There's Not Enough Here: Caravaggio by Andrew Graham-Dixon

Visitors to London’s National Gallery will find themselves in the company of Europe’s finest artists. Across its many rooms, the Gallery hosts masterpieces from Degas, Rembrandt, Da Vinci, and, relevant for this book review, Caravaggio. The scale of these works is truly breathtaking.

Next to each painting is a small plaque detailing the artist’s name, the painting’s name, the relevant dates for both artist and painting, and a short paragraph describing the artwork. But many plaques are bemusing because of what’s missing.

On some plaques, the painting’s name bears a question mark. On others, no artist is credited, leaving the work as “unknown” or “After Rembrandt”. Still others have no definitive dates attached, only a range e.g “1578-1590”. The paragraph describing the paintings doesn’t help either. For example, take this paragraph for Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano’s Saint Mark(?): “Two monumental saints – Mark and Sebastian – stand in niches topped with shell-like arches. They must originally have formed the outer wings of a multi-panelled altarpiece. We don't know where they originally came from, but in the seventeenth century two panels were recorded in the church of the Crociferi, Venice, where they flanked an image of the Annunciation by Cima (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). They do not seem to have belonged together, however: the Annunciation is taller, quite different in composition and painted on cloth rather than wood.“

Notice the ambiguity. “We don’t know where they came from” and “They do not seem to have belonged together” show the Gallery is missing key bits of information. But this isn’t a matter of laziness.

Art History is a weird animal because artists now deemed legendary were unremarkable people in their lifetime. As such, few paintings come attached with all the relevant records. Fraudsters love this ambiguity as it allows them to slip forgeries into auction houses. Galleries presumably hate this ambiguity because visitors lack a solid understanding of what they’re looking at despite the institution’s best efforts.

Because Art History is filled with so many ambiguities and educated guesses, authors writing in that field have the same problem the National Gallery has. Unfortunately for them, they can’t hide their difficulties behind a pretty painting.

One notable example is today’s book, Caravaggio, by Andrew Graham-Dixon.

What’s It About?

For once, that’s not a rhetorical question. Normally, I would use this section of the book review to provide a blurb before going into what worked and what didn’t work for me. But this time, I can’t quite do that. Ostensibly, the book is a biography of the Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio. In actuality, the book is…well, we’ll get to that.

What Works

Not much, but I’m cutting the author a lot of slack here and I feel you should too. Graham-Dixon had a titanic task in front of him. On paper, his job was to chronicle Caravaggio’s life to examine which events may or may not have influenced his paintings. As an artist, Caravaggio’s training, style, and commissions were the bread-and-butter of his life. So, theoretically, exploring Caravaggio’s personal life alongside his artistic works would have made an interesting case-study for sixteenth-century Italy.

But though this might have been Graham-Dixon’s plan when creating this book, the archival reality doomed that idea from the get-go.

What Doesn’t Work

The problem with this book is that there’s neither enough surviving documentation of Caravaggio’s life nor is there enough space in the book to adequately study Caravaggio’s work. As such, Graham-Dixon has serious narrative holes to fill. Long sections of the book are devoted neither to Caravaggio’s life nor his art, but rather to what life was like in Renaissance Rome. These sections are like a commercial break that seemingly never ends. So instead of a biography, this book is a sort of Renaissance history book with a weird obsession on one particular artist.

Then when we get to Caravaggio’s paintings, Graham-Dixon has the hideous job of trying to describe a painting in words…a painting not ready available to the reader. Sure the book comes with image plates containing pictures of Caravaggio’s paintings, but they don’t tell you which painting Graham-Dixon is talking about at any one time. So after the reader escapes an irrelevant section on Rome’s criminal underworld, they’ll so find themselves sinking under descriptions of a painting for which they lack context.

And because so few documents about Caravaggio’s life have survived, the book is frequently incoherent.

The Moral of The Story

Unlike my other book reviews condemning an author as an incompetent wastrel, I’m letting Andrew Graham-Dixon off the hook. None of the above problems with his book stem from gross authorial misconduct. Rather, they’re a consequence of him having little material to work with.

Books, especially non-fiction, are deceptive because they don’t show how many other books, articles, and transcripts the author needed to read and synthesise into the new book. The only clue the reader has is the bibliography and works cited section at the back of the book. Depending on the subject, these two sections alone can take up a third of the pages between the covers. Graham-Dixon’s bibliography isn’t anywhere close to this number, and that’s the problem.

Fiction books aren’t quite the same, but the most realistic and memorable fiction books are backed up by considerable author research. For example, Margaret Mitchell spent years listening to relatives’ Civil War stories and reading large amounts of (now widely considered dubious) material to make Gone With The Wind feel as grand and epic as possible.

Unfortunately for Graham-Dixon, he didn’t have Margaret Mitchell’s mountain of paper. There just wasn’t enough there.

Taking An Opportunity By The Reins: The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich

When it comes to villains, the National Socialist German Workers Party—better known as the Nazi Party—is the gold(?) standard. Their evil is legendary and unlikely to ever be surpassed. In the near century since the Nazis seized power in Germany, interest in them and their evil doings has never wavered. Given this, it should come as no surprise that bookstores have entire sections devoted to Nazi Germany. Everything, from multi-volume biographies of Hitler to individual stories collected from ordinary people who lived under the Nazi dictatorship, has been dutifully recorded in book length form. But by far the most interesting books on Nazi Germany try and grapple with the why.

