The Six: The Lives of The Mitford Sisters, Thompson - B

                     The sisters were born in the heart of aristocratic England between 1904 and 1920. The ancient Mitford name preceded the Conquest. Their names were Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah. They became a novelist, a countrywoman, a Fascist, a Nazi, a Communist, and a Duchess. They grew up in the closed world of their family and servants at their country estates and London home. They were uncharacteristically politicized in an era of extremist political philosophies. The 1930's tore their family apart and diminished their father's wealth. They remain a focus of fascination to the English for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which was their extraordinary self-confidence and indifference to what people thought of them.

                    When his older brother died in WWI, their dad inherited a lordship, some financial assets, and an abundance of real estate. David Mitford sold off his father's houses assuring, that although his daughters upbringing was strictly upper-class, it was somewhat peripatetic.  They were not afforded the opportunity for a formal education, and grew up in a house with an austere mother and a loving father, a member of the House of Lords, a true conservative and a man wholly incompetent financially. The two best-known of the girls were Nancy, the oldest, and Diana, the third. Nancy had a successful career as a novelist writing about the upper classes she knew so well.  Diana was considered one of the most beautiful woman in the world and was the first to marry. In 1929, she and Bryan Guinness, heir to the vast family fortune, were wed. She was 18. Nancy, on the other hand, was a bit too quick and witty for the average upper-class male and drifted through her 20's single, but launching  her writing career.

                   The year 1932 saw the beginning of the unraveling of the family's place in society. Diana walked out on her husband and took up with Sir Oswald Mosley, former MP and leader in the Labour Party, and about to be founder of the British Union of Fascists. Mosley and the BUF were quite popular and were lauded by such disparate people as Lloyd George and George Bernard Shaw. However, Diana's conduct was wildly beyond the pale of its times. In 1933, Diana and Guinness were divorced, the epic-philanderer Mosley's wife died, and Nancy married a totally unsuitable womanizer named Peter Rodd. Nancy's next book mocked her new husband, as well as his family and satirized the fascists in the BUF. Soon, Unity, the fourth daughter, entered the arena as a serious fascist and joined the BUF. Diana and Unity went to Germany, attended the first Nuremberg rally and met Hitler. Unity decamped to live in Munich. She and Hitler became fast friends and met 140 times before the war's outbreak. She was sort of a "younger sister, court jester and talisman." Their dad made a pro-Hitler speech in the House of Lords. Diana actually obtained funding from Hitler to help keep the financially floundering BUF afloat.  She and Mosley married at Goebbels' house in Berlin in 1936. In response to all of the Germany-loving in her family, Jessica, the fifth, became a communist.  Jessica fell for her cousin, Esmond  Romailly, and followed him to Spain, where he reported on the Civil war.  She was pregnant when they married in 1937. The sedate and entirely normal sixth daughter, Deborah, had her coming out parties in 1938. Two weeks into her debut, she met and fell for Andrew Cavendish, the future Duke of Devonshire. They would marry three years later. The day after the war began, Unity put a gun to her head in Munich. Although she lived, she was in a childlike state and would be so until her death in 1947.

                  Lord David and Lady Sydney Mitford retreated from public life to their last remaining piece of real estate, an obscure island off Scotland's western coast. Nancy drove an ambulance in London and Mosley was arrested for being part of an organization "subject to foreign influence or control." Diana soon followed him into captivity. After 18 months in horrid prisons, the Mosley's were placed in a married accommodation for two years and eventually placed under house arrest in late 1943. Nancy's husband Peter, their brother Tom and Jessica's husband Esmond were all in combat positions overseas. Esmond died in late 1941 while flying over the North Sea. The ultimate blow for the family came when the only son and brother, Tom, was killed in Burma in early 1945. Lord and Lady Mitford split up and David became a recluse.

