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.
2018
Zhang, Weiwei. The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State. Hackensack, NJ: World Century, 2012.
One powerful insight, China as a civilizational state; my main question is why China and not India.
Robertson, John. Iraq: A History. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.
Emphasizes Iraq’s illustrious past up to the Abbasids’ fall, a reasonable decision he handles well.
Lee, Min Jin. Pachinko. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2017.
A really important book; one star off for dialogue that fell flat and felt fake.
Profoundly dated; best for research on end-of-Cold-War American policy in MENA, too dated for the layperson.
Roth, Joseph. The Radetzky March. New York: The Overlook Press, 2002.
A magisterial rumination that makes the Habsburg decline tangible; highest recommendation.
Potter, David Stone. Ancient Rome: A New History. Thames & Hudson, 2009.
A decent summary, though the chapter on “fall” felt inadequate; still worth thumbing through.
El Akkad, Omar. American War. New York: Picador, 2017.
Inverts the Middle East’s civil wars onto America; ham-fisted and caricatured, perhaps deliberately.
Ortega y Gasset, José. The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993.
Almost the pinnacle of progressivism: a liberal, universalist vision worth remembering in times of nationalist populism.
Slezkine, Yuri. The Jewish Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Fascinating whatever discipline it is: modernity means everyone is becoming Jewish; convincing, if too generalized.
LeBor, Adam. A Heart Turned East: Among the Muslims of Europe and America. Thomas Dunne Books, 2001.
Really good in the first half; not a bad book, but there are surely better things to read.
A question I stupidly never thought to ask; reading it amid Brexit makes it more relevant than ever.
A must-read on how integral Ukraine is to Russian self-identity.
Shows its age, outright optimistic about the EU; a version written today would come at it very differently.
The “New Racism” declared multiculturalism failed when European states barely practiced it.
Reframes the debate as two modern universalist ideologies fighting; incredibly nuanced and respectful.
A fascinating argument that human rights didn’t exist until the 1970s; I don’t entirely agree, but worth mulling.
The paritaristes argued republicanism’s abstract citizen was a sexed, male-coded being; convoluted but persuasive, and distinctly French.
A remarkably weak, superficial world history; there are far better books on this subject.
Ultimately disappointing: a travelogue that never grapples with whether totalitarianism’s afterlife exists at all.
A pamphlet that should be common knowledge, resonating as much today as 80 years ago.
Khmer nationalism emerged through the French administration, not anticolonial journals.
Letters showing soldiers and civilians shared far more than separate spheres; highly recommend.
Veracini, L. The Settler Colonial Present. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Most of the theory is quite good, but the two ways out just raise more questions.
Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New York: Penguin Books, 1956.
Outstanding partition fiction whose real main character is the village of Mano Majra as a whole.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Random House, 2011.
I enjoyed it immensely, but that doesn’t necessarily make it good; the later sections lean on dated sources.
Squarely in Said’s tradition: the War on Terror examined through the postcolonial rhetoric that makes domination feasible.
A monumental work of environmental history: yellow fever and malaria conserved the Caribbean status quo for centuries.
Keay, John. India: A History. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
Kinda terrible: everything after Harappa and before the Mughals was brutal to read; I recommend staying away.
Reads the Jasmine Revolution through “coastalization”; not entirely correct, but worth thinking about.
Guha, Ramachandra. Environmentalism: A Global History. New York: Longman, 2000.
Short and fairly superficial, but I quite enjoyed it; the Third World treatment is the most interesting part.
An interesting introduction to European empires, but sloppy and prone to anachronism.
My first Libyan literature and it blew me away: desert conservation above, Sufi spirituality beneath.
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.
Genocide from mundane concerns, not indoctrination; a harrowing work that needs reading.
Better written than critics allow, but treats eliminationist anti-Semitism as uniquely German and can’t explain the trigger-pull.
Really important though jargon-dense; most discussion of non-Western history relies on it as bedrock.
