Category Archives: Non-fiction

February 16, 2025 · 2:23 pm

All the Worst People: In which you accidentally think something

Phil Elwood worked in PR for a lot of terrible people: dictators and tyrants and etc. Then he wrote a book about that experience All the Worst People. And in the book makes the argument that whoever controls the narrative controls what people think. So one cannot help but think that the book itself might just be one such effort to make us readers think particular things about Elwood.

While the explanatory frameworks of mental illness, or desperation, or youth make his individual actions comprehensible, the book casts the larger structures of extreme wealth and connection are the real problem.

And while I’m inclined to agree with the argument, in a book about how feelings and thoughts get constructed and manipulated, this reader could not help but be suspicious that the same was happening. All the while enjoying the narrative intensity of Elwood’s anecdotes of adventure and misadventure amid piles of cash or injections of ketamine (which, let me say, the book does a great job of convincing the reader is a Good Idea).

As I continue my tentative exploration into more non-fiction by way of very fiction-like non-fiction, I’ll say this one does much to build and maintain narrative and character.

That’s it – no strong endorsement one way or another. If you’re looking for that, the NYTimes put this in the top 100. Maybe 10? Who cares.

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January 31, 2025 · 1:09 am

Soldiers and Kings: If you can face non-fiction

Since November I’ve taken a bit of a pause from the news. But I had a problem: years of daily politics coverage on podcasts and newspaper replaced with: what? Surely not my own thoughts. And stipulated that music has its time and place, I’ve always been a talk radio person (for the Canadians in the room think of CBC radio one just quietly droning in the background) So. I turned to non-fiction audiobooks.

Any guys, while my first picked knocked it out of the park in terms of an excellent book, it was – far from – the reprieve from our political moment that I’d half-hoped the exercise might be (though I bear some blame as the title does suggest it may not be the lightest of content). Enter Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Snuggling.

A cultural anthropologist, De León’s Soldiers and Kings, covers the years De León spent living with and learning from a group of Honduran human smugglers. Over the chapters the book brings the complexity of their lives and choices alongside the crushing structural impossibilities that make their lives what they are.

As the book follows many years we also see how changes to immigration policies, climate catastrophe, and demands on/for labour change – and worsen – the experience of those trying to find safety and to stay there. Which makes it a particularly hard book to read right now and to be reminded – albeit from the privileged distance from which I read – of the concrete lived suffering and death that recent political changes in the US – and the likely changes within Canada – wreak.

It’s beautifully written – with the men De León meets and works alongside full in their complexity and their dreams. While sharing with the reader the contradictions of their livelihood, De León’s manages to at once also describe and analyze the broader social and political context in a way that never reads as pedantic, only as illuminating.

So while it will not be a cheerful read, it is – I think – an important one.

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April 4, 2024 · 2:48 am

Going Infinite: That one time I decided to be a crypto investor

In case you need proof that I ought not to be responsible for large sums of money, it was the winter of 2021 that I decided I’d become a crypto investor. Indeed, that was just before the giant crypto crash: good memory. Thankfully my risk tolerance is that of a hospital administrator or air traffic controller, which is to say: low. And if I hadn’t lost my $50 in the crash, I’d have lost it because I misplaced the book where I’d painstakingly written down all the passwords to the many layers of security I’d installed – because, you know, someone was going to hack me for my $53-turned-$13-turned-who-knows.

All this to say it was with some sense of proximity to the crime – what with being a crypto investor myself – that I read Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite which describes the rise and fall of crypto-investor-turned-exchange-turned-convict Sam Bankman-Fried. Lewis does a fantastic job of grabbing hold of the reader and making clear just how bananas crypto investing was (is?). A casual two billion here, an easy three billion over there. And while the descriptions of outrageous wealth are, of course, fascinating, I found the turn toward trying to understand Bankman-Fried the most compelling part of the book. What were his intentions? What were his aims? How did he come to be in charge of such riches? (I think the short answer is math camp).

Oh and the intentions of the effective altruists. What a bunch! Taking the idea that the purpose of an individual life is to save the most human lives / reduce the most suffering (at least that was my read on their movement) they figure the best route is to make as much money as possible so that money can be invested in different domains (AI research, pandemic planning, etc) where it can do the most good. (I’m sure there’s an argument for why this EA approach is better than a redistribution of wealth that would see investments in these worthy aims made by government rather than the billionaire class, but I digress).

Anyway, thanks to C. and M. for suggesting this one. Non-fiction FTW. I think C. told me there’s also a good accompanying podcast about the trial and sentencing, so if you get fully hooked on SBF you can listen to that, too.

As for me I’m on to reading about forest fires because ’tis the season for angst.

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March 1, 2024 · 2:54 am

The Talk: Excellent

I hadn’t heard of Darrin Bell before my mum suggested The Talk, but I can’t wait to spend more time with his work. The Talk is Bell’s memoir of growing up in amid racist structures and people and of his path to becoming a Pulitzer winning editorial cartoonist. A Künstlerroman for those collecting their literary terms. I wish I’d had it to recommend in a recent conversation with a white man who told me there were no racist police officers. Or that I was teaching a course that I could put it on the booklist for so that more white young people could hear early: racism is real and white supremacy is not an accident and you have responsibilities for change. And as Bell ends the book, so that more black young people could hear early: you are not alone. Alas, all I have is this humble platform on which to echo mum’s recommendation: go read The Talk!

Oh and if you needed more reason: it’s visually stunning.

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