               After the war, Nancy continued her very successful writing career and moved to Paris to share her life with a Frenchman. Jessica was already in America, where she had remarried and settled down. Diana and Mosley also moved to Paris. David died in 1958 at the age of eighty. Jessica achieved literary fame when she published a history of their upbringing in 1960. Three years later, their mother died. Nancy's career continued very successfully in France until her death in 1973. Pamela lived comfortably abroad and in the English countryside until her death in 1994. Mosley died in 1980 and Diana lived until 2003. Jessica published an acclaimed book excoriating the American funeral industry in 1963 and became a bit of a media celebrity until her death in 1996. Andrew and Deborah lived a long privileged life as the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. She died in 2014 at 94.                                                                                                This group biography feels less like a history and more like a social analysis and assessment. The author constantly compares their lives to Nancy's novels which apparently were heavily autobiographical. One who has never read any of those novels (certainly almost all Americans) is at a distinct disadvantage. The concept of being 'famous for being famous' comes to mind in an attempt to understand their role in English society. One does walk away though with an admiration for their tenacity and marvels at the literary accomplishment of women who were not afforded any education.

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown And the Last Years Of Hollywood, Wasson - B

                   This is the story of the legendary movie told from the viewpoint of its four principals: director Roman Polanski, screenwriter Robert Towne, star Jack Nicholson and producer Robert Evans. The film was nominated for and won many of the preliminary awards, and was up for 11 Oscars, but only Towne took one home. The perspective is that it was the end of a brief era, that began in the mid-1960's and lasted barely a decade. The Hollywood of the studio moguls had been tottering for decades and the 60's saw it end, with sales of the legendary dream factories to holding companies and conglomerates. The decade was the time of the auteur young directors: Peckinpah, Coppolla, Friedkin, Bogdanovich and Polanski. They created movies of magic and integrity. The first was Bonnie and Clyde; the last was Chinatown. This time of free-flowing talent was followed by the blockbuster era, epitomized by Jaws and all that followed. In addition to pining for the Hollywood of that era, the book looks wistfully back on the inter-war years of a simpler, less congested and more bucolic LA.

 

Stripped, Freeman - B

                     Stride has left Duluth for Serena and a job on the Las Vegas PD as a detective. He starts a murder case that quickly graduates to a series of killings, all related to a murder forty years ago.  The killer believes he is the son of a murdered dancer and sets out to take vengeance against any and all who knew his mother and were part of her downfall. The investigation is totally complicated by the relationships from the past and the survivor's clout in modern day Sin City. In the end, a return to Duluth is the preferred option.

Return To Robinswood, Grainger - B

                  Back, after only two weeks, to my Irish soap-opera set just after the end of WWII.   The entire extended family comes together for Christmas, as everyone is happy and the Kenefick's and Murphy's work hard to put the estate back together.  The only interesting takeaway is the discussion of food. After the war, the UK continued rationing for a decade because it was not agriculturally self-sufficient and it was broke.  A major source of food, with a touch of irony were the abundant harvests of Ireland.   

Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, Demick - B

                  This book is a highly-acclaimed best seller that tells of the takeover and on-going oppression of Tibet and its people by the CCP. Although the book ranges far and wide, it focuses on the town of Ngaba in western Sichuan province. The Tibetan plateau is a vast million square miles with an average elevation of 14,800 feet above sea level. It is larger than India, and is known as 'the roof of the world'. Tibet, prior to the advance of the Red Chinese, had a very loose affiliation with China, but was more of a place than an entity. The residents were nomadic Buddhists in a land with few towns. Beginning in 1950, the Chinese began the forced collectivization and subjugation of Tibetans in what they called their "Democratic Reforms" - a redistribution of land. Tibetans call 1958, the year of an aggressive crackdown, as the time "when the sky and the earth changed places." The temples were destroyed and the Buddhist monks turned out. The Dalai Lama fled to India. Mao's death in 1976 led to change. Economic activity took off. Ngaba began to recover some of the vibrancy it had lost under communism.  The traditional nomads made a fortune harvesting and selling medicinal herbs. Slowly though, the Han moved in, and soon vastly outnumbered the locals. A period of liberalization was reversed in the 1990's, after Tiananmen, when the Han began constructing massive infrastructure projects throughout the plateau. The year 2008 saw Chinese police fire on Tibetans and the beginning of a decade-long self-immolation wave. By the end of 2019, 156 people had committed suicide this way, with about a third of them in and around Ngaba. Tibetans poured over the border and joined a substantial expatriate community in India. The plight of these victims of communism has resonated and garnered sympathy around the world. But like their Uighur neighbors now under the heel of the regime, they are too far removed and isolated from free peoples to ever achieve any semblance of the free life they once enjoyed.

