Lawler, A. Under Jerusalem: the buried history of the world's most contested city.

 Well written and fair-minded book among the myriad books about J'lem. If it's not plagiarism, pervasive among the authors in US bestseller lists, it's great. 

E. Shawcross. Last emperor of Mexico.

    

The book is very well written and organized as far as the struggles of the Great Powers and European dynastic alliances are concerned. There is almost nothing concerning Mexican society, culture and history except for a few racist comments of the French officers about the Mexican army. And these were the soldiers--Juaristas, obviously were not made from a different cloth than Imperialists--who, with the help of American weapons expelled foreign mercenaries and installed the Mexican Republic, which existed ever since. Furthermore, this was precisely a complex structure of property and landholding in post-Spanish Mexico, and the lack of support of the imperial cause by the peasantry, which doomed Maximillian's and Napoleon III enterprise, not the minor disagreements among his French military advisers. 

Tariq Ali. Winston Churchill, his times, his crimes.

        

The book by Tariq Ali is a welcome respite from a cult of Churchill upheld by the British media. Quite tame criticism amidst ample praise in Geoffrey Wheatcroft's "Churchill's Shadow. The Life and the Afterlife of Winston Churchill" was called a "character assassination" and other names by the standard chorus of cheerleaders. Too bad, that together with sound judgements on his policies and legacy, as well as on the British Empire as a whole, the book contains unfair and, frequently, bizarre allegations against him. 

Churchill was a product of Victorian class society and must be judged accordingly. Furthermore, as any great political figure, his errors were equally great. Bismarck, Gandhi, Nehru, Deng Xiaoping and Boris Yeltsin also committed great mistakes but their riding on "coattails of G-d" (Bismarck's maxim) was undeniable. Policies of the British Empire were egotistic and, sometimes, genocidal? Who can name another great power, lest the power, which once ruled over quarter of humanity, which was innocent of those traits? For all its horrors, British colonial rule was considered by most, including natives more benign than almost any other power. One needs only to compare it with chaos and mismanagement of the Italian, French or Spanish colonial rule, or with the naked brutality of the Germans, Japanese, Belgians and Dutch. 

And Churchill, during a relatively short period of his position as the Prime Minister, was preoccupied by the titanic struggle with the Nazi Germany. He could hardly could foresee the challenges of the postwar Britain. 

Kate Darling. The New Breed.

 Kate Darling continues the tradition of the brilliant but nearly-narcissistic auteurs reviewed on this blog. The book is cool and capably written. The main thesis of the book is that robots evolve into human companions similarly to the path and significance animals took in the past. Being historically considered as implements (her judgement; not mine), domesticated animals became anthropomorphic incarnations of our own selves. 

P.S. She claims that there is no acceptable definition of 'robot' and cannot come with one, which is strange for the Harvard-trained jurist. I suggest the following working definition:

Robot is a machine having:

1) Intelligence, i.e. the capability to gather information from its environment and use it to modify one's own actions;

2) Capability of autonomous movements, and

3)  Articulated parts, by which it performs its main functions. 

There will always be borderline cases, but it seems this definition provides clear distinction between robots and other computerized devices. 

Arianna Neumann. When Time Stopped.

     The book by Arianna Neumann deserves to be read because of it personal, well-documented approach and the absence of graphic horrors--as if the reality of the Nazi terror was not horrific enough. Shoah in the Czech Lands was almost total. During the Gacha regime 80+% of the pre-war Jews perished--and this was "achieved" by the SS office counting twenty-something officers with--as was the case in Holland with almost complete collaboration by the local authorities. 

    This fact makes even the more remarkable that Arianna's father survived with the help of his factory's manager, Franz Novak? and the friend Zdenek Tuma, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose in case their ruses to save Hans Neumann were discovered. Novak made almost invisible hiding place for Neumann in the basement of his factory. The clever design walled up the basement so that there was no access from the factory and the window outside looked like belonging to a different and abandoned building. Czech Gestapo minions had to crawl through a narrow ground-level frame into a dark and dirty basement with good handheld lamps to discover traces of human habitation. This feat would not be possible with the modern security cameras. 

