The books which defeat their message: Chanda Prescod Weinstein "The Disordered Cosmos" and Kara Cooney "The Good Kings: The Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt"

   The books by the experts in the fields of Astrophysics and Egyptology differ in the fact that Prescod is mad and Cooney is perfectly normal and supremely organized. 

Chanda Prescod Weinstein repeats on every page "As a Black woman astrophysicist...". O'K, Sandra, we learnt it from the second page. On every sixth page, she tells that she is Jewish. When she speaks about physics, her thought is lucid and up to the point. But these are rare intermittencies among mad rant about oppression of the Blacks and Native Americans with the extensive references from Woke literary universe. But somehow, in the beginning of the book she repeats--a correct, in my view--mantra that race is a socio-cultural construct. Indeed, if we take skin color as a race marker, it does not conform with genetics. The populations of Sudan are more distant genetically from the populations of Namibia than Norwegians are from Indonesians. If we add territory of ethnic origin, or language, nothing again will make sense. For instance, if the characteristics of a White Race are its European origin and Indo-European languages, the whitest Finns and Estonians, together with Hungarians, not to speak of Jews are excluded. And so on. But if race is an artificial construct of European colonizers, why one has to identify with a particular race at all? Furthermore, her views are Amero-centric. She obviously, does not realize that, historically, class, religion and place of origin played much more significant role than race. 

For instance, in the Late Medieval Europe, where the Christianity and ability to form an organized state defined the characteristics of the "Master race", the barbarians were the blond and blue eyed Finns and, especially, Lithuanians, who adopted Christianity only in 1387. It mostly repeated Graeco-Roman classification of German tribes as barbarians for their lack of classic culture and statehood. 

Equally strange is the Kara Cooney's discussion of the Egyptian civilization. First, it was the most successful civilization in the world history, ours included, which maintained itself for about 27 centuries with little change. This testifies to the incredible resilience of the structures of its society and powerful centripetal  tendencies despite all foreign invasions and conqueror rules. Her criticism was that it was a despotical state based on the cult of deified pharaohs. This is really odd given that a modern democracy is barely older than 200 years and already has developed the signs of senility. Egypt suffered upheavals once in half-millennium, while more "democratic" Roman Empire, for most of its history, had these at least once in twenty years. But this is not the worst part of her altogether interesting book. The worst part are her immature projections of the Egyptian polity on the modern politics (Putin and Trump, in particular--no book should be without them), including women's rights, which she asserts in the epigraph proudly declaring herself being in charge of her family affairs. 

[Recently, I re-examined the book of beau Cara. Because I was not sufficiently attentive while reading it the first time, I realized that every passage in the book is peppered with modernizations purporting to prove the connection between autocracy -- a very uncertain term -- and male patriarchy, and white privilege. These diversions make the book more readable, yet they are ahistorical, modernizing -- not in the good sense -- and totally unwarranted. Re-phrasing her argument one can also consider polar exploration, Apollo program and LHC at CERN as monuments to the power preservation and vanity of the Christian male patriarchs.] 

E. O. Wilson. The Social Conquest of Earth.

 A great book, written by one of the XX Century great minds. Too sad that much of it is dedicated to polemic with inclusive fitness theory and, especially, Dawkins, whom he hates so much that he even uses arguments of B. F. Skinner against him, despite the fact that behaviorists are uniformly despised by him in other parts of the book. Noam Chomsky is viciously derided by Wilson as well. Furthermore, he promotes a competent linguist, who unnaturally evolved (pun intended!) to a neocon philosophical charlatan in the spirit of Fukuyama and a defender of pedophile Epstein, Steven Pinker, whose views are congenial to Wilson's. But Dawkins' and Chomsky's views are not so incompatible with his own. Group selection theory, which Wilson advances against inclusive fitness is remarkably difficult to formalize. 

But one can imagine that, sometimes, a population splits into disconnected clusters which do not exchange genes between themselves. In fact, the Galapagos observations were instrumental for Darwin. A given cluster might have a suboptimal genetic profile, which is yet insufficient to cause its extinction. But, in case of a large environmental catastrophe, only one population with a given genetic profile could randomly survive, or be the best adapted to the new environment and propel its genes to posterity. Then, Wilson group selection theory can be formulated in the language, probably almost identical to the "selfish gene" proposal of Dawkins. 

