Books

 From the time I learned to read in first grade, I have been a lover of books.  In fact, it started earlier than that--my parents read to me.  I kept at it through the years.  My kids picked up the habit as well.  During the '90s we lived in Dearborn County, IN; we had the Lawrenceburg Public Library, but because of an agreement between the districts we also had access to the Cincinnati Public Library, which was considered one of the best in the US.  We would go to the Main Library in downtown Cincinnati--me, my wife, and our three kids--and check out as many as 80 books for the five of us.

Even now, while I do a lot of my reading on the Internet, I still go through six or eight library books every three weeks.  Sometime around 8 to 9 in the evening, I shut down the computer screen and read a book before going to bed.  I read some ebooks on my iPad, but I mostly prefer real paper books.

I mentioned several books in my last post that have shaped my thinking over the years.  I am going to recommend a few here that I have read in the last year or two.

"Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer

While most history books pay the most attention to Jamestown and Plymouth, the first major settlements, there were actually four major waves of settlers that came to America after those first two.  Each of those four waves came from different areas of the British Isles, and brought different sets of customs and cultural traditions to America.  Fischer traces their background in the homeland and their history here, and the effects they had on the basic cultures, especially in what are now the eastern states.

"Born Fighting" by Senator Jim Webb

Webb tells the story of the last of Fischer's four groups of settlers, the Scots-Irish (also known as Scotch-Irish and Ulster Scots).  He is of that heritage himself, and includes some stories about his own family.  But he starts with their history in the north of Britain, in the area that became the Border between England and Scotland during the Middle Ages.  In the early 1600s, many Borderers, from both sides of the line, migrated to northern Ireland, which had been largely depopulated during wars and civil unrest under the Tudor monarchs.  Because of ill-treatment by English landlords and the Anglican church, many of them started migrating to America, starting around 1715 and lasting almost to the start of the American Revolution.  They were not appreciated or welcomed by the three earlier groups, and tended to settle in the back country, away from the coastal cities and the government authorities.  To this day, the culture of the Appalachian region is still largely Scots-Irish.  So is much of blue-collar working-class culture as well.  And I must admit, it is a major part of my own heritage as well.

"Dignity" by Chris Arnade

Arnade was a Wall Street trader who got bored with his job and started hanging out at homeless camps in Brooklyn.  Eventually he left his job through a buyout, moved his family to upstate New York, where living costs were lower, and began traveling the country.  He went to the small towns in the Rust Belt, and the run-down neighborhoods in the cities, and talked to people.  His book includes a lot of photos of the people he met.  He would go into a small town, find a McDonalds, and talk to the people of all ages who hung out there.  He went to the run-down and store-front churches in inner-city neighborhoods, and was impressed by how many people he met who got free from drugs and alcohol through those churches.  He sorts people into what he calls "front-row kids"--the elites of business, academia, and politics--and "back-row kids"--the poor, the disadvantaged (of all races), the ones who didn't "make it."  By the end of the book, Arnade admitted moving from being an atheist to becoming an agnostic; he has since returned to the Catholic church of his childhood.

"The Revolt of the Public" by Martin Gurri

Gurri was a CIA analyst, monitoring foreign news media.  What his book documents is that much of the worldwide unrest of the last twenty years or so is rooted in the rise of the Internet and social media.  The mass of the people are no longer dependent on the traditional news media.  In the past, someone had to won the printing presses, the movie studios, and the TV and radio stations.  Therefore, communication was mostly from the top down.   With the Internet, information can go in all directions--top down, bottom up, sideways...and the elites have lost control of the flow of information.  His book was self-published first as an ebook in 2014, then an updated version came out in hardback in 2018.  He discusses the uprisings in various countries of the Arab Spring; at one point, the Egyptian authorities caught a young man who had started the first protests through a Facebook post, and tried to negotiate an end to it with him, only to find out he had no control or authority--he just started the thing and it went on without him.  Gurri covered other disruptions in Spain and Israel, and the Tea Party movement in the US.  The hardback added a chapter on Brexit and Trump's election.  For a while he was writing a blog called "The Fifth Wave" and covered the Yellow Vest protests in France and other events.  I would not describe him as a Trump supporter, but he sees Trump more as a symptom than a primary cause--the dissatisfaction of the people was already there, and Trump stepped up to give it voice and ride it to office.

"War and Peace and War" by Peter Turchin

Turchin is a Russian-American academic, who has written about the rise and collapse of societies.  Two concepts in this book are striking.  One is "asabiyya"--a concept of social solidarity, first described in the Middle Ages by the Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun.  A group with great asabiyya will often defeat a seemingly more powerful enemy--think of the ancient Greeks repelling the invading Persians in the 5th century BC, the American colonists defeating the British in the American Revolution, and possibly today's Ukrainians holding off the Russian army.  Another concept is a problem for nations that he labels "over-production of elites" where the upper-class becomes too numerous to be supported at the level they expect.  There was such a situation in medieval France, until the Hundred Years' War reduced their numbers; the English got their turn at it with the Wars of the Roses just a few years later.  The French again took another turn at it with the French Revolution and Reign of Terror.  I see a possibility that we are in such a position today, with one difference--our modern elites mostly do not send their sons to fight our wars anymore.  While the draft was in force in the US, they had to make some effort; now they do not.

I am going to end this post with a bit about a pair of books that deal with the regional cultures of the US.  One is Joel Garreau's "Nine Nations of North America," published in 1981.  The other is more recent--Colin Woodard's "American Nations" which was published thirty years later.  They both go into the regional cultures of America, which are quite different from the official state lines.  They both look at the history and the early settlers, who usually determined the local culture.  There are some differences in their regions--what Garreau calls "Dixie," Woodard splits into three areas--Tidewater, Deep South, and Greater Appalachia.  He ends up with eleven regions compared to Garreau's nine.  Garreau tended to look more at modern economic differences, Woodard at dealing with ideas and ways of doing things.  Woodard also looks at how the regions interact politically, with the northeast and West Coast usually working together, the southern regions having their own alliance, and the rest switching back and forth depending on particular issues.  Both books are valuable for understanding the US; neither is perfect, because both miss some things and each emphasized some things and ignore others.  But together they help in understanding the background of what is going on.

These are books on secular topics that I have found interesting the past couple of years.  I may put together a post about the Christian books and authors that have influenced my thinking over the years.