Why did it happen? How could it happen?

For history books trying to answer that question on any subject, only lengthy hindsight can provide a definitive answer. New evidence comes to light, documents once overlooked get a second reading, and unexpected outcomes can finally be fully understood. This is why we’re getting some of the best books on World War I now rather than in 1921.

But for Nazi Germany, a book explaining the regime’s malign influence, complete with every bit of context anybody could have ever wanted, came a mere fifteen years after the system’s apocalyptic collapse.

The book in question was The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich by William L. Shirer.

What’s It About?

The title is unambiguous about the book’s subject. It’s not a clever pun or an ironic postmodern eyewink. The book is about the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Full stop, no exceptions. First published in 1960 to rave reviews, the book is considered one of, if not THE, most significant works on the topic.

It’s easy to see why. Clocking in at a jaw-dropping 1,029 pages, no expense was spared in telling the story of history’s most evil empire. For readers who might be intimidated by the length, don’t be.

The author, William Shirer, was a journalist, so the book reads like a 1000+ page newspaper article. Academic fluff and authorial bloviation are nowhere to be found. Speaking of Shirer, his approach to making the book is why I’m reviewing it here.

The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich is not merely a recommended read (its sterling reputation existed well before I came along), but it’s also a perfect case study in how a mountain of paper makes for more substantial books in all genres.

How Shirer Got The Material

In the forward dutifully resting atop the 1000 pages of Nazi history, Shirer outlines how he came across the idea for the book and why it needed to be written. He makes a compelling case that’s worth quoting at length.

“The swift collapse of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945 resulted in the surrender not only of a vast bulk of its secret papers but of other priceless material such as private diaries, highly secret speeches, conference reports and correspondence, and even transcripts of telephone conversations of the Nazi leaders tapped by a special office set up by Hermann Goering in the Air Ministry. The 485 tons of records of the German Foreign Office, captured by the U.S. First Army in various castles and mines in the Harz Mountains just as they were about to be burned on orders from Berlin, cover not only the period of the Third Reich but go back through the Weimar Republic to the beginning of the Second Reich of Bismarck. For many years after the war tons of Nazi documents lay sealed in a large U.S. Army warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia, our government showing no interest in even opening the packing cases to see what of historical interest might lie within them.”

Most historians would drool at having access to so much material on a subject. Indeed, most historians will never get access to that amount of material because rarely does this amount of material survive. But as the US Army stormed across Germany in 1945, they faced an enemy who was notorious about keeping their paperwork tidy. You might say they were Nazis about it (ba-dum-tish). Joking aside, Shirer was right: never before has a fallen empire’s bureaucratic apparatus been seized so completely and so dramatically.

Shirer mentions later in the forward that he has not read every single document, an impossible proposition, not the he needed to. Shrier didn’t start building an epic history of Nazi Germany from nothing. Instead, he linked up the documents he read with his own experiences living in Nazi Germany. Shirer was a journalist posted to Hitler’s empire, and so he had kept a lengthy diary during his time there, which would prove useful in constructing this book.

Another item in the forward worth quoting at length is Shirer’s policy toward objectivity: “No doubt my own prejudices, which inevitably spring from my experience and make-up, creep through the pages of this book from time to time. I detest totalitarian dictatorships in principle and came to loathe this one the more I lived through it and watched its ugly assault upon the human spirit. Nevertheless, in this book I have tried to be severely objective, letting the facts speak for themselves and noting the source for each. No incidents, scenes or quotations stem from the imagination; all are based on documents, the testimony of eyewitnesses or my own personal observation.”

As far as I’m concerned, a version of this paragraph should be inserted into every non-fiction author’s contract. Too often books are published by people with a clear vested interest that leaves the reader with a wholly false view of the world. For those wondering, a wholly false view of the world is far more harmful than mere ignorance as ignorance can be rectified in short-order. But talking people out of an incorrect viewpoint they already have is much, much harder. Some people are so stubborn that an atomic bomb exploding on their head wouldn’t be sufficient enough to move them.

But with this policy, Shirer’s book takes an emotionally charged topic and wipes clean the prejudice wherever it can, and Shirer is honest about the inevitable failures. Speaking of those failures, that leads me to the funniest part of the book.

Unintentional Comedy

Shirer by and large keeps his word and removes himself from the narrative, except when the topic concerns his firsthand experiences. When he does make an appearance, it’s memorable and well worth the effort to find it.

For example, in Chapter 4, which discuses at length the intellectual roots of Nazi Germany, Shirer gives the reader a run-through summary of Main Kampf. Such a summary is necessary because Hitler’s obscene absurdities are choking on his turgid prose. Shirer makes that last point clear enough with this quote: “Hitler insisted on airing his thoughts at random on almost every conceivable subject, including culture, education, the theater, the movies, the comics, art, literature, history, sex, marriage, prostitution and syphilis. Indeed, on the subject of syphilis, Hitler devotes ten turgid pages...“

Put in Shirer’s context, Hitler’s rambling about STDs is way funnier than anything JoJo Rabbit could have come up with. Humour is rare when talking about Nazi Germany, but Shirer unintentionally creates these comedic moments from his brief editorialising.

