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.
2020
Loved this one: far more fleshed out and nuanced than the first volume, though I can’t quite place my finger on why. Neoplatonism was brand new to me, and I have to confess, it is completely my thing.
On first glance a text on how Mehmed Ali created the Egyptian military; really a critically important work on Egyptian state-building and the development of the Egyptian nation. I can’t speak highly enough about Fahmy’s work: it seems impossible to overestimate its value.
Mackintosh-Smith, Tim. Yemen: The Unknown Arabia. New York: The Overlook Press, 1999.
I expected a work of history; it’s entirely a travelogue with historical interpretations littered here and there. Mackintosh-Smith has a good sense of humor and a real love for Yemen; some of the writing comes off strangely naive, but the meandering style makes it rewarding.
Despite the bombast, Windschuttle is broadly correct: too many historians pigeonhole their ideas into theory when evidence should construct theory. But he’s too conservative for my taste, wanting to fully jettison post-structuralism and the rest; worth reading, not worth accepting wholesale.
Classic Kurlansky, good and bad: highly readable and at times entertaining, perfect for a popular audience, but he spends too much time exoticizing Basque people, running the risk of making a group whose origins are genuinely mysterious into something “other.”
Landes claims Europe has been the prime mover of development and modernity for the last thousand years; that is precisely the opposite of what the historical record shows. Patently wrong, and others have made that case much better than I could.
Honestly the definitive starting point for all things Ukraine, especially in the way Magocsi decentralizes Ukraine and depicts its panorama of peoples and cultures. Utterly excellent; one to come back to and read paragraph by paragraph.
Crouch, Blake. Dark Matter. New York: Crown, 2016.
Super interesting book: Crouch starts with an idea he was interested in and builds the story around it, and the concept is well thought-out. A good read, though the characterization and dialogue are, at times, a bit weak.
For the 25 years after its publication this was the starting point in English for studying modern Algeria, and it does quite a decent job; in my view it has since been surpassed by A History of Algeria.
Davis claims he won’t “endorse or decry” the attack, then writes that Qaddafi brought the punishment on himself (thank you Brian, very cool). I mostly agree with him anyway, though Reagan policy was a bit too heavy-handed and tended to evade diplomacy in favor of force.
A good general work on the diplomacy behind the creation of the modern Middle East, but not really Middle Eastern history: it’s a study of the Middle East without Middle Easterners, laser-focused on European imperial bureaucracies, especially the British. Deliberate, but it doesn’t quite offer the full picture.
The mass media is gaslighting us all to protect elite interests; thanks Noam, that was insightful. A good study of the actual process, but it’s all received wisdom now, though Trump-era coverage left me wondering what Herman and Chomsky would make of the media’s step back from the government.
Valentino argues mass killing is strategic and instigated by small groups, making societal cleavages poor predictors; the strategic claim holds, but the PRC and Rwanda show killers who were by no means small. There seem to be just as many popular mass killings, performed by average citizens, as elite-led ones.
Stavrianos, Leften Stavros. Global Rift. New York: William Morrow, 1981.
Weirdly “modernist.” Good that this distillation of Dependency Theory from 1400 to 1980 exists, but capitalism’s spread wasn’t the inexorable consumption Stavrianos describes, and the “Third World” doesn’t hold together; worth skimming as a blueprint, not worth much as a historical study.
Hoganson, Kristin L. The Heartland: An American History. New York: Penguin Press, 2019.
No. The Midwest deserves to be taken seriously as a historical space in its own right, not as a zone significant only for its connections elsewhere; Hoganson’s “actually, the Midwest isn’t isolationist” angle tells us nothing we needed. Feels almost like an insult.
A bit of a disappointment: the first and last thirds (Bush, Clinton’s two terms) are good, but the middle is an odd amalgamation of three events asked to stand for the whole decade. The “Tabloid Nation” case lands; as a general history of the 90s, a great deal is missing.
The gold standard for histories of the Confederacy as a state in its own right rather than a few states in insurrection: the constitution, political schisms, and the positions of blacks, women, and poorer whites. A dense and difficult slog at times, but nothing short of illuminating.
I was super excited about this and came away a bit disappointed: Caryl does a fair job with each of his five 1979 stories, but they function as discrete phenomena, and he never articulates the broad “counterrevolution” that would make this truly comparative historiography.
I picked it up looking for a period that echoes our own pandemic, and it falls short of that: this is a history of medicine angle on the Spanish Flu, the race to find a cure, with the social and cultural side a minority of the work.
A good counterweight to the 1930s of European and American history classes: internationalism, both imperial cooperation and anti-imperial activism across borders, is the decade’s real story. The Communism and Fascism chapters shortchange movements outside Europe, but it’s an excellent starting point; those who know the period will find it old-hat.
Four rules I kept from it: don’t break the chain; make it impossible not to write every day (mornings); write even before you know your thesis statement, since the act of writing does the rest; and get friends as accountability partners.
Richardson’s case that the South’s oligarchy was profoundly antithetical to American democracy lands; her claim that the South won by replicating itself in the West doesn’t, downplaying the differences and skipping the industrial Northeastern oligarchy that needs discussing. Easy to read but, on the whole, unconvincing.
A decent overview of Islamic history, with some problems (Arabization, how Tanzimat functioned). I would have liked to see Muslim interactions with Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia rather than simply Europe, but the book is ambitious enough as it is.
Gombrich, E.H. A Little History of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Easy to read and never condescending, but this is a history of Europe with occasional glances elsewhere: African history does not exist at all, and connections between regions barely register. I can’t fault a 1935 book for children too much; I can fault readers who praise it as world history.
