Volume 2, Issue 3: Diving into culture and society
I think it is fair to say this is no longer a monthly newsletter (the data has supported this for quite some time…), but I hope I’ll make up for it with a longer set of reviews. There are several books in here that were not originally on my list, but with the latest progressions in the Black Lives Matter movement, I found it evident to dig into literature and writings that keep me informed, ground me in empathy and facts, and make me a stronger agent for positive change. There are also some books on British East India company, cyber warfare, and a novel grounded in the conflicts of religion in the family unit. Hope you enjoy. As ever, please subscribe to the newsletter if you do in fact enjoy the amateur write-ups.
This is my first book by James Baldwin, and I was simply blown away by his writing. I don’t just mean his ability to write, but the ability to write with such clarity and purpose and illustration. I read each paragraph and I found myself magnetized by the substance of his narrative, the logic of his argument, and the clarity in his explanation of emotions. For context, it is written in 1963 — the year of MLK’s famous speech, and 5 years before MLK and Robert Kennedy are assassinated, and 6 years before the Civil Rights Act. The first few pages is him writing a letter to his nephew on how to be a black man in a white world. The main essay (just under 100 pages) is a response to social injustices and a plea to America to better understand what racial injustice is and looks like, and how it must be addressed. In the years following the writing of The Fire Next Time, it played a key role in the literature used to galvanize the Civil Rights movement. His explanation of the pain, subjugation, and material impact of injustice is raw and cutting, and important to be heard. He also takes direct issue with the Black Panther movement and how they wanted to solve the problem. Fast forward 57 years substantial progress was made, but his definition of injustice, and the importance that all of America understands and acknowledges this injustice and contributes to its abolishment, is still as relevant as ever. In the current climate we are seeing a resurgence of activism and conversations/debates happening in every home and on every social media platform. And it is OK to have varying levels of involvement in solving the how (i.e., donating, volunteering, protesting, etc..), but what I believe must be universal is the acknowledgement of the remaining inequity, and to rid the mindset that Baldwin called out:
“In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.”
It isn’t about stripping identity away from people, it is about understanding and acting to make sure every race is given the same opportunity to be proud of their identity and that our systems treat everyone equally well.
This book is so powerful and so concise. I’d put it easily in the top 10 I’ve ever read, and one I will likely revisit over the years.
The Anarchy covers a great history from early 1600s to the early 1800s, spanning the 200-year rise and (initial) fall of the British East India Company. A private enterprise that started with the fledgling ambition to reap profits as a spice trader with the Mughal empire of India, they eventually took on the Dutch and French for total control of a very chaotic landscape on the Indian subcontinent. The region was split between the Rajputs in the west, the Mughals in the North and East, and the Marathas in the south — all of whom were fighting each other amidst the declining imposition of the Mughal Empire. These efforts to increase their profitability in trade, eventually morphed into the East India Company providing private armies to regional princely states, and running their administration (tax collection). As they yielded more power, and more money, the line of being a private enterprise and being a protector of the state blurred so greatly that the ambition of the East India company far outgrew enterprise and solidified as ambition of rule. By 1750, the East India Company was the de facto ruler of nearly the entire subcontinent.
I picked up this book out of my great interest in the history of India, which was sparked to life during university years and deepened during my travels there in 2016. I was also intrigued by the factors that led to the first ‘too big to fail’ private company, with which our world has unfortunately become intimately familiar. Dalrymple does a phenomenal job interweaving first-hand accounts from poets, generals, nawabs, and maharajas from this time — transporting you into the minds of the primary actors and into the many battles undertaken. At times you may find yourself in your own battle to keep every name straight, both from the British and Indian histories. It is expansive, covering 200 years of frequent shifts in regime change. And yet you could argue he only covered half the story, leaving the period of its transition to Crown rule and eventual demise for another book. What I loved about this book are the following: the first-hand accounts make it a very intimate history; surprisingly, more interesting than the angle of an enterprise that became too big to fail (that although was woven into the narrative, was not the central theme — in my opinion) was the absolute brute force and carnage of battles from this era, that seemed to be won based on who could engender loyal, organised foot soldiers (sepoys) and bring the art of surprise during battle; and finally the sheer scale of the initial domain controlled by the Mughals and the near impossible rise of the East India Company, which was constantly on shifting ground with any group (Mughals, French, Marathas, British) seemingly ripe to prevail. It is a dense book, with a lot to take in — but I loved the density of knowledge and opportunity to cover such a spectrum in one book.
