I was immersed in Graeber and Wengrow’s brick of a book for the final week of my Christmas holiday. With a province once again locked down and curfewed and a low-grade pandemic-engendered melancholy, it nevertheless buoyed my spirits. Dawn of Everything is optimistic, ambitious, and convincing. It’s written with a populist bent I found headily accessible and likeable. I liked that the authors weren’t shy, or coy about their political leanings: left-wing, anarchist, and equal parts communal and humanist. (And I liked that they started out by pointing critiques at Steven Pinker and Yuval Harari; though I have respect for the latter, I have eye-rolling contempt for the former. If Pinker is quixotically positive about what he doesn’t recognize as our present predicaments, then Harari is beautifully, more temperamentally-in-tune-with-yours-truly pessimistic.) The “Davids”, as I’ve heard them called on various podcasts, are here to answer the question “why we’re stuck?” with the answer, “we’re not,” maybe qualified to “we don’t have to be,” and, though it takes them 700 pages to say so, the ride is fun, which doesn’t make it any less serious or scholarly. (more…)
Tag: History
Review: Ben Macintyre’s AGENT SONYA
I haven’t found a nonfiction book as compelling as I did Macintyre’s Agent Sonya since last year’s summer Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing. Though the books don’t have much in common by way of sensibility, or topic, they are both fascinating, stay-up-too-late-reading products of talented writers, who know how to tell a story and make you care about it.
The present volume tells the story of “Agent Sonya”, Soviet spymaster, aka Ursula Kuczynski, a woman whose long life spans the 20th century’s cataclysmic history, from post-WWI Weimer Republic to the fall of the Berlin Wall. A remarkable life, a remarkable story, as Macintyre concludes: “She lived several whole lives in one very long one, a woman of multiple names, numerous roles, and many disguises.”
I had read Macintyre’s account of another Soviet master-spy, Kim Philby, in A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. In truth, I found it a slog, less because of Macintyre’s story-telling prowess than how incredibly unlikeable Philby was: his drinking and womanizing and poshy-posh affectations and then his avowal of true happiness in the Soviet Union, ughs to it all. But Ursula/Sonya was fascinating, likeable, even admirable at times in her convictions, her equal commitment to motherhood and spyhood, an Everywoman’s story, in the midst of the most harrowing aspects of 20th century history, about having a career and being a mother and lover/wife. Maybe this is why Macintyre tells us over and over again that in the double-crossing, dangerous world of spying, where careers rise and fall with régimes like lightning striking the ground, Sonya was never betrayed by any of her comrades, even under torture. Her likeability, intelligence, resilience, and the best spy’s disguise in the world, her womanhood/motherhood, ensured her survival time and time again and to the end of her life, her ability to remake her life, to start over and over again, in new countries, new careers, with new friends. I never understand anyone’s adherence to ideology, a skeptic I am and always have been; Sonya, Macintyre claims, wasn’t driven by ideology, but justice, Macintyre’s most interesting insight. (more…)
REVIEW: Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 LESSONS FOR THE 21st CENTURY
It has been a long while since I’ve written about my reading. “The world is too much with us,” us poor working folks, or as Harari says in his latest, everyone is too busy to look around and analyze how our world is shifting, changing, transforming, and dangerously so. Hence, why Harari sees his role, the historian’s role, as one providing clarity. Reading 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, certainly “clarifies” what ills beset our world. Moreover, his book is fearless, brilliant, and terrifying.
“All is vanity, saith the preacher” … Harari takes our Western “vanities”, our most closely-held ideals, as illusions, as the fictions of childish adults, and bashes our shibboleths to smithereens. It is a powerful, relentless argument that strips away at every illusion of Western cultural, political, religious, and economic bulwarks. Not that the East escapes: he has less to say about it, but what he does say, stays pretty much in the same vein. No one is exempt and no one escapes from Harari’s frightening intellect. In the end, not even Harari himself. (more…)
Miss Bates Reads Romance 