lpm100's reviews
711 reviews

Book Review
The Half Life of Facts 
3/5 stars
"It just didn't feel like there was that much value added."
*******

Of the book:

-211 pages of prose over 10 chapters= 21 pps/chapter
-208 point citations, ≈1 per page.

This seems to be a decent book, but somehow I've read many of these things before in other places.

Toward the end, it seems like the author was straining to fill up some type of page quota. If there was a connection between the thesis of the book and the things that he was talking about, it didn't come through for me.

Of course, it never hurts to revisit/recapitulate sundry aspects of Epistemology--and this author is an applied mathematician and so he should have been the best choice to write a book like this. (But, I have read one applied mathematician that is done a bit better.)

I think the whole book could be read in a couple of afternoons. (211 pages of fast flowing prose.)

A bit from each chapter:

1. Author marks out his territory in describing "mesofacts." This is midway between things that are well known and impossible to overturn (such as the fact that there are five fingers on every hand) versus things that change every single day (the weather).

2.  A Derek Price in this book notices around 1947 the exponential growth of knowledge in journals. Author lets us know that fields have unique doubling times. The number of entries in a dictionary of national biography doubles once every hundred years. But the number of asteroids known doubles every 10 years. Medicine and hygiene has a doubling time of 87 years whereas Genetics has a doubling time of 32 years. (Stylistic problem: only English people know the Euler number as the Napier constant.)

3. Knowledge increases exponentially, but it also decays exponentially. The author took the specific field of medical knowledge about cirrhosis or hepatitis. He calculated that it took about 45 years for half of it to be disproven or become out of date. Papers also decay in the amount that they are cited by other authors. (Economics has a half life of 9.38 years.) 

4. A lot of technology approximates Moore's Law. (Doubling every 18 months.) If not directly that, it is exponential with some other unspecified doubling time. Tightly linked logistic curves can, when combined, yield a smooth curve over time. (But then, we don't know if this smooth curve will have logistic curve characteristics as well.) Population growth is limited by technical progress, but then technological progress is helped by population density above a certain level.


5. Re-exposition of network theory. (Six degrees of separation, strong versus weak ties, short versus long ties, et al.) "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."

6. Undiscovered knowledge. Multiple independent discoveries. Meta analyses. Even medieval publications can be fit onto a logistic curve.

7. Analogizing of changes of state of knowledge to physical phase transitions (it's an interesting analogy, but a little bit strained --phase transitions are reversible with changing conditions). Knowledge may increase gradually (knowing one new species one at a time that doesn't lead to anything earth-shattering) or, it may occur in leaps and bounds (once we had an understanding of the atom, then we could do GPS).

8. Things learned in learning how to measure certain things (mountains, trees, India). This chapter is a synopsis/recapitulation of many things learned in Simon Winchester's "The Perfectionists." Furthercomments about how poor the reproducibility of certain experiments is.

9. Technology can be defined as "anything that was invented after you were born." Arthur spends some time discussing types of reasoning and error and why errors stay around for such a long time. And why scientific progress proceeds one funeral at a time.

10. The author talks a little bit about the limits to our knowledge. (He doesn't actually make any predictions about the consequence of having so much knowledge; that was more aptly and more accurately done by Nate Silver in the book that I will reference below: Silver suggests that the political polarization that we see today is people's response to dealing with too much knowledge.)

Verdict: Weak recommendation. I would not pay more than $5 for this book. Also, in the event that you have a choice between this book and Nate silver's "The Signal and the Noise," I would recommend that you pay for the Silver book instead.

Other books that I've read that cover: knowledge from this book in a more interesting fashion:

1. Rigor Mortis, Richard Harris (talks about reproducibility issues in biological experiments.)

2. The Perfectionists, Simon Winchester (talks about the difference between accuracy and precision and about increasing accuracy in measurement).

3. Nate Silver, The Signal and The Noise (he takes a lot of specific case studies of things that are actually measured and shows why and how the measurements are / are not good. A variety of interesting topics.)


Vocabulary:

Lazarus taxa
S-curve theory
Logistic curves
Carrying capacity
zeta-
femto-
yotta-
yocto-
actuarial escape velocity
Hawthorne effect
preferential attachment (Matthew effect)
Godwin's Law (reductio ad Hitlerium)
citation decay
Meta-analysis
Cumulative meta-analysis
mesofact(s)
taxonomic bias
taxonomic chauvinism 

Factoids:

1. (p.91) "Only about 20% of scientists who cite an article of actually read that paper."

2. The entire Popeye franchise was because of a decimal error in the content of spinach--which contains nowhere near as much iron as the cartoons would have you believe.

Book Review
Political Order And Political Decay
5/5 stars
"Greatest Hits of PoliSci/ Comparative Politics."

*******
Of the book:

-Doesn't need to be read in order, owing to a PLENTY of repetition; chapters can be selected in order of interest
-Each chapter has a 1 to 2 sentence synopsis at the head
- Bibliography has about 600 sources.
-743 point citations (1.4/ page; ≈20/chapter).
-546 pps prose; ≈15 pps/chapter.

Part I (194 pps, 37%) The State
Part II (182 pps, 35%) Foreign Institutions 
Part III (56 pps, 11%) Democracy
Part IV (94 pps, 18%) Political Decay

*******
This book sat on my shelf for ≈7 years, and it occurred to me that I had better get it read because books on Political Science have a fairly short half-life.

°°°On the one hand,  the book appears to be credible AS A HISTORICAL PANORAMIC of governance; It seems to be a mashup of a lot of the best / most influential/most long lived books about public policy with examples that are both interesting and pithy.  (It has aged fairly well.)

°°°On the other hand, the book has the perfume of evolution/Evolutionary Psychology about it: you can work backwards and explain anything that you want to, but it doesn't seem to be all of that useful for forward predictions (p. 548: "there's no automatic historical mechanism that makes progress inevitable, or that prevents decay and backsliding.")  And Fukuyama makes it clear even in the first chapter that he will "not suggest concrete policies or a short-term solution to problems outlined here" and that the book will not offer any easy answers.

He observes many times that the business of war is what makes states, but then (p.209): "Prolonged military competition does not necessarily produce states, because it has not in Papua New Guinea for the last 40,000 years."

Since books about political science tend to be overwrought with detail / have a fairly low signal to noise ratio, I would say that, relative to some of the garbage that I've had to read in undergraduate, Fukuyama reveals everything by covering only what's necessary. (Kind of in the way that a good bathing suit does.)
I would have to say that the single biggest messages of this book (which puts me in mind of Margaret Thatcher's "Statecraft") are that: 

1. Governments and countries take different directions because of specific idiosyncratic factors on the ground, and

2. Whatever the case: over the very long term, all of these political arrangements and institutions decay. It's never the same chain of events twice, but it does eventually happen. 
*******

Spillover thoughts:

1. Author is *somewhat* data driven. 

a. He described Tanzania (2022 GDP $1100) as a "successful" example of creating national identity and Kenya as not (2022 GDP $2082) and Nigeria as not (2022 GDP $2066).

b. (p.173): "Government- operated railroads in Europe and Asia have often been leaders in service efficiency." (I think there is one high speed line in Japan that is profitable and maybe two in France. All the rest lose money.)

