Books of 2021: Non-Fiction

Non-fiction books of 2021

Just the list for now.  The highlighted links connect to my reviews of the book. 

My Favorite:

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman.

My least favorite:

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck

Biography, Memoir:

Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel by Francine Klagsburn.

Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne by David Starkey.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.

Faith:

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristen Du Mez

Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

The Neglected C.S. Lewis by Mark Neal and Jerry Root.

History:

Red Sea Spies: The True Story of the Mossad's Fake Holiday Resort by Raffi Berg

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan

The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton

The Roman Way by by Edith Hamilton

A Higher Call: An incredible story of chivalry in the skies above war-torn Europe by Adam Makos.

Spearhead: An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives in World War II by Adam Makos.

The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham.

Philosophy:

Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt.

The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt.

The Promise of Politics by Hannah Arendt.

Paradox by Margaret Cuonzo.

Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus by Karl Jaspers.

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.

Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper.

Technopoly by Neil Postman.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

Social Science:

Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

Science:

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Maphead by Ken Jennings

Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA by Neil Shubin

Books of 2021: First, My Favorite Book

 

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, 

translated by Wayne Rebhorn

In 2021, I read fifty books. But the first and best book of the year for me is the book I have not yet finished. It's a book I first read in 2015 and went back to last year: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Also known as The Human Comedy in contrast to Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy, The Decameron inspired Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales among hundreds of other writers and their works over the past eight hundred yers.  

For me and many others, these tales written and published during the worst years of the Black Death in Florence have been a source of fun and inspiration during the current pandemic.  

I have loved the Divine Comedy for decades, but had not read Boccaccio nor Francesco Petrarch.  The lives of these three Florentines overlapped in the early thirteen hundreds.  Dante died in 1321 when Petrarch was 17 years old and Boccaccio was eight.  The two younger poets became friends after Boccaccio published The Decameron in 1352.  Together the three poets are known as The Three Crowns of Florence.  

After reading and re-reading Dante for 35 years, I read Boccaccio and Petrarch in 2015 in class on Medieval Italian Literature taught by Chelsea Pomponio at Franklin and Marshall College.  I was delighted by Boccaccio, less so by Petrarch. In 2020 as the pandemic sent the world into crisis, I went back to Boccaccio and to the sonnets of Petrarch.  Now I read both regularly, thinking about how they survived the terrible plague of their time and created stories and poems that inspired and delighted people ever since.  

My favorite book of 2021 is the book I have not yet finished: The Decameron.

In 2013, Joan Acocella reviewed the translation of The Decameron by Wayne A. Rebhorn in a long review in the New Yorker. It's a good review and gives a lot of background on the book. Here is the link.

Civilization by Niall Ferguson

Civilization: The West and the Rest is the 10th of the 15 books 

Niall Ferguson has written between 1995 and 2021

 I love one-volume histories of great spans of time.  Historians who step out of the competitive academic environment and say, in effect, "This is how the world we live in came to be" are books I read and re-read with delight.  

My top three in this category are (in publication order)

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says geography is the reason western culture came to dominate the world in the past half millennium.  

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, who charts the history of the species Sapiens including highs like civilization and medicine and lows like all the misery that ensued when we left hunter gatherer lives to settle down and become the servants of wheat. 

These Truths by Jill Lepore traces the history of America from its discovery to the present with a focus on women and minorities. Her stories of the lives of slaves and native Americans and the first abolitionists are amazing.

I am currently becoming a fan of Niall Ferguson. He was a guest on the "Honestly" podcast by Bari Weiss. The discussion was centered on Ferguson's latest book Doom but ranged across his long ouevre. I picked Civilization because it has a half millennial timeline form 1,500AD to the present, tracing the way western civilization came to dominate the world and why. 

The chapters are the reasons why the west dominated the rest. At the beginning of the second chapter, Science, Ferguson quotes Jesus saying "Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and give to God the things that are God's." Ferguson said the separation of Church and state is fundamental to Christian faith. 

It took the Reformation and the Renaissance to break the hold of the Catholic Church on western culture and allow science to flourish freely. Ferguson then lists 29 great innovations in science between 1530 and 1789 that happened after two millennia of relative stagnation.  

