How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

How to Hide an Empire is the bookend, if you will to James Bradley's The Imperial Cruise. From its title alone, Daniel Immerwahr's thesis is clear: yes, the United States is and has long been an empire. (This surprises exactly no one who has read such works as Lost Kingdom or Notes on a Foreign Country.) More than the outlines of the empire itself, which Immerwahr traces diligently and convincingly, what he truly sets out to explore is how so few Americans can possibly be aware of the facts of empire. Aside from the obvious answer that what passes for 'education' in this country frequently leaves much to be desired, Immerwahr points to the fact that globalization has replaced colonization, making it easier to hide an empire. And then, of course, is the deeply ingrained American belief that empire is 'bad' and that empires are, at their core, at least a little bit evil. Drawing on the example of Star Wars, Immerwahr writes that the US "even fights empires in its dreams."

Perhaps, though, it's surprising that the US empire was never larger than it was. After all, this is a country where, in 1830, fewer than 100 people called Chicago home; six decades later, more than a million residents lived in the shadows of the world's first "dense cluster of skyscrapers" - and this despite the best efforts of Mrs. O'Leary's cow. The sky was the limit, no? (And perhaps it might have been had the Americans not been late to the party. This lateness is at least partially attributable to the war for independence they had to fight from their own mother empire, Great Britain, but I digress. In any event, Cecil Rhodes was already lamenting that "the world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered, and colonized" well before Teddy and the Rough Riders charged San Juan Hill.)

Speaking of Teddy, Immerwahr walks a fine line between awe at Teddy's exploits and exasperation at their extent, as when he notes "that the man who played such an important part in starting and expanding the war - a political appointee with no combat experience - should also become the hero of its decisive battle seems more fictional than factual. But an aura of "Wait, that really happened?" engulfed much of Theodore Roosevelt's life." It's also from Immerwahr that I learned for the first time that while campaigning for president, Roosevelt was shot in the chest and close range and preceded to speak for an hour as "blood ran from his body" before, presumably, seeking medical attention. How did we not cover *that* in school? 

Joking aside, this is a book everyone in America needs to read, for the lessons here are unfortunately entirely too timely and resonant today. One example? "Combine a republican commitment to equality with an accompanying commitment to white supremacy, and this is what you got: a rapidly expanding empire of settlers that fed on land but avoided incorporating people. Uninhabited guano islands - those were fine. But all of Mexico or Nicaragua? No." What's striking about the empire of old, though perhaps it shouldn't be, given the aforementioned, is how poorly the US ran it once it was established. As Immerwahr notes, there was a period of months - months! - when the entire territory of Alaska had not a single federal official in it. FDR's first governor of Puerto Rico "left reporters with the distinct impression that he didn't know where the island was." Mercy.

Still, as timely as this work is, it's Immerwahr's writing that makes it such a pleasure to read. Writing of the nuclear tests on Bikini atoll, Immerwahr notes, "to the proverbial Martian looking on from space, it must have appeared that humanity was for some indiscernible reason waging furious, unrelenting war on a string of sandbars in the middle of the Pacific." Or consider his description of the valor displayed by the Hawaiian regiments in World War II: " 'valor' in this case being a euphemism for an extreme disregard for personal safety in the enthusiastic service of killing Nazis," or of war itself, which Immerwahr writes is "entropy." He explains, "atoms split, buildings tumble, people die, and things fall apart. As wars go, the Second World War was the big one - a giant, planetwide entropic pulse that converted whole cities to rubble and some fifty-five million living humans into corpses." (At the risk of stating the obviously, I'll note how much more powerful - and persuasive - Immerwahr's description is as compared to the anodyne "war is hell.")

It is largely to this planetwide entropic pulse that Immerwahr attributes the fall of the old empires. Beyond the well-known impulses toward independence, Immerwahr makes the case that the efforts necessitated to win the war - the need to develop synthetics for rubber and silk and so much more that became unavailable when the colonies went offline amidst the fighting - meant that once the war was over, the empires as they had existed for centuries - as the source of raw materials - were no longer needed. The materials the colonies had long supplied could now be created with the magic of chemistry. At least in the developed world. U Thant's observation that "the truth, the central stupendous truth, about developed economies is that they can have - in anything but the shortest run - the kind and scale of resources they decide to have," rings as true today as the world clamors for supplies of a covid vaccine, as it did in the 1960s.