Hašek, Jaroslav. The Good Soldier Švejk. London: Penguin Books, 1974.
The good material is in part 1, after which the humor turns forced; high recommend.
Perhaps the only complete English-language biography of Bourguiba: balanced on the achievement, harsh on the narcissism.
Less a monograph than collected articles; worth reading as an introduction to Gentile and a view past fascism-as-monolith.
Morgan, Philip. Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945. London: Routledge, 2003.
Good, albeit contradictory: fascism does exist, united by hypernationalism, though that can’t be the whole explanation.
Masri, Safwan M. Tunisia: An Arab Anomaly. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.
The argument seems short-sighted; easy reading, but serious readers should look elsewhere.
A goofy attempt to fit 500 years of colonization into one neat theory, stripping away the idiosyncrasies.
Mawdsley, Evan. The Russian Civil War. Desperta Ferro, 1987.
Skip this: sparse sourcing and a Reds-versus-Whites scheme that ignores how un-discrete those groupings were.
Well-written and nuanced, finding the Sepah the real threat to Iranian democracy; highly recommend.
Really interesting, but I don’t think it’s accurate: she never dissects what fascism is.
Argues the Revolution was doomed, not betrayed; I disagree, but the closing seems almost prophetic.
Admirably pierces Eurocentric diffusionist history; grating writing, but an invaluable advance in world history.
Sweeping but weighted toward Revolution and Stalinism; it lets me place other USSR books temporally and thematically.
A mammoth introduction arguing every Great Power intervention has hurt more than it helped; recommend.
The USSR eliminated metadiscourse around ideology, so nobody saw the collapse coming; highest recommendation.
Fascinating and quite readable on occupied Germany, 1945-1947; highly recommend.
It didn’t live up to the hype: Andersen preaches to his own choir; not recommended.
Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
A great piece: African Americans in Paris from 1914 formed a cohesive community, not isolated individuals.
Douagi, Ali. Sleepless Nights. Translated by William Granara. Carthage: Beit al-Hikma, 1991.
A window into early twentieth-century Tunisian life; this early foray was a pleasure.
Interesting subject, not well executed: critical theory where material realities would have grounded it.
Sometimes dry, but the research is excellent; the chapter on unveiling women for ID cards is the standout.
Memmi, Albert. The Pillar of Salt. Translated by Edouard Roditi. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
Renders the psychological toll of colonialism astoundingly well; read it as colonialism lived.
An unapologetically pro-Shia introduction in broad strokes; a good way in, but far more reading is needed.
A rehabilitation of Soviet 1920s utopianism, critical enough not to treat it as good in itself; highly recommend.
Attacks the view that France “gave” independence; nationalists could bring down French rule.
An ambitious, pessimistic synthesis; a must-read on Southeast Asia or French colonialism.
There may be a decent argument here, but the book is impenetrable to me.
Class as an inherently gendered category; “family” as analysis deserves wider uptake.
A good popular history of nineteenth-century “homosexuality,” at its best probing Foucault on its “birth.”
The French and British mobilized best; Eastern Europe is neglected, and the Ottomans would make a fascinating case.
Dense, difficult, at times dry, but necessary for the full picture of German industrialization.
Quite good on the rarely examined Habsburg homefront: shortages framed everyone else as enemies to be removed.
Mostly received wisdom now, but a decent summary of masculinity, best on “degeneracy” and the new fascist man.
Too economically focused and outdated; I recommend finding something else to read.
Good for asking new questions about the war, not for a general overview.
Doerr, Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner, 2014.
Blindness forces tactile, auditory vividness; writing powerful enough for five stars.
Not the Prague 1968 book I expected: a scathing critique of Communism and all sweeping ideology.
Fantastic on the Habsburgs’ strategies of rule: the empire was no anachronism and could have lasted beyond 1918.