2. Rule OF law≠ Rule BY law (=regularized administrative commands of a sovereign).

3. (p.357): "China represents the ONE world civilization that never developed a true rule of law."

4. When the state precedes the law (e.g. China, Japan) it is a very different case to the other way around (Western civilizations). 

5. The author keeps singing up the praises of democracy, but I wonder how good of an idea that is. It has been known FOR A LONG TIME that democracies tear themselves apart. (The next Civil War will probably be over something stupid like transvestites on beer cans or drag queen story hours.) Give me good ol' Wealthy Authoritarian Singapore any day of the week in preference to such (democratically chosen) frivolity.

6. Sometimes countries just get stuck in a bad equilibrium. Interest groups provide money to politicians who don't want to give that money up. And interest groups do not want a system where money no longer buys influence because that is their raison d'être.

7. Is following the course of a civilization in a state of decline is the same thing as following a single man who lives and dies: He could die now OR he could die later, but he is still going to die. And there's nothing that can be done about it, and no one knows the day nor the hour. 

By extension: governments and countries ultimately fall apart just through sheer entropic factors--and the intellectual exercises are just that.

8. How many societies that exist today are snapshots in time of a much older society that no longer exists in the way that it did? (p.135):  "The Englishmen who settled North America in the 17th century brought with them the political practices of Tudor. On American soil these old institutions became entrenched and were eventually written into the American constitution, a fragment of the old society frozen in time." (This topic shows repeatedly throughout the book with respect to Latin American institutions being imported from Spain.)

10. US academia is an evil and heinous place: (p.196): Forgetting [conquering / assimilation] is essential to the process of nation creation, because everybody had to be conquered at some point or assimilate to some other dominant culture. But much of the academic modus operandi is keeping old historical grievances festering--and therefore reverses the development of a national culture upon which a state rests. (The Chinese habit of executing mouthy academics is not such a bad idea, and it also can be seen as the cost of a few worthless Gender Studies parasites against the benefit of having a state in place.)

11. I just wonder what it is about US academics that make Europe the place of All Things Right and True in their minds? (p.157) This is been going on for at least a century and a half  (Woodrow Wilson), in spite of all of their wars and Eurosclerosis.

12. Who knew that Greece and Sicily were ruled by foreigners for so many centuries? Those specific cases create a deep distrust of the state.


Vocabulary:

Hanseatic countries
usufructuary rights
demurrage fees
prebendal(ism)
alluvial
collective action problem
low level equilibrium 
acephalous
depredations
deracinated 
creole (it means "settler population,"as used here not "mixed race" as it does in the Black American lexicon)
cordilleras 
captain donatory
Mauryas
intendant system
cadastral survey
1883 Pendleton Act
Northcote-Trevelyan Reforms 
Gemeinschaft
Gesellschaft


Quotes:

(p.420): "This view was first articulated by Gaetano Mosca, who stated that the different regime types - monarchy, aristocracy, democracy - made little difference to actual life because all were in the end controlled by elites."

(p.421): "Communism did not eliminate the distinction between rulers and ruled, or end oppression by elites; it merely changed the identity of those in charge."

(p.245): "Slavery had existed in West Africa for several centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century, largely as a result of the trans-saharan trade from North Africa and the Middle East."

(p.294): "It was only in 1975 that Africa's population density reached the level that Europe enjoyed in the year 1500." In 1900, per km²: Japan had 118.2, China had 45.6, and sub-Saharan Africa had 4.4.

(p.189): "In the 1860s, a quarter of France's population could not speak French, and another quarter spoke it only as a second language. The final linguistic unification of France was not completed until World War I."
 

Verdict: Recommended
A bit from each chapter:

1. What is political development? Author uses his extremely overworked phrase "getting to Denmark" (=democratic, secure, prosperous, well governed, with low levels of corruption). Institutional rigidity and repatrimonialization are the two forces that contribute to decay of states.

2. The dimensions of development. Not all good things go together. Political development is not a deterministic path and depends on many different things.

3. Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy can be many things, contingent on the ability of the state in question to administer it effectively. It is not categorically good or bad.

4. Prussia builds state. Similar to China 2,000 years ago (during the consolidation of the house of Qin and moving into the Han dynasty), the Prussian military bureaucracy necessary for wars actually created a state. And once the state was established, then the bureaucracy repatrimonialized. German participation in the world wars is reinterpreted as autonomous bureaucracy run amok.

5. Corruption. "Clientelism" (US style corruption of special interests) ≠ "prebendalism" (African style corruption, where the government just steals the money directly)

6. The birthplace of democracy. Inside view of that awesomely corrupt state known as "Greece." Attempts to talk away their inability to get their fiscal house in order as something other than moral corruption.

7. Italy and the low trust equilibrium. Excessively weak governments lead to institutions like the Mafia. Getting into a low trust equilibrium is easy enough, but getting out is next to impossible.

8. Patronage and Reform. Comparison of the early corruption of US and UK government positions and initial steps of reform.

9. The United States invents clienteleism. Discussion of how geographic conditions and initial conditions made the (antique) US state such as it is. Clientelism is a fancy word for "machine politics." (p.147): "One of the reasons that socialism never took hold in the United States is that the Republican and Democratic parties captured the votes of working class Americans by offering short-term rewards instead of long-term programmatic policy changes." Clienteleism involves a reciprocal exchange of benefits, whereas in corruption public officials simply steal.

10. The end of the spoil system. The US cleans up its machine politics with formal creation of the merit-based Civil Service. The US pension for hamstringing the executive as opposed to finding ways to make it more efficient has a long pedigree.

11. Railroads, forests, and American state building. Technical difficulties with public private partnerships as evidenced by the United States figuring out how to regulate the railroads over the course of a century.

12. Nation building.  Tribal identity politics is antithetical to nation building. The building of A Nation (as well as its destruction) is the work of men of words. (Martin Luther in Germany; Jose Rizal in the Philippines.) Fukuyama seems to think that language based-culture is a central unifying source of social cohesion. Industrialization and the movement of people from farms makes nation building spontaneous, as people who spoke different languages had to learn to cooperate with each other. 

13. Good government, bad government. Recapitulation of the two methods to make a modern state. The Prussia/China model-some bureaucracy is organized around military issues; the US / Britain model, where interest groups create an efficient government because they need one. 

14. Nigeria. Dutch disease, and some number of Sorry Black People running a country like a racketeering operation. (This chapter only took 10 pages because of the banality of the subject matter.) 

15. Geography. Recapitulation of selected bits of "Guns, Germs, and Steel"  and "Why Nations Fail."

16. Silver, gold and sugar. (Brilliant chapter, by the way.) It describes the slave trade to Latin America as well as the stage at which European intervention found the New World. (They had large states, but they were not very well developed and the Spaniards in Portuguese just replaced it with things that were worse.) A bit on Spanish mercantilism.

17. War made the state and the state made war. The Latin Americans have not fought interstate war as much as the Europeans did and the state building that went with the wars was something that they sat out. States are still very weak even to this day.

18. The Clean Slate. Argentina is singled out as a special case because they didn't start with the same burdens as places like Mexico and peru. Nonetheless, they made several meals calculations and went from having a GDP per capita equal to Switzerland to having one 1/6 the level of Switzerland's.

