In 2020, I read a total of 50 books, including 47 unique titles, 36 new, 11 re-reads from past years, and 3 re-reads within the year. My volume of book reading was down about 25% from recent years, a fact which can be roughly accounted for by the time I did not spend commuting due to working from home. Despite being in one of the hardest hit industries (aviation), I was fortunate to keep my job and was able to largely work from home in 2020.
I spent much more time on current news than has been my practice for a long time, as the historical significance of 2020’s events greatly exceeded the rough stasis of the previous years. My particular focus was on understanding the immunology, epidemiology, and scientific/medical aspects of the pandemic, which I took to be the fundamental driver of everything else, not least the prospects for the industry I work in. I continued to do the best I could to tune out the unenlightening and unproductive spectacle of our politics, but that was harder in 2020 for obvious reasons.
EXPLORATIONS
My fundamental interest is in understanding and exploring our world and its people in all of their awesome complexity. Four titles stood out as exemplary expositions of significant fields. It is fair to say that these are my favorite books of the year.
The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations, by Daniel Yergin. The latest from the veteran, Pulitzer prize winning energy and geo-strategic expert Daniel Yergin shows that he continues to work at the top of his game. The New Map chronicles the rapidly changing global energy and climate landscape, and its complex, shifting geo-strategic implications. The most fundamental disruption is the US based fracking revolution, which is the setting of the opening scenes of the book. Yergin continues around the world considering the major geo-political and energy powers, including Russia, China, and the Middle East. He looks at automotive-tech and transportation technology, the impact of climate change and climate change activism, and the coronavirus. The entire discourse is comprehensive, authoritative, neutral, and grounded in an understanding of the hard, deep interests of all the players. Yergin is resolutely apolitical. To my taste, he leans a bit too much into policy and not enough on technology, but his policy level assessments of technology are very well informed and quite sound. Other authors, notably Vaclav Smil, do an excellent job of covering the technology in titles such as Energy and Civilization: A History; Power Density: A Key to Understanding Energy Sources and Uses; and many others.
Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities, by Vaclav Smil. Speaking of Vaclav Smil, Growth is an astonishing and comprehensive exposition of the facts of growth. It may be the most fact dense book I have ever read. It will not be to everyone’s taste, but I found in fascinating, start to finish. It starts out with a long chapter covering the mathematics which describe growth phenomena, and their historical development. Using that foundation, it moves on to successive studies of nature (living matter); energies (harnessing and converting energy to do work); artifacts (things people have built); population, societies, economies (human organization at all scales). It concludes with a consideration of what comes after growth, since all growth processes have limits. The scope and rigor, quantitative and analytical, of Growth is awesome and peerless to my knowledge. A true intellectual feast.
How Innovation Works and Why it Flourishes in Freedom, by Matt Ridley. This one is just plain fun. Ridley (best known for The Rational Optimist) spends most of the book telling the stories of innovation in numerous fields: energy, health, food, transportation, low tech, computing/communication, and prehistoric. Having laid out that history and told those stories, he devotes the latter part of the book to developing a theory of innovation. As a career technology developer, I find his stories and theories apt and fascinating.
The Invention of Surgery: A History of Modern Medicine: From the Renaissance to the Implant Revolution, by David Schneider. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that did such a great job laying out a field with which I had limited familiarity. The Invention of Surgery is a compelling exposition of how modern medical science and practice developed, in its human, experimental, and technical detail. It is also the author’s personal coming of age story as a physician, and is quite moving in that regard. Schneider gave me eyes to see something that I hadn’t really looked at before. Excellent.
DEEP PHENOMENA
How and why did our human world and cultures develop as they have? What are the truly fundamental factors and forces at work?
Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, by Walter Scheidel. This one is tough for me to review. Scheidel got my attention last year with “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century”, which I commented on then. He is a massively learned global historian capable of impressive and formidable works of analysis and synthesis. Escape from Rome promised to be the most interesting work of macro history that I have encountered since Guns, Germs, and Steel. How and why did the world turn out as it did? It is that. But it was also the hardest slog of a book that I can remember. I listened to it in audio format and did not have the maps, graphs, and charts. That was surely part of the problem. Scheidel traces the intricacies of historical development, and its interaction with geography and empire on a global scale. The core axis of comparison is Europe vs. China. The centralizing tendencies of China’s geography and interaction with the Eurasian steppe contrasts with the decentralizing tendencies of Europe’s fragmented landscape. Europe’s “polycentrism” promoted a diversity of culture and experimentation that fundamentally drove the great divergence from long term historical conditions, and created the modern world. I found the introduction to be extremely exciting intellectually, but the body of the text to be very difficult. However, while writing this, I have convinced myself to put Guns, Germs, and Steel on my re-read list and then take another run at Escape from Rome in print format. The top review on Goodreads promotes this as the premier macro history yet written. I believe the review is probably correct, and hope my lack of engagement may be overcome with more familiarity and the written format. (BTW my first two books of 2021 are in this general field of large, deep history, and are very good.)
Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, by David Reich. This 2018 title is the first report to a general audience of the findings of a new field: the exploration of pre-history based on genetic evidence from samples of ancient DNA found around the world. It paints a fascinating picture of a dynamic field of knowledge that has been possible for only a few years, relying on modern genomic and computational technologies plus ancient DNA samples. It uncovers human migration and merging patterns going back hundreds of thousands of years. Today’s population configurations and mixing are just a snapshot in time of a much deeper phenomenon. Interestingly, the African founder population has mixed the least with the separated groups and is genetically the most diverse. One of my personal theories is that this has profound implications for this century given the inevitable ascendence of African populations in the coming decades and the great capabilities implicit in their rich genetics. However, it doesn’t take a lot to see that this research could become ideologically fraught in some circles; the most interesting results are from the Indian subcontinent, where access to the raw genetic data was least filtered. Presumably a great deal has happened in this field since this title was published; it is nonetheless an excellent intro.
Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class, by Charles Murray. The fierce controversy surrounding Charles Murray in some circles belies the actual mild reasonableness of this project. Murray has gone deep into the technical social science, neuroscience, and genetic research literature and reports the findings on hot-button ideological propositions: “Gender is a social construct”, “Race is a social construct”, and “Class is a function of privilege”. The result is a far richer, common-sensical, and mild/realistic exploration than you might think is possible on these issues today. We need to recover a sense of the unconditional dignity of all humans and the full range of expressions of that dignity (inherent in the Christian view of man and woman). Murray’s reporting and modest, restrained reflections provide a solid map for doing that, and celebrating the genuine richness of Human Diversity.
RECENT PHENOMENA
Our current culture has very little sense of history—of the past before our present. The works in this section explore our present, inclusive of the past roughly bounded by my lifetime.
The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, by Christopher Caldwell. This history describes how the current divisions in American culture arose from a starting point in the early 1960s. These are my times and I think Caldwell basically gets it right. On the right, he identifies Ayn Rand as a poisonous influence and takes Ronald Reagan down a few pegs; on the left he traces a cultural rise and dominance in conjunction with a replacement constitution competing with the original. On the whole, he depicts a steady ratchet of events dividing the country and delivers the punchiest closing I can recall. This is straightforward history in the sense of what happened, and how it happened.
The New Class Conflict and The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, by Joel Kotkin. Demographer Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict was published in 2014 at the height of the Obama era and presciently identified the changed nature of class conflict in the USA. He depicted the alliance of the Oligarchs (the tech elite, 1%, etc.) and Clerisy (academia, media, entertainment, bureaucracy, etc.) vs. the increasingly marginalized middle orders aka the Yeomanry. Roughly those who trade in abstractions vs. those who trade in things. I believe the Trump era has amply demonstrated the validity of that thesis. In 2020, Kotkin updated and extended the thesis with The Coming Neo-Feudalism, which globalizes the argument, deepens its historical basis, and extends it especially to China.
Maoism: A Global History, by Julia Lovell. This is a very useful and timely history. By any objective standard, Maoism is in the fight for the sloppiest, most foolhardy, and destructive ideology in history. Wildly unrealistic, its only competence is destruction—and it is fearfully competent in that regard. Yet it has inspired religious levels of ecstasy and devotion to changing the world in its legions of followers—even as it reaped destruction and a body count measured at least in several tens of millions. This is an absorbing account of its followers and follies around the world from China, to Africa, Indonesia, Peru, Southeast Asia, and its quasi-revival in contemporary Xi-ist China.
A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, by Robert Bryce. Bryce tells the technical, economic, and human story of electricity in the modern world. The gap between rich and poor is very much between those who have reliable electricity, and those who do not or have none. He makes the case that electricity is a justice, and social justice, issue. What then to make of the drive towards low density and intermittent forms of electricity? I think the question answers itself, but it threatens to consign those living in electricity poverty to permanent poverty, and those with abundance to poverty. Bryce lays out the technical facts in a narrower and more journalistic form than Vaclav Smil and Daniel Yergin.
Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, by Michael Shellenberger. This is a fascinating book. Shellenberger is a died in the wool left wing environmental activist. He was 15 years old when he pulled off his first activist fund raiser event, and spent his young adulthood pursuing advanced training and built a career as an environmental activist. And he is still at it, but in a more nuanced way. He is perceptive and realistic enough to truly follow the evidence as to what works, what doesn’t, how it effects people and the earth, and what the trade-offs are. In chapter after chapter, he starts with an activist position and then delves into the issue, and finds a far more complex and nuanced reality. Often, the truly environmentally effective position is the opposite of the activist one. Do not discount the fact that environmental and climate activism and policy are big business, very big business.
Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, by Nicholas Christakis. This is the first book length attempt to chronicle the coronavirus. Christakis is a Yale professor, an MD, and a public health expert. The book is excellent in presenting historical pandemics, epidemiology, and historically informed speculation about what the post-pandemic period will be like. As a first draft of the history of our pandemic, I think it is mediocre, plus it is limited by its completion date of 8/1/2020. I expected a more insightful account from such a well-positioned and connected expert. Glass half full.