And so it is that science and the global economy have given the US an empire the likes of which even good Queen Vic never could have imagined. Late in the book, Immerwahr offers an example (something to do with changing the universal standard for stop signs, shortly after having set the standard) of the "stupefying privilege of the United States." He's not wrong - it's just that said privilege extends so far beyond stop signs as to beggar belief. That most of the inhabitants of this country are unaware of the fact is proof in itself. 

Five stars.

A Prayer for Owen Meany

I must have read A Prayer for Owen Meany close to 20 years ago; in the interim, the details had faded, and I remembered mainly that parts of it made me laugh harder than any book I'd read before or since. 

My memory was correct: I did laugh until my side hurt, and more than once. I also cried. But this book is so much more than that. It is, first of all, a joy to read from the standpoint of how, exactly, the story unfolds, the delicious care John Irving takes in deciding how much to reveal and when to reveal it. It is also a marvel for how expertly Irving fits an entirely fictional narrative into the cloth of historical events and (at the time it was written) current events. That the narrator, Johnny Wheelwright, is an English teacher and therefore many classics of literature also make an appearance is the icing on top.

Irving is the master of the improbable, and Owen Meany is infused with it from the opening pages (Johnny's mother being killed by an impossibly hit foul ball at a Little League game) to the closing lines (the inclusion of which, here, would spoil the story). Lest you think that only the events of the story are improbable: I assure you, the characters, too, beyond a mere mortal's imagination. 

It is, perhaps, this improbability - the impossibility - that renders the touches of wisdom so sharp. Just as the reader falls into the trap: that these people and this story is so ridiculous as to qualify as mind candy, that's the moment Irving springs one of his lines. "It's a no-win argument," he writes in the midst of describing Johnny's over-the-top cousin, "that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth." Who among us doesn't wish to know more of said mysteries?

Owen Meany, the reader learns early, does not believe in coincidences. The notion of a coincidence is described by him as a "stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design." Given the structure of Owen Meany, I think it's fair to ask whether it is John Irving who does not believe in coincidences....and whether he might be at least a little bit correct.

Five stars.

7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain

 Lisa Feldman Barrett's 7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain is a slim little volume, and timely (more on that in a minute); probably if you haven't spent the last 3-4 years reading all of the neuroscience you could get your hands on, it's more interesting and more informative that what I may make it seem because I have read so much on the brain these past few years.

That said, it's well-written, and owing to the structure (each lesson is a chapter) and clean, concise writing, it's a fairly quick read. Having been published in 2020, the science is certainly the leading edge of what neurologists and others know; I'm heartened to read that both the resiliency and plasticity of the brain are ever-greater than has been understood in the past (which was ever-greater than previously thought, which was ever-greater, and so you get the idea). 

In terms of getting the most out of plasticity, Feldman Barrett details the neurological advantages of acculturation, which is "an extreme version of plasticity." As acculturation occurs when we are thrust into unfamiliar cultures and most respond to even the most basic interactions - such as how to greet one another, or navigating personal space and hand gestures - on the fly, it's fair to say that Feldman Barrett makes the case that travel is neurologically helpful. The book does not include any studies on the brains structures of those who have experienced such acculturation as compared to those who have not - and such studies may not even exist - but it doesn't seem a bridge too far to imagine that they exist....and that such differences may further explain the challenges various groups of people have in understanding one another.

Speaking of which..... I mentioned the "timeliness" of this book: Feldman Barrett speaks to the neurological underpinning of why humans prefer to exist in an echo chamber, the advantages and disadvantages of which are only too apparent these days, but - in no small part because of how our brains are wired - increasingly difficult to escape. As Feldman Barrett notes, "your nervous system is bound up with the behavior of other humans, for better or for worse." 

It is in the closing pages that she strikes at the heart of the matter, which is the ability of the collective mind to create and shape social reality. "Social reality may be one of our greatest achievements but it's also a weapon we can wield against each other. It is vulnerable to being manipulated. Democracy itself is social reality." Truer words...

