Mini-reviews of books I read in 2018

Here are some thoughts on books I read in 2018. As always (going back to the old Rs.5), absolutely no poli sci books allowed on this list. I may have forgotten one or two books but I'm not sure. Anyway, without further ado:


Basketball and Other Things by Shea Serrano

Really fun book. The footnotes and illustrations alone make it worth it. Almost as encyclopedic as Simmons' masterpiece, and highly recommended for anyone into the NBA. The important thing is he has all the right opinions, especially on questions like Jordan vs Lebron. He's also really, really funny.


The Spider Network: How a Math Genius and a Gang of Scheming Bankers Pulled Off One of the Greatest Scams in History by David Enrich

Meh. If you want to understand the 07-08 financial crisis, you'd be better off reading any of Michael Lewis' books on the subject (except...see below). This is less about the grand structure of high finance/corruption (is there a difference?) and more about how autistic one guy in London in the 2000s happened to be (everything from his relationships to his crimes are boiled down to this aspect by the author). It's a good hate read for people who hate finance and financiers but honestly not that well-written.


All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire by Jonathan Abrams 

I fell in love with Abrams during the halycon Grantland days (I refuse to believe that the internet will ever see anything as good as Grantland again). I gobbled up his book on high schoolers going to the NBA (also highly recommended). This was just something else. I thought I knew everything about The Wire but not even close. If you watched and liked the show, you should buy and read this book. So many great details and anecdotes that were totally new to me.


Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Steve Coll

I don't know too many Americans -- academics, journalists, whatever -- more knowledgeable and careful about South Asia than Coll. Did I agree with everything in it? Obviously not, it's more than 700 pages. But this was really fantastic. Great writing, extensive and deep sources, and about as nuanced and fair as you can get about stuff that Americans, Afghans, and Pakistanis get very, very riled up about (just log in to Twitter on a random Tuesday and see for yourself). Highly recommended.


Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald

Soooooo funny. You can hear Norm's very unique and very identifiable voice and intonation in every sentence. In true Norm fashion, you don't really know what's true, what's based on something true but taken beyond a recognizable state, and what's wholly false. As it turns out, he's one of those anti-anti-Trump people -- something I discovered on Youtube, not this book -- but whatever. If you like Norm and his comedy, you have in all likelihood already read this, but in case not, please do so.


White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson

Pass. This book got a lot of hype from some people on Twitter so I bought it. Since I have taken a single course in African American history in college and read Ta-Nehisi Coates' columns before he disappeared, it had nothing to offer to me. There was basically zero information in it that I didn't already know, which is pretty disappointing given this is hardly my area of study. It is aimed at the person who saw Trump elected in 2016 and wondered "wow, does America have a problematic racial past?" That's not me, and if it's not you, move right along.


Life and Death in the Andes: On the Trail of Bandits, Heroes, and Revolutionaries by Kim MacQuarrie

Really enjoyable! I wish there was less Peru in this book and more Argentina and Chile, but whatever, that's splitting hairs. I've been on the lookout for more "casual" literature about Latin America, and this absolutely hit the spot. Fun, digestible stories about everything from Escobar to Machu Picchu to Che to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.


Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

Yikes. This was super depressing. It was also one of the best books I've ever read, very touching and very real. It's about housing in urban America, choosing Milwaukee as its case study but applicable to many, many more cities. Honestly, homelessness is not something I've paid much attention to in the past, but the precariousness of many people's living situations was really brought home in this (no pun intended). Before opening it, I thought it would be a simple black-white thing, but it's really not. The book is not super long but it is quite heavy, so you should not anticipate finishing it quickly.


The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames by Kai Bird

A biography of a guy who worked for the CIA in the Middle East and was killed in the Beirut bombing of 1983 (that's not a spoiler). On the one hand, it's a bit hagiographic and sets up the subject on a pedestal (perhaps understandable given the author was Ames' friend). On the other, it's a pretty good window into the lives and times of spies and spy agencies. Ames seems to have been a good guy and unlike many American officials, did not have ridiculous or idiotic ideas about the Middle East/Arafat/the Palestinians etc. Pretty interesting read though I would have appreciated a somewhat more critical take.


Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victor by Ben Macintyre

Now this was a spy book. Wow. It did not take me long to get through this. You know how some books are basically movies, but you're reading them? This is like that. Fast-paced and super entertaining. Highly recommended.


Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder

This fell somewhere between "highly recommended" and "meh". Ever since watching The Lives of Others all those years ago, I have been really fascinated by East Germany. How does a society function when everyone is spying on everyone else? I remember visiting the Stasi museum in Berlin in 2016 and loved it, probably one of my 2-3 favorite museum visits ever. Did this book do justice to all that? It didn't totally hit the spot for me, but it's still pretty good and tells different East German citizens' stories in their own words without too much editorializing. My favorite parts were hearing from the old Stasi spies directly. It can be found for pretty cheap online, so if you're into this era/area, you should buy and read it.


Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis

I read and loved Liar's Poker, Moneyball, and The Big Short, so I must confess this was a bit disappointing. Lewis ventures beyond what he knows really, really well -- finance, money, and the culture of Wall Street -- to making Gladwellesque pronouncements about Greek, German, Irish, and Icelandic culture. Did you know Germans like to be clean on the outside but dirty on the inside, and are obsessed with shit? (Literally: shit). And furthermore, did you know this obsession with shit and the clean/dirty dichotomy can explain how German banks acted in the 2000s? Well, now you do. It's a bit off-putting. There were too many such passages in this book for me to recommend it.


A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman

The only book on this list I didn't finish. I am sorry, I couldn't bring myself to care about the finer details of random battles between the French and English more than 500 years ago (yes, I know they weren't "The French" or "The English" five hundred years ago but you know what I mean). The chapter on the plague is absolutely ace, and if you can get a scan/PDF of that, I would definitely read it. But this book is about 200 pages too long, for me anyway. My only prior experience with Tuchman was her World War I book, so I was pretty surprised to see how dry this was, but maybe that's just me.


Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

I bought this after Bourdain killed himself. My family history means that every suicide in the news stings, but this one, for some reason, hurt quite a bit more. I am not sure why; I never really watched his show and didn't know too much about him before he died. The crazy thing is once you read the book, you can start seeing little random clues and signs about Bourdain's depression and suicidal tendencies (he brings up his death totally randomly and out-of-nowhere a number of times). The book itself is fantastic, whether you cook or not and whether you know anything about food or not. Yes, there is that New Yorker essay floating around that functions as a nice excerpt, but do yourself a favor and read the whole thing: it is laugh out loud funny, insightful, and sweet. I do wonder how much of it still applies -- it's 2018, surely restaurants have worked out a way to serve fresh fish on Mondays? -- but a lot of it still rings true, at least to an uneducated consumer.


The Barcelona Inheritance: The Evolution of Winning Soccer Tactics from Cruyff to Guardiola by Jonathan Wilson

Yes, yes, yes. This book was basically sex. Though nothing will ever live up to Inverting the Pyramid, this was a welcome bounce-back for Wilson, after his Argentina book which I found kinda disappointing. It pairs nicely with Winner's Brilliant Orange and Lowe's book on Barca/Madrid. Wilson melds tactics, history, and results through the major personalities that were at or around Barca in the 1990s -- Cruyff, Mou, Pep, Koeman, Van Gaal, Lucho -- and tracks how their ideas about football changed or did not. Highly recommended for Barca, Dutch, Spanish, and football fans more generally. 

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