     

Blacktop Wasteland, Cosby - B

                   This somewhat unusual novel is about a black man, Beauregard, who has been trying to get out of the life, but keeps getting pulled back in. Like his daddy before him, he is a wheel man of exquisite skill, and is recruited for a job that will solve his many financial problems. When it goes sideways, he has to pull off a second in order to get out from under the man who was robbed in the first job. It's exciting and explores some interesting father-son dynamics, but I would suggest should not have shown up on a recommended list.

The Glass Kingdom, Osbourne - C

                   Once again, a highly acclaimed novel eludes me. Set in Bangkok and designated a NYTimes Notable book, it is about decay, unrest, karma, and greed. A 30-ish New Yorker absconds with $200,000 from her aging employer and hides out in an anonymous old luxury building that feels anonymous and safe. It isn't.

V2, Harris - B

                   This very successful writer of historical fiction has written mostly about WW2 and Ancient Rome. Here, he focuses on the Revenge rockets on which Germany wasted a massive fortune  in order to terrorize the UK, particularly London. There are two stories. One is about a German civilian who has worked with von Braun since the beginning, is the flight officer, and in the waning days of the Reich, struggles with the tightening  SS security apparatus. The British side of the story is based on the memoirs of a woman who was part of the team tasked with figuring out where the rockets were fired from. Armed with radar information about the arc of the lift-off and the location of the hit in London, they were able to calculate the parabolic arc and figure out where they were launched from. Fun read.

The Witch Hunter, Seeck - B+

                This is one heck of a read, featuring a serial killer(s) in Helsinki replicating multiple murders in a trilogy of mystery books. They plot, plan, execute and keep a few steps ahead of the police, especially the detective in charge who keeps finding disturbing personal connections. Nordic noir at its best.

What Once Was True, Grainger - B

                   I purchased this because it was presented as an Irish WW2 novel, and the simple uniqueness of that intrigued me. It's more of a romance themed soap opera, but did offer limited insight into the Republic's position of neutrality. It had been less than twenty years since the English had been ousted and it was simply too soon to move past 800 years of oppression and oppose the forces of evil in Germany. In the novel, an Anglo-Irish Lord dies, leaving his family bereft, causing his wife to leave and lease out the land, and compelling the family that worked the land to also leave. The central story is the love between the young RAF pilot who succeeds his dad and the 3rd daughter of the long-time manager of the farm. The farm manager has some interesting IRA skeletons in the closet as well. It's not especially compelling, but I'll likely read the next two books in the trilogy.

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Agents at the Dawn of the Cold War - A tragedy in Three Acts, Anderson - A*

                   This book is an attempt to pinpoint when anti-communism went from being a worthy crusade to a dictator-backing refutation of our national values. The author, who grew up in Taiwan, S. Korea and Indonesia, places his father was stationed for USAid, and who saw aspects of the Cold War in person, selects 1944-1956. America's transformation was "nothing short of staggering." We went from toppling empires and supporting democracies to bankrolling the British and French overseas, and overthrowing the left-leaning governments of Guatemala and Iran. At home, we engaged in a Red Scare that "fueled cynicism and distrust of government."  The focus of the story is four men. Frank Wisner, Michael Burke, Peter Sichel and Edward Lansdale, all of whom worked for the OSS in WWII.

