Cushla's 2011 nonfiction books

I like the idea of separating out my nonfiction reading from the rest. I used to read nearly all nonfiction, but since I found LT in 2006 I've been reading more and more fiction.

My favourite nonfiction reading areas are politics, especially US politics, history, and biographies. I have a thread over in the 75 Book Challenge group here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/111924

and will re-post reviews of non-fiction books over here.

So far this year I've read these:

- As Always, Julia by Joan Reardon - letters between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto (4 stars)
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (4 stars)
- Manhattan, When I was Young by Mary Cantwell (3 1/2 stars) - memoir
- A Fork in the Road: A Memoir by Andre Brink - memoir - 4 stars
- God's Philosophers by James Hannam - 3 1/2 stars (history of science)
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins - 4 1/2 stars - religion, or lack of it.

At the moment I'm slowly reading Andrew Marr's The History of Modern Britain, which I'm really enjoying, but I am also trying to finish War and Peace at last so it might be a while...

Last year's NF reads were:
Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin - 5 stars
The Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn - 4 1/2 stars
Hot, Flat and Crowded by Tom Friedman - 4 stars
Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Helperin - 4 1/2 stars
How Markets Fail by John Cassidy - 3 stars
The Greatest Trade Ever by Gregory Zuckerman - 3 1/2 stars
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain - 5 stars - favourite book in 2010, stupendously good!!!
A Wall in Palestine by Rene Backmann - 4 stars
The Last Resort: A Zimbabwe Memoir by Douglas Rogers - 4 1/2 stars
The Big Short by Michael Lewis - 3 stars
Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski - 4 1/2 stars
Chasing Goldman Sachs by Suzanne McGee - 4 1/2 stars
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress - Rhoda Janzen - 3 1/2 stars
Mountains beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder - 4 stars
On the Brink by Hank Paulson - 4 1/2 stars - TIOLI money challenge
The Berlin Wall by Frederick Taylor - 4 stars - TIOLI chunkster challenge
Finest Years: Winston as Warlord 1940-1945 by Max Hastings - 4 1/2 stars - TIOLI history challenge
Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz - 4 stars - TIOLI Nobel Prize winner
Fighting France by Edith Wharton - 3 stars
Running the Books: Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian by Avi Steinberg - 4 1/2 stars
Brief Lives: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe by Andrew Piper - 3 stars (just)
What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami - 4 stars
The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin - 4 stars
Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth by Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro - 4 1/2 stars-
Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo - 2 1/2 - won't be reading her next one;
In an Uncertain World by Robert Rubin - 3 1/2 stars

I finished The God Delusion over 2 weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. I gave it 4 1/2 stars, and wish I hadn't let it sit on the bookshelf for 3 years since I bought it.



This book sets out the reasons why Dawkins does not believe in a supernatural God - either a personal God who can intervene to do miracles today, or a God who created the world then stepped back from actively changing what happened after he was finished creating.
The biggest surprise was how readable it all was, even the bits about cosmology - I really like his writing style, even though I don't agree with him on everything in the book.

Early in the book, he sets out a spectrum of belief from 1 to 7 that I've quoted below. How much you enjoy this book will probably depend where you fit on the spectrum.

1. Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the words of C.G. Jung, "I do not believe, I know ."

2. Very high probability but short of 100%. De facto theist. "I cannot know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there."

3. Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. Technically agnostic but leaning towards theism. "I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God."

4. Exactly 50 per cent. Completely impartial agnostic.

5. Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. Technically agnostic but leaning towards atheism. "I don't know whether God exists but I'm inclined to be sceptical."

6. Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. "I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbably, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there."

7. Strong atheist. "I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung "knows" there is one."

I think that if you're in the first 2 categories, you would not like this book, just as I would probably not like reading a papal encyclical or the book of Mormon. Otherwise, I think it's worth a go - it's what Suzanne would call a Thumping Good Read.

I'm a 6 on his scale - a de facto atheist - and I have been for many years, but I grew up Catholic. I stopped going to church when I was 18 because a) I didn't believe any of the doctrine and b) I had some pretty big problems with some of the social messages. I remember Mum looking very worried that I was going to get up in the middle of a sermon in which we were told the father was the head of the family and should decide how much TV got watched. I sat there, but that was near the end of my attendance at Mass. For me, reading this book was like putting on a pair of snuggly pajamas and drinking hot chocolate - Dawkins articulates some of my problems with most religions much better than I can. He also makes a strong case (which I'd have thought would be obvious to most people, but apparently not) that it is possible to be an atheist and lead a moral life that leaves the world a better place. I'd like to think that's how my kids are growing up, heathens though they are.

