Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2010) by Tony Judt

 Audiobook Review

Postwar (2010)

by Tony Judt

  Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 was itself published in 2010, which puts it on the edge of being out-of-date, but I couldn't turn down the opportunity to listen to the 40 hours plus Audiobook.  It took me months, because like many titles in the LA public library system, they have one or two permanent copies of many titles, and you have to wait months between check-outs.  I'm not complaining about it, just saying it happens with longer books.  At one point I had thought that the book blog aspect of this endeavor would be focused on history, not fiction/literature, but there is a real lack of content, as the kids would say.  Cutting edge history is the domain of for-pay journals or graduate student work that isn't published.  Popular history in the United States basically means books about "the wars" (Revolutionary, Civil, World I, World War II, Vietnam) or "the presidents."   Leading writers of popular history in the US would have to include Bill O'Reilly, again, not complaining, just describing the market for history books in this country.

   Subjects that fall outside those two categories are few and far between.  I use the Bancroft Prize, which focuses on the Americas, and the Pulitzer for proxies on history books that are making the scene, but for subjects outside the US, it is even worse, in terms of supply.  Thus, Postwar, despite or perhaps because of its length, is a rare treat, a contemporary work of popular history about a subject that isn't America based (although the US does pop up relentlessly in the context of the subject), writing about areas (Central, Eastern, Southern Europe) that I don't here much about on a day-to-day basis.   In print, Postwar is 960 pages long, and I feel like that wouldn't include an index let alone footnotes.  Maybe an Index.   Judt starts at the end of World War II and methodically works his way forward, area by area, using contemporary, specialist sources to write a book for generalists (although, 960 pages calls that term into question). 

  Were it not for the Audiobook, I'm quite sure I would have never read  Postwar in print, if only because, closing in on turning 50, I believe that physically reading a book over 500 pages, in paperback or hardback, is a real ordeal.

    Trying to say anything about Postwar is tough because the subject is so large- like reading a book called History and then being asked to describe it.   The major trend is the rise and fall of Communism, though Judt's major contribution to this subject matter is combining that more familiar story with the first chapter of the European Union story.    The cut-off point in time leaves the reader wondering whether the accession of Eastern and Central European states will prove a success, and with the Ukranian conflict not even on the horizon. 

   I guess, the parts I found most relevant to the present situation were the chapters about the rise of post-communist populist/nationalist movements in central, southern and eastern Europe.  Postwar cuts off too soon to cover Brexit, and Le Pen makes a brief, late appearance, but the stuff about the split between the Czechs and the Slovaks, the situation in Hungary- where Victor Orban appears as a rabble-rouser, not yet in power and the conflict in the former Yugoslavia all gave me pause.   Another theme, or rather, absence of a theme, is any premonition that Ukraine and Russia would begin a now decade long war over...?.?>? only four years after the publication date.

  With the benefit of reading Postwar I would now argue that the war was precipitated by the eastern reach of the E.U., and Russia's feelings about that vis a vis Ukraine, which for many is considered a part of Russia and whose independence movement is fraught with Nazi's, Neo-Nazi's and the far right.  I could go on. 

Native Nation (2024) by Kathleen DuVal

 Audiobook Review

Native Nation (2024)

by Kathleen DuVal

  I like my history books like I like my coffee... magisterial.  Native Nations won a Pulitzer Prize last year, which is why I looked up the Audiobook on the library app and checked it out.  The Audiobook version clocks in at over 20 hours, and it look me a couple of check-outs and months of waiting in between to finish up, but it really is a great gloss on the history of the Native People in North America.  DuVal's major scholarly achievement is blending part of the argument made David Graeber in The Dawn of Everything, where Graeber, drawing on other scholars, argued for the historical choices made by allegedly non historical peoples (pre contact Native Americans) and essentially postulated that the "contemporary" Native American political scene when the Europeans showed up was the result of a centuries old rebellion against the Cahokia regime in the area of modern day St. Louis, and a similar rebellion in a similar time frame against a different group.   The idea is that the Native American who made contact with Europeans were not ignorant savages, but a collection of peoples who had rejected the kind of hierarchy and consolidation that won the day in the "old world" lands of Europe and Asia. 