Pamuk, Orhan. Snow. Translated by Maureen Freely. New York: Vintage Books, 2005.
The first third felt very familiar, full of conversations I’ve shared over the past few years. If nothing else, this book made me feel sympathetic towards Islamists, and to me that makes it a good book (sorry, FBI).
Some really good insights on the uses (and misuses) of Ibn Khaldun’s thought in modern history, anthropology, and sociology; but the attempt to explain the structure of Ibn Khaldun’s own work is severely lacking, and I still don’t know what he means by any of it.
Really kaleidoscopic: Worth zooms from a few individuals to whole societies with ease. His Tunisia chapter, on Essebsi and Ghannouchi building the national dialogue, is largely right, though emphasizing individuals misses Ennahda’s larger potential threat and downplays the corruption in Tunisian politics.
Aderin-Pocock, Maggie. Book of the Moon: A Guide to Our Closest Neighbor. Abrams, 2019.
I wasn’t terribly impressed: Aderin-Pocock clearly loves the moon and writes in an ok manner, but the text lacks substance; what’s in here makes for good trivia and doesn’t go much beyond that.
Manton, E. Lennox and Lennox Manton. Roman North Africa. Seaby, 1988.
A really weird approach: the Arab conquest as the end of Roman North Africa rather than a transformation, plus talk of “Hamites” from 4500 BC that suggests a Creationist angle; Manton is hardly a reliable source. A decent primer, but once you have some grounding, move on to something else.
What sets McCants apart is the time he spends on what separates ISIS from other jihadist groups: its disagreement with al-Qaeda is strategic, not scriptural, and the West plays a surprisingly small role. The apocalypticism only became thinkable for Sunnis after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Not outstanding, but a manageable entry point.
Parsons, Frederick V. The Origins of the Morocco Question, 1880-1900. Duckworth, 1976.
A 650-page diplomatic narrative with no introduction, no conclusion, and no guideposts; it could have been cut in half without losing much of substance. Parsons is in many ways the definitive pre-Saidian orientalist, presenting British correspondents’ claims of Moroccan “stagnation” as fact.
Suraqah, Abdul Aziz and Muhammad Al-Yaqoubi. Refuting ISIS. Sacred Knowledge, 2016.
A fatwa, not a Western critique: al-Yaqoubi argues from religious orthodoxy that ISIS are modern 5arawij, rejecting all other leadership in the Islamic world. The parallel isn’t perfect, which makes the book less compelling, and the age of ISIS has mostly passed anyway.
McCullough, Brian. How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone. Liveright, 2018.
A really neat history, as much about the business side as the software and hardware; the financial emphasis is earned, since the infrastructure wouldn’t have survived without monetization. It ends in 2008, exactly where my own internet life began: it feels designed specifically for me.
Truly one of the foundational works on North African history: Burke sets the ground for other scholars to dive deep into anti-colonial resistance by non-elite, non-national groups like the zawiyas that were ever active across the Maghrib.
Whoever had the idea to transliterate Qaddafi as al-Qadhdhafi should be shot: “technically” right, letter by letter, but impossible to read or pronounce in English. As a side note, the book itself is quite good.
A curious book: popular national history of one people across a region, with good insights on Jewish life but sweeping, often incorrect statements about the rest of the Maghrib; Chouraqui lost me in calling French colonization a godsend. Worth reading if you have no prior knowledge, but best paired with other materials.
Are numbers real? Some are. Is math useful? Usually yes, sometimes no. Clegg’s whirlwind tour runs from the invention of numbers (likely simple abstraction through counting) to the current state, where advances in math generally have little to do with the world as we know it, though they might yet be used.
A powerful criticism of the colonial, male gaze toward Algerian women, but in some respects irresponsible: borderline (if not outright) pornographic photographs with no attempt to censor the faces of the girls involved. Does the intellectual argument outweigh the violation of privacy? I’m inclined to say no.
More or less a country profile: Tunisian history up to independence in 1956, then a thematic look at society, economy, politics, and foreign affairs to 1986. Nothing new for those familiar with Tunisia, but a decent reference for forgotten information.
Brusatte shows a great amount of the scaffolding of how paleontology gets made, but here it functions as filler: the actual dinosaur content is shallow and familiar from any high quality natural history museum. Too bad; I really wanted to know more about these fantastic beasts.
Earle, Peter. Corsairs of Malta and Barbary. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970.
Most of the book is really quite good, the argument less so: state-sanctioned corsairing as an “eternal war” between faiths sustained through peacetime. Earle’s chief contribution is combatting the stereotype that Mediterranean pirates were all Muslim; Malta’s Knights of St. John supported a massive amount of privateering too.
Very interesting, albeit dense, multidisciplinary study of the Tunisian peasantry before the Protectorate: deeply anthropological at the start, more economic at the end, with memorable sections on food and the rhythms of daily life. One to revisit down the line, but I recommend it.
A provocative book: Anderson traces Tunisia and Libya’s divergence to the colonial period, the French protectorate preserving Tunisia’s political institutions where Italian colonization destroyed Libya’s in their totality. My qualm is the laser-focus on these two; bringing in Morocco would offer much more.
If you’ve followed the New Yorker and Washington Post exposés about ISIS, you’ll know most of this already, and it feels a bit dated; still worth the read, because the internet is a powerful place for political organization and may be relevant once again.
My notes are two quotations (Carthaginian dress persisting in the modern Maghrib; North Africa’s first chance to exert influence on another region) followed by an extended scream. Read into that what you will.