Library
This library is a record of books that I’ve read, with a written response to each. There are no ratings here. I limit recommendations, and I do not write with the aim of reviewing. A book might make me think about something else, I may engage extensively with one passage, or I might evaluate the argument of the text as a whole. The texture of my responses will shift depending on the text.
One caveat: the write-ups from before 2024 read more like book reviews, because that’s what they were. Most started life on Goodreads, a few in graduate seminars, back before this site existed.
Some of my responses are short (perhaps a few paragraphs) while others may be entire essays. The amount written is a reflection not of the quality of the book, but of my own thinking.
My books are listed in reverse-chronological order by when I completed them. Each entry is listed in full bibliographic form, with a short annotation below. Some of these I own, others I do not.
2019
The Ottaways are excellent at historical narrative and remarkably terrible at historical interpretation: reading 1960s Algerian politics as Ibn Khaldun’s asabiya is Orientalist, projecting a timeless past onto a fundamentally different people. Nonsense; the same pressures appear everywhere from the Soviet Union to China.
A really interesting subject: most discussion of the Harkis paints them in a derogatory manner, and Crapanzano, while not enamored of them, is sympathetic. His loosely phenomenological language suffers at times from syntax; some paragraphs took me real time to get through.
O'Ballance, Edgar. The Algerian Insurrection 1954-1962. Archon Books, 1967.
Really sloppy work. O’Ballance is almost obsessed with painting the 1954 outbreak as the work of power-hungry radicals, near-Leninists with nationalism in place of Communism; he misses that the vanguardists had very real concerns, and that a surprised Algerian peasantry was not therefore an opposed one.
McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976.
McNeill’s contribution was centering disease as a subject of historical analysis at all: before this, nobody gave thought to disease’s role in historical processes. The book is so foundational it has been eclipsed by its successors, and much of it rests on hunches newer science can now test.
A bit dated, especially on handwritten versus typed and whether to use a computer (questions almost unthinkable in the academy these days). Nevertheless, there’s some good advice in here, and it was worth the short amount of time it took to read.
Great synthetic overview, less eurocentric than competing surveys though the colonial empires deserve more focus. The argument, if there is one: the 1920s were a brief dance on the edge of a precipice. A brief dance it was.
Informal imperialism through the biographies of six chartered-company leaders: it frequently feels disjointed, and Bown’s “Age of Heroic Commerce” is nonsense (heroic for whom?). Still, most of these narratives are not well-known, so it makes for some interesting reading.
Appreciated better the second time through: Moore’s “permissive” versus “neo-Leninist” ideal types explain Tunisia’s successful early modernization. Clearly dated, with laughable predictions about the presidential succession, but suggestive of the decolonizing hopefulness of the mid-60s.
Micaud, Charles A. Tunisia: The Politics of Modernization. Pall Mall Press, 1964.
A goofy little book from 1964: Tunisia’s modernizing success was political, not economic, explained through a four-stage model of colonial modernization. The model seems outright wrong to me; Micaud overstates the staticity of Beylical Tunisia and misses the weight of postcolonial decisions.
Moorehead, Alan. Desert War: The North African Campaign 1940-43. Sphere, 1965.
A bit disappointing: just an English journalist’s eyewitness account of the war between Benghazi and Cairo, with no Operation Torch or Tunisian Campaign. Handy for a journalist’s view of northeast Africa; not suitable for studying the Maghrib in broader terms.
Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
A great skeleton of events for newcomers to the Cold War, but it overweights superpower politics and treats the conflict as inherently ideological when the superpowers’ real goal was global mastery; too much praise for the icons of the 80s. Decent, and inferior to Westad.
Fakhry, Majid. A History of Islamic Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
An excellent overview of Islamic philosophy for novice readers, with a qualification: you need basic Plato, Aristotle, and especially neo-Platonism going in (Plotinus and Porphyry are crucial), and I didn’t. Dense at times, but Fakhry does his best to make it accessible; I’ll revisit after some Classical and Hellenistic philosophy.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.
It’s not good, it’s not terrible. I would have loved this eight years ago, but Dean’s treatment of his wives made me angry: he destroys everything he touches, and yet he’s supposedly the allure of the book. I understand the literary merit; I cannot in good conscience recommend it.
Lovecraft, H.P. The Call of Cthulhu. Penguin Classics, 2016.
My opinion is really mixed: the plots are dull and the real power is the dream-grotesque atmosphere; “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” alone should bring him fame. The inheritance theme (we inherit the sins of our ancestors) is where he’s most racially prejudiced: reprehensible, even for his time.
A solidly written summary of the youth’s role in the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, though published a bit hastily: Egypt ends sensibly with Sisi’s coup, but Tunisia and Libya simply fizzle out, and Cole underestimates the role of Islam in millennial politics.
Really an important work on sovereignty, but not an approachable one: Agamben writes for other philosophers, with constant name-dropping of obscure classical and medieval thought, and it takes some time of close reading to get the point.
Boucheron, Patrick, ed. France in the World: A New Global History. New York: Other Press, 2019.