19. Storms in Africa. Author seems to be very hopeful that the inability of Africans to set up governments is not due to genetic sorriness. If there are not strong states in Africa it is because there never were owing to geographic factors. (For example, the continent is extremely thinly populated with few navigable waterways.) And the colonization of Africa was the third and final wave of colonization. They were not colonies long enough to develop a strong tradition of state. 

20. Indirect rule. More about the interest in case of Africa. The colonial government to natives was around 1:50,000.

21. Institutions, domestic or imported. Indirect rule has been successful in many other cases. Interventions today are not the same as before. In United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand direct rule was the order of the day because of small host populations.



22. Lingua Francas. Why Kenya and Nigeria failed to create a national identity and Indonesia and Tanzania did not.

23. The Strong Asian State. It's easier to build a state on top of an existing nation than the other way around. Witness the cases of China and Japan.

24. China had a strong state for 22 centuries that practice ruled by law. Recently, they are taking some very small steps toward rule of law, but they are slow and inconsistent.

25. A lot of the highly centralized and technocratic projects of the current CCP dynasty are actually the re-emergence of a very old form of government that goes back a couple of millennia, since the First Emperor. Even the difficulty of the central government to control various Regional governments goes back that far.govb

26. Three Regions. Comparative analysis of Africa, East Asia, and Western countries. 

27. A confused chapter trying to link economic growth, social mobilization, legitimacy, the state, the rule of law, and democracy. Analyzed through something called the Marx-Moore framework.

28. Universal suffrage came in waves, the 3rd of which seems to have started about 1919. The last country to have universal suffrage was Switzerland, in 1990. Conservatives appealing to the working class is not limited to the current US strategy and has been the case at least since the time of Disraeli--a century and a half ago.

29. From 1848 to the Arab Spring. Big surprise! Just because one Arabic dictator is removed from power doesn't mean that democracy is going to magically self-generate: the conditions on the ground have to be right to support it, and it appears that currently they are not. "Political Islam" is closer to Identity politics than revived religiosity.

31. Political decay. Author uses the prototypical example of the United States Forestry Service.

32. A State of courts and parties: Since 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education), the precedent has been set to use the judiciary to effect social change. Not a good idea.

33. Repatrimonialization. Excessive judicialization and interest groups. Just because of the mathematics of it, interest groups hold hugely disproportionate sway over legislation. And that explains how bills that only need to be three pages long end up being 900 pages - - because of carveouts and goodies for special interest groups.

34. Vetocracy. The point at which checks and balances become detrimental is not fixed. The US checks and balance system is an outlier among democracies. (The Westminster system has unicameral legislature, no separate presidency, no written Constitution and therefore no judicial review.) The most autonomous arms of government (CDC, Federal reserve, etc) have the highest levels of approval and the most democratic sections (Congress) have single digit approval.

35. Autonomy and subordination. Discussion of selected dimensions of the principal-agent problem. Kudos to the author for being aware of the 25 century tension between Confucianists and Legalists. (Fukuyama has really done his homework.) If the bureaucracy has too much autonomy, we could have the Japanese military taking it into the second world war. If it has none, then it can actually solve any problems. Where to draw the line? "Taylorism" makes a cameo.

36. There is a directionality to political development, and that's about it for what is worth. It could go forward. It could go backward. It could stop. It could never arrive (see the case of China).

Book Review
The Alchemist
2/5 stars
"I don't see what all the hubbub was about."
*******
This book only takes a few hours to read, and that is what makes it salvageable.

Other than that, it is a book full of hokey, corny metaphors (Soul of the World. Personal Legend. Soul of Gd. Language of the World.), and as I look up the symbolism...... It also has a huge amount of, um, Christological awkwardness. All the while also appropriating a lot of Jewish symbols. (In the Hebrew Bible, the Urim and the Thummim are elements of the hoshen, the breastplate worn by the High Priest attached to the ephod. )

I honestly believe that the book's popularity is because it was endorsed by a lot of celebrities (Madonna. Bill Clinton. Rush Limbaugh. Will Smith. And let's remember that Kabbalah only got popular when Madonna decided it was cute one day when she was having a mani-pedi.)

It seems like the (hackneyed) central message is to "not be afraid to follow one's dreams" and "when you want something, the whole universe conspires to help you."

Honestly, for somebody who is of a certain age (let's say, 40),  many of these ideas are frankly silly. (I think the quote is that:  "Hopes are like hair ornaments. When a girl is young, she probably wants to wear too many of them, but by the time she becomes old she looks silly wearing even one.")

1. How many people spend their whole life following that dream after that "next big business idea" when, it really would have been more cost effective to just work a nine to five job somewhere. (This has been generations of my family.)

How many young guys think that they're going to be in the NBA or they're going to make a living rapping?

2. How many people spend years in a state of wanderlust and find that what they were looking for could have been right at home? (I myself spent 11 years living in China and abroad and ended up living just a few miles away from my hometown back in the States.)

3. Every guy wants a lady with a shape like Kim Kardashian or Jen Selter, but in reality there are just not enough of them to go around. And so if you can't take who you want, you just have to take who you can get. (I just passed by a Certain Familiar Callipygian Jewish lady today. If I had followed my dreams, would I have been able to find somebody like that right where I am? Less than 2.5% of Jewish ladies would consider a black partner and black guys are seven times more numerous than Jewish girls. Somebody's dreams are going to have to run around on the rocks of reality. Of statistical necessity.)

4. The perfect is the enemy of the good. As you age, it really is possible to let your mind drift down dark corridors and wonder what might have been. And then assume that any of those possibilities would have been better than what you actually have and create a fantasy life around what may never have existed.

Since there's no way to know one way or the other, it's better to just not think about it. (Would I have been able to snag somebody like today's Callipygian Jewish Lady in an alternate reality? Would that extra body weight have stayed in the right places as the kids kept coming? Likely not. Would the jiggling go from being attractive to being a tidal wave of cottage cheese? Likely yes.)

*******
I don't understand why the author made a lot of the narrative choices that he did.

1. He is a Portuguese speaker, but a Brazilian. I don't think that the Muslim conquest of Portugal is any closer to a Brazilian than the Norman conquest of England is to an American even though both Englishmen and Americans speak English.

2. Why did he keep calling the protagonist "the boy" after he did a lot of growing up just within the first year?

3. Since this was set around the end of the 1800s, wasn't there a boat trip that could have taken people from Morocco to Egypt? (≈4,542km)
*******

There are some good aphorisms (as the author sometimes lets us know by repeating them several times):

1. "Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time."

2."It's not often the money saves a person's life."

3. "Death doesn't change anything," the boy thought.

4. "You could have died later on," a soldier said to the body of one of his companions. "You could have died after peace had been declared. But, in any case, you were going to die."

5. "Usually the threat of death makes people a lot more aware of their lives."
*******

Verdict: Not recommended. If you want to read a fiction book that is extremely quotable, I would recommend instead "Memoirs of a Geisha."

New Words:

Sacristy
Simum

Interesting concept: 

(p.116):  "Rather than being killed by a blade or bullet, he was hanged from a dead palm tree where his body twisted in the desert wind."

I do know that when Saddam Hussein was captured, he asked to be shot because he thought that was more honorable way to die. And, instead they hung him. And that was deliberately chosen to disrespect him.

Arabs been killing each other for thousands of years, and being desensitized to death / other things are definitely a certain part of their conceptual space.

