Astoria - Peter Stark

Our May bookclub book was Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival, by Peter Stark. Nate recommended this one, and I really enjoyed it!

Astoria is a remarkable true tale of ambition, wilderness exploration, and hardship, recounting John Jacob Astor's efforts to establish the first American outpost in the Pacific Northwest, as a means of building a hugely profitable global trading empire. Astor was a friend of Thomas Jefferson's, and undertook the mission with his support.

While Astor remained comfortably lodged at home in his mansion in New York, he sent two parties, an overland and an oversea party, to try to forge a path through the wilderness, and meet up in present-day Astoria, Oregon (about a 2 hour drive northeast of Portland, on the Columbia River and coast of the Pacific Ocean). The story covers the 3 years of their expedition, from 1810-1813.

Astor was an incredibly far-seeing and enterprising person, and he did his utmost to select the very best men and equipment for his missions. Even still, the journeys were incredibly brutal, owing in part to the roughness of the unknown terrain, physical hardship and starvation, and constant stress from fear of Native American attack, and in part due to interpersonal conflicts and ignorance among the party members themselves.

A fascinating story! Definitely recommend, especially for Pacific Northwest enthusiasts.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

This exceptional book by Katherine Boo reads like an absorbing, fascinating novel yet is, almost unbelievably, nonfiction.  Boo, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and writer for the New Yorker, lived in Mumbai and delved into the lives of the residents of Annawadi, a small slum beside a lake of sewage, adjacent to a very busy international airport serving Mumbai.

"Everything around us is roses" is how Abdul's younger brother, Mirchi, put it.  "And we're the shit in between."

In an afterward, Boo describes her research, interviewing and filming residents with the help of translators and student interns, for four years, then piecing together this extraordinarily vivid and clear-eyed account of key events in the life of Annawadi, including suicides, a murder, a tragic accident involving horses painted like zebras, and always the crushing power of poverty, inequality and pervasive corruption.

As Abdul and his family had already learned, the police station was not a place where victimhood was redressed and public safety held dear.  It was a hectic bazaar, like many other institutions in Mumbai, and investigating Kalu's death was not a profit generating enterprise."

Boo's aim is to understand how globalization and world economics shape the lives of those at the lower end of the economic scale and her insights are penetrating and empathetic.  This is a beautiful book, though heartbreakingly sad.

Plagues and Peoples - William McNeil

This book by William McNeil offers an interesting interpretation of the way that epidemic disease has shaped the course of world history from ancient times to the present day, a topic that the author asserts has been neglected in traditional historical accounts. The book is written in a charmingly old-fashioned style which is pleasant to read, although it is at times a bit tediously wordy and the citations are sparser than I would like.

Nevertheless, here is one passage from the Introduction that I think provides a good example of the interesting theories underpinning this book:

Disease and parasitism play a pervasive role in all life. A successful search for food on the part of one organism becomes for its host a nasty infection or disease. All animals depend on other living things for food, and human beings are no exception. Problems of finding food and the changing ways human communities have done so are familiar enough in economic histories. The problems of avoiding becoming food for some other organism are less familiar, largely because from very early times human beings have ceased to have much to fear from large-bodied animal predators like lions or wolves. Nevertheless, one can properly think of most human lives as caught in a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators, chief among which have been other human beings.

Originally published in 1977, parts are noticeably antiquated, but it remains an interesting and thought-provoking work which has sparked my interest in learning much more about the bubonic plague and the medieval period. 

Understanding Power - Noam Chomsky

My book group's most recent selection (at my suggestion) was Chomsky's "Understanding Power." My friend Dan had urged me to read this book many times and I kept putting it off, thinking it would be boring and difficult. Nothing could be farther from the truth! This gripping book, although shocking and disturbing at times, was extremely interesting and readable. It is an edited transcript of Chomsky's various talks, and his style is clear and persuasive. I found this book to be profoundly eye-opening and unsettling regarding American politics and media censorship, and while I felt very disillusioned, it was important for me to have a better understanding of power and oppression in our nation. A must-read for everyone, I think!

Footnotes to the text are available here.

Paul Gilding - The Great Disruption

There is a war coming.

In this book, Gilding tries to articulate a way out of the mess we're in - he says, in essence, "if we're going to solve these problems, here's what it will look like."  He argues that the coming crisis will initiate a response from the first world directly analogous to that of the second world war, in which enormous swaths of first world economy were nationalized and repurposed to the war effort.  It is this wartime economy, with an emphasis on efficiency and frugality, that will allow us to orchestrate a crisis management response to the collapse that we are now far too late to head off with more gradual efforts.

While much of the material covered in the book is not new to me, Gilding's experience as first an environmental activist with Greenpeace, and later as a environmental consultant who has worked with people like the CEO of DuPont, provides a perspective that is more of an insider's view.

I think the most important point that I drew from this book was his argument that we cannot fight a war on two fronts.  The first front is the radical and transformative restructuring of our political and economic systems that will allow the creation of a sustainable and steady-state (as opposed to growth-focused) economy.  The second is the direct response to the chaos and violence that will make the conflict of the twentieth century look like a gentlemanly session of fisticuffs.  Since the vested interests of the current establishment will, like any hegemony, fight to protect its power, we need to find a way to in the short term harness the old capitalist system to fight the Carbon War, in a concerted effort that will in turn bring about the systemic transformation that we need so desperately.

While I don't know if I share Gilding's optimism, his analogy to the war-time effort of WWII is thought provoking (he notes that military spending went from 3 percent of GDP at the beginning of the war to 39 percent at the end, in a time when the GDP as a whole increased by 75 percent.)  If we can accomplish something similar, along with a total paradigm shift in the consciousness of the first world which will divert our collective activity away from mindless consumption, there may still be hope.

David Harvey - Spaces of Hope

This is one of the books I am reading for my thesis. In it, Harvey presents a convincing case for and way of adapting Marx's ideas to the conditions of capitalism in postmodernity, particularly in the context of globalization and the death of the Modernist utopian project in the aftermath of WWII.

Particularly interesting is Harvey's application of his "historical-geographical materialism" in his case study of Baltimore in the second half of the twentieth century, as he examines the ways that capital manipulates the construction of urban space in order to maintain its exploitative control over the working class.

In this book Harvey brilliantly addresses the worries of postmodernity and the various postmodernisms while maintaining a commitment to the utopian dream and political praxis, offering both a framework to understand the mutual interactions of geography and capital and to offer resistance to the bourgeois myth that "there is no alternative" to consumer capitalism, democracy, and the tyranny of the free market.

I read two chapters of this book for a class in my sophomore year, and it has been highly influential in the development of my own political sympathies. Harvey's writing is clear and accessible (for the most part, although some background in literary theory and intellectual history of the twentieth century is useful) and completely devoid of the obscurantism that plagues a lot of academic writing. Fascinating and highly enjoyable.