Another example, also from Chapter 4, similarly benefits from Shirer’s opinions. In this section, Shirer is continuing the summary of Main Kampf. He has this to say, hilarious moment in bold: In Mein Kampf he expanded his views and applied them specifically to the problem of not only restoring a defeated and chaotic Germany to a place in the sun greater than it had ever had before but making a new kind of state, one which would be based on race and would include all Germans then living outside the Reich’s frontiers, and in which would be established the absolute dictatorship of the Leader – himself – with an array of smaller leaders taking orders from above and giving them to those below. Thus the book contains, first, an outline of the future German state and of the means by which it can one day become ”lord of the earth,” as the author puts it on the very last page; and, second, a point of view, a conception of life, or, to use Hitler’s favorite German word, a Weltanschauung. That this view of life would strike a normal mind of the twentieth-century as a grotesque hodgepodge concocted by a half-baked, uneducated neurotic goes without saying.”

I can’t help it, but I always burst out laughing every time I read that. Shirer’s comment is blindingly obvious, yet its placement amongst the otherwise stern and serious text is like watching someone slip on a banana peel. I love it.

Moments like these are sprinkled throughout the book, making the 1000 page march more enjoyable than it would otherwise be.

Conclusion

The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich is one of the most substantial books ever written. Its subject is immense and timeless, revealing exactly how the darkest hour came to pass. The author’s first-hand experience with Nazi Germany when combined with the US Army’s outstanding document preservation makes an authoritative read backed up by the strongest possible evidence any author could ever hope for.

In my view, all books, fiction or non-fiction, should be approached in this manner. Creativity resting atop a fully-mastered subject is a force to be reckoned with.

Biography: The Best Non-Fiction Genre

Unlike their fictional counterparts, non-fiction books don’t need characters or linear story arcs to succeed. Non-fiction books can simply be about ideas, which last time I checked aren’t privy to the three-act structure taught in so many creative writing courses. Non-fiction books can also be about living people, dead people, the structure of science, and new theories about the world hitherto untested. Some of these ideas can change course of history forever (looking at you, Origins of Species). Nobody has ever put down a non-fiction book because “the plot is too ludicrous”, giving non-fiction a diversity of reading material that fiction, for all its many genres, can’t match.

Of course if you look at the stats, you’d realise something: fiction outsells non-fiction…by a lot. The linked study also provides a good explanation for this state of affairs: fiction authors publish more material than their non-fiction counterparts. After all, there isn’t one Lord of the Rings book but three. A multi-volume series gives those authors a clear mathematical advantage. After all, you can only write one memoir or one summation of your entire life’s work.

But another reason for the sales discrepancy you won’t arrive at purely by crunching numbers is the fact that non-fiction books are about ideas and not characters and stories.

Though I praised non-fiction for breaking out of fiction’s character-based storytelling, I also failed to mention that ideas do not drive stories forward and as such it can be much harder to understand a non-fiction book. Fiction, if edited and structured properly I hasten to add, is cognitively easy. If you can follow the character’s journey, you can learn everything about them and relate to that character on a deeper level. It’s like having an imaginary friend.

Non-fiction is not so easy. Understanding and enjoying some books might require formal education in the subject they are about. And the non-fiction books aimed at a general reader can still struggle to get their meaning across because of constant need to provide context, sometimes in staggering amounts. Examples of these brilliant but baffling reads include many a science book like the aforementioned Origin of Species, history books about certain complex events (see just about any book about World War I), and books in the ‘smart thinking’ section of the book store, which often commit a host of logical fallacies to shove their square theories in the round hole of reality.

But one genre of non-fiction is different: biography.

Three Reasons It Works

The biography genre, when done well, cuts across all of non-fiction’s storytelling failures and makes the act of understanding certain fields, notably history and science, a much easier task. In my experience, three elements found within the best biographies skew towards my liking and I wager the same applies to you.

1) Ideas and events are forced into a narrative structure.

Ideas like the supremely unintuitive Theory of General Relativity are hard to understand, there’s no getting around it. I’ve listened to the most informed experts explain the subject in a lecture designed for schoolchildren and I still struggled to understand them. This isn’t to pick on Physics or even science in general. History, which I’m stronger with, can be a similar struggle. How did the Battle of Stalingrad happen? I’ve got a partial answer, but nothing that would satisfy a historian. Sure I can list the end outcome (General Paulus lost), but not how or why it mattered to the overall war effort. A deeper understanding would require something more.

Non-fiction, simply by basing its subject matter in reality, is prone to confusion, contradictions, and uncertainties. But in the world of (good) fiction, confusion, contradiction, and uncertainties are non-starters. A novel I can’t understand is objectively terrible, a plot that contradicts itself in the middle is sloppy, and a mystery novel that doesn’t resolve its mystery is a waste of time.

Biography, by chronicling a person’s life, is not susceptible to the usual non-fiction difficulties because there’s a centre of gravity that even the most abstruse of ideas can’t escape from. For instance, Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity is hard to grasp by looking at a pure description of it, but biographies of Einstein are forced by chronological structure to review Einstein’s scientific influences and reconstruct his thought pattern. By doing so, the reader is brought along with Einstein and can see how the theory came to be alongside its final form for themselves.

