

What Are You Reading?

Summer is usually a good time to catch up on reading and with Chicago temps running in the triple digits all week there’s little else to do.  I’m interested to hear what books have caught your attention.  Post your recommendations below.  Here are a few of mine:


In recent years a series of authors have sought to explain the basis for the success and failures of different political models.  Jared Diamond perhaps launched the trend in 1997, with Guns Germs and Steel.  Diamond traced economic success to the advantages of geography.  His analysis made sense in understanding why European colonists, for example, held such advantages over the Native Americans.  It shed much less light, though, on why relatively poor Britain became a world power while wealthy Spain stagnated.

In 2000, Hernando de Soto published The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else.  He made an interesting, but incomplete case that national success was derived from the proper recording and protection of property rights.

The authors of Why Nations Fail offer an explanation of national success that is probably more relevant for modern times than Diamond’s and more comprehensive than de Soto’s.  They claim that open inclusive institutions that incorporate broad public opinion into public policy are the key to national success.

Preserving those institutions requires a careful balancing act, maintaining sufficient central control for the government to function while preserving enough devolution of power that creative destruction can occur.  Even in a relatively free society, such as the early Roman Republic, as soon as powerful elites develop enough influence to use public policy to protect their narrow interests, the society begins to stagnate.  As the masses lose their political influence, they lose their protection against exploitation.  Growing exploitation destroys the state’s legitimacy leading to economic and political decline.

The book is packed with stories from history illustrating their points.  In particular, their comparisons of Southern Slavery/Jim Crow regimes with the relative freedom and prosperity of the Northern states hits home.

Winter’s Bone

One blogger described Winters’ Bone as the “Gone with the Wind of the Scots-Irish.”  A young Ree Dolly, played by Jennifer Lawrence in the Oscar-nominated film version of the story, must save her family when her father, Jessup, disappears.  Jessup posted the family’s Ozarks homestead as bail after a drug arrest.  It is apparent that’s he’s been murdered, but she must produce proof to satisfy the bond.

Her mentally ill mother can’t help and the family is isolated from the larger clan by the suspicion that Jessup became an informer.  It’s a rare thing to see my grandparents’ cadence portrayed with both honesty and sympathy in a work of literary fiction.  The story is fantastic, but I’ll read it again just for the language.

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

It is tough to adequately describe any of Charles Murray’s work without tripping over Godwin’s Law.  Needless to say, the emphasis Murray places on genetics as the touchstone of all individual and cultural success has been, um, out of fashion since sometime in the mid-Forties.  Murray is consistently annoyed by the revulsion his work so often inspires.  He blames political correctness, claiming that his science should speak for itself, but Murray himself in Coming Apart explains that the science isn’t there…yet.  He believes science will catch up to him.

Murray’s thesis is that America’s genetic superiors, the supersmart people who are capable of living the best, most successful lives, are gradually walling themselves off from everyone else.  Instead of lording over their inferiors and instructing them on the best way to live, they are failing the rest of us through a sort of noble politesse.  The muddle-headed masses, deprived of the influence of the overclass, are disintegrating into a morally bereft heap of fast-food, primetime TV, and unwanted pregnancy.

Since the concentration of the best, smartest genes (through what Murray calls ‘The College Sorting Machine’) is the driving force behind this problem, Murray has few useful fixes to offer.  Basically, the best people need to be more assertive, firmly but lovingly reining in the rest of us who are hopeless idiots.

The book is interesting because of Murray’s anecdotal, yet still persuasive depiction of the fracturing of American society.  Murray is seeing something real and amorphous, then focusing it through his somewhat horrifying political lens.  His conclusion is, as usual, worthless, but the anecdotal information he collects has potential.  The vast expansion of freedom and wealth that we’ve experienced over such a compressed period of time (Murray sees this trend starting in the Seventies) has in fact splintered the country.  It has not merely split the Middle Class, it has shattered it into dozens of categories and collections with different goals, values, and definitions of success.  Murray misses this phenomenon even as he accidentally describes it in fascinating detail.

The book is worth a read, but it only makes sense if you start by reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  Gladwell describes what Murray’s ideology won’t let him see – that raw talent is a relatively minor component of success.  Gladwell describes the ways that family and community create the soil in which talent can flourish.

Others that have been good:

In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire – Islam finally starts to get the same historical-critical attention that Christian literalists have long complained about.

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cyber-Crime Underworld – Ever wonder what those spammers are actually looking for and how they make their money?  This book does for the Internet what the movie Jaws did for skinny-dipping.

What are you reading this summer?

Categories: General
Chris Ladd