    Graeber offers this analysis mostly as a theory, but DuVal fills in that gap with actual chapters from actual Native American history- she goes all over the map, with particular highlights coming from the Southeast and Southwest.   If you read Graeber, and are looking to follow up his Native American supported arguments, this Pulitzer Prize winning history book is worth reading.

Vanishing World (2025) by Sayaka Murata

 Audiobook Review

Vanishing World (2025)

by Sayaka Murata

Translated from the Japanese by Sayaka Murata

  I'm not an anime watching fetishist, but it is hard to deny the emergence of East Asia on the global cultural stage since World War II.  Compare the popularity of cultural products emerging out of markets like South Korea, Japan and Taiwan to places like France and Germany.  When was the last time a German act played Coachella?   Generally speaking, if the New York Times does a full length or capsule length review of a work of fiction translated from Japanese, Korean or Chinese, I'm going to take a look and if I see anything like "speculative fiction" or the like I'm going to check out the Audiobook and maybe even read an E-copy on my Kindle.   It's one of the most interesting areas in global fiction- East Asia and South Asia I'd say, but South Asia gets a boost because of the large number of English language speakers. 

   Vanishing World has it all: It's a work of disturbing speculative fiction, and it takes place in an alternate present where Japan turned to IVF after World War II, and where traditional sex between a married couple has become akin to incest.   It is a fascinating world, drawn out with the kind of wavy realism that I associate with Japanese literature read in translation.  Getting the Audiobook was a real stroke of luck. I spend so much time waiting for Audiobooks in the library queue. 

  But this was one of my top books of the year for sure. 

The Power Broker (1974) by Robert A. Caro

 Audiobook Review

The Power Broker (1974)

by Robert A. Caro

   Clocking in at over 60 hours, the three volume Audiobook edition of Robert A. Caro's seminal masterpiece, The Power Broker, a comprehensive biography of New York park-and-freeway man Robert Moses, is certainly one of the most epic Audiobooks I've ever heard.   The Audiobook is broken into three volumes; each volume is a little over 20 hours long.   I wrote a review for the first volume back in September of last year.  Volume two didn't get the break-out treatment because, like many Volume 2's in a three-volume set, it didn't seem like it warranted a stand-alone post.   Roughly speaking, volume 1 is his rise, volume 2 is his hey-day and volume 3 is his decline and fall.  Reader, what does it tell you that I couldn't wait for the fall, and the last ten hours of the third volume was my favorite piece of the entire endeavor. 

  I was reflecting on The Power Broker, and Caro's achievement, during a recent trip to the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin Texas (thanks Dad!) Caro has famously been trying to finish the fifth volume of his LBJ biography for years- the last update was in 2023 after his longtime publisher Robert Gottlieb died.   Both Moses and LBJ symbolize a very specific type of 20th century man, the non-ideological Government guy who saw the rise of big government as an opportunity to obtain the specific type of success both craved.   One of the ironies that plays out again and again over the cours of all three volumes of The Power Broker is that Moses, the ultimate public servant, held the actual voting public in the kind of contempt one associates with modern day plutocrats like Peter Thiel.    He did not brook criticism or compromise, which is astonishing for a man who spent his professional career rooting up large parts of New York City, displacing thousands, and rebuilding it in his image (parks and freeways to get to those parks). 

  His path to power was unique to the rise of big government in the 20th century, he was able to master the internal bureaucracy of New York state and city- serving as the head of the Tri Borough Bridge Commission in addition to a dozen over entities in his prime AND he served as the link between New York and Federal freeway fund.  If he was outmaneuvered at the state level, he could shut off the funding at the federal level, and his opponents knew it.

  Ultimately, he was only bested by two men, one he survived and the other who ended him.  The first was Franklin Roosevelt, who first encountered Robert Moses when he was the Governor of New York and Moses was in his early, progressive phase associated with his parks era.  Roosevelt owed nothing of his rise to Moses, and was secure enough in his power not to be cowed by the others backroom machinations.  A final showdown wasn't required because Roosevelt went to Washington DC, and spending on public works became a preferred path out of the recession, and Moses was a position to spend more of that money than anyone else in the country, so they needed each other and that was enugh.