Book Review
Changing The Immutable
5/5 stars
"R'Schwab: We do not need realism, we need inspiration from our forefathers in order to pass it on to posterity."
*******
Of the book:

-283 pages of prose over 8 chapters, ≈35/ chapter
-Estimated 1450 bibliographic sources (5.1 citations per page)!
-Replete with examples of censorship (Photoshop, reformatting) of highly variable quality.

This is a serious scholarly text. 

I did check two further things about this book:

1. The first is that I had a Big Rosh Kollel take a look at the sources and tell me whether or not they were mostly books or short responsa. He said that he thought there were mostly heavy books that comprised the bibliography.

2. The second is that I contacted the author directly and asked how he had time to read 1,450 books, and what he told me was: this is "not the type of book that somebody can directly research."  He had already studied the sources in other contexts, and realized that there was enough information over some number of decades of study to write a book about in its own right. In this case, the censorship of Jewish texts.

I spoke to one of my teaching rabbis, and he endorsed the author as a "big Talmud chacham."
*******
It's really hard to put together a pithy description of all of the overarching themes here.

But, I will try.

Second order thoughts:

1. The takeaway message is that: If you wanted to build a mass movement and you had a choice between trying to be intellectually honest, versus creating a bunch of mythology in order to sustain your adherents...... I would say that the latter is emphatically the best choice.

Conservative Judaism did try to be intellectually honest ("Conservative Judaism," Neil Gillman), but they just were not able to keep their people. They are fading away into obscurity, and the best that I can say about Modern Orthodoxy is that it is at least stable (but aging)? 

The Corrupt Haredim have created a historical narrative for their followers about a time that never existed. But, they do have a lot of babies! And they teach them what they believe.

2. It's meaningless AND overburdensome to try to determine what is "truth." (I really hate to give a nod to the postmodernists, but this book FORCES me to do just that.)

(p.25) Truth can be many things:

∆"Historical" (i.e., you go about the business of trying to find out what really did happen)

∆"Pragmatic"/"utilitarian"/"instrumental" (ie, the results justify whatever definition of "truth" there is; no problem to mix up biblical and rabbinic commandments, nor to lie to someone if it will modify their behavior in a way that you think is appropriate [p.247-8]).

∆ "Pedagogical" (think of all of those times when a Hasidic rabbi is giving a drasha involving a bunch of characters that never existed)

∆ "Moral" (i.e, if everybody decides what morality is, then you can make statements within that conceptual framework - - but the conceptual framework is completely arbitrary).

3. The rewriting of religious texts is something that happens so slowly that is imperceptible. If there are 18 editions of a book published, by the time a censor cuts out a little bit from each printing..... At the end of the day, you have something that is not quite the same as the original. (And we can only know this because the author searched through almost every edition of each book published.)

4. Conversion law has been many different things just in the past couple of centuries. These days, it is: a) provisional; b) reversible; c) excessively arduous/traumatic.

But it wasn't always that way!

If you go back just a century ago, It was believed that: a) a person could convert to Judaism knowing nothing about the religion; b) the conversion was valid as long as someone regarded himself as a member of the People of Israel (p.235).

Spillover Questions:

1. What is the point of study? All of these men sit around here in Kollel for YEARS on end in order to "understand" (gemara/halacha), but it's a wild goose chase: whatever people believe could change over time, and the people whose scholarship supported the disfavored position are/can/will be airbrushed out of history - - along with their scholarship.

It may well be that the statements "I know more than you"/"Ploni is such a big talmud chacham" have NO objective meaning.

2. Is it completely meaningless to try to objectively understand anything?

In my own study of how to read the Torah, I have learned that that the Torah was originally written in paleo Hebrew, and that there was a lot more gemination of letters than there is currently, and the fact that many Hebrew letters [ש/ת/ס]have been merged.

But, the memory of this information has been completely rewritten out of History and replaced with a bunch of Kabbalistic gobbledygook about the origin of the alphabet. 

The bad news is that 90% of Black Hats believe the Kabbalistic version of events and the other 10% have actually picked up a history book.

3. Maybe too much of anything is not good. The author specifically talks about the extreme lengths that Haredim go through so that people don't even have to hear any word that could be vaguely sexual (to the point where they can't even put Breast Cancer Awareness Ads in their publications because it would require the use of the word "breast").

But just the same:

a. I have read more than a couple of autobiographies of sex workers and Haredim have shown up in every one of them. (Sex worker Kayley Sciortino, in "Slutever," recapitulates what every Israeli taxi driver already knows--predictably conflating "Hasidim" with "all Haredim.")

b. I have read comments from OTD gay people as well as observations by Deborah Feldman ("Unorthodox") that Haredi yeshiva'ot are a smorgasbord for gay/curious/"sexually expansive" guys (and also "sexually expansive" girls if you believe Reva Mann).

c. When I pick up the newspaper and read about the semi-monthly Haredi sexual abuse scandal, it's 90% of the time Boy-on-Boy Action for some reason--so, all of those euphemisms may not have helped all that much.

4. This rewriting of historical narratives goes both ways. Hasidim are mainstream these days, but during the time of R'Yaakov Emden and the Vilna Gaon, they were Public Enemy Number One. 


Memorable Quotes:

1. (p.3, Simon Schwab): "We do not need realism, we need inspiration from our forefathers in order to pass it on to posterity."

2. (p.4, Yosef Chaim Yerushalmi): "Israel is told only that it must be a kingdom of priests and a holy people; nowhere is it suggested that it become a nation of historians.")

3. ("this is the halaka, but we do not teach it.") הלכה ואין מורין כן  

4. (p.251). geneivat da'at. ("Leaving someone with a false impression.") גניבת דעת.

5. Antinomianism in Jewish (!!!) life? (p.228) Female Hasidic Rebbes ? (Maiden of Ludmir, ibid.)

Selected interesting points per chapter:

1. Truth is not absolute. It is instrumental and contextual. Distinction between necessary and true beliefs. The author mentions that his target are Haredim, and I guess it's because they take the most "liberties" with sources in order to support community growth.

2. Recapitulation of his book "The Limits of Orthodox Theology." Halachic truth≠pshat truth. If a cleric writes something down, there's no guarantee that future generations will not reinterpret/excise his positions. (And it doesn't even matter if the scholar is someone as big as Maimonides.)

3. What happens in the case that some Jewish people were doing something it a matter of fact way for several centuries that later poskim decided was not okay? (This author uses the controversy of Italian Jewish people drinking non-Jewish wine because of the vanishingly small probability that it had been used in idol worship; the author could just as easily have chosen the sturgeon controversy.) Of course, you can just delete any references to it in current/future texts. (p. 109: "These responsa should be omitted in order to protect Schick's honor, and that is what was done... 22 responsum from Schick that were not included with the responsa published after his death"; p.114: "Most common way is simply not to mention these opinions in halachic discussions.")

4. The case of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. He did a lot of good, but he had a lot of positions that other people were uncomfortable with. Hmm..... How to deal with this? I know! (p.123: "....the latter told Wolf that he was obligated to alter such passages as this, or to omit them entirely.... When Netzah reprinted the '19 Letters' in the late 1960s ... All criticism of Maimonides were cut out."). This chapter also seems to contain the majority of (badly) photoshopped images.