There is so much stuff in here - why it does not make sense to take the Bible literally, the push against teaching evolution in some schools in the US and UK, why creationism does not fit the evidence, Thomas Jefferson and secularism, the beauty and power of natural selection. But most of all, his message to atheists is to be proud instead of apologetic that you don't believe in God.
(I also don't see any reason to be rude to my friends who do believe - I know that lots of my LT friends are religious, and I do not want to shove this book down your throats.)

As usual after a good non-fiction read, I have a huge list of new ideas for reading. High on the list is the King James Bible or one of the books about it that has recently been published. One of my criticisms or our religious education in school is that we read precious little out of theold testament and had no historical context for what was happening. There's a good reading list at the back.

My impression of Richard Dawkins is that he constructs a rather narrow concept of God, then bashes it. A scale from 1-7 along a continuum supports this impression, but I suppose that I should someday actually read the book. I consider myself to be agnostic, though I'd guess most theists would consider me to be atheist -- the concept of God has to be quite abstract before I'll buy in. I had no religious upbringing (the closest we got was a Unitarian church, and that didn't last long), so nothing to rebel against.

Not sure why the scale supports that impression? I didn't find his concept narrow, and I found the book much less bash-y overall than I'd expected.

I enjoyed reading your review of this book very much and look forward to reading more of your ideas after reading nonfiction. I have not read any Dawkins and I think I'll place this book on my Wishlist, maybe with an asterisk meaning "sooner rather than later" (I'm borrowing from DragonFreak, I think).

Welcome to this little group which I think will be a lively one.

3: A linear continuum of "how much" rather than "what". I'm not intending to be antagonistic, just describing why my reaction is kind of meh. Dawkins and other biologists get dragged into culture wars even if they'd prefer not to, so religious rigidity looms large. It is possible to be religious without being fundamentalist or literalist. There is a flavor of atheism that denies this. I happen to be more interested in how people go about being both religious and scientific without resorting to separate mental compartments.

2: Unless you have a great love of Early Modern English grammar and syntax, I would recommend reading some Bible other than the King James version. It has a lot of sonorous language but it often obscures the meaning of the text for current English speakers (not to mention that the texts it had available to do the translation from are not the oldest, most reliable available to us now.) I'd recommend the New English Bible or the New Revised Standard.

I agree about it being possible to be religious without being those things - I find John Spong's books quite interesting, for example. I see what you mean about the continuum looking like compartments, but I just included it in my review to give people an idea of whether I thought they'd like the book. It wasn't something Dawkins went on about.

Maggie, I suspect your thread is going to add lots of books to my WL and I already like this group a lot - thanks for setting it up qebo.

I finished The God Delusion in late January 2009. I had a considerably lower estimation of it, from what I recall, but I appreciated hearing the reasons you enjoyed it.

JBfideidefensor, sorry for not replying!! I have been AWOL from this thread and reading a ton of fiction. I finished War and Peace 10 days ago and have been racing through short books ever since, but now I have 3 NF on the go and I thought I'd do an update over here in case anyone is interested.

The first is Andrew Marr's A History of Modern Britain. It's good but bitsy and I keep falling asleep reading it. Must try to read it after breakfast instead. It's not boring, it's just not screaming at me to be read.

The second is the fantastic The Calculus Gallery by William Dunham, which petermc recommended last year. The maths is not too bad so far but I have an exercise book next to me while I read it. I think if you've done second year calculus at uni you would find it fine, less and it might be a bit of a brain workout. But I'm still in the early parts. Dunham goes through the development of calculus and analysis right from Newton and has a lovely writing style to go with the equations.

The third is Dani Rodrik's The Globalisation Paradox, just published this year (no touchstone yet) and so far it is awesome. Rodrik is a very smart development economist at Harvard who argues that the way global trade and finance works needs changing. Tons of interesting economic history in it, not at all knee-jerk anti-globalisation or I wouldn't be going near it, but I can see he's going to be arguing for some big changes.