You can repeat this thought experiment by thinking about anything of historical significance. For example, reading about the sublime nature of the Declaration of Independence from a history book on 1776 is one thing, but reading through the thought process from Thomas Jefferson’s eyes in a Jefferson biography is ten times better because you’ll see the whole document in the context of the life of its author and his compatriots.

Biography’s structure is pseudo-novelistic because it’s linear and follows a compelling central character. Any extreme deviation from the biography’s subject will quickly arouse the reader’s anger. But though biography is close to novelistic, it isn’t exactly the same because the reader still needs context of the times and history in which the biographical subject lived, which leads me to…

2) The right amount of historical context is always provided, distilling key lessons in the process.

A book listing a person’s life in dates and numbers would be very boring, and a book talking about historical achievements without providing contexts of the times in which they were set would be baffling. Therefore, by the genre’s design, a good biographer needs to provide the reader with just the right amount of historical context and nothing else.

For example, in a biography of Franklin Roosevelt, simply talking about Roosevelt’s reaction to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would feel like reading your eighth-grade history textbook again. Instead, a good biographer would show Roosevelt’s growing antagonism towards the Japanese because of certain trade deals and also provide an overture of the worsening diplomatic relationship between Washington and Tokyo in the buildup to the attack. Context like this, when distilled to a few pages, can be a revelation to somebody like me who knew nothing about it. Your middle-school textbook made it sound like the Japanese attacked “just because”. However, because a biography of Franklin Roosevelt already has a main subject, the biographer doesn’t have the luxury of going into a huge tangent about US-Japanese relations. If they did, they would annoy their editor, who would force the author to chop such a tedious section.

Reasons like this one are what make biographies a superior way to study history, science, philosophy or indeed whatever discipline the biographical subject is affiliated with. Decisions made back then become less arbitrary and the conditions the person operated under become illuminated. The relevant historical context leaves the reader grounded by keeping them abreast of key dates and names that, ironically, might get lost in a book purely about the events taking place on those dates. A biographer who doesn’t get bogged down in the weeds will be doing their book and their reader a great service.

But biography has one more trick up its sleeve besides context and a clear writing topic…

3) Presentism is limited.

Structuring a good biography relies on the historical evidence left behind in archives and interviews. Since biography is ultimately non-fiction, the author isn’t allowed to fabricate quotes or pretend their subject did something when they in fact did not. The evidence available to the author forces them to admit uncertainties in a straightforward way. For example, going back to Franklin Roosevelt for a moment, it has been alleged he knew Pearl Harbor would happen in advance and he let it happen so he’d have a perfect excuse to join the raging world war. Any Roosvelt biographer reading Roosevelt’s archived papers would quickly realise such a claim has no evidence to support it. So any Roosevelt biographer repeating the claims would be roundly castigated for their stupidity.

But even if the biographer did not engage in outright fabrication, any editorialising or prejudice on the author’s part would also be spotted immediately. A biography is the story of a person’s life, not a doctoral thesis arguing about if they behaved virtuously in life. Of course, no biographer can be truly neutral, but every biographer can be balanced in their assessment. Syrupy praise and hostile criticism coming from the author will make them guilty of a sin called presentism. For those unfamiliar, presentism is the fallacy by which historical people and events are judged by modern day standards and attitudes. Presentism is frowned upon because it unfairly loads the dice against historical subjects by examining them for things that they couldn’t know anything about in the times through which they lived. Biography, moreso than most history books, shines a light on the scourge of presentism because the author’s relationship with their subject is more intimate than a general history book.

Conclusion

Fiction books provide entertainment that’s more in line with how people process information but suffer from the unfortunate reality that the story is fictitious. Wouldn’t it be nice if The Hobbit was a true story? Non-fiction books can be more exciting in this regard because everything in them purports to be the truth. However, the messiness of reality can translate into a choppy and unpleasant reading experience.

Biography meets the two in the middle by providing a non-fiction genre that is forced to have linearity and characters which ensures important ideas are given the right amount of context.

As such, it is the best non-fiction genre.

The Most Underrated Author: The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark

Generally speaking, books of history are a high-risk, high-reward reading proposition. If executed well, a work of history can illuminate an aspect of the past you knew nothing about and make you realise your friends often have no idea what they’re talking about when they quote Abraham Lincoln at keg parties. But if executed poorly, history books can be a mess of contradictions, confusion, and frustration.

Certain history books are more susceptible to the latter category than the former. One repeat offender is the class of books discussing specific military battles. For these tomes, the trouble is often the author’s scope: what should they focus on? Perhaps they should focus on the individual soldiers marching forward. Or maybe they should discuss the decisions from battlefield commanders? Or better yet, why not both? Most authors choose to focus on everything about the battle great and small. Unfortunately, focusing on both gives the reader an experience similar to watching a movie where the television can’t decide if it wants to display the movie in full-screen or wide-screen format and flicks back and forth. It’s jarring and unpleasant.

This is why today’s book by today’s author is so special: not only does he avoid getting bogged down in the weeds, he synthesises more information than I believed possible on subjects so wide in scope that it’s frankly impressive it all fit into one book.

