David Graeber

2021

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A book with an amazign ambition: to re-visit and re-interpret the whole of political theory from a basis in modern anthropology and archaeology.

The authors have done a deep dive into not only modern archaeological evidence but also into the nearly-forgotten thinkers of the early Enlightenment. And they make some startling discoveries. Wehn we think of the Enlightenment, we think of something unique to a particular moment in European history when the rights of god and kings were being questioned for the first time. But many of the thinkers didn't see it that was at all: they were responding to critiques of the European system by Native American observers, who – far from being overawed and impressed by modernity – were disgusted by the poverty and arbitrary violence they saw: so different to their own societies. This re-discovery leads to further re-considerations: of the linear flow of development, the occurrance of an agricultural revolution as a particular turning-point moment (and whether it persisted), the emergence (or not) of hierarchies and kings, all backed up evidentially from recent sources.

Graeber and Wengrow take issue with the narrative of inevitability in the route to modern civilisation. In part this is based on the observation that many "events", such as the adoption of agriculture, weren't "events" at all, but happened over a period of centuries, were unevenly adopted and frequently rolled-back. Their central theme is that it's a mistake to think of early civilisations as blank canvases in which nothing political happened: that's an assumption, and not one supported in any way by the physical or even the literary evidence.

They frame their ideas of liberty around three freedoms: freedom to move, freedom to disobey the orders of others, and freedom to re-imagine society. (The last is obviously very different and more abstract than the first two.) They contend that modern societies have become "stuck" without these freedoms as a matter of choice, not of historical inevitability.

It's a persuasive narrative, impeded slightly by the very wealth of detail they marshall in its support. And there are some crious omissions: no consideration of anarchy or Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, and (more surprisingly) no reference to Isiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty, although his ideas are clearly part of their intellectual background. Still, this is an intensely political book that deserves a wide reading, if only to defeat the notion that we've somehow arrived at a civilisational peak from which there's no sense in deviating.

4/5. Finished 05 February 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Brian W. Kernighan

2019

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You probably have to be a hard-core Unix head to get anywhere with this book – but it's a gem if you are. Kernighan was there throughout what is possoibly the most formative period of computer history, when Unix was developed and many of the paradigms of operating systems and software tools were developed.

There are other books that handle many of the stories in greater detail, but this book is great for the "sweep" of Unix through Bell Labs and out into the world. The memoir parts are perhaps the most interesting, as they illuminate how the various tools came into being and why. There are cameos by people like Richard Hamming, whose own scientific contributions are matched by his insistence that you can only do important work if you first find the important problems, and by both an expected and unexpected cast of pioneers. I'd like to find a similar book on the early years of Lisp showing how decisions that now seem to be inevitable came to be made, and what alternatives there might have been.

The most hard-core part of the book? It was written using groff, the GNU successor to the roff text formatter than Kernighan himself wrote.

5/5. Finished 04 January 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Martin Gilbert

1994

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A thoroughly readable narrative history of the First World War and its aftermath. I think the strongest parts are the beginning and end: there's an unavoidable tedium in the middle that reflects the statis of trench warfare.

Churchill comes out well, perhaps unsurprisingly in a book by one of his biographers. Later authors place more of the blame for Gallipoli at his door. The American army also comes out well; Pershing, its commender, somewhat less so, as his insistence on having a solely American field army delayed their deployment and in many ways invited disaster in 1918. The Kaiser cuts a sorry figure throughout, belligerent and indecisive and blind to reality right up until the end.

Gilbert is also very strong on the often-overlooked mior allies of both sides. The complexities of Polish and Finnish independence movements, allied to the Central Powers largely in order to defeat Russia, get a lot of exploration, as does the eventual breakup of the Habsburg Empire. The Middle East and the Ottoman Empire are less well-covered. In each case there are clear lines drawn to the peace treaties and the grievances that later gave rise to the Second World War.

4/5. Finished 04 January 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Mike Rothschild

2021

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Does a fantastic job of explaining an essentially inexplicable movement.

QAnon is a conspiracy theory like no other, one that subsumes other conspiracies and morphs into new shapes as its existing tropes and predictions fail to come to pass. It's hard to see it as anything other than a rejection of reason and modernity and the embrace of ... well, nonsense. Rothschild sees it as far more than that, and manages to dive into the abyss without ever becoming lost or tempted to become a believer. He traces the theory's development, from before the first Q "drops" until after Q's disappearence, and draws some historical parallels with previous movements whose failed predictions did little to damage their popularity.

4/5. Finished 04 January 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)