10: The single LT review of The Calculus Gallery sure makes it appealing. I have a bunch of books of this sort, and I need to find ways of reading and understanding without getting too bogged down in mathematical exercises. Part of the trouble is that being in the 75 books challenge group, I feel obligated to maintain a pace that isn't quite sufficient but is not woefully pathetic either.

Qebo, I swing from not caring about keeping up some kind of pace to loving it when I have a) a run of shorter easier books and b) time to keep up with my own thread and the other ones I follow. I won't get anywhere near 75 this year - we move home in late Nov and I think moving is eat up reading time in Nov and Dec. I nearly moved over to Club Read this year but am really happy I stayed put for the friendliness and people - CR has lovely people too, but now I am in one group I want to stay there!

12: In some ways I like the pressure, because it forces me to set aside time for reading. I'd find 50 more comfortable, and sufficiently challenging, but that group is too busy and not as well organized, and now that I've sifted through the threads in the 75 group, I'm happy with the people I've found and would miss them if I departed, and I'm not so sure I want to go through the process in another group.

#10 - Your NF reading is paralleling some of my own interests -another challenge for later this year is development/economics (I do know a bit about this area, as I have a degree in Economics, albeit 35 years out of date!), so Dani Rodrik's The Globalisation Paradox is going on my list.

Janet that is really cool - I have a string of development/financial system books that I want to read and it is great reading with you (you do know that my comments will be of the "It was good." variety though, don't you?! )

The Dani Rodrik book is still really good - a blend of financial history and macro theory. It's focused on the international financial system more than the international trade rules. He's looking at performance under Bretton Woods for 30 years vs performance since most developed countries moved to floating rates, and is starting to build an argument (I think) for capital controls, e.g. a financial transactions tax. What's really interesting is how he traces the swing in mainstream economist opinion on capital controls vs. international capital mobility. It's very thought provoking and hopefully I'll finish it today. There is no math in the book at all, but if you haven't gone through the detail of how fixed vs floating exchange rates are meant to work (eg in first year macro) you will probably find it harder to keep up with his arguments and might find it a drag to read.

I read Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid last year, which was much more obviously a development economics book, and was unimpressed, but did not write my comments down while I was reading and now it just sounds like a knee jerk comment. She got so much hype and I felt like there was a lot of mixing up causation and correlation. I could barely finish it.

I've given up on Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain book for the second time. There's nothing wrong with it at all, it just never grabs me enough to keep going and I am surrounded by books I'd rather read right now.

I did finish a NF a few weeks ago and forgot to post it over here as well as in my 75 BC thread. It was fantastic.



Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed - 5 stars and probably going to be my top non-fiction book for 2011

I bought this last year while I was reading several books about the financial crisis. It had lots of good reviews and won several prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2010 and the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year for 2009. It's Liaquat Ahamed's first book, and he was interviewed on the Guardian Books podcast and sounded like a genuinely nice guy, which always makes me more likely to read something. It's 500 pages, so it sat there for ages till I was in the mood for a solid non-fiction read again. I will be forcing it on my real life friends who like economics, history, or politics, work for central banks, or are interested in the causes of WW2. You don't need to have an economics background to read it, but it will definitely make it an easier read.

Ahamed starts his book at the end of World War 1 and tells the story of how the western world ended up in a series of financial disasters that lasted through the 1920s and well into the 1930s. He does this by focusing on four central bankers: Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, Hjalmar Schacht, at the Reichsbank, Emile Moreau at the Banque de France, and Benjamin Strong, Governor at the New York Fed. All four were interesting guys with plenty of eccentricities to liven up the book. Norman and Strong became very good friends. Their decisions, and indecision at critical times, contributed to an imbalanced global economy tipping over into chaos again and again. It has huge parallels to what's going on today in the US and in the Eurozone.

The book has a great blend of economics and anecdote - I have dogeared so many pages. Some other reviewers have found the anecdotes offputting, but I loved them.

The story goes something like this (and without Ahamed's eloquence): Before World War 1, most world economies operated fixed exchange rates under a system called the gold standard. Money was backed by gold - you could rock up to the central bank, present your francs or dollar notes, and ask for a gold ingot. This worked well enough, and was treated as the holy grail of macroeconomics by central bankers and politicians. Trying to stick to the gold standard after World War 1 made already serious economic problems insurmountable.