From an academic perspective, excellent: not a cohesive global history but episodes of France in the world and the world in France. But it requires a solid sense of French history that Americans don’t have, so I question its utility here; digest it slowly rather than cover-to-cover as I did.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Translated by David McDuff. London: Penguin Books, 2004.
A scathing critique of Russian imperial society from the perspective of a devout Christian: Russia so corrupt that not even Jesus Christ himself could endure it. Read against the rise of imperial-philia among the Russian Orthodox today, it makes a superb case that admiration for the empire is misguided at best.
Most of this is really good and helpful for travelers to Tunisia, though the history section is super rushed, the content on censorship is out of date (published a year before the Arab Spring), and there are weird, essentializing statements like references to the “Tunisian psyche.”
An outstanding work: Campbell argues women were essential to the Croix de Feu/PSF’s success, politically active in the “social sphere” without full citizenship rights; in North Africa, where their strength was less, male settlers enacted a patriarchal, authoritarian, and racial system of power fairly called fascist.
A really interesting argument: the “Libyan nation” first emerged among colonial-era exiles, while those at home identified with Tripolitania or Cyrenaica. Admirable work on a woefully understudied nation, though it reads like a dissertation and needs editing.
Nagle pulls no punches, and she’s sound on Millennial-Right tactics (subversion inherited from the counterculture, closer to interwar fascism than to the 90s culture warriors), but she doesn’t quite get the movement: she misses its demographic paranoia, European identitarianism, and its women. Felt rushed; worth a look for the uninitiated, by no means exhaustive.
Weir, Andy. The Martian. New York: Crown Publishers, 2014.
Some of the science went over my head and I don’t think the story is actually that plausible, but Weir kept me hooked: turning a manned Mars mission into a survival novel was a great idea, executed rather well despite sometimes forced dialogue. I really loved this one.
Mann, Sally. Immediate Family. London: Phaidon, 1992.
Supremely uncomfortable to look at. Critics say Mann depicts her children in an almost “sensual” manner, but I don’t think that’s quite it; perhaps it’s simply seeing the closeness of family life, candids and embarrassing photos throughout, from the outside.
Townsend, Naomi. Mother Words: Poems from the First Year. Independently Published, 2018.
A short collection I really enjoyed: Naomi shows motherhood as a universal process, the same across time and space, by writing not the world around raising children but the emotional relationship between mother and child. Don’t let the self-publication fool you; it’s really good.
From 1940 to 1943 the heart of Free France was not London but Free French Africa, and the archetypal early resistance fighter was black, from Chad, Cameroon, or Oubangui-Chari. An important story that transforms our idea of World War II and of “France,” and Jennings tells it remarkably well.
Woolf, Virginia and Eudora Welty. To the Lighthouse. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.
I understand the literary merit, but it’s not for me: emotional and psychological tensions between individuals, read like putting sand through a sieve. I don’t remember the beginning and doubt I’ll remember the end; maybe I’ll try again some other time.
An excellent study of Fascist Italy’s contest with France over Tunisia, the lynchpin of Mussolini’s “fourth shore”: Italian settlers and Tunisian nationalists played against the French state until the alliance with Nazi Germany wrecked it all. Essential to understanding Italian foreign policy between the wars.
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2010.
It first seemed paper-thin and a bore, but Salinger speaks through what is unsaid: Holden’s war on phoniness is its own self-censoring, and he can’t admit what he loves at risk of sounding corny. One of the most human characters I’ve read; the carousel scene brought me to tears.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
The first hundred pages are slow, but it picks up into an outstanding novel. Kesey is deeply critical of institutional power, and Foucault seems almost weak after reading this: they share an overarching argument, but Kesey is much better at illustrating the “Combine,” the tentacles of power, to general audiences.
Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Berkley Books, 1954.
An engaging, deeply Freudian novel: Jack the Id, Ralph the Ego, Piggy the Super-Ego, pitted against Rousseau’s noble savage. But if it takes utter isolation for the Id to manifest, what lets Ego and Super-Ego triumph in the adult world? No answers, lots of questions.
Steichen, Edward, ed. The Family of Man. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990.
THIS is the liberal universalism I love so dearly. The reasonable criticisms (American-centric, general experiences rather than deeply individual ones) don’t undo the really important message here, one that needs preserving in an age of divisive identity politics and integral nationalism.
Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Vintage Books, 2003.
More a novella than a novel (I read the whole thing in one sitting), and not really about the dog at all but about living with autism and its effects on the people around you. The ending was a bit abrupt, but I really enjoyed it.
A short work with a large purpose: introducing the Carpatho-Rusyn people. Not a ton of detail (10-15 page chapters, large print, colorful images), but I came away with a reasonable sense of how they fit into the history of Eastern Europe.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Return of the King. The Lord of the Rings, 3. New York: Mariner Books, 2012.
The Return of the King finishes the series with excellence: Book 5 is the best in the whole story, Book 6 above all bittersweet. I’m sad it’s over, though digging into Tolkien’s supplementary works would be superfluous.