Not only that, the subject is easily the hardest for any historian: the outbreak of World War 1.

This is The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War in 1914 by Sir Christopher Clark.

What It’s About

The Sleepwalkers is among the newest and, in my view, most definitive works on the outbreak of World War 1 aimed at a general readership. This is not to say it is a light read as it clocks in at a healthy 600+ pages. The Sleepwalkers takes the reader through the events, some remembered but most forgotten, that weighed on the minds of the ensemble cast of monarchs and government ministers in the decades and years leading up to the July Crisis of 1914. By the end of the book, you will realise that few if any of the players in this drama had any idea of what they were doing. Indeed, they sleepwalked into the painful birth of modernity.

The Sleepwalkers is a panoramic book of the highest caliber. Every participant country is granted the appropriate amount of attention. France, Britain, Russia, Austria, Serbia and Germany are all thoroughly examined together rather than examined in isolation. Clark had access to every archive, one of the privileges of being the Regis Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, so he couldn’t go into the project with any preconceived notions of what he would find.

The result is a thoroughly original and essential read for historically-minded readers.

Why It’s An Essential Read

Where to start with this monster? The Sleepwalkers is an essential read because it eloquently explains the most complicated event in history, a feat that I frankly thought wasn’t possible. This is no understatement. To illustrate the point for non-historians, consider the difference between asking someone how World War I happened vs how World War II happened. Even the most historically illiterate person can say World War II happened because Hitler was running the show in Germany and the other states didn’t like that.

But ask someone how World War I happened and the best you’ll get is “someone shot the Archduke and everyone got mad at each other for some reason.” The complexity of the event should be intimidating even for the most talented historian.

Adding to Clark’s woes was the 100 years of books, articles, and historical material written about the war. Famous historians like Barbara Tuchman and Fritz Fischer had all produced famous works which ought to have rendered any new volume irrelevant. Clark admitted this in the book, noting that one book written twenty years before he started writing The Sleepwalkers estimated there to be 25,000 books (!) on World War I already in existence…just in English. The amount of information should have crushed him and doomed this project.

And yet, in spite of that, Clark produced a fresh, original book about a subject everyone had already written about. The key is in the subtitle: How Europe Went To War In 1914. The operative word is ‘how’. Notice that Clark didn't ask “why did that happen” because that’s what the 25,000 other books did.

Asking ‘how’ also solved a different problem: increasing reader accessibility. The issue with a book on a complex historical topic, especially World War I, is trying to get somebody who knows nothing about it excited enough to give it a read. If Clark had chosen to ask “why” he would have implicitly assumed the reader knew something about World War I…which might not have been the case. Asking “how” forced him to put the causal reasons and relevant events in a coherent order, the order most likely to entice novices to this subject.

For that reason alone, the book is worth the time of any literate person, even those who might only be faintly interested. To be sure, The Sleepwalkers is still a book with a high degree of difficulty attached to it. There’s no escaping the complexity of the subject, so trying to read the book in a loud coffee shop is a bad idea.

Conclusion

The historian Sir Christopher Clark is an underrated writer who I believe deserves more attention. Being a Cambridge historian is useful in one sense as it lets him write these magnificent books, but on the other hand, I feel like it leaves him out of the relevant network of influencers that might get the book in front of more people.

That aside, The Sleepwalker’s success at achieving a nearly impossible task earns it a rare “essential read” label on this site.

Seeing It From Every Angle: Corruptible by Brian Klaas

Did you know the former president of Madagascar was overthrown by a 34-year-old radio DJ? Have you ever wondered what happens when researchers load up monkeys with cocaine? Would you like to have a date with the daughter of an African dictator? Why is the guy from the homeowner's association a solid-gold asshole?

Those questions might sound like responses from an AI on its fifth beer, but they are in fact all subjects covered in Brian Klaas's brilliant new book, Corruptible.

What's It About?

Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, has done something rather unusual in this book: demolish a cliché. Everyone has heard the expression "power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely" (the origins of which Klaas looks at BTW). It's a cliché for a reason: we've seen what happens to people when they come into positions of power. Not only does their moral compass collapse, but they also gain perverse pleasure in hurting other people. History is replete with examples of kings, emperors, presidents, and corporate executives who made life an absolute hell for everyone else.

But writing a book saying "yes, that cliché is true, have a good day" would be extremely boring if for no other reason than nobody would learn anything.

However, Klaas goes against the grain and tries something else. Rather than write about power as this vast impersonal force magically exerting itself on all persons, he instead reframes the questions we ask about power. Instead of asking "does power corrupt", Klaas posits the questions "what kind of people are systems of power attracting", "do systems optimise for the right behaviours in people", "what are the circumstances that draw out certain kind of behaviour in people", and so on.

By reframing the usual question, Brian Klaas has put a fresh spin on a tired subject and he might just change your perspective in the process.

What Works

The book's strength is Klaas's marvellous ability to examine the application of power from every possible angle. He looks at corruptible people, corruptible systems, random circumstance, and even neurochemistry changes people’s brains. This core strength allows Klaas to explore absolutely fascinating subjects, and meet extremely interesting people.

