Year in Reading, 2022

When I was younger, I always appreciated how Aaron Swartz (RIP) would compile a list of his yearly reading, along with brief blurbs and recommendations amongst them.

This year was probably my most productive in reading since high school, so I thought it would be worthwhile to tackle the project myself. As with last year, most of my reading was history, with a special interest in nuclear weapon policy and the build-up and maintenance of the national security state.

For me, ’50s through ’70s are the sweet spot—sharing enough concerns with the present that I find them vivid and relevant. After that it starts to get a little more emotionally charged and unpleasant, especially for stuff I remember being frustrated by at the time!

If you’re interested in my other reading history—or want to read the longer reviews I dashed out after finishing each book—you can check out my Goodreads page (or my The Story Graph profile).

(Following Aaron’s example, I’m bolding the especially-recommended reads.)

1. Notes on a Foreign Country by Suzy Hansen
   • Pretty daring to write a book about ignorantly wandering around a country, being corrected by the locals. I guess an Ivy League education doesn’t go as far as it used to.
2. Store of the Worlds by Robert Sheckley
   • A surprising, playful book of sci-fi short stories. NYRB Classics rescuing another under-heralded author from obscurity.
3. Hiroshima in America by Robert Jay Liston & Greg Mitchell
   • A really interesting look at how Truman and others understood the power of the bomb, and how they tailored their self-image to justify it in retrospect. Also goes into details of the 50th anniversary exhibition of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian, and the ferocity that right-wingers and veterans groups showed at anyone who would question their self-delusions about the necessity for killing tens of thousands of civilians.
4. Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald
   • An argument that continued intervention in Vietnam would be unsuccessful, written from an anthropological view while the war was still ongoing (1972). Interesting as a corrective on some American illusions about the war, but I would recommend skipping it and going straight to Young’s The Vietnam Wars (further down this list).
5. Bomb Power by Garry Wills
   • There’s an interesting book to be written here about how the nuclear bomb and project to build it helped give rise to the post-WW II world order and organization of the federal government. But Wills’ project is a little more narrow (and misleading for the title): examining how secrecy procedures developed during the Manhattan Project became a useful tool for all sorts of government work, and a way to expand executive branch power. Read Kaplan’s The Bomb and Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine before you bother with this one.
6. The Bitter Road to Freedom by William L. Hitchcock
   • The liberation of Europe from the Nazi war machine was a bloody affair, and WW II histories usually focus on the battles more than the civilian aftermath. Hitchcock’s account here brings some attention back to the effects on those not fighting, and how the Allies were fighting mass starvation just as much as enemy soldiers. Cities were ground into dust by artillery bombardments, and mass amounts of refugees had to be returned or resettled after hostilities ended.
7. The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
   • There’s a fig leaf that conservatives have leaned on recently in discussing discrimination: making a distinction between de jure segregation vs de facto segregation, and then throwing their hands up at the latter as not eligible for government remedy. Rothstein here aims to blow up the distinction by pointing out all the ways government aided segregation through zoning, builder subsidies for segregated communities.and more. It’s a necessary but also somewhat silly book, since it labors under the illusion that Federalist Society judges won’t just change their reasoning to a different justification.
8. Necronomicon by Alan Moore & Jane Burrows
   • Moore doing a pastiche/take on Lovecraft, unearthing some of the base impulses that went into HP’s work. Pretty good, and planning to read his followup Providence.
9. Gambling with Armageddon by Martin L. Sherwin
   • Fantastic book—not just on the Cuban Missile Crisis, but also on the decision-making processes within the Kennedy Administration. Sherwin does a fine day-by-day read of how the crisis developed, and just how much admin officials struggled to wrap their heads around the situation and their options. Just amazing how much they defaulted to preferring air strikes, and the number of times they ignored or forgot contrary evidence and arguments. Sherwin’s final book before his death just recently, and a masterpiece of analysis.