   The other, Nelson Rockefeller, spelled the end for Moses, who was in his late 70's and early 80's when Rockefeller appeared on the scene.  As spelled out by Caro, the enduring key to Moses' unassailability within the New York state and city bureaucracy was as the counterparty for all the bond that the state had issued via his various positions.  Basically, you couldn't do anything to Moses because the bond holders viewed it as tampering with their bonds.  Fortunately, the largest holder of those bonds was the brother of Nelson Rockefeller, so he could do whatever he wanted to Moses and the bondholders wouldn't do shit to stop him.

Published 9/11/24

Audiobook Review

The Power Broker: Volume 1 (1974)

Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

by Robert Caro

Read by Robertson Dean

(2011)

   Lists like the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America and 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die commonly keep fiction and non-fiction books separate.  For example, in the two lists I just cited, there are zero works of non fiction.  At least with the 1,001 Novels project the bias is in the title, but the 1,001 Books list has no excuse.   One recent list to buck this separation is the recently published New York Times Top Books of the 21st Century, which combines fiction and non-fiction.   Such an approach might have benefited the 1,001 Novels project.   You can see why if you listen to the Audiobook of The Power Broker: Volume 1, which is just about as New York a book as one could possibly imagine.  Indeed, there is an argument that its inclusion is required if a reader wants to really know New York, city and state.  No single person has had a greater impact on how the entire state LOOKS than Moses.   

  Volume 1, which lasts 22 hours in Audiobook format, handles his rise, and takes us to the cusp of his monumental bridge, tunnel and freeway building projects that remade Manhattan in his image.  We learn that Moses came from a patrician upbringing- a key element of his success is that he never needed to make money from his work and that his vision was inspired by the idea of a non-partial bureaucratic technocrat, who overcame all obstacles to benefit "the people."  Caro presents it as an idea he came up with while he was doing post-graduate studies in Oxford University, and his school-child dreams of a core of highly disciplined, uncorruptible state employees was about as far from the facts on the ground in New York City as could be possible.

   After some early career missteps, he was rescued from obscurity by a friendship with Belle Moskowitz, a reformer and early supporter of future Governor of New York Al Smith.  Moskowitz recommended Robert Moses to Smith as a man who could get things done, as someone who could help Smith implement the progressive ideas he wanted to advance to distance himself from the Tammany Hall political machine from which he sprang and get him in the running for a run at President.  Smith and Moses were an odd couple to be sure, and the depiction of their friendship is the unquestionable highlight of the book.   

   In Volume 1, most of the action is stage setting, as Moses begins to develop his vision of parks and freeways to drive to those parks.  Most of the action takes place on the tip of Long Island, where Moses spent the 20's and 30's in endless litigation with the land barons who owned all the property out there.  Parks were really popular with the general public and the press, particularly when those standing in the way are wealthy captain of industry.  It's clear both from the action of the book and Caro's relentless foreshadowing that the combination of power and lack of public accountability would turn Moses into a monster, but by the end of Volume 1 that moment is still on the far-ish horizon.

Perspective (2025) by Laurent Binet

 Book Review

Perspective (2025)

by Laurent Binet

   This is pretty clearly a Laurent Binet riff on Umberto Eco or, more recently, Alvaro Enrique- i.e. a medieval who-dun-it with real life characters.  The plot involves a risque portrait of a duchess (or somebody like that) and the efforts her scheming father will go through to retrieve the portrait and her honor.   I was disappointed and barely paid attention, a sad miss for Binet, from my perspective, or at least not the kind of inventiveness I'd expected from his other books. 

Brother Brontë (2025) by Fernando Flores

 Audiobook Review

Brother Brontë (2025) 

by Fernando Flores

 I checked out the Audiobook of Brother Brontë from the library based on the capsule review in the New York Times book review promising Latin American themed/dystopian/literary fiction, and it was that, though perhaps it suffers from the narrow viewpoint common to many protagonists in post-apocalyptic fiction.  If you don't know anything different, what is there even to say about the situation.  Here, Flores hedges his bets by making one of the young-ish characters a "last bookworm" sort of heroine.   Various elements flash into view and then disappear, rendering the proceedings closer to literary fiction, but less exciting than genre.  Only the setting, which I imagined to be something like Brownsville, on the Mexican/Texas border, really stirred by imagination.    My issue with Brother Brontë is similar to my issue with the YA and child narrators from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list:  They don't go anywhere, they don't do anything, and they aren't particularly interesting people, being under 13 and poorly educated.   The sameness of the inner experience of the lower echelons of the socio-economic ladder across genre and geography is something that is never commented upon by literary critics, but I think it is worth noting. 

