People often ask me what is the difference between a good fiction book and a good non-fiction book. The simplest answer is good fiction books are meant to be enjoyed in their entirety. However, non-fiction books can change your life with one amazing chapter out of ten bad ones. The ideas within them are so powerful that the value can come from a fraction of the pages. That’s a counterintuitive approach to adopt because most people assume that if someone went to the trouble of publishing it in book form then it must all be important.
But that is less true than you think. Nowhere is this situation for non-fiction more extreme than in today’s review: The Square and The Tower by Niall Ferguson.
What’s It About?
The subtitle gives it away, kind of. It reads: Networks and Power From The Freemasons to Facebook. Ferguson’s aim is to examine key historical events through the lens of two different power structures, networks (aka the titular town square) and hierarchies (aka the titular ivory tower).
This looks like familiar territory for anyone familiar with Ferguson’s previous work. Ferguson’s main talent is smushing together economics and history to reveal certain historical patterns. For this book, Ferguson opted to examine history via the lens of network theory and there is much to discuss.
For one thing, many people, even the most historically literate, have no idea what this science even is. What the bloody hell is network theory? they ask, not unreasonably. Ferguson thus spends the first section of the book’s seven parts introducing network theory to the reader. This was a smart call: grounding the reader in his conceptual terms early on prevents any subsequent confusion. If nothing else, the first ten chapters or so provides a solid overview of this underrated science.
What Works
Once the conceptual terms are out of the way, Ferguson’s grand tour of history begins and proceeds in a way that readers of his previous work will find disarming. Previous Ferguson titles like Empire and Civilisation come with five or six enormous chapters. The Square and The Tower by contrast gives the reader sixty chapters running about five pages each.
The approach allows for the widest possible topical coverage. Ferguson stumbling on the insight of using networks and hierarchies as a historical lens leaves him spoiled for choice. Should he cover The Roman Empire? Maybe the Hapsburgs? What about the Medici family? Perhaps Stalin’s Soviet Union? The choices are endless and all have enormous potential.
A major upside to the small chapters with wide topical breadth is the flexibility Ferguson has to explore unusual topics. Some of these topics are among the most revealing and life-changing you will ever read. Case in point, the chapter on Enlightenment networks. Ferguson maps out how letters exchanged between various eighteenth century thinkers helped usher in the burgeoning scientific age. Ideas could be swapped more easily in such a network rather than a formal hierarchical tower. It’s a fascinating insight into where world-changing ideas come from. Furthermore, the 9/11 chapter reveals how the hijackers’ network was so informal that none of the institutions in America could spot them in time.
Every single one of these chapters could be their own book. Speaking of which…
What Doesn’t Work
The biggest problem with this book is the broad range of topics and the shockingly short chapters. I know I just got done saying how much that approach works, but for every chapter it works, there’s another chapter where it really doesn’t work. Not all topics are created equal, and certainly some topics in here are real snoozers. Topics like the Russian spying in Cambridge in the 1930s feel like homeless refugees from a completely different book.
Even for topics that work the short chapters come with their own problems. For those effective topics, the chapter feels nowhere near long enough to satisfy the reader. For the topics that don’t work, you have no idea how or why they fit into the current thesis or why they’re taking this long to read.
The result is in inescapable impression that the book’s brain has melted all over the floor. The chapters are too fragmented to feel cohesive in relation to the chapter on either side of the one you just read. Not enough space is given to each topic, creating the (mistaken) impression that Ferguson hasn’t thought it through.
Ferguson said in the introduction that he was deliberately trying something new with the short chapters. It was a good idea, but by and large it didn’t work. But hey, kudos for trying.
Conclusion
This book is incredibly important. The good chapters have changed my perspective about the world more so than the complete theses of other books. This is good non-fiction reading at its most extreme. The chapters I found valuable were worth the price of the book six times over. But the chapters that were not useful, too short, or otherwise frustrating made me question the meaning of my very existence.
In one aspect, Ferguson is right to cover all the topics he did: I hope experts in the relevant fields Ferguson covers will use network theory for deeper historical studies. A book mapping out the social power in Nazi Germany could be one of the best books ever written if executed correctly.
Everyone should pick this book up, but be prepared to skip and skim in many places to get the most value from it.