The levels of power Klaas examines vary hugely in scale. Klaas gives himself breathing room by writing about psychopathic school-board leaders with as much passion as the absolute dictator of Madagascar controlling an entire country. This breadth in scope gives the book a personal application because it is wholly devoid of abstruse theorising about what goes on in the corridors of power. Whilst on the subject, Klaas certainly encounters those who have walked those corridors, all to the book’s benefit.

A major strength of the book is Klaas’s extensive interviewing of powerful people. He had access to the aforementioned deposed dairy kingpin-turned-president of Madagascar, but he also had the chance to interview ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and plenty of others. By meeting and talking to them about the decisions they made—some minute, some monstrous—Klaas puts a human face on the powerful and lets the reader pass their own judgement.

And yet, the high-profile people Klaas interviewed aren't even the most interesting characters to appear in the book. Among the most memorable are researchers working with monkeys in laboratories. Monkeys, being the closest species to humans, can be tested in ways that humans never could, including by deliberately giving them cocaine (yes really). Just the premise "giving coke to a monkey" is fascinating and could be its own book, so I’m thrilled Klaas included this delightful vignette.

In short, Klass’s core combination of examining power from every angle and having access to the world’s most fascinating humans makes Corruptible an extremely fun read.

What Doesn't Work.

Basically nothing, good night.

You Can't Be Serious

I am quite serious. This book is well-researched, well-written, and easy to recommend. It changed my perspective on so many things that even if its conclusions turn out to be empirically bunk, it doesn't really matter. So unlike other reviews on the site, I will not be writing a five-hundred word complaint to the court of literary appeals about the gross injustices committed against high art because such injustices were never committed.

Sometimes, a book with two or three compelling elements like Corruptible is just a good read and I have nothing else to say.

Go read it for yourself.

Your Brain Melted All Over The Floor! The Square And The Tower by Niall Ferguson

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.

What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? The Value Of Everything By Mariana Mazzucato.

What is value? Seems like a simple question, but in actuality, it’s anything but. Even predating Adam Smith, various economic thinkers in history have grappled with the question in one form or another. The latest such thinker is Mariana Mazzucato in her book The Value of Everything.

Initial Summary

The Value of Everything seeks to shake up the idea of what constitutes value in the modern economy. Mazzucato herself said so, writing “My aim for the book is to stir a new debate, putting value back at the centre of economic reasoning.” (Page 279) To achieve this aim, Mazzucato created a book primarily divided into three parts.

Chapters 1 through 3 give a brief history of value theory in economic thinking. Several well-known economic thinkers, including the almighty Adam Smith and Karl Marx, tried to place something resembling objective measurements on the subject. Which parts of the economy were “productive” and which were “unproductive?” However, that all changed with the rise of Marginalism, which flipped the concept of value on its head. Suddenly, the concept of value went from being an objective measure to a subjective measure. Just because you wouldn’t pay sixty dollars for an opera ticket doesn’t mean it has no value. I, a pretentious art critic, might find that price to be a bargain and thus it means the ticket has value. In small instances like this, the Marginal might be fine, but what happens when everyone behaves like this? Then, the problem becomes clear. As Mazzucato put it, “price has become the indicator of value: as long as a good is bought and sold in the market, it must have value. So rather than a theory of value determining price, it is the theory of price that determines value.” (271)

This leads us to Chapters 4 through 6, covering the rise of finance in the economy and the pernicious applications of this “non-theory” theory of value. Mazzucato is, quite rightly, unimpressed with the creeping role of finance, which if you’ll recall nearly wrecked the global economy in 2008. This middle section of the book critiques the idea that finance is somehow creating value, ultimately concluding that the way finance operates is detrimental to the economy. The industry’s focus on short-term gains and maximising shareholder returns, among other things, are extremely problematic when applied to other sectors of the economy like healthcare and education which don’t naturally operate in the same way.

Finally, Chapters 7 through 9 look at the modern economy’s facets through a revamped concept of value. Most impressive is Chapter 8, which talks about the criminally underrated role of government investment and public sector projects in creating valuable entities in the economy. These chapters are familiar territory for Mazzucato, whose 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State made the case that private sector actors were overrated when it came to innovative ideas, as they drew on ideas that came from years or decades of public sector investment.

Mazzucato’s conclusion is clear: without a clear idea of what’s valuable and what isn’t, the economy will continue to be filled with a few winners and plenty of needless losers. A new idea of value is needed and needed now.

Elliott’s Opinion.

Upside, You Need to Know About This

If you made it through my summary or read the title, you might have picked up on what I like and don’t like about this book already. The positives should be quite apparent: Mazzucato’s idea is badly needed in a world where the price of stuff seems as connected to reality as Pink Floyd on their fifth acid trip. Why in the name of Christ does a first-class ticket on British Airways cost $10,000 Orlando to London? It’s not like that’s the flat price either. Depending on what time of year I’m travelling or hell even what day of the week it is, the amount of money going out of my wallet can be 50% more than that.

In this context, learning about the so-called Marginal Theory of Value (if it can even be dignified with such a description) was incredibly valuable (pun maybe intended). For that reason alone, I’d recommend a peruse of this book. Once you learn about this concept however minimally, you’ll start to see its applications everywhere and maybe how to avoid suffering as a consequence.