Random Family (2003) by Adrian LeBlanc

 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (New York Times)

Random Family (2003)

by Adrian LeBlanc

#25

       This might be THE most representative book from the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list, a 432 page in depth exploration of the life and times of a loosely related group of New Yorkers who are knee deep in the crack epidemic.  You've got Coco Rodriguez, the main character, a woman who manages to have four children by three different men in between the ages of 17 and 24.  You've got Jessica Martinez, the consort of a notorious crack kingpin who is sentenced to life in Federal Prison during the book, and who herself serves a ten year federal prison sentence over the course of Random Family.  You've got Coco and Jessica's respective families, who are equally filled with child sexual abuse, drug usage, child neglect and early/frequent exposure to domestic violence.

   As someone who deals with individuals who are enmeshed with the Federal Criminal Justice system because of their participation in drug trafficking, I am well familiar with the social milieus that produce the characters in this book, and everything that they say or do was familiar to me- listening to the Audiobook of Random Family was like listening to a 20 hour federal probation report, where probation officers try to get to the heart of the same questions that LeBlanc frames in 15 pages instead of 400.

   A common theme, both in Random Family and my own professional experience, is disordered living.  A one parent household headed by Mom, or a serial household with Mom and a succession of partner's, is common.  It's been my own observation, borne out at length in Random Family, is that people who get into organized criminal activity do it because a) they never think it will end up with them serving decade long prison sentences b) they literally do not have a single other idea about what do besides crime. The men in this book, most of whom spend the entirety of the book in Federal or State Prison make these decisions when they are very young and even as they spend their ten, twenty year or life in prison sentences, the level of self-reflection is minimal because there were never any other choices to be made.

  The women on the other hand, again, based both on the experiences depicted in Random Family and my own professional experiences, is that women often believe that the only thing they have to offer is their body and that a child is their best chance of forging a lasting relationship with a providing male. When this inevitably fails to happen, the man disappears, and the woman is left with the child.  Coco, at the center of this book, is incapable of making a reasoned decision or really even looking after her own interesting, rather she is buffeted by the day-to-day chaos of the consequences of her decision to have four children with three different men.

  Coco is, in a sense, amazing in that she manages to keep her tattered family together through the entire book.  Jessica, on the other hand, manages to get impregnated by a guard while in prison and foists the children off on her long-suffering mother, also caring for some of her other children which she left behind to serve her decade long prison sentence.   The men are equally despicable and pathetic, the tattered flotsam of late-stage capitalism, going nowhere and doing nothing.  What, one wonders, is the end game for anyone in Random Family, except as a burden to the state and incubator of intergenerational trauma.   Those looking for answers will find none here and the author doesn't bother to try- it's not that type of book.

  

     

Gold Diggers (2020) by Sanjena Sathian

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Gold Diggers (2020)
by Sanjena Sathian

1400 Dunwoody Village Pkwy SUITE #1406

 Atlanta, Georgia

Georgia 11/26

    You'd think there would be more novels written by the sons and daughters of the Indian diaspora in America but one gets the sense that writing fiction is secondary to becoming a doctor, scientist or venture capitalist. The post World War II South Asian immigrants to the United States mostly arrived as graduate students in hard-science/technical subjects- they had top degrees from elite Indian universities.  There's a much smaller subset of small-business owning immigrants who were fleeing turmoil- your NYC cabbies and gas station owners, but mostly the South Asian experience in the US has been small families: Dad, Mom and one or two kids.  Dad works as a scientist or doctor or in computers, Mom stays at home or has some kind of home business.  Kids are under intense pressure to do well.  