He also charts in detail the reasons China and the Ottoman Empire, both much stronger than Europe in the 1,400s, fell under European dominance by the 19th Century.  Tyrants who allowed the suppression of science and innovation are the reason both empires went from dominance to decline.  

I am barely into the second chapter and love the book.  If I get obsessed there are 14 more to go!

Thomas Jefferson and the First Draft of History

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

There is only one actual version of the past, but there are endless interpretations of events that already happened.  

In the past year, when Thomas Jefferson was getting attacked for what he did wrong, and not celebrated for what he did right, I  told myself I had to learn more about the writer of the Declaration of Independence.  

Recently I read about the protesters in Prague reading Jefferson aloud in 1989 as they protested communism.  So I started reading both Jon Meacham's biography of Jefferson and The Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton wrote most of the weekly articles that comprise the case for the Constitution. But I thought it important to read them together to see what Hamilton thought so important about keeping the slave states in the union that he did not propose two Americas in 1787. 

I knew that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at just 32 years old. What I did not know was that the first statesman to make a public declaration for the abolition of slavery was Thomas Jefferson in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.  

Jefferson wrote the first draft of that document, but it had to be approved by the Continental Congress. It was largely approved but about a quarter was struck out, including the anti-slavery passage. The original text is here.  

Before the Declaration of Independence, the divine right of kings was taken for granted. The Declaration of Independence said America would not follow the track nearly all of humanity followed for all of previous history.  

The freedom that Christianity promised and fucked up so badly in state churches began to become real in 1776.  It took nearly 200 years to extend freedom to all even in law, but unless the Trump Republicans throw away democracy and end what Jefferson began, America will continue to be the place the world looks for freedom. 

Without America and the people who risked their lives to found America, freedom would never have become a dream and a goal and a reality for large parts of the world.   

From 1776 to 2016, the trend in America was toward more freedom for more people.  Every other country in the world that in the same period was ruled, at oleast some of the time, by a monarch or a tyrant or totalitarian horror.  America had a peaceful transfer of power from Washington to Obama until the Trump broke the tradition.  No other country has ever done that.  

Jefferson started the 240-year march to more freedom for more people here in America and around the world.  

The Loving Resistance Fighter

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

Nearly three decades, more than a decade before Facebook was a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg's eye, Neil Postman wrote Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Postman wrote more than 20 books about education and technology.  

His most famous, a book I have read and re-read, is Amusing Ourselves to Death. That book covered the rise in communications technology in our lives and how it corroded our ability to think. It was published in 1985, before the internet rotted our brains more than ever.  Before social media, Postman was worried about a divided nation. 

His advice was to resist the worst of Technolopoly, but with a goal of preserving what is good about America.  At the end of Technopoly, Postman tells his readers to become "Loving Resistance Fighters."  

(I am transcribing a very long passage because it is so good.)

Postman says, "I can, however, offer a Talmudic principle that seems to me an effective guide for those who wish to defend themselves against the worst effects of American Technolpoly. It is this: You must try to become a loving resistance fighter. That is the doctrine, as Hillel might say. Here is the commentary: By "loving" I mean that in spite of the confusion, errors and stupidities you see around you, you must always keep close to your heart the narratives and symbols that once made the United States the hope of the world and that may yet have enough vitality to do so again. You may find it helpful to remember that, when the Chinese students in Tianamen Square gave expression to their impulse to democracy, they fashioned a papier-mache model, for the whole world to see, of the Statue of Liberty. Not a statue of Karl Marx, not the Eiffel Tower, not Buckingham Palace. The Statue of Liberty. It is impossible to say how moved Americans were by this event. But if one is compelled to ask, Is there an American soul so shrouded in cynicism and malaise created by Technopoly's emptiness that it failed to be stirred by the students reading aloud from the works of Thomas Jefferson in the streets of Prague in 1989? Americans may forget, but others do not, that dissent and protest during the Vietnam War may be the only case in history where public opinion forced a government to change its foreign policy. Americans may forget, but others do not, that Americans invented the idea of public education for all citizens and have never abandoned it. And everyone knows, including Americans, that each day, to this hour, immigrants still come to America in hopes of finding relief from one kind of deprivation or another." 