5. This chapter is the special case of Rav Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Israel under the Mandate government. Of course, he wrote voluminously, and was a Zionist. Since Zionism is not yet popular in the Haredi world, this chapter is a study of how a prolific Chief Rabbi is excised from history. Books remove his haskamot. His name is no longer featured in the index of books. Eulogies that were written for him have all uses of his name expunged to where the obituary may as well have been written about Ploni.

6. If you go back to original printings from the 1600s, there are topless women all over the place. In the Mishneh Torah, for example. Some of these rulings are so shocking, that you just have to look them up. (Sefer Hasidim,176.) Rashi's commentary on Adam's, um,  sexual proclivities before the arrival of Eve (p.200). A guy who believes that marital disputes can be resolved by beating his wife's ass only need to go back in time far enough to find a ruling that says he can. Maimonides. R'Eliezer Papo. The Rema (p. 207).

7. a. In these days of modern translations, messages in Hebrew and the local language (English, in this case) don't quite line up--and that's not an accident.

b. People of earlier times may have had warm relationships with people who later became bêtes noires. Moses Mendelssohn has become one such because of his movement of Haskalah, but he actually had a respectful relationship with the Chatam Sofer (p.219), but later writers deleted this.....R'Moses Hagiz was a good friend of an Xtian Hebraist, J.C. Wolff, but that got extracted, too 

8. The truth is not important. ONLY Scholars/The Rabbinate do have the right to create pseudoepigraphic works as long as it is being advanced in a noble cause. Subheadings in this chapter include:  When Can One Lie / False Attribution/The Problem of Where to Draw The Line/Other Examples of Lying For a Good Purpose/Lying as an Educational Tool / a Rabbinic Doctrine of the Noble Lie / Redefining Truth. The Zohar is a literary forgery (p.264), but a halachic case can be made as to why that's ok! (Remember this the next time someone starts up with an Sokal Hoax-style Kabbalah instead of cracking open a history book.)

Verdict: This is a great book, and I see why it is so expensive. (Still.) It's going to be kept on myself and reread at various points. "One of the harder things about being a normative, Orthodox Jew is trying to predict the past."

There's just so much information here that it could not be absorbed all in one reading--and to be honest, I'm surprised that this book could be written.

Book Review
The Corpse Walker
5/5 stars
324 pages and 28 stories.
≈11 pages per story.
"The matter-of-fact descriptions of the horror stories of these common people are poetry."
*******
The book does not need to be read in order.

All of the interviews are unscripted, cleaned up for clarity, and very pithy.

I can't think of a book like this that has been written before, and that is because when people give books about historical events they often give huge panoramic views without actually talking to any real people. (The same theme as with talking heads on television.)

The second reason is that the people selected in this work are the marginal elements of society, and so often they don't have any authentic voice (as opposed to somebody that is using them as a mascot for his own purposes) because they tend to not be Men of Words. Many of these interviews were originally published in Chinese as part of "Interviews With People From The Bottom Rung of Society."

The interviewees are much older and their memories are mostly from the time of the Great Leap Forward [famine that killed 32 million people] and the Cultural Revolution [the country was terrorized by 14-year-olds for a 10-year period].
*******
The first overarching question that comes up is: WHY?

What is the point of all this misery and suffering?

The next overarching question that comes up is: HOW?

For people who lay claim to having the world's oldest civilization, how is it that they have come up with nothing better than the events described in this book?

There's so much anger toward Japanese people, but to be honest: Japanese have nothing on the brutality that Chinese people visited on each other both before and after the Japanese occupation.

Not by a damned sight.
*******

The brutality in these Chinese prisons were just unspeakable.

1. (xi) "At one point, his hands were tied behind his back for 23 days in solitary confinement until abscess is covered his armpits."

2..(p.268): "A new prisoner would have to go through various tortures designed by the guards and his fellow inmates to break him."

3. (p.236): "After they finally removed the shackles, my neck, wrist and ankles were abscessed.... It took another 4 months for the wounds to heal."

4. Government can stop issuing monthly retirement money. For one victim: It was reduced to ¥120/ month and then reduced again as further punishment to ¥50/month. Not even enough to buy rice.

*******

I will just give a couple of the most funny/disturbing quotes from each chapter in the order that I read them. (This doesn't do the book justice, and it really should be read if possible.)

∆The Mortician (p.176, 181): "Do you know why they wanted to eat human flesh? Many people were suffering from constipation after swallowing a combination of wild grass and white clay to appease gnawing hunger. Some herbal doctors told him that human flesh was an  effective relaxative. They wanted the relief badly" ///"This is China. You don't have much control when you are alive. When you die, you won't have control over your own obituary either."

∆The Falun Gong Practitioner (p.240): "After the camp authorities found out about it, they didn't even bother to send anyone to catch me. I figured they would just happy to get rid of me so they didn't have to bear any responsibility if I died."

∆The Human Trafficker (p.17): "When someone earns money without working hard, he begins to bullshit about the value of life."

∆The Corpse Walker (p.30): "People in the countryside believe that the fake money is used to bribe the corpse's guardian ghosts so they don't block the road to heaven."

∆The[falsely accused] Grave Robber (p.264): "The prison guard then told his lackeys to be careful during future tortures. We should focus on the areas we can cause pain and discomfort without killing the person. He then patted me on my shoulder. Thank God you didn't die in my hands."

∆The Sleepwalker (p.306): "Since we didn't get to eat meat, our only source of protein was placenta, which I picked up from my hospital. Locals didn't want to touch the stuff for superstitious reasons. We were quite lucky that we survived."

∆The Migrant Worker (p.309) Q: "If you were so poor, why did you keep having children?" A: "I am penniless. I have no luck with money at all. That's my fate. But my dick is not willing to accept fate. That stuff down there is the only hard spot in my body."

∆The Former Red Guard (p.197): "In those days, it was very common to see students beat their teachers to death. So, if an accused capitalist was tortured to death, nobody cared."

∆The Counterrevolutionary (p.207): "Protesting against the government was like throwing an egg against a big rock - - A futile attempt with a big personal loss."

∆The Safecracker (p.267): "I have cracked many safes and stolen millions of yuan. I'm waiting to be executed."

∆The Street Singer (p.293): "The Municipal Regulatory Agency are like state supported robbers. Vendors need to bribe them big time to get a permit. If you don't have a permit, they smash all your equipment during regular checkups."

∆The Composer(p.110): "I'm composing a series of elegies for the whole nation, for the millions of victims who died uncalled for deaths or suffered under Maoism."

∆The Leper [who actually was not one] (p.43,45): "Over the years, many healthy people have been sent to the hospital because fellow villagers suspected they had leprosy." AND Q: "I can't believe they set her on fire while she was still alive, didn't she react?" A:"She was blind and deaf. She hadn't eaten for days and she was probably already in a coma. Even if she had been awake, it would have only been a few seconds before she died."

∆The Public Restroom Manager (p.24): "One day the tube was blocked. When I went to investigate, I saw that a fetus had got stuck there...... The public toilet was like an abortion clinic, a dumping ground for dead fetuses. In China, life is cheap."

∆The Professional Mourner (p.4) Q:"How long can you wail? What was your record? A: 2 days and 2 nights."

∆The Illegal Border Crosser (p.251): "The pursuit of freedom is the hardest thing in this world. In China, if you are dying of hunger, nobody gives a damn. But when you try to move to a new place to find food for yourself and look for change of lifestyle, someone will immediately pounce and arrest you."