    Zdenek Tuma and female friends (Arianna's dad seemed to be quite popular with girls) helped to smuggle him from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia... to Berlin as the last place he would be looked for. The irony was that green-eyed artificial blond Neumann looked more "Arian" then Tuma on his passport photograph and his hair had to be painted a darker hue. What is especially remarkable is that during Nazi and Stalinist terror there were always people willing to risk their life to resist, to sabotage, to slow down the evil system. Even NKVD officers and state prosecutors sometimes nullified or questioned decisions of their superiors, notwithstanding that they could be easily become defendants in the next round of repression. [1] 

    Her father always a ladies man, was so much so, that in Berlin he had a German girlfriend. She confided to him that although "Slavs are definitely an inferior race, the factory manager considers him intelligent and so does she. Obviously, Czech women deliberately mated with German men to improve their racial stock". This shows how deep was the penetration of Nazi propaganda even in the questions of intimacy and how difficult it was to relieve Germans of their inherent sense of superiority. 

[1] Similarly, at a completely different level of risk, there were people who gave work to blacklisted writers and hired faculty without stupid oaths. Equally, during Brezhnev's era, there were bosses who, despite secret prohibitions, employed Jews, were willing to overlook discrepancies in the anketa--colloquial name for the collection of open and secret files, or gave work to the dissidents and otkazniks. No such thing can exist in the contemporary United States. Nobody, not even the Congressional Committees and courts tasked with supervision of the intelligence services and the Armed Forces, challenged their establishment of secret torture chambers, unconstitutional blanket surveillance over American citizens and the like. Seemingly, public disapproval or career sabotage can deter honest behavior more than the executions. Beware: similar situation of blanket silence around Government surveillance was maintained in DDR, the East German Republic with rather puny sanctions for transgressors, rarely a suspended jail term. Yet, demoralization of society was so deep that the whole state machinery self-destructed literally in 48 hours after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Edward Slinglerland. Drunk.

    

        Philosophical disquisition of a Sinologist turned philosopher, Edward Slingerland, who equates the pace of human civilization with the use of intoxicants. 

My first objection is that, while he pays courtesy to Darwin, Singerland mostly follows Lamarckian evolution. In a vulgar rendering it is "ancestor of the giraffe pulled its neck to touch the upper leaves and, herewith, giraffes have long necks". He trashes what he calls a "hangover theory" without much understanding or attention how random evolution works. It asserts that hominins benefiting from ripe fruit, developed an attraction to the smell of rotting fruit. Slingerland suggests that the negative side effects of eating rotting vegetation could not develop a taste for alcohol. But, for a non-acculturated plants, there is always a distribution of unripe, ripe and rotten fruit. The fact, that hominins followed the smell of rotten vegetation does not suggest that they consumed mainly the rotten samples. Second stage of the development of taste for alcohol could have been a random mutation, which, for some populations, allowed digestion of rotten fruit -- the possibility, which Slingerland recognizes but dismisses without much argument. 

This does not suggest that atavistic taste for rotten fruit explains all of the facets of human consumption of intoxicants. Here comes his second weakness -- not distinguishing between biological and socio-cultural evolution. The fact that the search for the fruits rich in fructose latched on already existing pleasure centers in the brain, and the fish soup rich in Omega-3 oils did not, is biological. The fact that humans, unlike most if not all other animals prefer to share pleasurable activities in groups is largely cultural. Not all procreation-fostering activities are evolutionary adaptations. Use of lipstick and high heels is certainly not. 

Finally, there is factual sloppiness. Mescal bean, Dermatophyllum and relatives, such as Texas Mountain Laurel, Sophora Secundiflora, do not contain mescaline in measurable quantities. Its psychedelic properties are only displayed during acute poisoning by cystine/sophorine. On the contrary, mescaline in substantial quantities is obtained from peyote cactus, Lophophora williamsii. But all in all, Slingerland weaves an amusing yarn, if his expertise in fields other than in Chinese language and culture is not taken too seriously. 

Pat Shipman. Our Oldest Companions. The Story of the First Dog.

           

Guess why this map is here? 

With the advent of paleogenetic methodology , it was thought that the origins of all animal species can be easily established. One biologist told that the whole science of animal origins got shrunk because of the possibility to analyze ancient DNA. Not so: it turned out that with our oldest companion, the archeological data simply do not square with the paleogenetic ones. The story told by Pat Shipman is so wondrously convoluted that it may take decades to untangle all the migrations of humans with non-human animal companions (a.k.a. pets) before the era of recorded history. Her book is damn wonderful. 

P.S. Pat spends a lot of pages to prove that "domestication" of plants and animals are, in fact, two different processes. This is an Anglocentric linguistic exercise. For instance, in Russian the word similar to domestication is used principally for animals, while for the plants more frequent term is acculturation. 