The Allies were enormously in debt to the US, which had entered the war much later, and Germany was even more enormously in debt to the Allies because of the level of reparations payments assigned at Versailles. The US already had much more gold than it needed, and it kept getting more. Ahamed covers the endless negotiations about Germany's reparations really well, and goes through everything that followed - Germany's hyperinflation, France's surprising economic bounce-back until the 1930s by fixing their exchange rate lower than sustainable (making its exports recover quickly), the UK getting back onto the gold standard at too high a rate, Germany's financial crisis in 1929, the US stock market crash, then a series of banking crises from 1931-33.

In the end, but too late to avoid the massive hardship of the depression, the US abandoned the gold standard and let the value of the US dollar fall. The central bankers come out of the book looking fairly useless (albeit when faced with extremely difficult problems - hindsight is a wonderful thing), and so do most of the politicians. FDR and Keynes look pretty good overall, and I have already bought Freedom from Fear as a follow-up read based on rebeccanyc's review of it, to read more about Roosevelt.

I have that and ought to get to it along with This Time is Different. Some people have reported favorably on Debt: The First 5,000 Years; have you any exposure to it?

Robert

I have This Time is Different and got about 100 pages into it last year, and was really enjoying it but something happened and I stopped reading it (can't remember what - my reading time is unpredictable). Now I need to start again because it is a data-heavy book.

Debt: the first 5000 years looks really interesting. I'll see what other reviews I can fInd and add it to my WL.

Earlier today I finished Book 51: Nothing to Envy - yes I am a bit slow on the uptake... I've read nothing but great things about this book on LT since it was published and I agree with them. I've cross-posted my comments from the 75 Books thread below.



I know I'm late on the bandwagon for this book but if you like non-fiction at all, this is a superb book. I gave it 4 1/2 stars, but it was nearly 5 - the only thing I'd have liked more of near the end is about the role of the aid agencies, South Korea, and Western countries, and whether there's anything anyone can do.

Barbara Demick was the LA Times reporter based in Seoul from 2001 for a few years, and her book tells the stories of 6 North Koreans who defected. I found the first 60 pages of this quite slow, because it was so depressing that I wanted to put it down, but then it got so grim that I couldn't stop till I got to the part where her subjects start to escape - and I read the last 240 pages in one day.

Mentioning that they all escape isn't a spoiler - there is no way she could have spoken to them if they hadn't managed to leave. Anyone who gets a permit to visit Pyongyang has two minders and sees a version of North Korea that bears no resemblance to reality (but even the pretty-pretty version is awful enough). Even for those who get out, the endings aren't overwhelmingly happy - defectors often have trouble fitting in to South Korea and have to deal with guilt and shame for the rest of their lives, because anyone they leave behind in North Korea gets sent to a labour camp for the rest of their life.

Her six subjects really came alive during the book and the things they had to do to survive were ghastly, especially during the famine in the 1990s. One of the stories I'll remember next time I'm a bit sick of folding laundry is Oak-hee's. The paddocks were and still are fertilised with human excrement, and when she was a teenager every family in her apartment block had to produce a bucket of it a week and deliver it to a barn where they would receive a shit chit for their food rations. Oak Khee figured out that nobody was watching the full buckets of poo and would steal one and pass it off as her family's.

The stories about eating grass and weeds and corn husks (which seems to be the staple of most families) were terrible - every page had a new atrocity till they started to escape. *spoiler for those who've read it* And poor Mrs Song, the good-Communist-housewife of the book, whose will to return to Chongjin doesn't waver till she is fascinated by the electronic rice cooker in the house she's being hidden in over the border - I will have to tell my mother-in-law the story in December because she has a fancy rice cooker too! *end of spoiler*

19: You might be interested in these photos of North Korea: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/09/north_korea.html.

Thanks very much qebo - I've just had a good look. The ones on the cruise ship are so awful they're funny. A friend of mine has just visited NK and has given me a good reading list for when I have the stomach to read a bit more.

Great comments on Nothing to Envy! I'm glad to see you enjoyed it and will be interested to see what else you read about North Korea. I, too, was left with the feeling on finishing the book that I wanted to do something to help the situation. It's frustrating and incredible that the country can remain so isolated and its regime so controlling.

Hi Rebeki, a month late!

Last weekend I finished Germany 1945 by Richard Bessel and gave it 5 stars.