Another positive of this book is the extension of The Entrepreneurial State in Chapter 8, a book that I recommend to everybody, now even more so in an era where everyone thinks their government is composed of dopes, morons, and other ne’er-do-wells. Any work that builds upon The Entrepreneurial State needs to exist. That book and Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk (also recommended) comprehensively demonstrate that the average person has no idea what their government gets up to and they neglect it at their peril.

Downsides, What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

For all the upsides of this book, I do have a few criticisms of it because I believe they hold the book back from having a more positive effect on readers. Books read by the right people in the right places can change the world (looking at you Gutenberg Bible and The Guns of August). I believe Mazzucato’s ideas should be treated in that way.

Here’s the kicker: notice the division of topics between the chapters. The first third of the book talks about the history of value, the middle third the negative role of finance and the final third a broader discussion of innovation via updated ideas from her last book. In other words, this book has no idea what it wants to be when it grows up because none of those thirds are sufficient enough to carry a book by themselves. The history of value is far too nebulous a topic to revolve a whole non-fiction book around, which dilutes the power of second and third sections of the book. Criticising finance and examining innovation could plausibly be their own books, but since these sections are sharing space with the first section, no topic feels like it received enough coverage. As a result, the title, The Value of Everything doesn’t really capture the essence of the book.

Another gripe I have is more personal, but no less important. Namely, there is an unspoken assumption running throughout the text that “if only people see the information I have, then they will see the light”. Mazzucato nearly says so on Page 268 when she writes “Once the story telling about value creation is corrected, changes can embolden private institutions as well as their public partners”. The prefix of that sentence is the tell at the poker table: “Once the story telling…is corrected…” This assumption, which exists in plenty of books besides this one, annoys me because it removes the idea that reasonable minds can disagree upon reviewing evidence.

If it were as simple as getting more information for people to see the light, then Steven Pinker’s latest book, Rationality, wouldn’t need to exist. That book runs through cognitive mechanisms like motivated reasoning which people employ to close their eyes and shut their ears to things they don’t want to be true. In fact, among the studies cited in Rationality is a paper by the scholar Daniel Kahan showing that opinions which reject the very best scientific evidence are not correlated to scientific literacy but to political affiliation. Climate change sceptics know the climate literature but reject it while climate change proponents say its a problem while thinking climate change is about toxic waste dumps.

In essence, Mazzucato makes the same mistake Kahan uncovered: plenty of smart people will know her ideas but reject them anyway; it’s not a failure of education but identity. Therefore, her goal of ‘starting a debate’ about value is in trouble, which is a shame because the idea is so important.

Conclusion

The Value of Everything is a book I would recommend to people for perusing. If you’ve never read a book on economics, this is so NOT the place to start. Few stories, lots of theories and abstract subject matter make it a slow-burner.

Overall, this book should be read in a quiet airport lounge and not on a noisy plane.

You Don't Need That: Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith

I usually don’t mind long books. Gone With The Wind (despite the racism) is one of my favourite novels ever. The writing is crystal clear, the characters are intuitive, and the best part is that it stretches well over eight hundred pages. It is an epic story, and reading it was easy.

So imagine my surprise when Robert Galbraith a.k.a. J.K. Rowling wrote a book about the length of Gone With The Wind that didn’t reach the same storytelling heights.

This week’s review is Troubled Blood.

Wait, that ain’t Hogwarts!

For those arriving from Neptune, Robert Galbraith is a nom-de-plume for Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. Although initially a secret, Rowling was unmasked as Galbraith shortly after the first book was released under that name. It should be noted that Rowling was not happy about how it happened.

The Galbraith crime series has been met with generally positive reviews. Particularly appealing is the recurring detective, a throwback to the Sherlock Holmes era of crime fiction. Rowling’s protagonist is the ex-British military cop (and one-legged Hagrid impersonator) Cormoran Strike. Also like the ‘20s era detective fiction, Strike is not a policeman but a private detective. This strips him of the sophisticated technology available to police-procedural protagonists, forcing him to rely on a magical skill known as deductive reasoning.

However, Strike isn’t alone. He is joined in the first book by Robin Ellacott, a young temp who becomes his full-time assistant before graduating up to agency partner in the most recent book. With their Will They/Won’t They chemistry, many fans want the pair to investigate more than their client’s request if you catch my drift.

With these two emotionally rich characters and a baffling unsolved mystery, Rowling has the chassis for a fantastic crime series.

Troubled blood? More like troubled launch.

Part of the reason I wanted to review this book was due to the controversy surrounding Rowling during the book’s launch. At the time, Rowling wrote a controversial essay on her website about transgender issues. When an early review stated (misleadingly) that the “moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress”, most of the subsequent reviews concerned topics other than the book.

Clocking in at over 900 pages, Troubled Blood is the longest tome Rowling has ever released. So just how complex is this mystery?

Strengths and weaknesses: Easy to Separate

Unlike my last two reviews, what I liked and disliked about Troubled Blood can be easily identified. Rowling’s superior writing skills explains why. She is the queen of concrete imagery, ensuring that the reading experience is pleasurable regardless of how complex the topic is on the page. The mind lights up at easy-to-grasp concepts and descriptions of motion, all of which Rowling nails by a couple of touchdowns. Without these features, Harry Potter would’ve been ignored by millions of kids. The Strike series thankfully continues the Potter tradition of concrete imagery.

