so that they would more easily resign themselves to leaving Israel and Palestine to go to other Arab countries. Yet, Israel had to cut off the Palestinians from the rest of the Arab world to keep the Arab countries out of Israel. By the end of the twentieth century, Israel was successful in the latter but not the former. Israel made peace with Jordan and Egypt and found a livable arrangement with others, but the cost was the development of a true Palestinian identity that will probably be impossible for Israel to eliminate.

2023 Year in Review Bookify Wrapped

    Another year in the books. This year's year in review post is a little lower effort. I was procrastinating on it but also very busy with other stuff, so I just figured I had to get it out. I read a lot of great books this year and even created a little library of them arranged by Dewey Decimal, a system that is not that intuitive sometimes. I ended up very interested in nationalism by the end of the year, and I tried to read some classics. I did Kissinger's Diplomacy, Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, Anderson's Imagined Communities, and started Said's The Question of Palestine. Not much fiction, but I also got some classics in I, Claudius, and Tevye the Dairyman. Got a lot of books done but a lower book and page count than last year, which was intentional. This was a good amount of reading for the year I would say, and probably even a little higher than normal.

Books and pages (according to Goodreads) read per month:
January: 4 books, 1,532 pages
February: 3 books 920 pages
March: 2 books, 638 pages
April: 4 books, 1,544 pages
May: 3 books, 980 pages
June: 2 books, 1,082 pages,
July: 4 books, 1,450 pages
August: 5 books, 1,560 pages
September: 3 books, 1,329 pages
October: 4 books, 1,907 pages
November: 2 books, 894 pages
December: 6 books, 1,793 pages

Best Books of The Year

Fifth: The Dawn of Everything. This book just made me think. It comes from a totally different perspective than I am used to and covers parts of human history and pre-history that feel like different worlds.

Fourth: Imagined Communities. This was one of several books I read about nationalism this year. It is obviously a classic and probably worth a re-read at some point. It was really interesting since it lead me on the path to Nations and Nationalism later in the year. Imagined Communities described the rise of nationalism in heavily linguistic terms, whereas Hobsbawm was more focused on the state.

Third: Amusing Ourselves to Death. I crushed this book, I think since media studies was such a foreign genre to me. Postman is a luddite in a really appealing way, and a true lover of intellectualism. And this is a book that feels more relevant of course now than when it was written.

Second: Capitalism, Alone. Milanovic's framework for understanding the world is extremely compelling. It reads like an epic in its scope, and Milanovic cuts to the core of what the world's biggest issues are and the costs of resolving them.

First: The True Believer. I got more interested in books written by the generation that lived through the democratic recession of the 1920s-1940s, and this book delivered way more than I expected. In very few pages, Eric Hoffer packed a huge punch of deep analysis on what makes a person join a mass movement. Best book of the year and one of the best I've ever read.

Honorable Mentions

• Nations and Nationalism
• On Diplomacy
• Talleyrand
• Who Owns Antiquity?
• The Great Partition
• To Start a War

My Best-Written Reflections of the Year

    For whatever reason, I think the reflections I did on the books below were especially good. Mostly just because I was thorough and was really feeling the reflection. They're linked below.

The True Believer

Osman’s Dream

Evicted

Death and Life of the Great Lakes

Diplomacy

Who Owns Antiquity?

The Second Sex

Mussolini’s Italy

Florida's Seminole Wars

Capitalism, Alone

 

2023: 15,629 pages over 42 books, averaging about 372 pages per book.

2022: 22,902 pages over 50 books, averaging about 458 pages per book.

2021: 14,144 pages over 27 books, averaging about 524 pages per book.

2020: 13,415 pages over 32 books, averaging about 419 pages per book.

2019: 55,502 pages over 116 books, averaging about 478 pages per book.

2018: 18,122 pages over 33 books, averaging about 549 pages per book.