nonfiction Archives -

THE MERCHANT OF PRATO by Iris Origo

Here is a book to make you feel like indeed all your problems are insignificant and death its on its way. It’s non-fiction, based on the 140,000 letters, 500 ledgers, 300 deeds of partnership, and various other paperwork left behind by a 14^th century Italian merchant named Francesco Di Marco Datini. This is apparently one of the largest records left behind by any medieval person, and it is truly astounding. His business ventures, his house, his food, his clothes, his private conversations with his wife, his worries, his medical problems, his religious crises. It’s all in there. I don’t know what I thought medieval people were doing with their time, maybe like religious mania and starvation, but apparently they were living full and rich lives that are now completely lost.

Let me give you a flavour. He is a super anxious guy, and here he is to his wife:

Remember to go to bed betimes and rise early and let not the door be opened until you have got up. And look well to everything; let them not go a-gadding. You know what Bartolomea is; she will say she goes one place, and then goes elsewhere. Ghirigora, too, has little sense . .

And here is someone else writing to him when he is getting really carried away with renovating his house, something that even today in Tuscany is called ‘rubble disease”:

Other wise and virtuous citizens do some building, but all except you in moderation! One man has a bailiff, another a friend or a paid overseer. But you are so greedy, you will allow no single groat to be misused, nor a single brick to laid lengthways, when it would look better upright – as if your little house where to be the dwelling place of your immortal soul!

I acquired some interesting historical info too. I was surprised to find that Italians had slaves at this time, actively acquired to replace people who died in the Black Death. Then at another point some town is ‘sacked by a company of free lances,’ from which I guess we get the word freelance? Also, how amazing is that it was standard to write on the first page of all your business ledgers: “In the name of god and of profit”

But I think this history stuff I will quickly forget. What I will remember is the density of his life, the huge anxieties and sufferings and drama, him and I suppose millions of other medieval people, and millions since, all forgotten.

STOLEN FOCUS by Johann Hari

It is a lot harder to concentrate than it used to be. For example, as a child I used to read for hours at a time, but now I almost never do. I wasn’t sure how widely shared this experience was, but I learn from this book it is very widely shared, and gain some ideas on what to do about it.

There are some obvious culprits, like social media, and how more-ish our phone are generally. There are some less obvious ones too. One is instant messaging: did you know the average American worker is interrupted on average every three minutes? Once you learn to be interrupted, he argues, eventually you start interrupting yourself. Another is the sheer volume of information we face, which means we feel we have to move quicker from thing to thing. Apparently the time things trend on Twitter has reduced a lot just in the last five years. Hari argues that this is why we aren’t pulling together as a society to ‘focus’ on climate change, like we did on the ozone layer, but this I think is a bit of a stretch. One very worrying point he raised was about how our constant need to be entertained means we almost never sit with an empty mind, and how damaging that is to our creativity.

The solutions are in part individual (set timers for apps, turn your phone to greyscale (I can attest, this one REALLY works)), and in part societal. If social media was subscription, for example, it would be more about making us happy (e.g. helping us meet our real friends in real life) and less about making advertisers happy (i.e., keeping us on our screens). He may have had more solutions but I don’t know because I had to quit before the end.

Clearly at journalism school you are taught that readers can’t relate to conceptual thinking, but rather need individual stories they can feel something about. This book takes it to the extreme. When representing certain ideas, even very obvious ones, he continually relates them to various dull stories about peoples’ personal lives (e.g., how my struggle with obesity inspired my ideas about how to swear off my phone). Now that I right it down this seems kind of minor, but apparently it was enough to make me quit the book.

MODERN ROMANCE by Aziz Ansari

Here is an audiobook about dating. It is written by a comedian, Aziz Ansari, so I thought it would be funny. It’s not especially funny, but it is very informative about dating. And specifically how-to, as studied by actual scientists. I get the impression that Ansari thought this would be a good way to get fact-based advice on how to improve his odds.

Here is the most interesting part: indeed, having lots of choice does make it harder to make a choice. In one famous study, some researchers went to a grocery store offering jam to sample. Some days they offered six, some days they offered twenty-four. On the days when they had six, they had far fewer people sampling, but . . get this . . about ten times more people actually buying. This has obvious implications for Tinder. And also for why I don’t seem to get further than ten minutes into most shows on Netflix.

Second most interesting: indeed, texting someone unpredictably does make you more interesting. As we long suspected, game playing works.

So there you go. Keep a short list and don’t text them very often.