10. LA Confidential by James Ellroy
    • Far bigger and stranger than the excellent film adaptation, enough that even on a re-read I was surprised by the scope. Ellroy’s one of our great American novelists, and American Tabloid my pick for the Great American Novel.
11. Tomorrow the World by Stephen Wertheim
    • Works through the pivot of how American policy-makers changed their mindset to the global power-projection that’s been the rule after WW II. Good at emphasizing how great a shift it was, and how much it was driven by initial fears of Nazis ruling Europe (which would necessitate the US controlling the rest of the world to economically match them).
12. Raven Rock by Garrett M. Graff
    • Good look at the very elaborate but also somewhat silly plans to protect the government in times of nuclear war. Graff juggles a chronological history with deeper dives into the various facilities very well, including a chapter on how 9/11 tested how the plans would work under much less severe emergency circumstances. The upshot: “continuity of government” plans often prevent “continuity of governance,” as the process of shuttling them to safe facilities takes them out of the decision-making loop at the very moment they need to be in it the most. Even with advance warning, it seems like the best solution is to shuttle technocratic lower-level officials to the secure facilities—just in case—and leave everyone else in Washington.
13. Ike’s Bluff by Evan Thomas
    • A mostly-hagiographic account of Eisenhower’s foreign policy work as president. Thomas is trying to push back on the idea of Ike as an absentee president, instead arguing that his bland and confusing answers at press conferences were a deliberate ruse to avoid revealing information. He’s right, but that doesn’t make them any better! Less convincing is Thomas arguing that Eisenhower was bluffing everyone—even his own staff—when he advocated for using nuclear weapons in public and private statements. His goal was ultimately to save money on the military by leaning on nuclear weapons and CIA subterfuge to do the job more cheaply, but by feeding the anti-communist rhetoric within his own party he ruined a bunch of careers and managed to expand the military budget anyways. Sad!
14. America’s Cold War (2nd ed) by Campbell Craig & Fredrik Logevall
    • The best single book I’ve read so far on the Cold War. Craig and Logevall argue that domestic politics drove Cold War actions far more than traditional histories admit, and make their case well. Concise, well-written, insightful, and far, far better than the Gaddis Cold War book I read later.
15. The Vietnam War: A Concise International History by Mark Atwood Lawrence
    • A slim, recent look at the Vietnam War. Too short and neutral to be very insightful. Read Young’s The Vietnam Wars!
16. In the Shadows of the American Century by Alfred M. McCoy
    • Short book covering some recent trends in the American national security state. Interesting enough but I didn’t learn much.
17. Something to do with Paying Attention by David Foster Wallace
    • An excerpt from The Pale King, probably the most accessible example of late-Wallace fiction writing. Essentially a novella, and felt like revisiting an old friend.
18. The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis
    • About as enlightening as a head injury. Expected much more from the “dean of Cold War history,” but Gaddis leaves out a lot of inconvenient facts—and engages in some unconvincing Reagan praise to boot. Read America’s Cold War by Craig & Logevall (above) instead.
19. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X & Alex Haley
    • Enjoyed this re-read quite a bit. One of the things I appreciate the most about Autobiography is it feels like a man in the midst of changing, because he was cut down before editing the earlier portions to match his later revelations. So we get a man telling his story of the hustler lifestyle and its appeal before being saved by conversion to the Nation of Islam, only to later question those beliefs in the final third of the book. It’s a somewhat-accidental honesty and openness you don’t often see within a single book, and a fascinating way into the era.
20. Nuking the Moon by Vince Houghton
    • Seems like a surefire premise for a book to cover failed schemes of the Cold War, but totally botched. Too annoying and not terribly interesting.
21. The Kennedy Imprisonment by Garry Wills
    • Wills has the Kennedy family on pins here like butterflies in a specimen drawer. Damning on the interpersonal dysfunctions that spawned from Joe Kennedy and the way his sons needed an array of admirers.
22. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
    • An outstanding biography, fleshing out the factual record in ways that enrich the captivating dynamics in Malcolm X’s life. Especially helpful in covering his post-Nation activities, including the financial and organizational struggles that go completely unmentioned in the Autobiography. Feels like it’s almost in dialogue with that book, examining the elisions and asking why. Wanted to re-read both of these before tackling the newer Malcolm X bio by Payne, which… well, read two entries down.
23. Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow
    • Thorough, but the parade of facts somewhat drown out any insight. Giving a lot of credence to the play-by-play can drown out the fundamental ideological misconceptions that drove Vietnam intervention and ensured its failure. Read The Vietnam Wars by Young.
24. The Dead are Arising by Les Payne & Tamara Payne
    • Oof, maybe my biggest disappointment of the year? For a book festooned with awards, it falls far short of Manning Marable’s work. Yes, Les Payne was able to interview some key figures in Malcolm’s life and get some more material around his early childhood. But it means the book is over halfway over before he even enters the Nation of Islam! And the new material isn’t really insightful. The writing is terrible too, just really a dud of a book.
25. Nameless by Grant Morrison, Chris Burnham, etc
    • Morrison doing a pastiche/take on Lovecraft. Less successful than Moore’s effort listed above, even if there’s a few interesting elements. Only recommended if you’re really into Morrison.
26. One World or None by Various Authors
    • Amazing that by 1946 when this was published, they already understood the implications of nuclear weapons very well. They realized nuclear weapons could be mass-produced, that other powers would be obtaining them, and that there would be no foolproof defense against their use. A little more of a historical curio than the other books listed here, but still a neat read.
27. The Samson Option by Seymour M. Hersh
    • Excellent account of the genesis and development of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which still (to this day!) has not been officially acknowledged. One of the reasons it really hasn’t been surpassed is so much of this stuff deliberately didn’t have a bureaucratic memory, so each group of analysts were starting from scratch and rediscovering the same things officially denied. Lots of behavior here that would have been called “rogue state” from anyone else.
28. Conversations with Kennedy by Benjamin C. Bradlee
    • Biggest takeaway: Kennedy was a shameless gossip, up there with Trump.
29. The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell
    • Will quickly disabuse you of any notion of surviving a nuclear exchange, nor that survival would be preferable to death. He talks a lot about how nuclear war is looming over the world at the time (’80s), and the harmful psychological effects of repressed annihilation; similarities to the current climate change crisis are left as an exercise for the reader.
30. How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
    • Accurately bemoans the corporate business model of stealing away bits and pieces of your attention for profit. But were this book more honest with itself, Odell would have spent the whole thing extolling the virtues of a welfare state—removing precarity from people’s lives so they can focus on things that aren’t day-to-day survival. Alas.
31. The Age of Eisenhower by William L. Hitchcock
    • Much, much better than the Eisenhower book by Thomas. This one also covers Eisenhower’s presidency with a focus on his foreign policy, but is even-handed enough that even though the author is clearly pro-Eisenhower, he doesn’t leave out any facts or faults that run contrary to the narrative. I came away from the book seeing Ike as a truly flawed character with delusions about what Truman or Stevenson would do the country, and messianic ideas about how he was the only one to save it.
32. The Ghost by Jefferson Morley
    • Good book about a tough subject, CIA official James Jesus Angleton, with much of the traditional documentation you’d want either still-secret or already destroyed. A lot of sketchy stuff went on back in the day!
33. Screenplay by Sid Field
    • One useful take on the craft of writing a screenplay; not much on dialogue, which was a bummer.
34. Too Close to Call by Jeffrey Toobin
    • A madness rune of a book on the 2000 election debacle in Florida. Truly an all-time cursed state, which was stacked against Gore from the start. Any successful coup will look less like January 6th and more like the 2000 recounts: enough deliberate confusion that conservatives in the judicial branch have a pretext to impose their preferred outcome.