Heino Falcke. Jorg Romer. Light in the Darkness, the Universe and Us.

 

  The author is brilliant and he is not shy to flaunt his incomparable brilliance: "Forty more seconds to go, and then, for the first time, people all over the world will marvel at the image of a giant black hole... Humanity's thousand -year journey of discovery...--today they all will be brought together...". He is also not shy to proclaim his Catholic-tinged Protestantism in every chapter and devotes the latter part of his book to his theological disquisitions. 

His book can be read with interest by a person with no physics background at all as well as the ones with a significant background in physics and astronomy. It is also written clearly and with gusto--a rare combination, and both authors are Germans--for whom English is a second language. 

Falcke's appropriation of all the history of Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) to himself and his own efforts for funding leaves the reader with the bad taste in mouth, even if everything he tells is true. But if one wants to discard his pride, equal to his achievement, as a small nuisance, one can expect a wonderful travel among the stars and galaxies. 

R. Schwarzlose. Brainscapes.

The book on important subject written by a competent expert: what can be better? But the laudatory preface by Harvard/Bloomberg's Cass Sunstein known for his penchant for much younger women, praising Schwarzlose for its writing made me apprehensive. Indeed, the book is so chaotic and is written in the style of an automotive manual so that the most information I got about the subject matter was from the drawings. If you want to follow her meandering train of thought, fine. But her book tells about the subjects, which other neurophysiologists miss, either because they consider them trivial, or too arcane for a common reader. 

Adrian Goldsworthy. Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors.

Horrific. I previously expressed opinion on the degradation of the British humanities and on Andy/Adie  Goldsworthy in particular. Has the depth of analysis deserving only six-to-eight grader school project. I checked it out in a vain hope that in a more than a pound book there is some information about 1) the structure of Macedonian society (very little), 2) Macedonian culture--if not an oxymoron--and its place in contemporaneous Greece, 3) contemporary geopolitics, 4) mutual penetration of the Greek and Indian cultures, and 5) some explanations why a tiny state on the border of Thracia and  Peloponnesus conquered much of Western Eurasia and Egypt and installed its generals as the heads of the local dynasties --almost none. All the book contains is a sophomoric description of battles, elephants and Alexander's drunken binges. The author can object that there is scarce information about most of these subject. But if you know next to nothing about the subject of your principal expertise--is not it the time to begin selling used cars? 

Gotz Aly. Europe against the Jews.

Usually, the books are being commended because of their visionary ideas. But, sometimes, there is a need to commend a book not for its prescience but for the courage of the author to enunciate the obvious. Gotz Aly succeeded in clearly representing two ideas: first, that the Shoah was not an aberration but an end to a relatively long tradition of Eastern European anti-Semitism and that the instant push to Shoah was the degeneration of Wilsonian idea of "self-determination" into an ethnocratic state--in most of the Eastern Europe, and, second that the dynamics of the Shoah was much less related to the race and religion, and that in many countries it was rather looting, rape, confiscation of the Jewish assets and real estate, which were the main drivers. 

For that, his book was chastised by Steven Zipperstein in the New York Times. He wanted the book to be faithful to Snyder's vicious assertion that the Russians are guilty of everything--and to relate the murderous streak in the European anti-Semitism exclusively to Russian pogroms, which were, in his opinion, whitewashed by Gotz Aly. But there is no lack of information, including statistical data, concerning pogroms beginning from 1882 to the Russian Civil War. Some of this information is garbled, surely, for instance peasant leader Makhno was no anti-Semite--he was surrounded by the Jews, including the head of his secret police Leva Zadov--so feared that long thereafter mothers scared unruly children by him. This was the inner dynamics of peasant guerilla armies that led to mass murder of the Jews in Ukraine by the anarchists. But his general narrative--for instance, that the Tsarist Government, surely no friend of the Jews, did not have any coherent policy of dealing with them--was ridiculed, rather than refuted by Zipperstein. Similarly, Aly mistakenly says that the Kishinev 1903 pogrom went without consequences. It shocked the whole world and resulted in overwhelming turning of the US public opinion in favor of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War. (see the contemporary gravure by E. M. Lilien, a Jewish-German painter). Not that the pogroms were unique for the Russian Empire--neighboring Romania was also engulfed by anti-Jewish violence before the Second World War. 