                    Wisner, a Wall Street lawyer, salvaged the OSS's operations in southeast Europe after they had been infiltrated by the Abwehr. Then in Bucharest, he witnessed first hand the Soviet Union's first perfidious occupation and takeover of a sovereign country. Burke, an upper-crust Ivy Leaguer, fought behind the lines with the Maquis. Sichel, a German-Jewish refugee to NY, was the OSS's blackmarket currency trader in N. Africa and Italy, and then ran agents in the Moselle region of France. Lansdale, a California advertising executive, was, because of his age, an OSS desk jockey in San Francisco, but one who had developed the ability to befriend anyone, particularly Asians, and so was assigned to be the Army's post-war deputy chief of intelligence in the Philippines. He was considered a genius in his ability to understand and observe people. The OSS, particularly Gen. Donovan, anticipated and wanted to be ready for the Cold War. Lansdale was ready in Asia and the younger three in Europe.

                 The transitioning of the OSS into a permanent peacetime foreign intelligence service was not a sure thing, in particular because it was vehemently opposed by J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, in Sept. 1945, Truman shuttered the agency and moved its functions to the Depts. of State and War. The aggressive conduct of the Soviets throughout eastern Europe eventually led to a firmer America response. The National Security Council and the CIA were established in 1947. A year later, the CIA was tasked with covert responsibilities. As the agency slowly morphed from a think tank to an active opponent of communism, Wisner was slotted in to run covert operations. Burke was hired to start a revolution in Albania. Lonsdale was just back from four years in the Philippines and was training Air Force officers in Colorado. Sichel was running agents in W. Berlin.`

                   Burke went to Rome and began working with the British on the joint effort to undermine the Albanian regime.  It was doomed to fail as the mission was an extreme long shot and his UK colleague was Kim Philby. Even before the mission was finished, Burke was sent to Germany to begin planning destabilization activities in Poland and Ukraine.  Lansdale had been recruited by the CIA, and was now working on how to counter the Huks' peasant uprising in the Philippines. He knew he had his work cut out for him because he had witnessed the landlords, who had collaborated with the Japanese, slide right back up to the top of Filipino society when the war ended. He proposed countering the Huks on the ground and in the villages. He befriended a junior politician, Raymon Magsaysay, a future Filipino president. The two men teamed up in 1951 to assure the honesty of the national election, by challenging the Huks with land reforms and financial awards. With Magasaysay now the Defense Minister, they increased the army's pay threefold and ended the it's endemic corruption. Magasaysay was on the road to the top and Lansdale was right next to him. In 1952, Sichel was sent to DC because he could no longer stay in Germany after having married a German national. And after seven years in Berlin, he was ready to leave. He felt that the US was sacrificing the lives of countless  emigres by returning them to their homes on the other side of the Iron Curtain to foment revolt in a police state, a very unlikely eventuality. Burke, Sichel and others on the front line in Europe slowly realized that they were simply and conclusively sending brave men to their graves. While these men had their doubts, Ike was elected because of his record and his promise to ratchet up the war against communism.

                             Wisner was to be the new CIA Director in 1953, but Hoover despised him, shunted him aside with innuendo and implied threats and laid the groundwork for Allen Dulles to be appointed.  Wisner wound up as number two. Dulles' older brother, John Foster, was the new rabidly anti-communist Secretary of State and looking for opportunities in the wake of Stalin's death. After the British intimated that the popularly- elected PM of Iran, who had just nationalized BP, might get friendly with the local communists, John Foster pushed to overthrow him. Wisner was opposed and thought we should be aligning ourselves with the young nationalist, not the fading empires, but was he overruled. The CIA-led coup eliminated Mohammad Mossadegh, and propped up the Shah. Almost seventy years later, the US is still suffering the consequences of that decision. John Foster squelched Ike's plans to seek some sort of rapprochment and locked in the Cold War. The early Eisenhower years also saw Joe McCarthy resuscitate his Red Scare, and in cahoots with and fed an endless supply of material by Hoover, went after the CIA. To his credit, Allen Dulles backed him down and stopped him in his tracks.

      After Lansdale helped Magsaysay win a presidential election, he returned home, where Dulles told him that "we want you to do the same thing in Vietnam that you did in the Philippines." He arrived as the French were leaving after their defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh and Diem was assuming leadership in the south. After their first meeting, Diem asked Lansdale to come to work for him. Lansdale became indispensable and helped Diem hold down a revolt by a massive crime syndicate in Saigon, eliminate the influence of the die-hard French colonials and solidify Diem's standing in Washington. However, Diem and his brother, Nhu, soon began a slow drift toward dictatorship, thrilling the US overseers and demoralizing the idealist Lansdale.