∆The Rightist (p.119): "You can't marry the Party or the People, can you? We used to hear phony stuff like 'So-and-so has been nurtured by the Party and the People.' What do the Party's breasts look like?"

∆The Peasant Emperor (p.50): "You should address me as Your Majesty."

∆The Village Teacher (p.169,171): "Since peasants seldom read novels, whatever you write about them, they won't know." AND "No shit. She has slept with hundreds of men and thinks she still has a fresh pussy."

∆The Tiananmen Father (p.227): "Despite the hectic situation at the crematorium, the government media still blasted out announcements denying that there had been any killings."

∆The Abbott (p.74,75): "Since my family was poor, my parents sent me to this Temple at the age of seven so I could get fed. So that was how I started out as a monk." AND "When you turn 100, and look back on the early part of your life, a couple of sentences are sufficient. Otherwise, I can go on for 3 days and 3 nights."

∆The Blind Erhu Player (p.278, 280) "When I turned seven, my parents couldn't stand the fact that all their children had been born blind. They both swallowed poison and commited suicide." AND "[Wasting] my life? I have never pondered these profound issues. For a blind person like me, every day is the same, unless I get sick or injure myself by bumping into a wall."

∆The Retired Official (p.126, 127, 133): "... revealed a terrible scandal involving cannibalism at the Fifth Production Division. That division encompassed 82 families with a population of 491. Between December 1959 and November 1960, peasants had killed and eaten 48 female children under the age of 7 which represented 90% of the female children in that age group. About 80% of the families were involved in cannibalism." AND "she was going to die of starvation anyway. It was better for us to sacrifice her to save the rest of the family. We just hope she would reincarnate into something else in the next life. It's too hard to be a human being." AND "We sent people to collect urine ..... Poured the urine into a big container and mixed it with garbage..... After a week, there would be a layer of green algae floating on top of the mess..... We'd scrape the thin layer out, added some water and sugar, and drink it. It didn't taste bad at all."

∆The Former Landowner (p.139,140, 142): "It was a change of dynasty and someone was bound to suffer." AND ".... Everyone in the village was in one way or another related by blood. We all share the same family name Zhou." AND "I'm turning 89 this year. I have long become tired of life. What can I do? The more I want to die, the further I am away from death. The pine coffin that lies in the main hall was made for me over 20 years ago."

∆The Yi District Chief's Wife: (p.150) "In those days, the work team acted like members of the triad. If they decided that someone deserved the death sentence, they simply called a public condemnation meeting and then had the person executed on the spot." AND "While I was away at the detention center, nobody was home taking care of my kids. My youngest daughter died of starvation. She was only 2 years old."

∆The Survivor: (p.324) "People in charge of cremation, they waited until there were 20 or 30 bodies. They then soaked them with gasoline and set them on fire. You could smell the burning flesh throughout the town. Since excavation work was done every day, so was cremation."

∆The Feng Shui Master (p.68): "If you get some herbs, you can mash them into a thick paste and smear them around your mouth, your ears, under your armpits, and around your asshole. It will prevent illness and drive away all sorts of bugs and evil spirits. Nowadays, I go days without eating. I simply sleep inside my tomb."

∆The Neighborhood Committee Director (p.183,189): "Times have changed. Everybody talks about money and nobody cares about Communism anymore." AND "Nobody wanted to hear me read the newspapers. Not only that, they even booed me off the podium several times. They converted the tea house into a mahjong parlor."

Verdict: Strongly recommended.

Book Review
"One People, Two Worlds"
5/5 stars
"Books like this make me know that the sparkling Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is not just a myth."
*******

This is a series of letters between two rabbis--one Reform and a former tank commander in the IDF and one an Orthodox Talmudist --from January of 2000 to October of 2001 that were so good that they could be stapled together to make a book. (I would have to say that the word ratio between the two is probably about three to one, in favor of the Orthodox rabbi. But the content of the reform Rabbi is more pithy and non-desperate.)

Part I- introduction and commentary on Reform versus Orthodox Judaism

Part II- (Mostly) discussion of the feminist aspects of Judaism..

Part III- Discussion of biblical criticism and the J/E/P/D hypothesis. Also, Darwinism, free will, Zionism.

Good index. Embedded references.
*******

Who am I? 

First: I moved to this out-of-town US community about 10 years ago, and converted about 7 years ago.

Second: I spent my earlier years after conversion living around a bunch of knuckle-dragging Haredim (and I moved on because of mistreatment-- the same way a lot of black people do.)

But, quite frankly, I've heard everything in this book already. (At least twice.)

Sample familiar arguments:

1. (p.133) In just a couple of generations, Reform people are going to go extinct and Haredim are going to take over the world. (You can find this argument since the 1970s. But, Orthodox people manage to stay about 10% of all Jews because of a high attrition rate.)

Reform are still with us, as they have been for two centuries. And they are much larger in number than Orthodox people.

2. (p.90) The secular world is just a den of iniquity and it just can't be people actually living their lives in a matter of fact way. (85% of secular men are unfaithful to their wives, according to the Orthodox Rabbi. Who knew?)

3. (p.27) If somebody reads A Source in English, then it's not good enough. It has to be read in Hebrew. And then if it is read in Hebrew, it has to be an "unfamiliar, unpunctuated, unvowelized page of Talmud and Aramaic." And so on, ad infinitum. (This is in spite of the fact that it has been my experience that the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of Haredim do not go word-by-word in their Chumash. (If you don't believe me, ask somebody what is a "meteg" or what is the difference between "infinitive absolute" and "infinitive construct.") That is the trick that this talmudist says when it becomes apparent that the reform Rabbi has in fact read some talmud and that he cannot be fobbed off with these "go check and see if it's raining around those corner" type answers.

If this argument goes on long enough, it will turn into: "You don't know the argument because you did not gather it by poking a pin into one side of the paper and finding the relevant argument on the obverse of the page."

4. Lots of No True Scotsman fallacies. So, if I point out that sexual abuse rates among Black Hats are at least two times higher than what they are among the rest of the Orthodox world, then those particular Boy Butt Pirates are "just not Orthodox."

5. Lots of confusion about time and change. Moshe Rabbeinu never wore a shtreimel, but nothing has EVER changed since the destruction of the Second Temple by Orthodox lights. Ritual authority changed from a hereditary priesthood to communal rabbis, who earned their positions by merit (p.239). (Ironically, the Samaritans still hold to this idea, and there are about 600 of them left in the world, and none of them are recognized as Jews and have not been for about 25 centuries.)

6. There seems to be a lot of mentioning of Jews for J****. (In every case, this was for the Orthodox Rabbi to make a point, specifically about delineating what is and is not Judaism.) And that's strange, because the bad news is that there are no Jews - - genetic or otherwise - - in that Southern Baptist movement for white hicks.)