35. Restricted Data by Alex Wellerstein
    • An interesting albeit kinda-technical charting of restricted data, a novel category of “born secret” data created for the nuclear age. Fascinating to see the initial demands of extreme secrecy run into mass production and deployment of nuclear weapons, followed by commercial applications of nuclear reactors and other research.
36. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
    • A wonderful, evocative book on science that gets more fictional and allegorical as it goes along. Good stuff!
37. The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour M. Hersh
    • More on the Kennedys, with this one reading like an oppo book. With how much dirt was out there on the family, you start to understand why JFK’s first appointments were bringing Dulles and Hoover back for his presidency.
38. Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean
    • Excellent book using James Buchanan’s career as a through-line of the right’s ascendancy over the back-half of the 20th century. Mainly designed to educate and radicalize NPR-ish libs, which helps me excuse some of the omissions, like laying out the problem without a solution. (The solution would be to diminish the power of capital through democratic ownership of the means of production.)
39. Hav by Jan Morris
    • Morris was a travel writer, but maybe her most famous book is this account of an entirely-fictional eastern-European country. Very charming.
40. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman
41. What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman
    • Both these Feynman books are full of funny tales and anecdotes from his career. He had his personal faults, but his approach to science and learning was extraordinary.
42. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
    • Group biography of Lincoln with three of his cabinet-members: Seward, Chase, and (bafflingly) Bates. Mainly interesting for looking at how Lincoln made decisions, usually choosing the option that would keep him in the middle of his party and coalition. It worked out for the Civil War—but may well have run aground in the challenges of post-war Reconstruction, even without Johnson’s racist mania running rampant. The Obama administration read this book in 2005 and took away all the wrong lessons about moderation.
43. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
    • Should have been a 25-30 page short story by Ted Chiang or Borges.
44. Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin
    • James Baldwin’s essay prose is the closest I get to a religious experience. Just an outstanding writer, and he’s at the top of his game here.
45. A War for the Soul of America (2nd ed) by Andrew Hartman
    • Textbooky look at the culture wars from the 1970s through the 1990s. Evenhanded to a fault, treating conservative complaints as if they were in good faith. Very funny he wrote the conclusion in 2015 that culture wars were on the way out, only to write in the 2nd edition this year that, “ok, so Trump happened, but now culture wars really are on the way out, I swear!”
46. The Making of the President (1960) by Theodore H. White
    • Full of the illusions and misconceptions about the presidency that predominated in 1960, which is why it’s still interesting yet so dated today. Doesn’t help that White’s prose is thoroughly purple.
47. What Were We Thinking by Carlos Lozada
    • Bills itself as an account of how books tried to understand and cope with the Trump years, but takes on way too many books to do a good job. Each 25 page chapter covers a dozen or so books, so each one gets two (very short and spaced out) pages, about enough for a brief summary and occasional quip. And as a book reviewer, Lozada is sorely underequipped for the job, only able to point out internal contradictions and not pulling in facts from outside the books. His brief critiques are inevitably centrist and boring. Bleck!
48. All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward
    • This one’s fun because it’s a warts-and-all account of what reporting out a story looks like, complete with the wrong turns, weird games, and side-alleys that don’t pan out.
49. The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 by Marilyn E. Young
    • The best book I’ve read so far on the Vietnam War. Clearly identifies that Americans didn’t understand the base of the insurgency was southerners, so all the violence directed at trying to cow North Vietnam ended up having the opposite effect and encouraging escalation. And in their demands for not just a neutralist, but a resolutely anti-communist government for South Vietnam, they ensured it would not have an independent enough political base to win over southerners or even survive without constant American aid.
50. The Final Days by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein
    • Where All the President’s Men was the story of an investigation, this hews closer to Woodward’s later books in being an account from inside the Nixon administration, assembled after the fact from hundreds of interviews. Remarkable how many people stayed on, convinced they were the only person keeping the executive branch together; Haig, Kissinger, and Ziegler thought they were the only ones who could manage Nixon, and Nixon thought he was the only one who could manage American foreign policy.