STORM OF STEEL by Ernst Junger

Here is a book about how bad things can get. It’s the dairies of a man who signed up on the the day the first world war began, and, incredibly, made it all the way through to 1918. The Somme, Ypres, Cambrai: he saw them all.

The book was published in 1919, and it shows. Most of the other books of this period were written at a remove of at least a decade or so, but in this one there has been no time to make sense of the war, or to do anything but just tell us what happened. It is in parts boring, as war is boring, and in other parts horrifying. As far as I can tell, no one whom he personally knew with whom he began the war ended it alive with him.

It is deeply revolting. Here he is on a patch of land that has been fought over repeatedly:

In among the living defenders lay the dead. When we dug foxholes, we realized that there were stacked in layers. One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under the showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors’ place. And now it was our turn.

He is on the German side, and is, as ever, extraordinarily depressing to see how very similar their war was from their alleged ‘enemies’ on the other side. He is even reading TRISTAM SHANDY in the trenches. Towards the end, though, his war does differ from that of English accounts I have read, because he is of course, losing, and he knows it. They start to run out of food; they are no longer sleeping in trenches, but in craters; and still he goes on.

With every attack, the enemy came onward with more powerful means; his blows were swifter and more devastating. Everyone knew we could no longer win. But we would stand firm.

He is clearly losing it.

A profound reorientation, a reaction to so much time spent so intensely, on the edge. The seasons followed one another, it was winter and then it was summer again, but it was still war. I felt I had got tired, and used to the aspect of war, but it was from familiarity that I observed what was in front of me in a new and subdued light. Things were less dazzlingly distinct. And I felt the purpose with which I had gone out to fight had been used up and no longer held. The war posed new, deeper puzzles. It was a strange time altogether.

It is in this context that he goes into his last battle. His company takes a direct hit, and twenty some young men are killed right next to him. Then he goes on for hours, fighting, sobbing, singing. At one point he takes off his coat, and keeps shouting “Now Lieutenant Junger’s throwing off his coat” which had the “fusiliers laughing, as if it had been the funniest thing they’d ever heard.” He cannot remember large stretches of this last battle. At one point he stops to shoot an Englishman, who reaches into his pocket and instead of bringing out a pistol brings out a picture of family. Junger lets him live. He kills plenty of others though, including one very young man:

I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn’t a case of ‘you or me’ any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams

And all this while HE KNOWS THEY CANNOT WIN. Guys, I would have deserted long before, and I am not even ashamed to say it. Honour, like courage, are concepts generally deployed by rich people to get you to do what they want. I can’t think of almost anything for which I would die.

A COLOSSAL FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE by Lawrence McDonald

The subtitle of this book is “The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers,” and so it proves to be, written by a former trader there, in a somewhat embarrassingly breathless I-read-bad-thrillers kind of style.

We begin with McDonald’s early years, in which we get a bit too much information about his various family issues and his obsession with working on Wall Street. Once he is hired at Lehman the book improves, and the author does an excellent job explaining clearly the complicated financial products that were Lehman’s undoing.

What I found particularly interesting was the fact that (at least according to McDonald) long before the crisis many people were aware how shaky the American mortgage market was, including many people at Lehman, and made repeated efforts to get the company out of the web of mortagage debt in which it was entrapped. I’m puzzled by how total the collapse was, and how unprepared the world’s governments seem to have been for it, given that so many people seem to have been aware for so long of which way the CDO winds were blowing.

You may recall I recently read Ehrenreich’s BRIGHT SIDED, about the role of so-called positive thinking in the financial crisis, and I was interested to see how ‘positive’ Dick Fuld, the head of Lehman, insisted on being, right through to the bitter, bankrupt end. Warned of the risks by Mike Gelband, the firm’s fixed income chief, he responded: “I don’t want you to tell me why we can’t. I want you to be creative, and tell me how we can. You’re much too cautious. What are you afraid of?”

Presumably he was afraid of world wide financial armageddon.

So, an interesting book, but also a sort of interesting view in a trader’s life. Leaving aside the horribly bad thriller style writing, what stays with me most is the idea that trading is somehow a higher profession, a profession that singles you out as special, and that making money is genuinely its own reward. I’m sure these ideas are widely held, but you don’t usually hear them quite so baldly put. His idea of describing someone is to describe what their fancy flat is like. His description of their work day makes it sound like they were nobly fighting in the trenches. Take this, about a bonus:

Not one day passes when I do not hink with profound gratitude of those moments when I stood up there with Rich and Larry and received my million-dollar reward. No day. No night.