7. Typical Haredi mind-blindness. 

a. No problem to accept subsidies from the Israeli state, but then also no problem to not recognize it or not recognize the Israeli flag.

b. (p.174) "In the traditional model of Jewish Family life, the man has primary responsibility for the livelihood and the woman for household and children." I'm sorry, but not a few times have I seen Kollel Bums who have 5 to 10 children and have never filled out a job application. Not. One. Time. But, their wives get up and go to work. In fact, I have seen entire kollels where the men laze about and all of their wives work.

c. (p.192) Misinterpretation of American slavery to make a point--and it would be a nice argument if it was not based on empirically false assumptions. No, slaves were not abducted. (The climate of Africa is so harsh that white people of that time would die before they even made it 50 miles inland.)
 Slaves were bought from other tribes.

d. If a lady is described as a "jug full of excrement whose opening is full of blood, yet men chase after her" [Shabbat 152a] (p.200), no matter how much context you provide, the sentence does say what it says. And this is a running theme throughout the text when the Orthodox Rabbi writes: Context, context, context. Apparently NOTHING can mean what it plainly says. (Too many examples to even get into here.)

8. Lots of reductio ad Hitlerium here. The Reform Rabbi says that people who think they are in possession of The Absolute Truth come up with things such as The Final Solution. The Orthodox Rabbi says that if enough time passes, people can question the historicity of the Torah the same way people could question the historicity of the Holocaust

9. Disagreement about changes in the law. If Haredim do it, then it's ok. If Reform do it, then it's heresy. (As an example of the first case: conversion /geirut used to be something that was one and done up until yesterday; now, people who are converts exist always and everywhere in a provisional state. As an example of the second, pork used to not be okay. Now it is.)

10. Baba Metzia 59b:5 ("my children have defeated me") shows up in here AGAIN and AGAIN. If there are three Reform against ine Orthodox, why does the principle of "majority rules" not work? It works everywhere it doesn't work?


*******
-Great quotes

(p.170): "They know everything. Unfortunately, they don't know anything else."

(p.275): "Any person who would have been sent to the gas chambers by °°°°°°- - a person with a Jewish grandparent - - has an open invitation to breathe the free air of the Jewish state. This is the ultimate victory over °°°°°°."

-For any Everyday Pulpit Rabbi, there is lots and lots of material here for drasha'ot.

What is the practical significance here? 

EXAMPLE 1: In the case of the Reform Rabbi, he would accept evolution as true, but should the discussion turn into an evolutionary reason for the obvious difference in IQ/intelligence between Jews and blacks, then that would be a forbidden issue..... For the Orthodox Rabbi, he would assume that all human beings were made in the image of Gd (and of course that Charles Darwin / Richard Dawkins were completely false). But, I'm pretty sure if it came time to introduce his daughter to a black guy, then that would be a forbidden issue. For that matter, if it even came time for reciting responsive amen's in behind the black guy who was davening for the amud.... Then that would be another issue entirely.

What is a black guy to do? (I haven't figured it out yet.)

EXAMPLE 2: My experience with the law (halacha) has been that it can be reinterpreted enough times to be anything at all. So, it is something about 36 times that is repeated to not harass/opressed the convert. (For the record, that is 12 times more than the repetition of not boiling a kid in its mother's milk.) There are only a small minority of people who act as if they believe that. So now what?

EXAMPLE 3: If you have a group of 100 guys, and 75 of them act as if they don't believe that Gd is watching them and 25 do, then you come up with a Gd value of about 0.25. How is that substantially different to Reform people who treat the Bible as "divinely inspired"? The first set, if they acted like they really believed in Gd would imagine that he actually wrote the 5 books of Moses. The second set says that He "kind of" wrote them.

Verdict: Some interesting arguments, but the book is 22 years old. Not worth more than $5.

Book Review
Ants Among Elephants
5/5 stars
"An exposition of that huge plane of weirdness known as 'India'"

Of the book:

1. No glossary (which was very needful);

2. No index;

3. No table of contents;

4. No references, nor bibliography (and this is forgivable because the book was told by the compilation of memories).

5. It's very hard to keep track of the events in this book, and that is as much because of the many subplots as well as the general unfamiliarity of Indian names. (We can all remember that "Chris" is "Bill's" uncle. But what do you do with somebody who is named Siddarthabhattacharyavenudivimohandas?)

Nonetheless book is chock full of information,  easy to read, and hard to put down.
*******
Heretofore, I've read very little about India; but, I have to say that it has a lot of parallels to another very old civilization about which I have read a lot more (China).

It's a good thought question: if you have a civilization that changes bit by bit (because the participants believe that change is possible), after enough time passes the civilization might bear no resemblance to its initial state.  (If the Founding Fathers of the United States could see the degeneration, they would be rolling in their graves.)

But, on the other hand: if you have very old civilizations such as China and India that are still recognizable in some form as what they were several thousand years ago, then the good ideas AND the bad ideas stay on for EXTREMELY long periods of time.

In this case, it is about casteism.... Somehow it managed to survive and supersede both Communism and modernity.

Because the scheduled castes in India are mostly illiterate, they don't have their own Men of Words to give their own perspective. And so even though there are tens of millions of them, it took all this time for one subway conductor who had immigrated to the United States to tell their story.

The impression that I come up with of India is: in spite of the fact that when they come to the United States they have the highest income of any ethnic group, they are generally from an extremely defiantly backward and impoverished society.

And it's going to be a long time before they figure out anything new, if ever. 

(China: US$12,556; USA: US$70,248; India: US$2,256. Ratios: 5.7:31:1. It's also lower than 35 out of 54 countries on the African continent. You have *really* to work to get a per capita income down to African levels.)

It's strange that they have something like 330 million different manifestations of the single Divine essence of Brahmin and yet...... Every single one of them seems to think that this caste situation has been a good idea for the last several millennia.
*******
Acquired knowledge points:

1. Christians in India are of two types: the ones that were converted nearly 20 centuries ago by Saint Thomas of Aquinas. Then ones that were converted a couple of centuries back and taken predominantly from scheduled castes/scheduled Indian tribes. (Islam in India also relied on recruiting from the same.)

2. Scheduled caste/tribal people have lived outside of the caste system in India from time immemorial. It was only after the British cleared the forests for teak plantations (p.15) that their habitat was destroyed and they had to switch from hunting and gathering to a rude sort of agriculture and start interacting with caste Indians.

3. Untouchables (17% of India) can't share meals with caste Hindus, nor marry them. And even to this day, untouchables will get killed for walking on paths that are reserved for caste Hindus or wearing pants instead of loincloths. It also appears that when they met Hindu caste people, they would have to take off their shoes and fold their hands and bend their waist (p.63).

4. Some of the untouchables threw their lot in with the Independence movement, and it turned out to be Fool's Gold: 15 minutes after the British had left, caste Hindus turned on them.

5. The (Muslim, Urdu speaking) Hyderabad Kingdom of Nizam was neither under British rule nor historically under Indian rule, but they were just as involved in the slave labor of untouchables. Urdu and English were the only official languages, and Telugu was suppressed.

6. One particular punishment that the Nissan shock troops liked to do was stab a man in the rectum with a long sword twist it around inside of him and pull it out with such force that his guts fell out in a heap. OR to wrap people and dry hay and set fire to them, watching them roast alive (p.50).

7. The Nehru government (that came after Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu extremist) was not a fan of Communists. They would just bury peasants alive in trenches and force the survivors to build new roads over the mass graves.

8. (p.96). A girl's getting her period is a celebrated event and it requires a feast as well, as 10 days of absence from school and smearing turmeric on the girl's feet.