However, the strongest examples in the service of Aly's own theses were omitted in the book--namely, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Holland. In all these nations, only a minuscule fraction of Jews survived, near-zero in the case of Estonia--it was attested by Heidrich at Wannsee Conference in 1942 as judenfrei as an example to other, more "backward" nations--and in none of these states history of the racial or religious persecution played any role. 

Two main ideas of Gotz Aly were earlier enunciated by this author--may be, not in such clear and well-documented form. But I am not upset, for it requires his stature and popularity to move the connection of the emergence of the ethnocratic government--newly reborn state of Estonia in 1990 proclaimed its goal to achieve "monoethnic Parliament" well before the term "ethnic cleansing" became popular in the Balkans--to genocidal policies against minorities.  

Muraresku, Brian. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of Religion with no Name.

     

Muraresku wrote a remarkable book, where decent exercise in amateur archeology and anthropology is mixed with a complete madness, to a strange result. It is quite probable that the antique cults of Demeter and Bacchus, especially in Early Antiquity, were accompanied by orgies, drug taking and human/animal sacrifices. It would be quite strange if it were otherwise. 

However, to suggest that there was a direct inheritance line between Late Bronze Age cults and esoteric teachings of the Early Modern Europe suppressed by the Inquisition  is madness. First, many tribal groups--predominantly Germanic, which dominated Europe after the Fall of the Roman Empire had neither genetic, nor cultural relationship to the civilizations of European Antiquity. It would be again strange, if these Germanic invaders were not taking "magic mushrooms" or some other form of hallucinogenic drug and did not participate in sacrificial rites, but this is not the same as the existence of a cultural continuity. 

Sean MacMeekin. Stalin's War.

 

There were times in 1950-1970s when the majority of the SS and Wehrmacht veterans were still young and sprightly, and threw lavish parties in which they boasted about their "victories". (The subject of the US-French 1967 movie "Night of the Generals"). To an occasional sympathetic British journalist they told that they were defending Europe and European culture from the plague of Bolshevism. And yet, they were provoked by the Russians. Holocaust? Ya, Jews were an obsession of a single deranged man whose supposedly incompetent meddling in the military decisions had cost them that wonderful war. [1] But its victims were much fewer than it is told by the "Jewish propaganda" machine and many were communist fellow travelers and partisans, anyway. Serial ascription of the victims of Nazi terror to the Russians and Stalin had to come much later. 

Meekin laments that turncoat Romania--it switched the sides when its defeat was imminent--was punished "for defending its territory", i.e. the territory grabbed from the decaying Russian Empire in the aftermath of the First World War. Forgotten are about 200 thousand Jews and many others exterminated by the Romanian Army in the Odessa Oblast' alone, not counting the Crimea and other territories, which were "blessed" by the Romanian occupation. 

But the Western allies are treated as shabbily by von Meekin. In his book, Roosevelt and, especially, Churchill were naïve dupes that were enchanted by Stalin to help USSR/Russia instead of accepting "reasonable" German piece overtures, of which little evidence except the neo-Nazi propaganda can be found. First, Churchill already had a taste of Hitler's sincerity and trustworthiness. Second, Churchill obviously, and cynically, preferred a million Germans fighting over Kharkov, or Stalingrad rather than El Alamein where slightly more than 100,000 British troops, many little more than colonial militias, were facing slightly less that number of troops of the Afrika Corps with uncertain results [2]. 

Books following this narrative periodically appeared but they were usually limited to provincial publishing houses in the countries--Canada, Australia--where the post-war British Empire shoveled war criminals too obvious to keep home. Now it penetrated the most prestigious American editorial empires--Basic Books--and the university campuses. Bard College hired a Nazi! 

