Summertime, and the Reading is Easy

Notes on recent bibliographic travels

Greetings from high summer, when many of us suspend our normal routines (which may include our regular media diets). But it’s also a time when many of us pick up—or may just like hearing about—new books on the publishing shoreline. The following are a few titles I’ve read lately.

I’ll begin with The [New] Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age, edited by Hal Brands. Back in 1943, with World War II raging, Princeton University Press published the first edition of this book, a collection of essays by esteemed strategists who sought to identify timeless trends of statecraft as well as consider specific circumstances—especially technological ones—that suggested that new times would call for new measures. The book was reissued in 1986 in the context of the Cold War and the complexities of the nuclear age. Now it’s back in a third edition, published in an era of military rivalry with China, asymmetrical warfare, and artificial intelligence. Makers of Modern Strategy is about 1100 pages long, and while I read it straight through, I think it probably works better as something you dip into. One essay I liked was Antulio Joseph Echevarria’s piece about Antoine-Henri Jomini, once more famous than the now better-known Carl Von Clausewitz. (Jomini was a less sophisticated thinker than Clausewitz but had quite a roller-coaster of a career). I was also intrigued by Robert Kagan’s iconoclastic defense of the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson—a once-lionized president about whom nobody, left or right, has much good to say these days—and Sergey Radchenko’s often amusing account of Leonid Brezhnev’s craving for American respect in the waning years of the Soviet Union. John Lewis Gaddis—the godfather of contemporary strategic studies—ties it up with a bow in the final piece. One final note: reflecting the spirit of the times, a significant number of the essays of this collection were written by women and people of color.

Speaking of women and people of color: I recently finished Chinese-Irish classicist Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s new book The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives. The premise of this study is simple but sturdy: the idea of the West is a lot more expansive than you think it is. To illustrate the point, Mac Sweeney renders a gallery of figures ranging from the familiar (Francis Bacon) to the obscure (Tullia D’Aragonna) to the recently canonized (Phillis Wheatley), all of whom challenged, expanded, or reimagined the borders of what we tend to think of as a stable Eurocentric world. Fair enough. But at this point in our history, it would be hard to deny the argument, assuming one were inclined to, and Mac Sweeney tends to create straw men along the way as well as to inject gratingly presentist preoccupations into her subjects (like an unsubstantiated assertion that Herotodus left Greece because he found it insufficiently diverse, or her complaints that democracy did not actually mean the same thing in ancient Athens as it did in the Age of Obama). An informative chapter on the recent leader of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, also suggests the degree to which Mac Sweeney backs herself into a corner: her energetic attempts to deconstruct the bias of the Western tradition start to look a little different when she bumps up against the flat pronouncements of the Chinese Communist Party. Her efforts to articulate a bracingly inclusive vision of intellectual tradition fail to fully acknowledge the degree she depends upon the epistemological foundations she’s quick to fault, and how much water there is in a glass whose emptiness she’s devoted to measuring.

I’ve been a Tom Hanks fan for a long time. (Actually, I devoted a chapter to Hanks’s body of work in my 2013 book Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, which was also issued as an Amazon Single back when the company was making a big push into online publishing. So when he published a collection of short stories five years ago, Uncommon Type, I bought it mostly on the basis of fandom. I was pleasantly surprised: this is a deft book, each piece of which is linked by a thematic connection to a typewriter (collecting them is a hobby of his). Hanks’s just-published first novel, The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece, is a big leap forward—a fully realized, narratively complex, and hugely entertaining story. (It surely helps to have friends in high places, editorially and otherwise; Hanks’s talent has always been in his ability to learn from other people.) As you might expect, this is a book about the movie business, and even a maven like me learned a lot about the process. But what makes it so satisfying is just how expansive his benevolent curiosity is, extending from usual suspects like film directors and movie stars to hotel clerks and rideshare drivers (some of whom happen to be women and people of color). There’s a nesting-doll quality to Motion Picture Masterpiece, in which he narrates a series of backstories on the way to telling a tale of how a child’s encounter with his World War II vet uncle in central California led to a comic book that inspired the making of an unconventional superhero movie. (The book features the talents of artist R. Sikoryak, whose graphic fiction, some of it in color, is interspersed throughout). Hanks is a solid sentimentalist, a figure squarely in the tradition of Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart. You can’t exactly say he exhibits vertiginous psychological complexity, but his sensibility shouldn’t be easily dismissed. In any case, it’s fun to spend time in his world. A gift from a gifted man.

A few honorable mentions for recently published books I read this recently: Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America is a deeply informed and readable survey of Native American history likely to be the standard treatment for some time. Ed Achorn’s The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention that Changed History tells a familiar story that reads like fast-paced streaming series (producers take note!). If you haven’t gotten around to them, Claire Keegan’s novels Foster and Times Like These, which depict rural Irish life of a couple generations ago, are little books in more ways than one. But they pack a huge emotional punch.

On the horizon: Jean Twenge’s: Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future. Twenge, a collaborator with Jonathan Haidt of Coddling of the American Mind fame, has done path-breaking research on the damage cell phones and social media have done to adolescents, especially girls. During a coming vacation, I’ll swing back and finally have a look a the novels of Canadian mystery writer Louise Penny, whose protagonist, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, features in the recent Amazon Prime series Three Pines, played by the reliably excellent Alfred Molina. I plan to take that on as soon as I finish the final season of Jack Ryan, which has just dropped on Prime.) After that, my summer itinerary includes a trip to London—and a foray into the world of David Copperfield, the novel Charles Dickens called “my favourite child.” Then maybe into Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer-prize reimagining of the story in Demon Copperhead. And so it goes.

Happy reading. Don’t be safe.

I will be taking a summer break from Americana. Please look for my return on July 14.