I mean, seriously, get a hobby. Or become obsessed with some woman or something. It’s creepy to think about some bonus, every day. Every night.

BOSWELL’S LIFE OF JOHNSON

This is a book I have been meaning to read for some time. It’s one of those books one ought to read. So, I’ve read it. Alright, most of it. I had to give up. And I feel terribly guilty. How charming is this, from the Preface, obviously written by a much better person than me:

Loyal Johnsonians may look upon such a book (the abridged ‘Life’) with a measure of scorn. I could not have made it, had I not believed that it would be the means of drawing new readers to Boswell, and eventually of finding for them in the complete work what many have already found – days and years of growing enlightenment and happy companionship, and an innocent refuge from the cares and perturbations of life. (Princeton, June 28, 1917)

Dr Johnson’s fame rests primarily on the fact that he wrote the first English dictionary. In other countries this was apparently the work of entire institutes, not just one man, so this is no small achievement. Dr Johnson was apparently a great conversationalist, and was much admired across eighteenth century London. And by nobody was he more admired than Boswell, who set himself, after every night out, to recall Johnson’s words and set them down. On the one hand, I found this a bit bizarre and stalkerish. On the other, there’s something touching, and not at all contemporary, about so unashamedly and entirely admiring someone. So we learn a lot about Johnson’s opinions. Here’s one I really feel:

When I was running about this town a very poor fellow, I was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty; but I was, at the same time, very sorry to be poor. Sir, all the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, shew it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune.

Or:

Johnson, upon all occasions, expressed his approbation of enforcing instruction by means of the rod. ‘I would rather (said he) have the rod to be the general terror to all, to make them learn, than tell a child, if you do thus, or thus, you will be more esteemed than your brothers or sisters. The rod produces an effect which terminates in itself. A child is afraid of being whipped, and gets his task, and there’s an end on’t; whereas, by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay the foundation of lasting mischief; you make brothers and sisters hate each other.

I got a good way through the book, but eventually I got bored and had to give up. There were large sections that seemed obscure and eighteenth century, and I constantly felt like I was missing the point. Also, it had no shape. Like real life, it had no plot, no structure or meaning, and I don’t read books to spend more time in real life, but less.

THE SELFISH GENE by Richard Dawkins (30th Anniversary Edition)

This book made a big splash when it was first published in the 1970s, and it is now in its 3rd edition.

Essentially, the book argues that evolution does not work on a family, group, or species level, but on the level of the gene.

Humanitarian feeling, by this measure, is not occasioned by a desire on the part of humans for humanity to survive, and it is certainly not (perish the thought) occasioned by some higher, non-biological feeling we might have (what! something non-biological, never!).

Dawkins takes us back to the primordial soup in which loose bits and pieces slowly formed molecules. The molecules which survived, were the molecules which were successful. They formed sacs to keep themselves safe, or learnt how to push chemicals away, or whatever. And slowly they developed into full organisms. However, the driver is still those early small organisms, which are now recognisable as DNA. So, for example, the DNA for two legs survived because giving a creatre two legs made that creature more likely to survive and thus produce DNA. We are, in Dawkins view, just robots created by our DNA to carry our DNA around and keep it safe.

I actually find this quite a believable theory. Though, why should we care what I think? I don’t know squat about biology.

He includes a very interesting section on how the basic rule of most religions – do as you would be done by – might have been shaped by evolution. More here if you’re interested.

Dawkins can’t bear religious fundamentalism, which is I find hilarious, because he is such a biological fundamentalist. He is so insistent on the whole nothing-beyond-biology argument, it gets a bit embarrassing. I think insisting loudly that there is not a god is just as silly as insisting loudly that there is one. You can really only weigh in on that one when you’re dead.

It does explain family feeling in an interesting way: in essence, his argument is that we protect members of our family because they share so much of our DNA. But where I struggled a bit was: we share like 99%of our genes with chimps. Surely therefore we should be conditioned to work for their survival too? But this is clearly not the case.

FAST FOOD NATION by Eric Schlosser

After all that 19th century morality I thought it was time for 20th century immorality. FAST FOOD NATION provides that in spades. Spades of offal, eyeballs, fat, salt, animal cruelty and poor working conditions for illegal immigrants.