[1] What about Soviet POWs (the second largest group subjected to mass extermination), Roma/Cinti, homosexual, communists, mentally ill and other human beings Nazi considered subhuman?  Meekin even has a nerve to present a piece of Nazi War propaganda describing a POW admiring food, by which his captors fed him and regretting his wife cannot share it with him. About 2/3 of the Soviet POWs perished in German (Finnish, Hungarian, etc.) captivity and the rest--mostly from the borderline areas--either switched allegiance to the Germans, or were liberated quickly after their captivity because of the shifting front lines. Almost nobody survived the war in the Stalag.  

[2] In the key battle of Alam Halfa, about 12 brigades of the German Army faced two British divisions. 

W. M. Arkin and E. D. Cauchy. The Generals Have no Clothes. The Untold Story of Endless Wars.

The book is schizophrenic. It competently discusses reasons, why the latest military conflicts started by the United States--no other country since 2006 ever began an interstate military conflict--though there were border clashes and interferences in already ongoing civil wars--never end. The main are the following. Systematic exclusion by the Washington foreign policy blob all outside experts on military matters, and limited information provided outside their closed circle--this was not the case during the Cold War, dominance of the hawkish civil servants and Congressional staffers with limited, if any, conventional military experience in the field (i.e. the neocons) in the decision making and waning of the civic military culture because of the professionalization of the army after the Vietnam War. 

Yet, while Arkin is competent in discussing why foreign policy of the United States degenerated into military adventurism, he is stalwart in his conviction that the US Armed Forces, which could not defeat rag-tag Taliban militias must maintain extremely aggressive posture against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, in about that order. I.e. the smaller the country and the fewer nuclear weapons it has, the more apprehensive Arkin becomes with respect to the military solution of all foreign policy problems. In full compliance with the neocon doctrine, he suggests that they cannot modernize their armed forces because they supposedly lack a "democratic culture". Besides a magic thinking relating any particular social structure with the military prowess--how democratic was Genghis Khan--he also does not notice a pitiful state of most European militaries despite their professed (but not always upheld) democratic values. 

Rutger Bregman. Humankind. A Hopeful History.

 

As Samuel L. Jackson's character says in Pulp Fiction: "I like it, but it ain't true".

Bregman's book is self-contradictory to the extreme degree. He, correctly, suggests that crime and violence tend to decrease on average since the beginning of the industrial era and then rejects the evidence that hunter-gatherer societies (which he terms as 95% of human history) were enormously violent. This author once suggested that a modern hunter-gatherer tribes could be "history's D-students" who did not learn to control violence--the only comparison of their causality rate in modern history was the USSR in 1942, the year of Stalingrad. But it cannot be denied that the only evidence we have is that their life was "poor, brutish and short". 

He attacks Machiavelli for his dim view of the human nature and suggests that in hunter-gatherer societies as in other close-knit groups persons with "Machiavellian" traits would be quickly exposed and exiled to starve. Not debating his interpretations of the actual writings of the great Florentine, the persons colloquially called Machiavellian are not spiteful and proud bullies. Vice versa, these characters exhibit steely self-control and the ability to cover up their power plays by the "greater good" and "the will of the people". Clinton and Obama were much more fitting examples than Bush or Trump. 

His pronouncements are trivial: power corrupts, infinite power corrupts infinitely and the like. Bregman suggests, in quite a Marx's--whom he detests--fashion that human puppies grow into violent sociopaths because of adverse influences of their environment. A disquisition of "nature vs. nurture" can be infinite until the new breakthroughs in neurophysiology will obviate this needless philosophizing discourse. 

Another mix of misrepresentation and naivete is involved with discussion about humanization of prisons. Bregman asserts that a "touchy-feely" Scandinavian prisons work better in terms of violence between guards and convicts, convicts themselves and the rates of recidivism. However, the conditions in most prisons are not the exclusive results of the prison regimen imposed by the guards and administration. In Brazil (I use Brazil simply as the best-documented case) there exists a parallel governance of the prisons by the Primero Comando da Capital. Basically, a new arrival who does not belong to the gang, whether he (overwhelmingly, he) is there for murder, or theft, or insurance fraud is met by the representative of the criminal administration who explains to him his responsibilities before the leader if he, or his relatives outside are to stay alive. These responsibilities may include giving up food parcels from relatives, providing sexual favors to the gang members, or help in trafficking SIM-cards or drugs into prison. In Mexico, the gangs are predominantly territorially based, Russian gangs are ethnic-territorial (based on a city of origin, or from Caucasus, Central Asia, etc.) and USA prison gangs are supposed to be racially based. 