                   John Foster Dulles was so happy with the Iranian coup that he set his sights on Guatemala. He put Frank Wisner in charge. In Guatemala, the man who had won the most recent election with two-thirds of the vote had decided to end the country's feudal structure and initiate land reform. He also took on an American fruit company, represented by Dulles when he was a a lawyer in NY. He also put a few communists in his government. Unfortunately for Jacobo Arbenez, these actions spelled the end of his career. The Army of Liberation marched in, and once again the CIA had triumphed over incipient communism. Cries of 'Yankee imperialism' rang out around the globe.

                  The Eisenhower administration believed in the CIA and expanded its budget and responsibilities. For Michael Burke, it was time to go; he retired in 1955 and returned to NY.  Wisner's doubts were mounting after his role in the Guatemalan coup the previous year. Continuing to lose people behind the Iron Curtain was gnawing at his soul. And he never received a satisfactory answer to his question: if we succeed in creating an uprising in eastern Europe and the Soviets crush it, which we know they will, what are we accomplishing? His conduct became erratic, prompting one colleague to conclude that"Frank is in real rouble."

                  The year 1956 saw a breakdown in Lansdale's relationship and influence with Diem, who was now an absolute and total dictator. Lansdale came home. In Moscow, Khruschev delivered his famous de-Stalinization speech in February. The news of it shook the world.  In the US, John Foster squelched any discussion of detente and stuck to the hard line. After years of the US encouraging revolt, it finally happened in Budapest. Peaceful protest morphed into spontaneous revolution, with Hungarians shooting the soldiers of the Red Army. They succeeded in expelling the Soviets from the city and the PM, Imre Nagy, declared that he would negotiate the end of Soviet occupation. The Soviets decided to leave, but Khruschev changed his mind the next day. The Soviets responded while the Hungarians awaited an American armed effort. It never came, and the Soviets brutally crushed the rebellion. Wisner was devastated. 

                By the end of Eisenhower's second administration, the US was "now regarded as just one more imperial power bent on the  3rd world's political and economic subjugation." Being tough on communism became the mantra of US policy for the next thirty years.  Ironically, Lansdale's retirement party was  the day of the Diem coup in 1963. The US was committed to a very different path than the one he had encouraged. Wisner's deterioration continued and his career took a downward spiral after he was hospitalized for mental illness. Sichel ran the Hong Kong office for years. In the 50's, he was tasked with the new mission of sending Nationalist Chinese from Taiwan to the mainland to undermine the regime. It sounded like the pipe dream he had walked away from in Berlin a decade ago, and he retired. 

                This is a magnificent book, very well-written, an easy read and a great spotlight on challenging times. The story is much broader than the four men referenced in the book's subtitle. As I have never been much of a fan of America's messianic and interventionist foreign policies, this is right up my alley. The reviews I have seen are all positive and the Times has put the book on their Top 100 for the year.

     

Snow, Banville - B+

                   The past is not even past, particularly in 1957 Ireland when a Garda detective investigates the vicious murder of an RC priest at a Protestant's home. The evisceration points in a likely direction, but the Archbishop would prefer no one looking  that way. The author has won a Booker and, needless to say, has a way with words. Three hundred easy-reading pages pass in a flash.

Bringing The War Home: The White Power Movement And Paramilitary America, Belew - B

  This is the history of the white power movement from  the mid-70's to its high point - the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1994. "It united a wide array of groups and activists previously at odds, thrown together by tectonic shifts in the cultural and political landscape." Loss of faith in the government in the tumultuous 1970's, particularly the country's failure in Vietnam, led to its formation. "The movements religious extremism was integral to its broader revolutionary character." 