This book is about the way in which fast food has shaped global culture. He begins by discussing the genesis of fast food as we know it. Apparently, it arose in Southern California, a place built very much around the motor car. There were lots of places selling burgers and so on, but it was all cooked from scratch by experienced cooks, with waitresses on hand. Then the McDonald’s brothers – who were sick of their teenage clientele, apparently, who came mostly for the young pretty waitresses – came up with a new system, based on the production line concept. They cut their menu to only those things that could be eaten without a plate or cultery, and simplifed the food preparation process so that no experience was necessary – each worker just did one simple part of preparation, so experienced short order cooks were no longer necessary. They were thus able to massively cut prices, and business boomed. Apparently this was the first time working class people could afford to eat in a ‘restaurant.’ Other people copied, and the idea spread. The McDonalds – now this is heartening – after they got really really rich, weren’t interested in getting any richer. So they weren’t looking to expand. But this other guy, Ray Kroc, convinced them to let him franchise for them. And that’s the real birth of the chain. He always said he wasn’t in the food business, but in show business – interesting, no? Anyway, he always resented doing what he perceived as all the work, and was eventually delighted to buy them out, and in the end force the closure of their last restaurant (now called M) by opening a McDonald’s up the road.

Interestingly, practically every big fast food chain was started by a high school drop out.

The book also talked about how fast food restaurants market primarily to children, especially toddlers. 25% of Americans eat fast food in any one day, and 90% of American children under 9 visit a McDonalds in any one month. Oh yes. It’s not good news. I in 8 Americans has actually worked for McDonalds at some point.

Also, something I never knew is that fast food in itself is made to be bland, as the flavour actually comes for added chemicals – just a few drops, that are carefully controlled. Most of the flavour in all fast food is made in New Jersey, apparently.

Obviously, the treatment of the animals is not great. But it’s actually getting better. However, the treatment of the people who work in meat packing is APPALING. That was really depressing. Lots of exploiting illegal immigrants etc. The treatment of the kids (the majority of workers are under 19) who work in the restaurants is not brilliant either. McDonalds works hard to fight unions, and sends in crack teams to stop any incipient unionizing. Not a single US restaurant is unionised. WOW.

One interesting thing was how much these big corporations, that drivel on about the free market, and competition, etc etc, are happy to take government handouts. Lots of franchises are begun with money from the fund meant to help small businesses. In fact, big corporations use it when they’re not sure an area can stand another Burger King or whatever, as they know the government will just take the loss. Also, they’ve worked hard to make sure franchisees have none of the normal consumer protections -eg, they corporations can cancel the contract at any time; they can limit who you can sell it too; they can make you use their suppliers, no matter what the cost, etc etc.

And yet, I have to tell you that all this talk about french fries made me want to eat french fires. What does this mean?

MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS by Tracy Kidder

This one was a true story about a man called Paul Farmer who has had a lot of success in improving public health for the poor. It all began when he went to Haiti during college, and was appalled. Impressively, bit by bit, he managed to set up an extremely good public health system in a very poor area in Haiti. His work spread to other countries, and he’s had a wide impact. Apparently the way in which TB was being treated globally was encouraging the development of MDR (multiple drug resistant TB) which is obviously very dangerous. The central problem in treating it was that the drugs were deemed too expensive, and managing patient lifestyles (food security, etc etc) too difficult. He managed to get the drugs made cheaper, and also entirely shift the paradigm for what was possible in monitoring patient lifestyles.

So all very impressive. He is really dedicated to the idea that you ought to work for the poor, because that’s a good in itself, a clear area of moral clarity. He doesn’t think you should work for money, or even for a feeling of personal efficacy (which was interesting, as I’d just been feeling jealous of just that aspect of his life!). In fact, he himself feels deeply guilty when not focused on working for the poor. I have often noticed that when Americans come to Africa they are amazed by the poverty. They can’t believe it is possible, or should be allowed. They just think it shouldn’t be possible, and is some kind of insult to the world. Which is maybe the right way to see it, but it’s also a very first world, naïve view. But whatever. He still saved thousands and thousands of peoples lives. You can’t argue with that.

Well maybe you can a little bit. It was an interesting book, but I had a couple of difficulties with it that made it a slightly uncomfortable read. For one thing, I’m not really sure I think that much money should be being spent on health. I’m not sure that there’s any point in just keeping people alive, basically through donations, without creating jobs, environmental sustainability, political stability etc. You shouldn’t just be pumping up population levels, because that will just make all the other problems worse, which will mean more issues for health, and thus more donations etc etc. So I’m not sure it’s actually the right priority. I know it sounds really cold, but if I was running a government, I’d spend much more money on education than on health. I think education starts to feed back and fix problems on its own, in a way improving health just doesn’t. Though then the books tells how one of Farmer’s clinics was bombed by the Shining Path guerillas, because they thought that these small improvements of the poor’s life just delayed the necessary revolution. I can’t deny I do sort of see the logic. So that made me feel a bit Pol Pot.

