Catherine Spiller

A charming but responsible take on a key issue

Reviewed: 07-23-24

In general biographies of conmen either love them and praise them or hold them in a certain kind of contempt. This book lays out the life of one of history’s greatest propagandists, explicitly tying his tactics to our tremendous need for counter propaganda today, and never lets you forget the costs, ultimately coming down in favor of quite limited imitation being the most that would be desirable today.

That limited imitation is important, though, and Pomerantsev’s affection for his protagonist makes this an emotionally complex and compelling read as a literary manner, while his restraint and lack of hyperbole make it an excellent policy guide for those working in the information space. As you can tell from that last sentence, I’m not a wordsmith, but don’t let my inarticulacy delay your reading this wonderful work!

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Great gonzo journalism

Reviewed: 05-11-24

I thought that this was excellent on the confusion and conflicting principles of the early conflict and the moments before it.

It jumps about too much to be the best military guide, it’s too shallow in the politics to be the best political guide (that’s probably The Showman), but it feels like the best non-fiction book for capturing the Ukrainian spirit and the social dynamics that have led to Russia falling so short in its initial invasion and losing so much even of that since.

There are other journalists writing out there, but this felt the most like I do when interviewing people in Ukraine, the most like their stories were really being told.

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Mindless repetitive bigotry

Reviewed: 03-27-23

The plot is based on Money, MS, being far removed from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, but the Greenwood MBI office is the closest police station to Money, about 12 miles away, near the closest Walmart.

The humor appears to lie entirely in the pastiche of redneck accents, bigotry, and buffoonery. The lack of interest in getting any of the details right lines up with this approach. Even the Trump pastiche, the go to joke for many unoriginal comics precisely because it is so easy to do adequately, sounds nothing like the man.

It’s not just facts external to the book that are treated with contempt. We learn of collections of thousands of names of lynched Americans and then we read the list and it’s surprisingly short. Why Everett didn’t bother to do more research and add more names is beyond me.

If the thought of a comedic revenge fantasy that pokes fun at rural Mississippian poverty before covering it in blood, or if the mutilation of corpse genitals or farting seem like funny concepts, I guess this book may have redeeming features that mitigate the terrible prose, lack of plot coherency, and inconsistent tone. For the rest of us, I can’t see the appeal.

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2 people found this helpful

Excellent book for the gilded age generally

Reviewed: 10-10-22

Troy writes a highly accessible, page turning romp through a host of issues, from race to romance.
Very few histories are comparably good at explaining the significance of the corruption engendered by tariffs during this period (if you want more, the relevant chapters of Doug Irwin’s Clashing Over Commerce are excellent). The Hawaiian coverage makes a complex issue clear, and his efforts to avoid making a horrifying depression worse are explained without cheerleading.
In an age of negative partisanship, though, with both parties engaging in isolationism and ideological or cash gifts to their basest elements (Google GSP for a particularly repugnant trade example), Troy’s meditations on the value of character may be the most contemporary elements. As with everything else in the book, the electoral, policy, and other benefits and costs to principle are described in nuanced ways, but it is hard to put the book down thinking that Cleveland would have done better if he had sunk to be a McKinley or a Bryan.

We could do with more funny, insightful, and compelling reads like this that get that way without sacrificing accuracy. Troy says that Cleveland was a great President with a less great Presidency, in part because of the depression, perhaps Cleveland’s chief subject. Fittingly, Troy’s sales numbers may not be great because of the subject, but he’s clearly a great author.

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4 people found this helpful

A real insight into how far and how fast China improved in the 1990s-2012

Reviewed: 01-12-19

It is easy in this time of backsliding to forget how recent the liberalism being dialed back is. Paulson provides a superbly balanced approach.