This is an outstanding book about Germany at the end of World War 2 and straight after it.

Bessel uses 1945 as a way to structure the book and keep it manageable - just. Instead of starting at the end of the war and moving onto the later 1940s and the start of the Marshall Plan in 1948, he focuses on Stunde Null (Zero Hour), which is what the Germans called the end of the war. The first 170 pages cover the end of the war, then he moves onto the occupation. It gets 5 stars for me for the depth of his research and the way he brings together many sources and perspectives. The maps and photos are good. It'll also win my 2011 prize for the greatest number of dog-ears I have made in a non-fiction book, because there are only 2 months left and I'm going to be reading fluff from here on. And yes, I know I should switch to post-its or something...

Bessel sums up the impact of 1945 on the German people as follows:

"As a result of the horrors they endured - particularly in the last months and weeks of the war - Germans emerged with a powerful sense of their own victimhood. They did so following a war launched by a Germany which had invaded and conquered much of the European continent, enslaved millions of people, destroyed cities and towns from Rotterdam to Minsk, caused the deaths of millions of soldiers, and murdered innocent civilians on a hitherto unimaginable scale. After the shock of their experiences during the last days of the Reich, Germans became preoccupied almost exclusively with their own problems and sorrows, and hardly concerned the mental energy to concern themselves with the problems and sorrows of others. This enabled them to emerge from the war and Nazism with a belief in their own moral rectitude, despite the crimes that had been committed in their name and, in many cases, with their involvement, whether active or passive. "

A week after I've finished the book, these are the things that have stayed in my head. If you start reading these and your eyes glaze over, this is probably not the book for you.

- the total defeat of Germany, and the desperation of the locals to get on with their lives
- how little resistance there was to the Allied occupation and how relieved many locals were to be free of the Nazi regime; Allied forces went in on the lookout for the Werewolf (resistance) movement but found nothing
- the sense among many Germans that they were victims, and a sense that the Holocaust was nothing much to do with them (this despite a lot of emphasis on forcing them to view concentration camps and acknowledge the depravity)
- the enormous upheaval of people in the wrong place: defeated Wehrmacht soldiers, Allied POWs, refugees fleeing the Red Army just before the end, thousands forced to leave their Heimat east of theOder-Neisse (East Prussia). Overall, 11 million refugees and expellees ended up in the new Germany after the war; Germany lost about 20% of its pre-war territory
- massive regional variation in German suffering: the chapter on the areas that went into Poland east of the Oder-Neisse was horrible to read but really interesting; the south-west corner (the part closest to me here in Basel) came through it easier, not that the French were exactly gentle in their treatment of the locals, but there was less destruction during the war itself
- masses of DPs (displaced persons) and a big increase in typhoid and crime, often blamed on foreigners with limited evidence
- of course, huge differences in policies and attitudes across the 4 zones, e.g. the Russians had already stripped 45% of industrial equipment and capital from their zone and moved it home to Russia by 1946, and they nationalised much of the rest so that what became East Germany started with very little capital
- how difficult it was to run a principled denazification scheme when there were terrible tradeoffs e.g. between having a member of the party advise on laying electric cables vs. not having them laid at all)
- extreme hunger
- George Patton's extreme anti-semitic views: he described the Jews in the DP camps in the American zone as "lower than animals".
- the commander of the Polish Second Army, who said of the fleeing Germans that "One must perform one's tasks in such a harsh and decisive manner that the Germanic vermin do not hide in their houses but rather will flee from us of their own volition and then once in their own land will thank God that they were lucky enough to save their heads. We do not forget Germans always will be Germans." I'd expect to read an SS officer saying this about the Poles; it was jarring to read it the other way round and made me marvel that Germany and Poland are so chummy these days.
- attitudes of the church to their role in resisting the Nazi regime: a real mixed bag, with a strong feeling that Christianity's time was again coming in Germany (and the formation later of the CDU), the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in which clergy signatories acknowledged that they should have done more to assert Christian values; strong opposition from the Munich bishops (Catholic and Protestant) to the Americans' denazification campaign and the suffering when SS members were uniformly denounced

If you made it through that list, I highly recommend the book!

23: Wow, thanks for the detailed review! Added to the wishlist. It'd be a perfect companion to a book I'm currently reading (in spurts, because it is similarly information dense) about Japan after WWII.