Karen G. Lloyd. Intraterrestrials: discovering the strangest life on Earth.

     Karen Lloyd wrote a brilliant book about the microbial life forms on Earth, so strange that no science fiction author could seemingly invent anything like that. The book is hard reading. This is an example: "Indeed, we find that at increasing depths in marine sediments, microbes make enzymes with a higher specificity that are available in the subsurface, suggesting that they are specially adapted for this environment". Or "the researchers also found genes suggesting that they might have passed hydrogen back and forth with an endosymbiont (maybe a proto-mitochondria), as well as external structures that would help them hang on to their Alphaproteobacterial friend". But overall, the book is a wonder. 

Alexander Clapp. The waste wars: wild afterlife of your trash.

 Clapp is an alarmist. His book enumerates many problems with disposal of the "industrial" wastes, most prominently of commercial ships. He lists many disasters following the disassembling of ships and the damage of the procedure to the environment. This part of his narrative is exciting and helpful for understanding of the modern environmental challenges. 

    Yet, he does not propose any solutions to these problems. In most of the book, the positives from the ships' dismantling are glided over. First, recycling of steel, and second, the reuse of the amenities of the passenger ships -- he mentions the cabin furniture, microwaves, etc. after their cleaning -- saves enormous energy and materials. In particular, currently the demand for coal for coking and the iron ore has been significantly subdued and enormous quantities of new steel is produced by (relatively) efficient electric smelters. 

    Many of the problems he lucidly describes: horrible conditions inside the ships' hulks, leakage of toxic liquids before and during dismantling and using the poor countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh as a garbage disposals for the rich countries -- can be addressed within either technological advancements or enlightened social policy. Not all of the former require a particularly high technology though a hulk-plying robots would help. For instance, chemists could develop gas mixtures, something like a hot mixture of carbon dioxide with hydrogen in non-explosive concentrations, which can flush out the residuals of oils and other petroleum substances before the dismantling crews in hazmat suites are left in. Similarly, there could be measures for protecting the workers if only rich countries become moderately interested in this. In these times, in the US everything which smacks of non-military international aid is taboo; and the EU hastily prepares to war with Russia. 

Sergio Luzzato. The first fascist. The sensational life and dark legacy of the Marquis de Mores.

       Marquis de Mores was a vicious anti-Semite, not very much different from the French aristocrats of his age and class, adventurer and psychopathic killer but the fascist he was not. His claim to fame resulted from his charisma and idolization by the early XX century nationalists like Maurice Barres, Charles Maurras and later fascists rather than from his own political ideas. Mores' appropriation of the fasces, a Roman symbol, as an emblem for extreme nationalism was probably an accident. 

    The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was full of dashing and violent characters: Prince Pierre Napoleon, Prince Victor Napoleon,  Lawrence of Arabia, Ernst Junger and Lettov-Forbeck to name a few. Even Russia, which did not have overseas colonial empire had Ethiopia treading poet Nicolas Gumilev and leading Duma member Gutschkov, who fought for the Boers against the English, added to the sample. 

     Fascism presumes some plethora (i.e. fasces) of social ideas, which de Mores would find impossible to reconcile to. First, racism and anti-Semitism are optional. Mussolini's original Fascist State was hardly anti-Semitic and its Race Laws were promulgated only under pressure from the Nazi Germany and against the wishes of several prominent members of Fascist hierarchy. Spanish Francoism and, especially, Salazar's corporatist Estado Novo in Portugal were barely having any anti-Semitic features mostly induced by the prevailing Catholic Church. Salazar looked the other way at the exodus of European Jews through the Portuguese territory. Mannerheim in Finland had nothing against the Jews as long as they were not Russian in origin. Genocide of Jews in Romania under Marshal Antonescu had its roots in endemic anti-Semitism of Romanian ruling classes and intellectual elites. 

    Fascism means that all public organizations must subscribe to a narrow code of rigid ideas. All for profit and non-profit corporations must act in support of the agenda of the state, and agents of the state sit in most corporate boards and media outlets. Current European Union resembles traditional fascism much more than aristocratic chauvinist fantasies of de Mores. During the occupation of France many members of the traditional French far-right -- La Cagoule and the original fascist party -- ended up in Nazi prisons. The real deal Nazis detested the competition. 

Nick Lloyd. The Eastern Front: A History of the Great War 1914-1918.

    

        A top English war historian published a book, in which he "missed" nearly half of the theaters of the WWI on the Eastern Front. The Western Front had been the pre-eminent meat grinder and the source of the most exalted war literature on the both sides, but the war was won in the Alps and swamps of the Veneto, the fact that even the competent British historians: Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller had to acknowledge. It were twelve battles of Isonzo and the Greek Front against Bulgaria, the latter scarcely mentioned by Lloyd, and mainly maintained by the French, which exhausted the manpower and destroyed the economy of the Austria-Hungary. Italian was the only front except the Russian, which Lloyd describes with some distinction. Turkey could not come to the aid of the Central Powers in the Balkans because its army was already scattered at Kars and Sari Kamyush by the forces of the defeated Russian Empire. Also, Turkey felt increasing pressure from the Middle Eastern front, or is Middle is not the East? Lloyd discusses Isonzo Battles in some detail but without giving them recognition of their importance for the war effort and its outcome. 

    Germany, which was quick to fill the Eastern gap after the Brusilov offensive of 1916, simply did not have sufficient strength to keep the borders of Austria safe from the imminent invasion from the South by the Allies. After capitulation of Turkey on October 30, 1918 and Austria's three days later, all the German victories on the Western and the Russian fronts became pointless because Vienna could not hold for long.  

"Victories" of the Austrian and Bulgarian Armies against the Serbs. Austrian postcard of 1914. 

Sven Beckert. Capitalism.

     

      The strongest point of his 1100 page book is his emphasize of "war capitalism" as the motor for the European expansion. Namely, for the first time in the human history, the conquerors instead of using loot for their prestigious consumption or, in the best case, taking artisans as captives, decided to invest surpluses in more production. This did not happen in Spain and Portugal proper for a number of reasons but in the Northern Europe (Low Countries) and parts of Italy -- both possessed at the time by Habsburg Empire(s). 

The rest 3/4 of the book more or less follow traditional neocon narrative because the alternatives were expelled from the Western universities. Marxism and socialism occupy about three paragraphs of Beckert's overstretched book. Yet, the spread of welfare state in Western Europe and North America and, consequently, the expansion of government powers was, to a large extent, the answer to the propagation of the socialist ideas. Welfare state in France had direct origins in Saint Simon and his circle, and Bismarck's "White Revolution" was an answer to the growing power of Social Democrats in Germany. Further on, UK elites decided on the welfare state course immediately after the First World War before the Great Depression being afraid that millions of unemployed soldiers would imitate the  Russian revolution. Only in the prosperous United States, the Great Depression, to which Beckert describes the birth of the Big Government, was the main driver of massive social programs. 

Equally, a de-colonization of Africa, South Asia and the Far East in the aftermath of the Second World War was imposed on the reluctant European powers and Japan by the United States as a policy paradigm for a fledgling Cold War. 

    This author views modern society as very distant from the capitalism a-la Adam Smith or Karl Marx dependent on one's predilections. In "old" capitalism, the capital appeared from profits on sales of something (cod, nails, so favored by Smith, or even books). In the "new" capitalism, the capital comes from investors: banks and private equity and debt funds, who suck money from pension and insurance funds, i.e. in the final reckoning, from the accumulation of workers' wages. This system has more in common with the Ancien Regimes in Europe where governments worked as giant monetary pumps from the Third Estate, including capitalists, into the first two.