  Countless people on the right viewed the US's failure in Vietnam as directly attributable to the weak-willed federal government. Based on their experiences in the military, many whites who fought there came away with a strong dislike for African-Americans. "The Vietnam War signaled a divide between the America of the past and one transformed by antiwar protest and the (civil) rights movement.."  After his tour, Louis Beam, a combat veteran living in Texas, began organizing and training Klansmen to be soldiers at a fifty-acre camp in south Texas. They harassed the Vietnamese fishermen on the Gulf coast and conducted patrols along the US-Mexican border. Significant tensions and violence followed. White anger escalated because of a fallacious belief that the Vietnamese fishermen were also receiving welfare. They began to burn Vietnamese boats in the Galveston area. Texas police, judges and the legislature shut down the white power training infrastructure in 1981.  

  In North Carolina, Klansmen and neo-Nazis began to work together toward the common goal of defeating communism. In Greensboro, the Communist Workers' Party organized an anti-Klan demonstration that led to violence on Nov. 3, 1979. Five demonstrators were killed by the supremacists. A year later, the prosecution of the 14 vigilantes led to state and local verdicts of not guilty. Greensboro garnered support around the country for the supremacists as they portrayed themselves as the righteous, and only, fighters against pernicious communist infiltrators, and anyone who didn't agree with them was  a communist. Some Vietnam vets engaged in armed conflict around the world, particularly in Central America and Africa. Rhodesia attracted Americans, but it was Nicaragua that became their focus because Nicaragua had actual, and successful, communists. The Sandanistas were a threat to the American-backed Samoza dictatorship. Similarly, El Salvador reminded them of another Vietnam. The CMA, an organization founded by a Marine vet from Alabama was actually the entity through which Iran-Contra funds and equipment flowed. 

  "In 1983, The White power movement declared war on the state." Instead of fighting for the US, they decided to destabilize it. The preferred method was to use cells that operated without a top-down system, thus requiring a common cultural narrative and assuring some insulation from the police. The movement featured ex-cons, as well as veterans and was centered in the Northwest, especially in  Idaho. The FBI engaged the movement vigorously and around the country, but was never able to convict more than a handful. The movement was armed to the teeth because of its effectiveness in stealing materiel from the military. With the end of the Cold War, the supremacists simply left behind their anti-communism and focused on anti-semitism and race-hatred of people of color. More people joined organized militias. But they now faced a state that had militarized policing and which crushed them at Ruby Ridge and Waco. At Ruby Ridge, the government used excessive force and broke its own rules of engagement to capture a man who had sold two illegally modified weapons, killing his wife and son in the process.* "It (Ruby Ridge) codified an alliance of tax protesters, radical ant-abortionists, militiamen, racists, Identity Christians, survivalists, conspiracy theorists, and those who simply believed the US government had grown too large." The following year, seventy-six Branch Dividians, violent cultists building a fort with a vast amount of weapons, died in a fire at their compound in Waco when it was stormed by agents of the ATF. Both events inflamed and further grew the movement.   

   The 1995 OKC bombing killed 189 and wounded over 500.  "McVeigh acted without orders from movement leaders, but in concert with movement objectives."  The movement fully supported his act of terror against a symbol of the state. "Indeed, the  bombing launched an almost immediate and widespread wave of violence as the militia movement, and the broader white power movement, took action around the country." Nonetheless, the FBI vigorously tamped down white power activity. The movement disappeared from public view until it re-appeared in the 2016 election. The inability of the state to prosecute and contain the white power movement or resolve the issues that led to its existence provide it with an opportunity to resurface once again.

    This is not an easy book as the prose is somewhat turgid  and the topic altogether frightening.  I do believe the author makes her case throughout. As the movement was extremely vibrant, I'm inclined to not believe it went on a twenty-year hibernation, but that today's vitriol and violence is a different offshoot that the author cannot yet diagnose.                                     

*The FBI agent in charge was demoted and Randy Weaver's family was awarded $3.1M in damages.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins Of Power, Prosperity, And Poverty, Acemoglu and Robinson - B

    The accumulation of wealth happens in societies where political rights are broadly dispersed, thus affording a wide swath of the community to prosper. 