   In that regard, what must be mildly embarrassing for Sathian's own parents (she went to Yale for undergraduate and then went to, sigh, the Iowa Writer's Workshop), is great for readers.  Sathian's magical realist/coming of age drama is a rare depiction of the inner lives of two families of reasonably well off Indian American immigrants living in suburban Atlanta.  Sathian's protagonist is feckless male high school student who moons over his more successful neighbor-girl, also Indian American.  One night he stumbles over her neighbor's secret:  Her mom is creating a drink out of stolen gold as a way to harness the ambitions of others.   Sathian goes light on the lore- I sense the hand of the market at work, but that doesn't detract from a lively tale. 

  I could actually identify somewhat with these characters- some of the action takes place in the Bay Area and some of Sathian's high school portraits reminds me of Indian American girls who went to my own, highly selective high school in Oakland.   I was glad to get this window into a world that had always seemed opaque to me as a high school/college/law school student.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025) by Stephen Graham Jones

 Audiobook Review

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025)

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Stephen Graham Jones is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet nation in Montana.  He is also a prolific author of genre fiction, with a bibliography that dates back to 2000, and usually with one publication a year, or two publications in one year and none in the next.  I'd never heard of him until he published The Only Good Indians, which was picked up by Simon & Schuster and represented a step up in authorial profile and out of the limitations of genre fiction (his previous publisher was Tor- a science fiction/fantasy/horror genre specialist.)

  I actually didn't like The Only Good Indian and didn't finish the Audiobook I checked out from the library, but that could have had something to do with the pandemic era publication date.  I also didn't know about the author's tribal affiliation, which makes a big difference in distinguishing genre horror from speculative but literary fiction.  The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, to me, is like, a riff on Interview with a Vampire but with the intent to actually say something about its historical era, instead of using the historical elements as scenery for the soap-opera plot.  It is also very much a horror novel with a very...um. visceral and uniquely Mountain West take on the familiar tropes of vampire lit.

  The format. a mysterious, black-clad Native American with an acute sensitivity to sunlight shows up one day in a late 19th century Montana frontier church whose minister has his own connections to the events that have touched the life of the stranger.  He insists on unburdening himself to the preacher over a series of evenings, and then the preacher recounts the events to his journal.

  Jones uses a somewhat awkward but historically accurate/appropriate framing device for this sort of 19th century yard, a present-day graduate student in western history who is the last descendant of the frontier preacher and who comes into possession of his narrative.  Considering his lengthy publication history, it's hard not to suspect that Jones is writing with editorial guidance about maximizing the potential for what I would imagine would be an FX miniseries adaptation.   More power to him- I think it would be a great tv show/movie, but you'd have to get the violence right, which would be tough. 

  The Audiobook is also good for this book because you get the Native American narrator voice, which I wouldn't have wanted to do in my head, reading a paper/e copy at home.

The Emperor of Maladies by Siddhartha Mukehjee

 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (New York Times)

The Emperor of Maladies (2010)

by Siddhartha Mukehjee

#84

   I'm wrapping up the non-fiction portion of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (New York Times) list.  I'm not sure if I'm going to do the fiction portion, since most of the books I haven't read from that part of the list are books I already know about and don't want to read.   I'm busy enough with my day job these days that I don't feel compelled to read as much during my leisure time.  I listened to the Audiobook version over a period of months.  It's a 22 hour listen, and frankly, 22 hours of listening to the history of the treatment of cancer proved to be a bit of a slog. 

   The take-away is that curing cancer is incredibly complicated because cancer itself is incredibly complicated.  Really, the history of cancer is the history of medicine itself.  No disease has attracted more attention from scientists seeking a cure, and The Emperor of Maladies was written at the cusp of the modern period, where a decline in the cost of genetic sequencing of individuals has made "curing cancer" a realistic prospect for a small but growing cohort of sufferers.   The major issue, as it turns out, is that each cancer is genetically different, and a cure requires sequencing the genetics of the cancer cells for a particular person.  

   Mukehjee does have lots to say about the causes of cancer, which can either be incredibly reassuring or the equivalent of a death sentence with no execution date.  Genetics plays a huge role in who does or doesn't get cancer, as do environmental factors and personal choices, but it really isn't only one thing or the other.  One fact I did take away is that family history is super important- if cancer runs in your family you are susceptible to it no matter how hard you try to stay away from risk factors, conversely, if no one in your immediate family has had cancer, you are more likely to get away with risky personal choices and environmental exposure.