Kerr, Ian J. Building the Railways of the Raj, 1850-1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
A Marxist approach to the labor behind British India’s railways; more difficult to read than it needs to be.
I couldn’t make sense of it: one inadequate map, no glossary, and assumed familiarity I lack.
Gaspar, Zsuzsa. The Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. New Holland Publishers, 2009.
A coffee-table volume that functions as an anatomy of the Habsburg Empire; not rigorous, but great for internal dynamics.
Johnson, Lonnie R. Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends. Replica Books, 1996.
Solid if awkward: strong medieval chapters, but the later two-thirds get lost in great-power politics.
A surprise: anti-Catholicism was integral to nineteenth-century German liberalism, paralleling the French anticlericalism I work on.
Gilmour, David. The Pursuit of Italy. London: Allen Lane, 2011.
Solid popular history accentuating the “many Italies,” though at times it reads as hagiography.
MacMaster, Neil. Racism in Europe: 1870-2000. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
An outstanding history of colonial racism and anti-Semitism, but dated; I’d sincerely appreciate a second edition.
Perkins, Kenneth. A History of Modern Tunisia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
The best synthetic work on Tunisian history to date, though strictly political and teleological about anticolonialism.
Rapport, Mike. 1848: Year of Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
A remarkable survey and analysis of the 1848 revolutions all over Europe; a must-read.
Schroeder, Paul W. The Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Vienna transformed diplomacy into a genuine balance of power, though less permanently than Schroeder suggests; highly recommended.
A vivid, highly readable narrative of 1813-1815; best read as general European history, not a Napoleon study.
He mines sources others neglect but won’t argue his own case forcefully.
He succeeds: Eastern Europe is not something that exists naturally; it was invented as Europe’s orient.
Israel overstates the moderate-radical divide; worth reading, but less useful than it could be.
Against the cold, mechanical Enlightenment: political economy as deeply moral, well worth reading for the history of liberalism.
Lies through omission and misleads those who sincerely want to learn; worth skipping.
Great narrative history of the Rwandan genocide and Congo Wars; I’d have liked more on Angola.
Gribbin, Robert E. In the Aftermath of Genocide: The U.S. Role in Rwanda. iUniverse, 2005.
A decent ambassador’s memoir, far more optimistic about Rwandan ethnic tensions than others; worth a read.
Quite frankly unconvincing: the argument only holds if worldviews are simplified excessively.
Really weird: armchair history without nuance, NRx incoherent; worth passing by.
A fascinating, sweeping, nuanced history of the French right; a must-read for historians of modern France.
Allen, Robert C. Global Economic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
An excellent introduction, though the “one size fits all” approach falters: excellent middle, lacking end.
A 1938 assessment: adequate for the moment, but limited expression and the costly colonial campaign bode ill.
Completely disingenuous and contradictory when perfectly valid conservative books exist.
An interesting little screed that needed far more reading behind it; convincing only to a segment of the Right.
I feel conflicted, but it’s absolutely worth reading as a window into North Korea, 1960-1995.
Guérin, Daniel. Fascism and Big Business. Pathfinder Press, 1994.
A solid distillation of the Marxist understanding of fascism, though Roger Griffin understands it better.
Most of it now commonly accepted; it must have been eye-opening in 1964.
A great reference for further research, though its major themes are a bit weak.
Blinkhorn, Martin. Fascism and the Right in Europe 1919-1945. Harlow: Longman, 2000.
Surprisingly well-researched for its size; this book does its job.
Attacks the New Consensus through Weberian ideal types; ultimately I found it unconvincing.
Mostly brief biography rather than reconciling Marx and Bakunin; reading anything before this makes it essentially useless.
Brings the order to life as narrative while avoiding the mythologizing; highly recommend.
An interesting snapshot of fascist studies in 1969, with less utility today.
Nobes, Christopher. Accounting: A Very Short Introduction. FT Prentice Hall, 2004.
Brutally difficult and I don’t think I understood much, but I came away with more respect for accountants.