Howard Marks (1996)

The autobiography of a drug dealer, and it’s captivating.

Howard Marks went from being an Oxford student, to an Oxford academic, to being an international hashish smuggler. Not the world’s largest, as his eventual indictment in America had it, but certainly on an epic scale.

A lot of the story is quite humdrum, interesting only as background to Marks’ own development and personal life. But there are some amazing anecdotes, such as shipping dope into America in the speaker cabinets of rock bands who are actually just stoners recruited to play a part – and then realising that US border control isn’t full of rock fans and so won’t realise that there isn’t actually a band to go with the equipment. Cue some made-up rock bands doing imaginary tours. No-one notices for ages.

There’s a lot of mythologising, of course. Most of the story takes place as dialogue, and there are some very intricate travel arrangements as he flies around the world doing deals. Is this all true? – either Marks has a photographic memory, or he kept a detailed diary (risky for a drug smuggler), or the details have been imagined from a broader recollection.

Eventually he’s caught, of course: arrested in Spain, the victim of an enormous and legally questionable operation by the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Marks has no time for the DEA agents, regards them as rigid and vicious. He skewers the US legal system and its arbitrariness, as well as its moralising while fixating on admission of guilt: an almost religious insistence that the victim admit and repent even when this means admitting to a crime purely in order to then be immediately released, with everyone involved knowing how fake the whole scanario is. Evidence is lost, faked, and dubiously interpreted, creating order and conspiracy where he sees accident and opportunism. He likens it, very persuasively, to the Soviet and Chinese purges.

It’s hard to know how accurate any of this is in terms of the historical record. But as the story of an outlaw with his own morality and a willingness to help others, it’s quite fascinating.

4/5. Finished Tuesday 1 April, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Jill Lepore (2020)

A history of a forgotten company from what seems like a radically different time. The company, Simulmatics, essentially invented the field of data science applied to social sciences, and tried to apply these ideas to advertising, warfare, and law enforcement. Sound familiar?

It’s probably unsurprising that Simulmatics is forgotten: it was barely ever a functional company, and would perhaps never have achieved even the limited results it did without the quagmire of the Vietnam War giving license to all sorts of unusual and even desperate ideas in the pursuit of a way out for the US – any way out. It doesn’t work out. Perhaps it could never have worked at that time, given the limitations of computing power and data availability, but there’s a weird unwillingness to properly engage with the funded projects, partly because of attitudes of the time preventing senior staff from engaging in field work, or with working computers, or working as equals with the women and local interpreters they hired – all of whom could have helped make sense of the situation.

It’s impossible not to read Simulmatics as a precursor to other trends too: to over-promising and under-delivering, to radically hyping-up every small incremental improvement in technology, to generalising from tiny successes to society-changing possibilities. Lepore sees this as leading directly to modern Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, and it’s hard to disagree.

There was a feeling at the time that predictive analytics was ipso facto anti-democratic and even immoral. I suspect the reality is slightly more nuanced than this, and that the problems start when the prediction becomes a lever to enforce (or avoid) a particular outcome. It may not matter whether the people with their hands on the lever are government or companies, conservative or liberal; it may not matter that the lever has only a very limited power to move opinions. Understanding social trends slides very easily into manipulating them in pursuit of a specific goal, which may not be transparent to those meing manipulated.

The conclusion nails many of the defining features of the early 21st century that emerge directly from Simulmatics’ techniques, even when they remain unacknowledged. They also skewer the techno-optimism, emerging in part from the 60s counterculture, that led directly to some of today’s problems. By using data to personalise people’s exposure to information and comment, and by simplifying who could become a journalist and publisher, the internet and the web encouraged atomisation and the emergence of communities never exposed to contrary ideas: everyone gets their own facts alongside having their own opinions re-affirmed. It’s definitely the major social challenge of our times.

But the conclusions are marred slightly by their purely American focus. It’s true that the US government declined to regulate data collection and processing by private companies, but not true that governments declined: the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations do precisely this, however imperfectly, and if there is a be a solution to the widespread abuses of big data then those (and similar) regulations will play a large part.

5/5. Finished Sunday 30 March, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Mary Roach (2003)

An amusing and informative study of corpses. Not a sentence I ever expected to write.

This is a book that digs into both the biology and the sociology of how we treat the dead. This includes the various uses made of cadavers over the year, from modern medical education to potions and “cures” made from mummies. Along the way we also get a discussion of different funeral practices being proposed by generations of free-thinkers and how they do (and don’t) get adopted by wider society. In many ways it’s amazing the the taboo against dissection and associated practices was ever overcome: it seems to be an almost universal belief that the dead should be disposed of whole.

While the content is fascinating, the writing style grates on me. I understand the need for some levity in dealing with a topic that has the potential to be offensive or distressing in equal means – but I wish Roach could have resisted the temptation to quip every third paragraph (it feels like). It feels forced.

3/5. Finished Sunday 23 March, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Victor D. Cha (2023)

The modern history of a nation that’s been to some extent marginalised by wider geopolitics. It begins with domination by Japan in the late 19th century, which continued until the end of the Second World War – only to be replaced by domination through “trusteeship” by the US and others, which itself was a direct precursor to the partition of the nation, a vicious war, and a long and convoluted evolution of two very different political and economic outcomes.

There are times when it feels a little superficial: the Korean War gets only a few pages. But that’s a consequence of the breadth of coverage, and especially the time spent analysing the politics as they evolve through repression (in the North) and authoritarianism becoming dictatorship and finally vibrant and raucous democracy (in the South).

The fact that both authors are Korea specialists (and in one case ethnically Korean) certainly helps. They have seen close-up the evolution of both Koreas’ places in the world, and their personal observations and anecdotes bring the story alive without being distracting.

The last chapter is a detailed analysis of when and whether any re-unification of the pennisula will happen. It’s a balanced and well-informed view, albeit one that’s too sanguine with respect to the expectation of continued US support and engagement: the recent (as I write) events in Ukraine don’t give confidence in whether the US would act as an honest broker in any crisis. But it remains a clear and well-reasoned (if largely non-committal) analysis of where Krean history may go next.

4/5. Finished Sunday 9 March, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)