One-trick books. Erica Thompson's Escape from Model Land and M. Mazzucato and R. Collington's The Big Con.

 There is nothing wrong with the books, which represent and illustrate one single idea but they are boring. Erica Thompson's "Escape from the Model Land" can be summarized succinctly in two sentences, one probably quoted somewhere in the book: "All models are wrong but some are useful". Another is that all social studies models incorporate value judgements of their creators and thus cannot be considered "objective" in the same sense as models of the physical sciences.

Marianna Mazzucato and Rosie Collington's book "The big con" equally illustrates one idea, namely that the decline of in-house expertise of government agencies and industrial companies led to proliferation of the consulting industry to the detriment of the latter. 

Der Untergang des Abendlanden.

 

Sheila Miyoshi Jager. The other great game: the opening of Korea and the birth of modern East Asia.

    A paean to Japanese militarism. What Sheila Miyoshi Jager calls "the opening of Korea" is the annexation and the brutal occupation by the Japanese. Chinese and Koreans are barely considered as people; only as objects of the Japanese policy. Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905), which acquired Japan a half of Sakhalin island from Russia but also got Japan a free hand in its robbery of Chinese Manchuria and Korea at the cost of several hundred thousand casualties and reign of terror over subjugated populations is celebrated as a great triumph of its foreign policy. United States, the friendship of which is upheld by Sheila Miyoshi as a cornerstone of its victory and achievement, in fact wrestled from the Japanese the fruits of its victory over Russia at the end in the Peace of Portsmouth. Yet, it led Japan into a swirl of militaristic expansion, which ended with the wars with the USSR and the USA and its ultimate defeat.  

Kenneth W. Harl. Empires of the Steppes.

 Historical science demonstrates a regressive tendency -- from history as science to semi-medieval chronicles telling mostly about the rulers and their campaigns. Kenneth Harl is not alone; he follows in the footsteps of Simon Montefiore, Frankopan and Adrian Goldsworthy in an almost total absence of scientific reflection. 

 I looked up his book thinking that I can learn about the origins of the steppe cultures, the structure and economics of their societies, historical, technological and environmental reasons for them springing from the tribal cradles into the world arena and the reasons their for their decline. I did not find any. Even the decline of nomadic empires in Harl's book ends by the death of Tamerlane and he declares that the nomadic warriors became obsolete with the emergence of gunpowder weapons. Not so; the origins of Mughal Empire in India, Safavid and Hajar Persia and spectacular conquest of the Ming Empire by Manchus were all the triumphs of steppe warriors with gunpowder and all against their settled neighbors. 

Simon Sebag Montefiore. The World: A Family History.

     Continental upper class males with little to do, usually eat, drink and philander. Anglo-Saxon upper classes frequently engage in literary endeavors. Simon Sebag Montefiore is a graphomaniac of distinction. "The World" is a  1200+ pages compilation similar in scope and concept to the Will and Ariel Durant "Story of Civilization", only with a lot of sexual details unmentionable in the 1930s when they began their magnum opus. 

   The book is a wonderful reading during insomnia but, otherwise, is a non-insightful compilation of facts, part correct, part erroneous, largely in a chronological order. Simon Sebag is not shy mentioning illustrious Montefiores of the past. I (and hardly anybody else) can verify all the stories in this enormous volume and, more importantly, their sources. So I mention only the errors from the Soviet history, which come to mind. Maybe, historians of antiquity, middle ages and the like can walk through his narrative in their field of studies. But the concentration of the factual errors in one small section sheds an untoward light with respect to whole endeavor. 

    The information that Leonid Brezhnev was instrumental in arresting Lavrentii Beria appears exclusively in the fake memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov, Stalin's chief of assassinations and is not credible at all. Brezhnev also was not a prime mover of the conspiracy to remove Nikita Khrushchev but emerged in the end as a compromise candidate between the coalitions of the "old guard" (Ignatov, Voronov, Podgorny) and the "Young Turks" (Shelepin, Mazurov, Semichastnii). So he belonged to the clique of the fence-sitters (himself, Andropov -- then the Secretary in charge of the relations with the Eastern Block and Suslov -- the chief ideologue) who procrastinated until the outcome of the impending coup became clear. 

    The power coalitions considered his appointment an interregnum similar to the Malenkov and Bulganin tenures in mid-fifties, before Khrushchev consolidated his power. However, the co-conspirators severely underestimated Brezhnev's acumen and cunning and were removed one by one, the latest -- Nicolai Podgorny -- the nominal head of the Soviet State, in 1977, a dozen years since the coup. 

    The closer he moves to the Russian present, the least credible are his sources and more-of-the-cuff are his conclusions. This would not annihilate the whole volume if I were not suspicious that a similar number of factual errors and gross misjudgements are not present in, for instance, Arab or Persian sections of the book.