Helen Rappaport. After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Epoque through Revolution and War.

       Remarkably even-keeled and cool-headed book, given the current political climate, albeit somewhat pedestrian. There are some small deficiencies in her narrative. For the author who is Helen Rappaport, and not Sean MacMeakin or Timothy Snyder, quoting Nina Berberova's elation for the Russian emigres who on the start of the Second World War went to Berlin to join Hitler's war effort without at least some critical comment is pretty strange. The husband and wife duo of Merezhkovsky and Hippius, prominently figuring in the pages, was widely considered evil pricks by most memoirists. Wartime diaries of fanatical Bolshevik-hater, Nobelist Ivan Bunin, demonstrate his disdain for German occupation and shameful behavior of the Russian collaborators. Remarkable, given Bunin's past anti-Semitic leanings and petty nobleman's pride, was his sympathy for the persecuted Jews. 

        The lives of exiles was not all misery and nostalgia: Rakhmaninov, Stravinsky, Sikorsky, Kistiakowsky and numerous others lived very well, thank you. Larionov, Goncharova, Zdanevich and Pozner became purveyors of the French culture. The story of Russian Corps fighting for France is reduced to one small paragraph telling about their discontent and mutiny. While this is technically correct after Soviet Russia signed an armistice with Germany in 1918, they fought on the fronts throughout the war in large numbers. But indeed, after the armistice, many demanded return to Russia and the French, fearing Bolshevist propaganda tried to put them away to the colonies. 

    Dear Helen missed two seminal sources in the study of Russian emigration. One is magisterial studies by Vladimir Ronin: Antwerpen en zijn ‘Russen’, 1814-1914 (1993); Russen en Belgen: is het water te diep? (1998) and two-volume ‘Russkoe Kongo’, 1870-1970 (2009). Though, technically they speak about Russian emigration to Belgium, the picture of the life in the Belgian Congo would be broadly applicable to the Russians in the French colonies as well. Another is encyclopedia of the Russian literature in emigration (Литература Русского Зарубежья). Helen Rappaport must know the writings of its editor, Alexander Nikolyukin, given that he was a main editor of Merezhkovsky and Hippius diaries. May be, his pre-1976 past as a pimp for underage girls prevented her from prominently quoting his work. But kudos for Helen, anyway. 

Mary Hollingworth. Princes of the Renaissance

There is an anecdote among art historians. Great Tamerlane had a bad right leg and a left arm. He invited three painters to make his portrait. The first painted him all intact. Tamerlane executed the painter. This was the birth of romanticism. The second painter depicted him as he was and was duly executed as well. This was the birth of realism. Finally, the third artist painted him in profile from the left side, so that his right leg was covered by the horse and the left arm -- by the shield. He was amply rewarded and this was the birth of socialist realism.

The brilliant book by Mary Hollingworth is an exercise in socialist realism in the above sense. The magnificence of the princes of the Renaissance, principally, d'Este, Sforza and Farnese families, as well as their patronage of the architectural and visual is shown all over the place. Their unbridled sadism, avarice and lechery is mentioned only in passing, frequently in elliptic terms. Even if the sufferings of the lower classes - the ones who built palaces, mixed paints, mercury ointments for their syphilis and gunpowder, fought their wars and died in epidemics under their rule - was not the goal of the book. Their wanton cruelty and serial rapes of both sexes by the rulers and prelates is glossed over. Inquisition and its excesses are barely present in the pages. The case of Princes of the Church who sired numerous illegitimate offspring from numerous mistresses for whose benefit they poisoned rivals, initiated wars, or engaged in profligate construction projects is mentioned only as a matter of fact. 

But from the left side all looks splendid. The book is well organized and carefully, and insightfully, illustrated. My only regret is that that uppity British woman does not notice society beyond the highest nobility, not even such rank commoners as G. B. Alberti, Rafael, Leonardo and Michelangelo. Evidently, she considers them paid servants not worthy of research. 

Joseph Weisberg. Russia upside down: an exit strategy for the second Cold War.

 Judging by the bookstore shelves, this book attracts much more attention than a usual Russian-bashing agitprop. Also, by its contents, this book must belong to my section "Books that defeat their message". It begins with young idealistic (sic!) Joseph interviewing for the CIA in the late 80s. In the rest of the book he, with many caveats and excuses, harangues on the subject that Russia, though bad enough, is not Mordor as the FT, NYT and "Economist" describe it in every issue. 

