Year’s best non-fiction about money and power
My Best Non-Fiction of 2018 list mainly concerns politics and economics plus singular personal misery. So just like last year then.
Crashed by Adam Tooze. The subtitle, “How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World,” is apt because the 2008 crash is still ringing in our ears and there may be another one coming. Deregulation caused the crisis, which caused austerity, which helped fuel the rise of the continent-hopping ultra-ultra rich. It was not an American crisis but a global one with new stresses being added yearly: subprime mortgages, unsupervised banks, unpredictable China, the eurozone crisis, the post-Soviet crisis, austerity, the Germans being German and Brexit. Tooze’s historical analysis ends with Trump, as may we all. Remember, Wall Street always wins.
Directorate S by Steve Coll. The ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, is known as Directorate S. It is at the heart of why the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a protracted failure. The CIA, Afghan intelligence and Directorate S all played their part in the resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and eventually Daesh, known as ISIS. What futility. I have always said the U.S. should never fight a war where the enemy isn’t in uniform and where enemies’ alliances are not distinguished by skin colour. They can’t cope. The longest war in American history continues, “a humbling case study in the limits of American power,” a people too rich and stupid to win.
Educated by Tara Westover. The memoir has been sold as the inspiring story of a young American saved by literacy, which was in short supply in the Idaho mountains. Yes, she was raised illiterate and yes, she made it to Cambridge, but this is not a happy tale. Publishers compete over who had the most miserable childhood and Westover wins, but the story is in her family, not her escape. She was trapped in a cult something like the Manson Family, her brother tortured and terrorized her, and she barely survived. This is a story of a mentally ill father, his stupid acolyte-wife, and their broken children. There’s nothing cute here. It’s Deliverance but with parents.
The Long Hangover by Shaun Walker. How did Russians fall for Vladimir Putin, the Guardian’s Moscow reporter asks. You’d think they’d have learned after centuries of suffering not to put their faith in anything, not communism, or charismatic leaders, or banks and bridges. And yet Putin’s as popular as Stalin, whose appeal has been reborn.
“That’s probably why nothing ever worked out for me,” one man tells Walker, sadly, about not paying bribes. Now ask every Russian why nothing ever worked out. Stalin’s all they’ve got. Deliberately forgetting the gulags is like Holocaust denial. It’s a lie, but wouldn’t it be nice if it were true?
Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq. I do like books that put me in a trance and throat singer Tanya Tagaq manages it with these autobiographical episodes about an Inuit girl in Nunavut. There isn’t much for the young to do, so they do as they wish and extraordinary things happen. After reading Sara Leipciger’s The Mountain Can Wait, I understand the smell of B.C. bark and tree innards. After Split Tooth, I understand a dark hallucinatory world of pain, ecstasy and incomprehension, with an ice floor over black water without end, swirling flashing northern lights and cold so extreme that every minute is a risk. “There must be an imbalance of pain in the world,” the girl writes.
Vivian Maier: The Color Works. Mad for all things Maier, I like this collection of the American photographer’s Kodak Ektachrome colour slides because she took 150,000 black and white shots and these are shockingly different, possibly better. Her work is imposing, her colour work hurtfully so, but it was only discovered by chance in a storage locker auction after her 2009 death. Two men attach their words to this volume, imposing the male gaze on this fantastically talented and eccentric woman who worked as a nanny for 40 years and went on walks with her camera in Chicago and New York. She had a gift for “the decisive moment” but whether she was born with it or taught herself, no one can say.