    The discrepancies between the US and Canada and the rest of the hemisphere stem from the differences in their respective foundings. Throughout the colonies of Spain, the conquerors decapitated the local elites and began extracting tribute and wealth. The objective was exploitation of the land and the people. "After an initial phase of looting, the Spanish created a web of institutions designed to exploit the indigenous peoples." Whereas in Virginia, colonists were given land and the vote. They were incentivized to work and invest. Eventually, all thirteen colonies had governors and elected assemblies. America grew in the 19th century, while south of the border there was instability and uncertain property rights. The wide-open banking system and the industrial revolution brought prosperity in the US. The political process determines economic outcomes.

    Patterns of prosperity and poverty around the world have been marvelously consistent for over one hundred and fifty years. It is not geography, religion or culture."The great inequality of the modern world that emerged in the nineteenth century was caused by the uneven dissemination of industrial technologies and manufacturing production." The author's two recurring examples are Nogales, a city in Sonora and its compatriot in Arizona. They share everything except governing systems and have had radically different results. Similarly, East and West Germany and North and South Korea. Economic activity in the north of Korea is one-tenth of that in the south. Inclusive systems generate prosperity; extractive ones, failure. That said, extractive institutions can generate growth, but it is a growth based on existing technologies, and thus, has limits.  The planter elites in the Caribbean in the 18th and 19th centuries created vast wealth on the backs of slaves cultivating sugar. The prime example, though, is the first 50 years of the USSR. The Communist Party re-ordered and grew the economy. But, by the 1970's the Soviet system had stalled as a prelude to collapse, because there were no incentives or property rights. On the other hand, inclusive societies may achieve success, for example Venice, and then drift into failure. The sea-going trading nation was the richest place in the world in the early Middle Ages. Its legal system encouraged business partnerships which in turn created upward mobility. The Doge was selected by a general assembly. In the 14th century, Venice slowly succumbed to aristocratic control and "went from powerhouse to museum."

    The Industrial Revolution in England was the most important event in the transition of mankind from subsistence economies to today's technological-based system of vast wealth and improving public health around the world. By the 18th century, the UK had broad pluralistic political institutions and enforceable property rights, thus creating an environment for entrepreneurial growth. The fields of textiles and transportation were the first to be transformed. While England and northern Europe embraced change, the absolutist regimes rejected it, thus causing their societies to fall behind Europe's. Free societies invariably trump absolutist systems.  The US and Australia eagerly adopted the revolution and had inclusive institutions that embraced it.  The end of absolutism in France opened up that country as well. The Russian, Austro-Hungarian,  and Ottoman Empires retained absolutist systems and fell further behind. China remained both closed, i.e. it discouraged any foreign trade, and absolutist. Of course, today's China is a much different story. It has succeeded by offering economic freedoms, but not political ones. The authors believe that China's oppressive politics will eventually stall economic growth.

    The success of inclusive states is not assured in any sense. "They are often the outcome of significant conflict between elites resisting economic growth and political change and those wishing to limit the existing...power of the elites." But, when conflict leads to reforms and broad-based empowerment, it also invariably leads to further success. 

    This book was highly acclaimed when it was published in 2012. Indeed, it is a brilliant exposition of a compelling idea. Jared Diamond offered his constructive critique that it did not hew close enough to his geographic considerations, but that said, the concepts are not mutually exclusive. However, it is a challenge to read because each chapter travels far and wide, spatially and temporally. My thanks to Wendell Erwin for suggesting (I think twice) that I read it.

    

    

First Wave, Benn - B

     This is the second book in the Billy Boyle series. This time, our Hardy Boy-ish hero is in North Africa for the US's introduction to war with the Germans. First though, the Vichy French need to be handled. The plot involves theft of the new penicillin wonder drug and French Nazi collaborators. As said earlier, pure light-hearted WW2-era escapism.

The Abstainer, McGuire - C

                     This novel is set in 1867 Manchester and features Jimmy O'Connor, a cop sent there from Dublin. His role is to try to find the Fenians, who are starting to make trouble, including the occasional act of terror. Most of the English cops don't trust O'Connor, who begins to have second doubts after a few failures. He leaves for the States to seek revenge on another Irishman who has killed his nephew. I am somewhat befuddled by the high-praise this book has received.