51. One Day When I Was Lost by James Baldwin
    • One of his lesser-known works, this was Baldwin’s unproduced screenplay based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The first half feels electric, but Baldwin totally wrong-foots the post-conversion stuff—substituting “The Movement” for the NOI and eliding most of what made the era interesting. Spike Lee’s adaptation much, much better in that regard.
52. The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
    • A group biography of the intellectuals that drove escalation of the Vietnam War during the Kennedy and LBJ administrations. Halberstam does an excellent job of hashing out the different characters, and how the group dynamics of Kennedy and later LBJ worked against people who advised too much caution. Also includes some background on things like the fall of China and domestic political repercussions. Amazing this was written in 1972.
53. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
    • Still the best prose writer out there, but as a piece it’s not quite as good as Nobody Knows My Name. The bit where he meets Elijah Muhammad is odd and unsatisfying.
54. The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang
    • Just poisoned by the New Yorker essay form, with antiseptic prose and exposition sans insight. And the end where she veers into chronic Lyme and witchcraft? Woof. My least favorite book of the year.
55. One Man Against the World by Tim Weiner
    • More Nixon! This one is an account of his entire presidency, written recently enough it has access to all the tapes and documents to make it really damning. Not much coverage of the political side of Nixon (compared to, say, Nixonland), but it does get at how the Vietnam War drove the paranoia and impotence that caused him to lash out against enemies and authorize rampantly illegal actions.
56. Elite Capture by Olufemi O Taiwo
    • Examines how identity politics (and related phenomena) are used by the elite to reproduce existing power structures under a different guise. Sounds interesting, but the execution is pretty meandering. It’s a widespread enough problem that Taiwo keeps it pretty general, but that keeps it abstract enough that we don’t get a real program of action or great examples. Feels like a book that would be better from an organizer, or someone with a few more years of distance for perspective.
57. Lessons in Disaster by Gordon W. Goldstein
    • Like Halberstam, examines the decision-making process within the Kennedy administration around Vietnam, this time from 1961 to 1965. But this is more of a history book, with Goldstein examining the documentary evidence along McGeorge Bundy’s recollections decades later. Some genuinely good insights here, like the extent to which LBJ took cues from Eisenhower on Vietnam decisions to secure his right flank, or how LBJ may have run some important meetings for show so the staffers felt listened to. Goldstein makes the best case I’ve seen that JFK wouldn’t have escalated in Vietnam after 1964, but I’m still unconvinced; the domestic politics of it were still so toxic, and almost all his staffers were pushing in the direction of more troops.
58. Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew
    • An outstanding, original account of how the violence we meted out in Vietnam returned home in the guise of the White Power movement. More than just shared ideology, Belew shows the financial and logistical cooperation between White Power paramilitary groups in the late-’70s and ’80s. There’s also a short account of the brief anti-state turn in the ’90s, culminating in the Oklahoma City bombing and Eric Rudolph’s bombing spree later that decade. Could easily write a followup book about the movement’s turn this century back to being friendly with—and even partially embedded in—branches of the state like the Border Patrol and local police.
59. American Caesar by William Manchester
    • Great match of author and subject: you can’t capture Douglas MacArthur’s larger-than-life stature without a bit of purple prose. Not very critical of MacArthur—like most biographers who fall in love with their subjects—but entrancing enough I plowed through the 700+ pages.
60. The Long Walk by Stephen King (aka. Richard Bachman)
    • No plot twists, minimal plot beats, just King doing amazing character-work—building up our walkers and then stripping away their psyches until gibbering madness remains. A lesser writer would have made this a metaphor for something, but in King’s hands it’s a metaphor for everything.
61. The Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings
    • Went into this expecting a straightforward history of the war, but got so much more. Cumings isn’t particularly interested in the military side of things, instead plumbing the origins of the war and its ongoing effects. Unabashedly leftist and absolutely outstanding.