    The most powerful message is concentrated in p. 306 when the author is happy about "Latvians, Armenians, Ukrainians" etc. who now enjoy freedom and prosperity. Had the learned CIA analyst looked at statistics lately? Lithuania and Latvia since their independence lost ~1/3 of their population, and, together with Croatia are less populous than after the Second World War when they - without much help from the Germans - exterminated their Jews and Roma and expelled most Russians (Latvia, Lithuania) or Serbs (Croatia) as refugees. Lithuania is also the world champion or strong contestant of alcoholism and suicide rates. This hardly testifies to the vitality of the population. With Ukraine, belatedly, demographic statistic is heavily manipulated to increase the freebies from the EU but the population under control of the Kiev Government is hardly 3/4 of the Soviet-era population. At the fall of the USSR, the living standards were on par with Russia proper, or even slightly higher. Now they are about as different as USA and Mexico. 

    The second amazing scoop, also on p. 306, bewails the state or Russia as "...If United States collapsed after slavery ended, or during the civil rights movements. The Soviets never got that chance..." But Russia did not collapse with the fall of the Soviet Union. 

    Between opening pages and p. 306, Weisberg claims that almost every evil real (and mostly imagined by CNN, etc.) committed by Russian Government can be matched by the behavior of the US Government. But some evils are really outstanding, for instance the murder of Boris Nemtsov. To remind you, this "opposition politician" retired as a Deputy PM after the 1998 default, never had a gainful occupation thereafter -- he went as an adviser to some provincial city government -- and, yet succeeded in accumulating fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Nemtsov lived in a penthouse of a five-star hotel and chartered a plane to fly another model girlfriend to Switzerland for abortion. People like that usually acquire many enemies with big guns and scant respect for the law, irrespectively of the political regime.  

What are his recipes out of a current disastrous situation? That Russian Government must unilaterally disarm, allow unrestricted work of foreign NGOs (what about allowing Al Qaeda in the US?) and negotiate with the so-called opposition. In contrast, to the Gorbachev era he does not even pretend that above-mentioned measures will be in any way reciprocated by the US and the titular West. A possible impact of these steps on Russian society is never enunciated by Weisberg. But, at least, he thinks about these problems rather than the "Foreign Policy" neocons, which have a boilerplate recipe for any foreign policy problem of the US - a "regime change" through sanctions, which never work, and war. 

Ray Dalio. The Changing World Order.

Ray Dalio & Friend 

It is surprising how enlightened the book is, given his advisers, Thomas "Make-the-war-war-war" Friedman and Niall Ferguson, thanked in his "Acknowledgements".  But all the correct things there are non-original and most original - incorrect. Previously, incomparable Azar Gat developed a static approach to measure the "strength of nations" quantitatively. His formula was based only on population and GDP and was not subject to much ideology-driven manipulation. Dalio's approach is dynamic -- it has a predictive power - but it includes many subjective factors that can be fudged. Not surprising that Dalio, a hedge fund tycoon, gives an exaggerated weight to the financial markets. That would not be so wrong, even if one remembers that most of the world largest banks at the end of the Cold War were in Japan, and that by 1900 the strongest bourses were London, New York, but also St. Petersburg (grain) and Buenos Aires (meat). But his ignorance of cultural factors and poorly digested history makes one suspect of his conclusions. 

The largest European powers by the controlled territories on the eve of XVII century were the Polish Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire. They also had the mightiest armies. The problem with them was that they were dominated by militaristic elites with narrow-minded sectarian outlook, bent on incessant conquest and religious proselytization of subject populations. A string of Catholic bigots on the Polish throne reduced this world power to insignificance and then to the disappearance by the end of the XVIII century. Another Catholic bigot, Louis XIV refused to consider any pragmatic solutions and emptied the treasury of then the richest land in Europe in futile search of military gloria. He could not contemplate neither deportation of the Huguenots to the French America -- proposed by Colbert -- nor mending his religious fervor by the alliances with Protestant powers. A relative financial weakness of France on the eve of the Revolution had its roots in the destruction of the most productive class of the French population in the late XVII century by Louis and his bigoted mistress, Madame de Maintenon. 

But all that said, Dalio, because of his independent wealth, can publish books on social policy, which can inspire some thought apart from a conventional neocon garbage. Yet, even he cannot or would not openly challenge neocon orthodoxy.