The Bluest Eye is Morrison’s first novel. In this edition, she writes an afterword 30 years after her initial 1970 publication. She criticizes her lack of structure and her belief that she struggled to convey her intent. As a reader (I believe for the second time, but it’s been at least 15 years) this novel is poignant, and relevant. Morrison is heavyweight writer, and in so many ways is a poet disguised in long form. Her language is allegorical and beautiful. Some times you may find yourself slowing down to unpack each sentence. In its whole, The Bluest Eye is an incredibly raw view into how society has engendered a culture of black guilt within the black community. It manifests in a meta-consciousness of otherness. Pecola, the tragical main character, is followed through her early, impressionable years where blackness twists into a deeper feeling of ugliness. She sees the solution to the way she is treated is to escape her blackness and somehow acquire blue eyes. Interspersed throughout the book are the personal stories of fringe characters — all of which amount to the many ways, explicit and implicit, that cause the black identity to be stripped of pride and engulfed by guilt of being different. Morrison makes a point of showing how these events also create a formidable resentment amongst blacks with one another, as if they all try to be less black than one another in order to distance themselves from this label of blackness. Allow yourself to shift in your seat as you read The Bluest Eye, and at best it can give you a deeper appreciation for the danger of allowing otherness to prevail in our culture, and at least it will be a poetic read by a revered author.
My friend recommended this book — and nearly all of the books he recommends, I would recommend. This one I’d leave to you to decide. It’s an interesting topic, cyber warfare. It represents an added dimension to traditional forms of warfare (such as The Anarchy demonstrates in its most draconian form), and in some respects poses an opportunity to avoid the tragedy of death that accompanies combat. But cyber warfare is just as pernicious in it’s own right — from exposure of sensitive information to disarming important computerized systems (say, electricity that may supply a terrorist camp but also a nearby hospital) to spying silently on masses of innocent people. This book attempts to unravel the history of cyber warfare, and emphasize how new and unknown is this paradigm. My issues with this book is with the writing. He spends a portly number of pages on the landscape of the bureaucratic, government agencies that were involved since the dawn of the digital information age. It paid much reverence to the names of the early actors and the institutions that laconically woke up to the threats that computers posed. The second half took us through interesting anecdotes that brought to life America’s growing awareness, from an averted war in Haiti, to espionage by Russia, to the Sony Attacks, to the drafting of updated NSA policies on use of American data. This book is equal parts the formation of institutional cyber warfare and the specific events that define its emergence. I found the events far more gripping than the formation of the agencies. You’ll walk away more knowledgeable than when you started the book, but there may be better books or articles to learn about this topic.
We Should All Be Feminists can be read in one sitting, coming in at 64 (small) pages. It is adapted from Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s Ted Talk. She explains that feminism is a phrase that we should all embrace. Feminism represents the acknowledgement that current artificial barriers are constructed to present women as culturally less able, and that as a feminist you are willing to stand up against these barriers. She makes the argument clear that it is not an attempt to reverse roles but rather to cement equal opportunity. In equal measure, she explains that by advocating for social and economic opportunity for women does not come at the expense of opportunity for men. This same argument is present in the current BLM efforts, and it’s unfortunate that we all have to be reminded of this truth. As long as we fear that life is a zero-sum game, we will continue to step on others to rise up. If you find yourself emotionally charged by the word feminist, there is no better way to step out of the emotional state and into the cognitive/logic state than by reading an essay such as this. The more we educate ourselves, the better listeners and activists we become.
A book like this doesn’t surprisingly fall short. It took me two attempts, very spread out, to finish this book. I appreciate the earnestness with which Grant shares ways that people have demonstrated how to take the untrodden path, but they all come across as fairly over-simplified ideas garnered from underwhelming research. I’ve read through a few goodread reviews and one said it well. To paraphrase, it is a pleasant read that you can cherry pick a few interesting nuggets from, but in its whole it is more mediocre than original.
This was a Christmas gift from my mom. I was a bit reticent to pick up a book I thought was an attempt to nudge me back into the religious fold, and so it took me 7 months to pick it up to read. My reticence was unfounded. Cara Wall writes a beautiful book about the role of religion for two young, precocious, students-turned-ministers, and the evolution of their identities within their families and communities. Charles was an academic, from an unreligious family, who has a calling to religion in school and yet marries an atheist. James came from a much less privileged background, but similar to Charles didn’t find religion until college. James saw religion as a form of activism (not as a calling), yet his wife was a traditionalist in her approach to Christianity. These two men join as joint-ministers of a church in the middle of New York City in the early 1960s and confront the evolution of religion in changing times. Wall writes with a very intimate view of what the inside looks like for these men, who go through their own questioning and evolutions of faith. It also makes the atheistic view prominent through the lens of Charles’ wife, Lily. I grew up in a family where faith was interpreted on a wide spectrum, and so reading a book where it demonstrates a muddy reality of the meaning of faith, I found it contemplative. Either way, a nicely written book that can be read through with ease.