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A little more demotic than I’d prefer

Reviewed: 12-28-18

But if Tom Clancy is your thing, this is for you. Lots of research packed into a twist filled dramatic plot, edge of the seat narration, and characters on all sides of the drama with believable and complex motivations. If Clancy is not quite your thing, you may find England somewhat better. If you hate Clancy for reasons that are not highly specific, probably best to look elsewhere.

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Important, but shallow

Reviewed: 12-11-18

There’s a lot of very good information here. Sadly, while the author periodically holds back from explaining how misinformed her interviewees are, she never stops making her contempt obvious. Clearly, when they complain about the Department of Natural Resources, they’re a: misinformed, b: racist, or sometimes c: complaining about not seeing people like themselves on the boards.

The possibility that there’s an actual substantive problem with the DNR is not considered. This isn’t to say that there aren’t cognitive and social issues that go into this stuff, but her endless calls for respect are pretty explicitly limited to procedural respect, to spending time with people. A better approach would include more of a sense of policy trade offs. Maybe they shouldn’t get what they want from the DNR (or from UW-Madison etc.), but if you go into the trade offs and establish that they have the inferior side of the argument you can at least have some respect for them as people. Instead, she assumes that they’re wrong about everything.

Sometimes she even checks. For example, she talks to people who feel like Walker listened to them more than Doyle did, and proves this wrong by counting the number of public appearances he made in the North, without having that listed in the claims she’s disproving.

The book’s central thesis is important and well argued. It would be a lot richer and more valuable if it were more like a modern ethnography and less like a Victorian exploration of an exotic breed of savages. In particular, more time suggesting reasons they believe things that do not involve them being hoodwinked, less time speculating slander that is explicitly not based in her interviews.

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4 people found this helpful

More effort to say that decisions were good or bad than to describe them.

Reviewed: 09-12-17

The, as yet incomplete, series that this book is a part of is generally exemplary in giving equal space to the more and the less popular periods of American history; books pretty consistently cover thirty year periods.
Herring has talked in interviews about how much he was thinking about Iraq when he wrote this book, and boy does it show. The first two and a half books of the Oxford history take America up to independence. These books receive no counterpart pages in this; "From Colony to Superpower" includes the superpower part, but not the colony. In general, events that can be used to talk about Iraq get a lot of space, which means that the first century and a bit he does cover goes by quickly.

While the superlative volumes of the series at its best do include value judgments, this book repeatedly devotes three or even four sentences in close proximity to describing Herring's view on the correct policy (often in the form of deriding the intelligence or education of those who disagreed with him; it appears from this volume that no intelligent or moral people were on the wrong side of historical foreign policy debates, no hucksters and charlatans on the right side).
Given the degree to which details are often smoothed over, this is not because he had space to spare.
We are told that the Afghan war was important, for instance, in the context of deriding Bush for Iraq, but we receive no description of the importance of Afghanistan. The degree to which this position mirrored the Obama speeches at the time may just be coincidence, but, Wilson and Vietnam aside, it falls into a general pattern of Democrats being uniformly correct in their foreign policy positions. The decision not to intervene more in the Chinese Civil War, for instance, is not a trade off that later saw America pay a high price in Korea (to say nothing of the price paid by China in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution). Rather, this was a struggle between the noble Truman and villainous and ignorant Republicans.
To put it another way, the language used is that appropriate to the OUP, but the substance is that of the Victorian children's histories parodied in 1066 And All That.

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7 people found this helpful

The best Senatorial book of the cycle

Reviewed: 06-04-16

The book is an even handed, readable and enjoyable romp through the last thirty, but particularly the last few, years of Senate history, accompanied by a large dose of all American personal story. I'd particularly recommend this book to students as it provides an excellent framework from which to judge future political claims.

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2 people found this helpful

Stream of consciousness wonder

Reviewed: 04-26-16

Hilarious introduction, much less impressive body. Some gems (vets come back and discover that somebody(singular) has taken all the jobs; clearly an industrious villain), but mostly a multi hour version of a Trump speech.

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1 person found this helpful