When I finished reading Technopoly a couple of weeks ago, I began reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson and reading the Federalist Papers.  Jefferson was 32 years old in 1776 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.  Alexander Hamilton was either 30 or 32 years old (his birth date is either January 11, 1755 or 1757) when he wrote most of the Federalist Papers. The brilliant young men who led America in the greatest and one of the only successful revolutions in history gave us something worth preserving. 

I want to be a Loving Resistance Fighter. 

Air Speed Versus Ground Speed on a Bicycle

 

Riding around the airstrip at Camp Adder, Iraq

One afternoon in Iraq in 2009, I decided to ride to supper from the motor pool on a day with a howling wind out of the west. I rode two miles in a crosswind then had to make a left and ride a half mile straight into that 30-mph wind.  Ten feet after the intersection I stopped.  I could not make my single-speed bike move another foot.  

A couple of Special Forces soldiers in an SUV saw me. They gave me and the bike a ride to the mess hall.  I assured them the ride back would be a "breeze."  I thanked them and went to dinner.  That sandstorm was the only time the wind completely stopped my ride.  

In the last week I was paying attention to air speed versus ground speed on my bike.  The group that I ride with has not gotten together because of rain and detours on the route.  I did my usual 25-mile solo ride that is 12.5 miles south ending in a 3-mile uphill, followed by 12.5 miles north beginning with a series of downhills covering three miles.  

The second of the four hills is the steepest.  Last Saturday Strava my top speed (ground speed) was 49mph.  Sunday it was 52mph. Today it was 48mph. As I was riding home today, I was thinking about my air speed.  

On Saturday, the wind was out of the northwest at 10 mph.  The north component of the wind was 7mph so my air speed was 56mph.  On Sunday the air was calm.  Ground and air speed equal.  Today the wind was 5mph out of the north northeast. That put the headwind a 4mph and my air speed at 52mph.  So Saturday was clearly the fastest ride down the 12 percent grade on Route 272 North.  

 Air is always apparent on a bike.

Talking About Mysteries and the Pandemic with a Writer of a Pandemic Mystery

Alison Joseph

At the beginning my recent trip to Europe I had lunch with the mystery writer Alison Joseph and her husband Tim Boon, head of research and public policy at Science Museum, London.  I met them at a science history event in 2018 and immediately became of fan of Alison's novels.  She has published more than ten.  

In 2018 I read two mysteries in which Agatha Christie is a character:  Murder Will Out and Hiddens Sins. I also read the mystery centered around Alison's fascination with the Higgs Boson and particle physics: Dying to Know.  At that point I had not read the Sister Agnes series of mysteries that began her career as a mystery writer in the 1990s.  By 2000 there were six Sister Agnes novels.  

This year I saw Sister Agnes was back in a pandemic mystery What Dark Days Seen.  It was fascinating to see a mystery solved by a person dealing with all the pandemic restrictions. Since the pandemic began I was re-reading stories from The Decameron and Love in the Time of Cholera.  Once I read the pandemic mystery I went back and The Quick and the Dead one of the early Sister Agnes novels and am now reading The Darkening Sky which is influenced by Alison's love of the Divine Comedy. 

In The Quick and the Dead Sister Agnes has a deep crisis of faith.  It is a very good mystery. I had no idea "Who done it" until the murderer was revealed. But the spiritual crisis of Sister Agnes is beautifully done. I would recommend the book even to those who are not fans of the mystery genre.  More than twenty years ago, I read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries written by Dorothy Sayers.  The mysteries were fun, but the character of Lord Peter Wimsey kept me reading until the series was finished.  

I was very glad to return to London. And it seems I picked a window between the Delta and Omicron variants that still allowed easy travel between the UK and Paris. It was my first trip on the Eurostar train through the Chunnel.  

For avid readers of mysteries, I would suggest beginning with the Agatha Christie homage books. It's fun to see Agatha herself in the story.  Anyone who has experienced a crisis of faith or wants to read about faith facing tragedy, The Quick and the Dead is fantastic.