FITNESS
My fitness book report this year is very practical.
Kettlebell – Simple & Sinister, by Pavel Tsatsouline. This is a ruthlessly minimal, awesomely effective workout program that the author does not fully understand. In my version, there are three core exercises plus two warm-ups, and the three are the most powerful moves you can do. First is the deep prying kettlebell squat. The deep squat is the pinnacle core strength move, requiring a high degree of mobility, flexibility, balance, coordination, and strength. You must earn it, and it took me a long time to do so. If you can do it correctly, your core is working optimally. Second is hard-style kettlebell swings. These are an awesome head to toe total body strengthener, and an incredible high intensity workout. Third is the Turkish get-up. This is a 12-step slow ballet move under the stress of an elevated kettlebell, and a fantastic total body strengthener and coordinator. Pavel has a couple of great practical points: 1) do this in low doses frequently, so you are ready to go afterward—not broken down and 2) weight is a teacher. S&S is presented with a Russian strongman/fighter schtick. At one point, he ridicules 150-pound distance runners like me. But his workout is great for us, and a great running warm-up—one of my quarantine discoveries. I do it my way—I ignore his weight recommendations and do not expect to ever reach his female minimums. But Pavel teaches you the right moves, and the right way to do them. If you are time constrained, or even if you aren’t, do this.
Running Rewired: Reinvent Your Run for Stability, Strength, and Speed, by Jay Dicharry. This is the opposite of S&S in the sense that it has a huge, maximalist set of workouts. I am not naturally body smart in my movements. This program taught me how to run with optimum biomechanics and has numerous, varied exercises to build your best stride. I had been working on that for years, but RR took me to a completely different level. I am doing the best running of my life with this foundation and am reversing time—for now—on my running times. I often say that I have the perfect basement gym. What I mean is that I have the stuff to do this entire program—plus I have an Arc Trainer. I have a favor to ask—I thought this book needed a better review on Goodreads, so I wrote one. I need a couple more likes to be the top review. If you would be so kind, please like my review.
ENDURING VALUE AND TRUTHS
A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, by Robert Royal. This is in the same field as last year’s favorite, The Irony of Modern Catholic History: How the Church Rediscovered Itself and Challenged the Modern World to Reform, by George Weigel. However, it is considerably longer, deeper in many details, and uniquely, devotes about one-third of its pages to literature. The permanent truths of the Catholic faith continue to develop, adapt, and deepen as they interact with a changing world and new circumstances and understandings.
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien; Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth, by John Garth. I rarely read fiction, but Royal inspired me to re-read Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings was the great book of my childhood and youth, but I had not appreciated its status as arguably the great Catholic novel. It is suffused with a great portrayal of the journey and quest of life, and a profoundly Catholic vision of the world and the good. This was a partly nostalgic escape in this difficult year. I am far enough removed from the movies to have a fairly pure experience of the books; as outstanding as the movies are as a cinematic achievement, LOTR is first and foremost a book, and that is its best and deepest form. Garth makes the case that Tolkien’s great works are rooted in his youthful and World War I experiences, and not World War II as many assume.
MIND BLOWING
A Burst of Conscious Light: Near-Death Experiences, the Shroud of Turin, and the Limitless Potential of Humanity, by Andrew Silverman. I can hardly hold this in my head, despite listening to it three times—but this is exploring some powerful territory. Silverman is a scientific expert on the Shroud, which has miraculously precise characteristics as a depth encoded photographic negative image, and is surely the most amazing and conventionally inexplicable extant historical artifact. The reasonable explanation is that it is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, and was imprinted by a mechanism we do not understand. Near death experiences are widely reported and studied, and also don’t fit any conventional scientific narrative—they provide extensive evidence of disembodied consciousness, that is, consciousness apart from brain. Silverman connects them and unifies them with an exploration of quantum theory—the most rigorously validated and notoriously difficult to understand scientific theory. In particular, he takes the role of the observer—of mind—in quantum theory with ultimate seriousness to show how consciousness transcends brain and body. Using the observable facts and established theories, he constructs a model of how the Resurrection unfolded and imprinted the cloth of the Shroud via an extraordinarily intense flash of light. A mind-blowing exploration of things that don’t fit contemporary materialist narratives, and a reminder that there are more things in this world…
CONCLUSION
I did not read as widely or as thematically in 2020 as in past years. The events of the year took their toll, and demanded a different focus, more on the right now. Books intrinsically take a longer view that was often more difficult to pursue in 2020. But I still managed to find some new things that interested me, and I enjoy reflecting on them and consolidating my thoughts and experiences via this essay. These are the highlights; I read many other things that also interested me, and are available via my Goodreads year in books link. I hope one or two of these might be of interest to some in my small audience. Thanks for reading.