Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

This book is interesting, but flawed.  Graeber compiles a broad socioeconomic history that spans centuries and the globe, which I found enjoyable and insightful.  I also found his argument that money is, effectively, debt rather convincing (I was, however, a proponent of that view before reading the book, so I might be a bad judge of that argument).  As far as that's the book's message, it's very well done.  Graeber, however, tries to do a lot more.  He attempts a close-to-Marxist critique of contemporary market economies, making several moral and policy assertions, but his claims about the world today fall very short.

His failures stem from two primary causes.  The first is that, while he has impressive anthropological insights about the way that transactions have fit into the social relations in various cultures, he really doesn't understand economics, in the traditional sense, at all.  This results in criticisms of the field and of the policy implications that come from it that are entirely untethered from reality.  He erects more than a few straw men in this book.  It also results in a utopian vision for the modern world (even if, perhaps, his utopia is less ambitious than most.)

The second, likely related, root cause of his book's shortcomings is that he glosses over the key developments of the 19th and early 20th centuries with very superficial analysis.  After giving in depth analysis of various ancient tribal wedding practices, it was bizarre that he didn't have more to say about Bretton Woods.  A corollary issue is that he was only limitedly successful in bridging the gap between his ideas about the social implications of money on an individual level and his critical ideas about the modern economy on the level of the global system.  Because of his limited coverage of the construction of today's global economic systems and his limited understanding of broad economic theories, there are a lot of holes in his attempts to use his anthropological analyses to criticize neoliberalism and its institutions.  This isn't to say that there's nothing convincing about any of his criticisms... It's hard not to be at least a little bit sympathetic to the argument that it's absurd to hold a nation responsible for IMF loans made to the dictators who oppressed them, and there's something inherently emotionally compelling when Graeber puts "in a good word for the non-industrious poor," since, "At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknowledge.”  However compelling one might find all of that, though, it's superficial.  He doesn't really suggest what it means for us or what could be done differently... he avoids the messy technical details altogether (and with economics, debt, and finance, the devil can often find a spacious abode in the details).  Plus, no one needs to read 400 pages to get a couple of brief, simplistic, emotional appeals like that.

I would recommend this book to those rare people who are so fascinated by economics, culture AND history that reading a 400 page book about them seems like a great idea... and who have sufficient knowledge of all three (especially economics) to recognize Graeber's shortcomings.  Parts of the book will be captivating for those people.  I wouldn't, however, recommend bothering with it if you're interested in it primarily to learn anything about the world today... not much of this lengthy book deals with that and, when he gets to the topic, a quarter of what he says is preposterous, and most of the rest is pedestrian.

The Challenger Launch Decision by Diane Vaughan

This book, while not light reading, is an important work. It is one of the best investigations into the Challenger disaster out there and will be appreciated by those interested in that story from history. This book, however, is not just a history book. It explores how bureaucracies work and why they often fail. It reminds the reader that a bureaucracy's failure is not necessarily the failure of one man in particular, or a result of gross incompetence at any step in the decision making process... that, often, these failures are rooted in the systems and cultures within which people work. That message can be eye opening, and is applicable to better understanding the workings of other government bureaucracies, and even, perhaps, our own private employers. This is one of those rare books that can change the way you look at the world around you.

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas

Metaxas' biography of Bonhoeffer is a thoroughly enjoyable read. He brilliantly balanced the personal, social, theological and political elements of Bonhoeffer's life to give a sweeping account of it that provides important insights into the man's life and thought. As a result, even though the book isn't short, it never dragged. Metaxas doesn't dwell to heavily on theology, politics, or anything else, but includes them only insofar as they help the reader to understand the intelligent, brave man he writes about.

It should be noted, though, that this is a rather uncritical look at Bonhoeffer's life. It approaches hagiography. This is not bad... Bonhoeffer was a great man, so it's appropriate to write about him as such. It may, however, irritate some readers that Metaxas goes out of his way to look at everything Bonhoeffer did in the best possible light. More bothersomely, at a few points in the book, Metaxas extends this approach to other figures he likes. He spends a few pages, for example, defending the legacy of Martin Luther against charges of antisemitism. This seemed, in context, appropriate enough, but it added to the impression that the book was driven by the author's opinions.

The book is a great read, it's thorough, entertaining, inspirational and informative about Bonhoeffer and the history and thought that surrounded his life. It doesn't have the viewpoint neutrality of a more academic work, but that's fine... The book provides a beautiful account of the life of a great man.

Citizens of London by Lynne Olson

Citizens of London is one of the most enjoyable history books that I've read in years. As with the best novels, finishing the book left me feeling like a best friend was moving away. In addition to Olson's fluid writing style, the book benefited greatly from her ability to at once treat every figure in the book honestly and critically while still showing them in as reverent a light as more hagiographic accounts of their lives. In fact, her acceptance of people like Churchill, Harriman, Winant and Murrow as fully human, with all of the flaws that go with it, makes them seem somehow more admirable than they do in depictions that scrub them of their shortcomings.