The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

I read this book years ago and loved it - it set me on the path of reading much more by David Quammen, and much more non-fiction in general. As the years have passed and I've become fuzzier on the details, I decided to reread it. My first thought, is that I am glad I read this when I was working on my dissertation and clearly had greater...patience...for the scientific aspects of the work. Which should not be taken to mean that it's entirely dry or dull - far from it. It is the case that there's more discourse around competing theories than I remembered and more hard science, but there are plenty of Quammen's own adventures, and all of it - from the hard science to the unlikely encounters - is rendered beautifully.

Interspersed with the hypotheses and journal article excerpts are the anecdotes of Quammen's own travels, the  hilariously self-deprecating stories that led me to declare a decade ago that I wanted to *be* David Quammen when I grew up. As I read about him being mugged in Rio, for example, I could not help but think, "I should not be laughing this hard," and yet also recognize he's selected his words to have just that affect upon the reader. Obviously any author who writes of his half-hearted attempts to ensure he doesn't run into one of the world's deadliest serpents in Tasmania: "I place [my feet] as carefully, anyway, as a person can who's foolish enough to be hiking through the outback at night in cheap running shoes while wearing a headlamp that isn't turned on" is strongly suggesting the reader shouldn't take him too seriously.

While the pendulum swings between hilarity and sobriety, Quammen is always deadly serious, and quietly poignant. It could hardly be otherwise when the recurrent themes are "insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom," or more succinctly, "islands are where species go to die." I was reminded more than once of Hariri's Sapiens, though Quammen was ahead of the game on the measure by which Homo sapiens were afflicting their damage on the planet by some twenty years. Quammen writes "what it has done here in Guam is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species;" this sentiment is virtually the hypothesis around which Sapiens is written! (It's in the final pages where the parallels are most striking, though, particularly the observation that "the richness of the Earth's ecosystems might recover to previous levels within, oh, ten or twenty million years, assuming that Homo sapiens itself has meanwhile gone extinct too.") So there's the rub: to save the planet, we must eliminate ourselves. 

More than the thoughts Quammen provokes, his prose remains the crown jewel of the book. Whether in the form of a quick turn-of-phrase tucked into a longer sentence (such as the description of something as a "gloriously improbably gambit"), or writing about a scientist who continues to believe that an animal is not quite extinct, despite what Quammen terms empirical discouragement ("that's what faith is: belief that transcends data," a beautifully concise observation with applicability far beyond luckless conservation officers), Quammen's writing remains among the best I have encountered. Questioning the accuracy of one's recollection, Quammen writes "There's surely some little human detail, incidental, piercingly vivid, so poignant that even memory chooses not to remember it." That line stopped me: what in my life had fallen into that category? What tiny details had I subconsciously judged so poignant that even memory chose not to remember? 

But when the topic is the very survival of so many species - when the outcome, should we continue on the current trajectory can be only that "the world will be an emptier, lonelier place," - how can Song of the Dodo be imbued with anything other than poignancy and reflection? Whatever urgency Quammen felt as he researched and wrote this book in the 90s, that urgency is only greater today. For that reason, I find it a shame that Dodo has the heft of a doorstop: more people need to read these words, to consider what it means that "there are no hopeless cases, only people without hope and expensive cases," to weigh the value of flora and fauna against those of unrelenting development.

Where the Wild Ladies Are

I almost gave up on this book, which is described on Amazon as a "witty and exuberant collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese folktales." Both the wit and the exuberance build as the folktales progress, gradually linking together. Which is to say that I didn't get it at all for probably the first one-third, and then enjoyed the remainder of it well enough, though it won't be making any "best of" lists that I compile this year. That said, Aoko Matsuda's work is certainly interesting in what it represents, and there were a number of instances where I found myself laughing despite myself. (I also learned that Japanese pillows are stuffed with azuki beans - at least some of them - which is obviously why they're so amazing. I may add pillowmaking to my 2021 goals.) 