GULAG ARCHIPELAGO (Contd)

This book has taken me months to read. This is not because it is boring, but because it is so sad it is hard to keep going. It is sad like real life is sad, because the sadness has no rhyme or reason or moral. If you didn’t read my earlier post, GULAG ARCHIPELAGO tells the story of the death camps that existed in Stalinist Russia from the 1930s onwards, and is written by a man who survived them. Obviously, the state was not keeping good records of what was going on – indeed, they were trying to cover it up – and most free people did not know what the camps were like. Solzhenitsyn clearly strongly felt that all the people he met should not have died entirely unmourned and in vain, so he set to record as much of it as he could, based on the people he himself met, and those others met.

The cover has a quote from the Preface “For years I have with reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book: my obligations to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately.” It got seized because a woman he entrusted part of the manuscript to broke down after A HUNDRED AND TWENTY HOURS of interrogation without sleep, and revealed its location, and the poor woman was so distressed by the betrayal that she killed herself.

What’s perhaps saddest about the book is the way in which he’s clearly writing about events that are so current. He gives lots of tips about how to survive prison – like practical stuff about surviving the thirst when they feed you only very salty fish and a half mug of water a day, and about how you must give away anything of value right away, as a man who has something to lose is a man who fears, and that’s lethal – really sort of awful grim advice – and it’s clear he’s doing this because many of the people reading will be going to prison themselves.

Guess how many people were in the Gulag at any time? Answers on a postcard. Oh, okay, I’ll just tell you. SIX TO TWELVE MILLION. And this is not prison, this is death camps. Often, you’d spend a month in a transport, with a hundred people in a railcar meant for twenty, and corpses thrown out at every stop (this is when you get the fish and water and nothing else), and when you get to the end of the line in Siberia, there is nothing there. Nothing at all. You are just going to build the camp right there. But it’s -30C, so you can’t dig into the ground, you just lie under tarpaulins in thin clothes (the guards steal all your warm clothes) and are sent to work everyday. And all you get to eat is fish, and just flour, that you wash down with SNOW. So obviously, almost everybody dies.

The authorities know that the public are aware that there are a lot of arrests, but they want to keep the full scale secret, so when it comes time to transport prisoners – one example given is a thousand a day, from one medium size town – they move them all at night. The government fears there’d be an outcry if the public are able to grasp the full breadth of the arrests. They used to write ‘Meat’ or ‘Bread’ on the cars(of which there wasnt much of either) so people would even be encouraged by thinking there was food in the country. One of the saddest parts of the book is when he tells you all about how once when they were changing trains, he and the others were hidden between two cars, and they got to listen to music from a nearby bar, and hear people laughing, and how they were all so incredibly happy. He goes on and on about this, like it was a highlight, and it was only twenty minutes.

In one cell, before going to the death camp, there were a lot of scientists. The reason for this is lots of intelligensia got sent to death camps authomatically, because they were bourgeoisie traitors etc. But once the government got rid of all the scientists, they realised: fuck, we don’t have any scientists. So they called them all back. Our man Solzhenitsyn only lived to tell the tale because on his prison card for occupation he wrote ‘nuclear phyisist.’ And their records were so bad, they believed him. Their records were so bad they often didn’t know if you were supposed to serve 10 or 25 years, so they just kept you for 25 years on general prinicples. I mean obviously only if you actually managed to live that long. Anyway, so in this cell, they used to have ‘Cell 72 Scientific Society’ that met every day after morning bread ration by the left window. Can you imagine?

Just the only last thing that really killed me, is that lots of people in the cells were WWII veterans. Can you imagine making it through the war to end up in a death camp? Our author was one. And he tells such grim stories about the war – how once he saw a Russian whipping a German who he had roped up to his carriage, like a horse. And he tells us how he did nothing about it. Solzhenitsyn feels that prison purifies, which is interesting. Lots and lots of people went insane, but if you don’t, he says you are purified. When he gets out, he honestly can’t grasp where other peoples’ problems are coming from. He says ‘What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I’ll spell it out for you right now. Do no pursue what is illusory – property and position: all that is gained at the expesne of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life – don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If you back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see,and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all.’ And I try and hear him, because you get the very clear idea that he’s walked a long hard road to get somewhere.