The Greater Journey by David McCullough

This book was simply a fun book to read. McCullough's renowned writing ability made the stories of those he wrote about come alive. Readers who have had the chance to explore Paris will find themselves envisioning its streets and alleys, peeling away 20th century changes to the cityscape, imagining the sites, smells and feels of Paris from the past. The story also brings alive a part of American history that is now often forgotten... the striving of young Americans to earn themselves and their country a spot as global leaders in their fields. American medical students looking to bring the United States to the cutting edge of medicine. American artists looking to claim their place alongside Europe's masters. McCullough shows how much they enjoyed Paris, and yet how distinctively American they remained.

I can't say that I found any overarching point to a McCullough's tale of the first ambitious young Americans to go to study in Paris, but I was OK with that. The book was fun and inspiring, and helped to give an appreciation of the work, the risks, and the adventures that went into earning America a role as a leading society in the world, and it was a reminder that throughout its history, America has had an (at time acrimonious) fraternal relationship with France.

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

This book is not good. It doesn't make an argument about "how the world became modern." It doesn't even demonstrate that there was a "swerve" of any sort that led to modernity. There's really no cogent argument in this book at all. There is, however, plentiful twisting of history used to push the revisionist narrative that, for centuries, people were basically stupid until a band of rebels played Prometheus, enlightening mankind and freeing it from the bondage of that superstitious nonsense called Christianity.

This book is less a history and more an attempt to create a romantic mythology to promote a neo-Epicureanism. Greenblatt even points to his mother to make the case that we'd all be better off if we embraced such ideals, demonstrating that his real message is about today, not the dawn of the Renaissance. The book would have been much better if he hadn't pretended at writing a history befitting a scholar, with the title implying that it would be a grandiose one at that, and had, instead, just openly written an argument for a "New New Atheism" that is more poetic than Dawkins, Harris, et al. I think that was the point... I don't know why he didn't just say it.

Zealot by Reza Aslan

If Aslan ever writes a fictional retelling of the Bar Kokhba rebellion, I will be the first to pre-order it. His writing is fluid and descriptive, yet still crisp. He seems quite knowledgeable about the politics of Ancient Judea, and he is able to bring it to life. 

As an historical account of the life of Jesus, and a history of early Christianity, however, this book is awful. Aslan's approach to Biblical criticism pushes all bounds of reason. He speaks as if he has read Q, the hypothesized source text that many believe informed Matthew and Luke, proclaiming with some specificity not only what was but also what was not in it, going beyond what even many of the more audacious scholars would dare assert about a text from which we don't even have the smallest fragment and which is not mentioned in any historical source.

His presentation of the intellectual and religious history of Judaism is a bit confused. He looks at all of the ideological currents through a purely political lens and therefore misses the deeper elements of where first century Judaism was relative to later and earlier periods.

He claims elements of Christian teaching as too foreign to Judaism to have come from the Jewish Jesus, even when the teachings were a central part of the messages of some of the prophets and even, at points, where they were fairly representative of the beliefs of the followers of the Pharisees of the day. He quotes passages of Deuteronomy which he claims would have been beyond question by any Jew, when those same passages are directly challenged by other texts of the Hebrew Bible (for example, Isaiah 56, which was plainly written as a rejection of the application of certain of Deuteronomy's laws).

Ultimately, because OTHER messiahs imagined themselves as political figures, Aslan seems to think it impossible that Jesus, who plainly, even to Aslan, had his own unique view of what it meant to be Messiah, could have reimagined the idea so dramatically. He openly wrestles with figuring out what Jesus could possibly have meant by ideas like the Son of Man and Kingdom of Heaven and then, despite the evidence that Aslan, himself, lays out, decides that he could only have meant armed rebellion against Rome because a Jewish peasant couldn't possibly have had a different idea... until after Jesus' crucifixion. He readily admits the obvious fact that, at that point, Jesus' peasant followers were able to re-imagine Messiah-ship just fine.

While, from a writing perspective, this book was a joy to read, from the perspective of the history in it, it was borderline torturous. From the bold proclamations about the contents of texts that we've never seen to the absolute certainty that the Kingdom of Heaven was an earthly Kingdom (despite Aslan's own admission that the only text that predates Jesus that uses the term uses it to refer to a spiritual dominion), the shoddiness of his arguments, and the absolute certainty with which he asserts them becomes rather grating.

If you're interested in a semi-historical story of political intrigue in first century Judea, you might enjoy reading this book as the writing is great and Aslan really does make the period come alive, but don't go into the book expecting its historical claims about Jesus of Nazareth to be unimpeachable, or even remotely reasonable.