When reading the book, I feel like I can see, smell, and hear what’s going on in the world. Therefore, when something works in a Strike book (or doesn’t), it’s easy to spot.

This is the way it should be. Too many books are painfully abstract in their writing style and storytelling.

The Case

Strike and Robin’s client, Anna, asks for their help in finding her mother. Her mother, a GP named Margot, disappeared after leaving her practice one day and was never seen again. Now the daughter has grown up without her mother and the case has been unsolved for no less than forty years. Not surprisingly, Strike and Robin’s chances of success are low. They are given approximately one year to solve the case, for the client does not have unlimited funds.

Cold cases are one of my personal favourite crime fiction tropes as they immediately come with an extra layer of difficulty. After all, if the police couldn’t solve the case in the past, why should present-day detectives fare any better?

Much of the book involves the pair struggling to track down Margot’s friends and coworkers to get their recollections and old police statements. Speaking of the police, Strike and Robin’s work is complicated by the fact that the Met officer tasked with solving the case tried to do so via occult means. Poor Strike and Robin have to consult tarot cards and take a crash course in 1970s astrology (shudder) to figure out what the first detective was banging on about.

Sure enough, Strike and Robin figure out that the other staff members in Margot’s clinical practice were…kind of fucked up. I’ll stop there to prevent needless spoilers. In short, Strike and Robin have a long road ahead of them.

So what’s wrong the book? Going on the above details, nothing. We have a mystery, a series of obstacles, and the detectives can’t rely on a deus ex machina to solve the case. They have to use their intellect and creativity, the hallmarks of great characters.

The problem with this book isn’t the central mystery, but everything else around the mystery.

A pile of crap on the ocean floor.

In addition to their case, the two lead detectives are going through personal dramas so intense that they’d give the Real Housewives of New Jersey a run for their money. Strike’s aunt is terminally ill, forcing him to make lengthy diversions to his hometown in Cornwall. His famous father is also trying to end their estrangement, resulting in Strike becoming an asshat for several chapters. For good measure, Strike’s ex-lover Charlotte wanders into the plot as well.

Robin isn’t devoid of drama either. She is in the middle of a nasty divorce from Matthew, a solid gold wanker who has been around for the entire Strike series. She is now in a new flat, living with a gay actor named Max. This divorce, plus the fact she is turning 30, coincides with Robin’s brother starting his own family, creating more angst.

Even Strike’s agency has its own drama. The cases Strike solved in previous books have brought him in-story fame and notoriety, forcing him to hire sub-contractors in order to handle the increased workload. As if having still more characters wasn’t enough, the increased workload means that Strike and Robin spend countless pages not working on the main mystery. They’re doing surveillance for unrelated and downright weird cases. The longest of these interloping shenanigans involves an adult diaper fetish. Jesus. Oh, the ballooning ensemble at the agency also allows for office politics to raise their ugly head for the first time in the series. The young female Robin has seniority over older men causing tension, dick pics, and a variety of other sanctimonious undertones.

Speaking of male-female interactions, Rowling’s feminist views also make an unwelcome cameo. The missing GP was a Playboy Bunny in her younger years, but a hardcore feminist by the time she disappeared. In another instance, a woman at the G.P. office needed an abortion. As mentioned in the early reviews, the chief suspect in the case, a convicted serial killer, exclusively targeted women, sometimes by dressing in drag. These women were sexually assaulted, tortured and creatively mutilated before the male killer disposed of them.

In another scene, Robin’s flatmate hosts a strange dinner party where the guests spend a bewildering number of pages talking about slutwalks in front of a drunken Strike and a mortified Robin. Shortly afterward, Robin and Strike have their worst row yet (W.T.F.).

In her attempt to create a panoramic story, Rowling utilised so many themes that each one of them was about as welcome as a pile of crap on the ocean floor. If she picked one theme and ran with it this book wouldn’t be so exhausting.

Good god…

The mystery confronting Strike and Robin is as compelling as ever. Collecting the evidence and interviewing the witnesses should be straightforward, but obviously isn’t. After all, a decades-old cold case will leave many gaps in knowledge and memory. That is, by itself, a good six hundred page book.

Rowling’s mistake was that Strike and Robin were too often distracted by other, unrelated nonsense. Why couldn’t the sub-contractors work on the other cases in the background, rarely if ever consulting the partners? Why did Strike’s aunt have to get sick in this book, where the plot was already complex enough? Similarly, why did Robin’s divorce have to drag through the whole thing? Couldn’t she and Strike not have as many rows in this book as their relationship progressed? Did we need the subtle highlighting of sexual harassment in the workplace too? On and on it goes.

I mention all of these things because I could easily imagine the book without them. One of the first pieces of advice doled out to new novelists is “kill your darlings”, i.e. take out anything unrelated to the main plot.

In contrast, the last Strike book, Lethal White, featured a wide-variety of characters and sub-plots. Yet it was considerably shorter, and none of the extra features muddied the story or reading experience. All in all, I preferred Troubled Blood’s core mystery to Lethal White’s.

The problem was everything else.