Matsuda should be lauded for the insights, too, as to the role of role of women, particularly in Japan. Most poignantly, she writes "Male employees had to pretend to be capable of doing things they couldn't do, while female employees had to pretend to be incapable of doing things they actually could do. Over the years, how many women had seen their talents magically disappear in that way?" In that sense, Where the Wild Ladies Are offers a modern-day corollary to Stranger in the Shogun's City, in which Japanese women struggle to find their place and controls their lives in the Edo era. Or, as Matsuda so succinctly puts it: how restrictive life as a functional adult is!

I am a sucker for all things Japanese, and the icing on the cake, if you will, was the late appearance of Himeji Castle, the sight of which first awed me - like so many others - from the window for the Shinkansen on my first visit to Japan. The castle tales, as well as stories of other quiet rhythms of life in Japan, was worth the wait.

Three stars. 

This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience

 Disappointing. 

Having read and loved several other books by Alan Watts, I pushed through this one hoping that it would improve, that the humor or grace or joy which so imbue his other works would appear, to say nothing of the golden words. How could it be that the man who penned "by all outward appearances our life is a spark of light between one eternal darkness and another" (Wisdom of Insecurity) or mused that one might swim to experience the water rippling past and for the shifting net of sunlight underneath (Still the Mind) managed essay after essay of long-winded sentences such as "the apparent multiplication of psychological disorders in our technological culture is perhaps due to the fact that more and more individuals find themselves caught in these snarls - in situations which the psychiatric anthropologist Gregory Bateson has called the "double-bind" type, where the individual is required to make a decision which at the same time he cannot or must not make." Sweet mercy. (The great irony is that Watts details his experiences with LSD in this book, so one would think if anything this little volume would be as given to fun as any others: no dice.)

Oh sure, there are still bits and pieces of sage advice and insights, my favorite of which centers on the Japanese and the "compulsion which turns every craft and skill into a marathon of self-discipline." Truer words... More poignantly, Watts notes that in gazing at the night sky "we make no comparison between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations" and that "there would be no bright stars without dim stars, and, without the surrounding darkness, no stars at all." Likewise, in the final pages, Watts leaves readers with the observation, proven so true to me in this interminable year that has been 2020 that "life organized so as to be completely foolproof and secure is simply not worth living." Still, these paltry lines feel like minor compensation for the slog through This Is It.

One star.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is as its title proclaims: a brief history of humankind. It's also a brief - and disturbing - history of humankind's impact on the planet and the other species, including those that were arguably human, that call it home. Spoiler alert: Harari minces no words in labeling Homo sapiens "ecological serial killers." It's hard to disagree. In any event, Harari manages to combine not only a general history, in which he effectively makes the case that our hunter-gatherer forebears of 10,000 years ago were happier and healthier than much of humankind today - with economic history (the origins of money and credit, the early trade routes, globalization in all its glory) and even aspects of philosophy. 

In regards to the latter, Harari in fact takes a sharp turn late in the book and goes as far as to pose the question of whether happiness depends on deluding oneself. (In case you can't tell, yes, I liked the book, and the writing, very much.) In fact, Harari's dry humor is on display from the first chapter when he declares, "Sapiens...is more like a banana republic dictator." I shouldn't have been surprised when a few dozen pages later, as he explains that the average sapien brain has actually decreased in size since we stopped having to hunt or forage our daily bread and that, in fact, the transition away from the survival lifestyle opened up "niches for imbeciles," which allowed the less....worthy?...to survive and pass on their unremarkable genes.

Time and again, Harari drives home the point that humans, excuse me, Homo sapiens, have lied, stolen, killed, and otherwise ruined things every opportunity they've had, literally from time immemorial. In the time of Hammurabi, "Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained." Cortes described the Spanish obsession with gold to the Aztecs succinctly as a "disease of the heart;" the Soviet experiment with the central barter system meant that "Everyone would work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs," became "everyone would work as little as they can get away with and receive as much as they could grab." And let's not get into the scourge of religion where, for example, "over the course of...1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion." (I told you, Harari's good.)

The miracle, it seems, is that we've survived to this point. Whether the species will continue to evolve for millenia more, though, is an open question. As Harari concludes, "is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?" 

Four stars.