Bregman objects to the Milgram and Stanford studies on the basis of newly discovered diaries but the evidence he presents to bolster his suggestion that the studies were faked is specious and unconvincing. For instance, he writes that "only" 56% of the tested persons in Milgram experiment were convinced that the electric shocks were real. That is quite enough. 

Rutger Bregman is one of the relatively new crop of paperback philosophers (Fukuyama, Henri Levy were the pathfinders) valued not for their profound ideas but for their media-savvy presentation of the latest intellectual fashions and prejudices. But he writes well. 

Seb Falk. The Light Ages.

 "The Light Ages" belies its author's concept: namely, that the Dark Ages were the times of the great creativity and discovery. First, most of the book's material refers to the time, which Johan Huizinga called "The Autumn of the Middle Ages", i.e. the times where medieval certainties began to unravel and medieval lawlessness had subsided. Second, indeed, the late Roman Empire was quite a technological laggard and many of the useful innovations happened, or became practical during the Dark Ages--cogwheel, water and windmill, mechanical clocks, crop rotation and others. The swords from Sutton Hoo burial in the British Museum testify to a much more advanced state of metallurgy among the Saxon barbarians than the Roman gladius, and Irish rowboats observed by the author in the Dublin Museum, not to mention Scandinavian longships, were much more seaworthy and maneuverable vehicles than oar-powered wooden boxes of the Classical Age. But all this happened during 10 centuries, twice as long as the existence of the Roman Empire, and had little to do with a high monastic culture so exalted by the author. 

Philipp Blom. Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present.

A charming yarn woven around a questionable idea that the "Little Ice Age" ushered in the European Enlightenment.  Indeed, during the XVI-XVII century the center of European science and engineering moved from Southern to Northern Europe but why worse harvests and failing crops accelerated economic development misses me entirely. Blom's unflinching clarity frequently prevents him to distinguish half-tones and he considers atheism as signifying progress.

Fred M. Kaplan. The Bomb: Presidents, Generals and the Secret History of the Nuclear War

With neoconservatism approaching its intellectual (but not political: neocons monopolized US Government offices dealing with national security, schools of diplomacy and political science) dustbin, Fred Kaplan--seriously, I spent a fair amount of time to distinguish him from Robert Kaplan, Fred and Robert Kagan--reissued his 2002 book, which he carried to the Age of Trump. Remarkably, except reliance on questionable media sources, this book demonstrates a partial return to sanity in some corners of American commentariat. Namely, a nuclear posture with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons on a hair-trigger alert was a consequence of the Cold War and resulting paranoia and self-inflicted errors of judgment. Yet, China demonstrated a significant restraint in building up its strategic nuclear arsenal, being content with a few tens of nuclear tipped missiles and not very high level of their readiness. This posture defended the Chinese from both USA and USSR--in both countries hotheads contemplated a nuclear attack once in a while. Will the Chinese who are now faced with quickly upgrading US ABM system feel sorry now? The question goes unanswered. 

Rosanna Warren. Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters.

I took Rosanna Warren's book to research a single fact: whether Nazi sympathizer Cocteau really launched a campaign to save Jacob as it has been portrayed in the movie "Picasso". I finished reading it with ashen face because of how vividly his slow demise in the clutches of Nazi terror machine was described in the book. When the French Police took him for handing him over to Gestapo, his landlady sighed: "And was it worth to pray so much?" (He absconded Judaism of his childhood and became a fervent Catholic). 

The book is somewhat light on his poetry (though, reading a few poems in Russian translation left me with the feeling that, unlike another catalyst of the new art, Guilliaume Apollinaire, his poetry was secondary in importance and this impression might be unfair) and heavy on his gay relationships. But, nevertheless it is a monument to a great man and a martyr. 

Jacob looks on his photographs exactly like his portraits or vice versa...