9. "Paki" is an epithet that is used in England against Indian people, but it is not calling them "Pakistani" (that would be a bad enough insult for Hindus). Pakis are actually VERY low caste porters of human nightsoil, and they carry it on their heads. (Predictably enough, caste status overrode Communist sympathy. p.115.)

10. The caste system is what seems to unite these heterogeneous (linguistically and otherwise) groups that make up the place called "India." In spite of that, the caste system is also intensely regional: there were several examples of the author telling us that this or that caste only existed in this or that place.

11. (p.189) "North Indians bullied South Indians and never mingled with them. They were separate messes for North and South. North Indians wouldn't go to the South Indian mess while South Indians wouldn't dare set foot in the North Indian one." 

12. (p.299): "An upper caste professor in the electronics engineering department was passing all the students of his own caste with high marks and failing his low caste students."

13. The maoist insurgency - - 55 years and counting - - got its start in Andhara Pradesh.

Second order thoughts:

1. If some colonial power encounters some impoverished people, it's very easy to use them against each other. In this case, Hindus policed themselves. And then when they can find somebody even lower to look down on (untouchables), they police them as well.

2. India was yet another one of these places that thought that paradise would come after decolonization -- and they were rudely disabused. (And this holds SO many lessons for black Americans.)

First, some of the untouchables were friends of the Colonial Government. And then that came and went and they were in the cold.

Second, a lot of them were friends of the Independence Movement, and once that battle was won they went right back to being untouchable.

Then, they were members of the Communist movement that opposed the Nizam, and once that battle was won (it only took 4 days for the Indian military to knock over Nizam), the the Indian military immediately turned them on the peasants. (p.60- "A popular uprising against landed property was intolerable.")

Later, they were members of the Communist Party in other contacts, and they were just as despised there as anywhere else.

3. Extremely quirky conceptual space: there is a shortage of women, and there has been for a long time. (Sex selective abortion will do that.) And yet, people talk about a woman over 25 being past her prime and unmarriageable (p.202). People also seem to be extremely colorstruck (ibid): people were half a shade darker than people that are already as black as shoe polish are thought / think themselves unmarriageable.

Verdict: India is surely a very interesting place and they have tasty food. But, after this book: you can keep all of it. Too strange and too dirty (!) for me to ever want to visit. Just one more example of some people that fall into something stupid and take several thousand years to come out of it (in this case, the caste system).

Vocabulary:

zamindar (absentee landlord)
harijan hostel
lalchi pajamas
mala people (a caste of untouchables that exists only in Andhara Pradesh).
puranas (Telugu poems in praise of the gods)
prabandhas (Telugu poems in praise of the rulers)
lathi (Indian version of the billy club)
dora (landlord)
vetti system (a slave system in Telangana)
Nizams (rulers of Hyderabad)
sangham (local chapter of a political party)
goonda (hired criminal)
simhadwaram
frieze
tiffin
jaggery
madiga (tanner)
stint
paki (night soil cleaner)
kamma (South Indian agricultural caste)
kapu (another South Indian caste)
hutment
pukka house 
gunintham
Dougla (mixed African, Indian)

Book Review
"Chiang Kai-shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation he Lost."
5/5 stars
"UNIMAGINABLE Chinese suffering after the collapse of the Qing dynasty; A TOUGH read."

Of the book:

-507 pages @27 chapters=19 pps/ chapter; 5 parts
-Range, 8 to 29 pages per chapter
-Bibliography=393 sources
-934 citations; 1.85/page OR ≈35/chapter>
-Includes an excellent index and dramatis personae (and that is very useful, because it is difficult to keep track of all of the many characters / monikers).
-Each chapter needs to be reskimmed and resynopsized because the information overload makes it a bit difficult to follow.
*******
Short Attention Span Lessons:

1. China does not learn from the past, and the Chinese future is the past. And vice versa.

2. From the American perspective: neutrality and non-alignment are the wisest choices.

*******
There is a great deal of information here, and all the chapters have to be re-skimmed.

The overwhelming events and bloodshed after the Communist take over of China have made it such that the years between the end of Qing and the beginning of the CCP dynasty seem to be a nebulous, overlooked period of history. But, a lot of events did happen during those times and this book fills in some of those blanks.

The author does as well as can be expected with creating an interesting narrative arc about a large number of random / idiosyncratic events stapled together to form history.

I read/have read a lot of these books on Chinese history, and these days I can only read one or two of them per year; the desparate-yet-futile misery makes these books too draining. And many historians and students of history are frustrated by the circular nature of Chinese history and their EXTREME OBDURACY to learning from it. (The present reviewer shares that frustration.)

Even as inane as the events around the rise and fall of the Nationalist party may be, in reality they are just variations on a theme of Chinese events that repeat incessantly throughout history: One emperor gets knocked over to be superseded by another emperor who, in turn, gets knocked over by another. And so on, ad infinitum. In between, there is untold human misery and suffering.

In that way, Chiang Kai-shek may have been the snowflake that caused the avalanche of events that made it such that China is what it is. But, in reality any other snowflake could have caused the same avalanche and in some way, the events of the revolution and Civil War were quite predictable.

Out of all these many "Regional Generals" (and this is the nicer term for "warlord") it's not hard to imagine that one of them would eventually get the upper hand. And it was, incidentally, CKS.

Some of the book is working out trying to understand the triangular involvement between the Nationalists, Communists and the Japanese. 

As many different accounts of these events as I have read, it may be a fool's errand to try to determine which is true: 

∆Version 1 is that the Nationalists cooperated with the Japanese (every single episode of state-run CCTV since 1949); 

∆Version 2 is that they left the Japanese alone so that they could wear themselves down trying to colonize a country that was way too big for them (Simon winchester, "The Man Who Loved China");

∆Version 3 is that the Nationalists allowed the Communists to survive at the behest of the Russians, who held CKS's son hostage. (Jung Chang and Jon Halliday). This book suggests that that NEVER happened, and he could have been exchanged for a Polish Communist in whom the Russians were interested. (CKS refused [p.205]: "It is not worth it to sacrifice the interests of the country for the sake of my son.... Chiang reflected that a person would be remembered for moral integrity and achievements, not because he has an heir.") Also, Chiang Ching-Kuo had returned from Russia with his wife at the point that the Communists were at their weakest point and almost destroyable (p.285).

*******
The same question keeps coming up over and over, which is: WHY did it have to be this way?

Even at the time of the events in this book, there had been a Chinese state for over 2,200 years. And yet: Orderly and regular changes of government were still not figured out. Nor military technology, nor central banking

The number of shifting alliances between this or that Regional General and the Central Government are just dizzying.

The Western invitation to China to trade (Britain) came 3/4 century before the same invitation came to the Japanese (United states, gunboat diplomacy), and yet: China let all of that time pass (learning absolutely nothing about self-defense) and large parts of it were annexed by a country 1/10 its size (Japan). 
*******
Much of this story is predictable based on my long experience with Chinese people:

1. Typical Chinese intransigence to learning anything new. (Most clearly illustrated in the chapter about the attempts of Chinese speaking General Stillwell to help CKS in his quest to build a modern military. All the suggestions that Stillwell made had actually been made by the Germans a long time ago when they were trying to help the Nationalists build a military.)

2. Given a choice between 2 steps to do something the right way and 5 steps to try to outfox someone to convince that it is done the right way then they will take the latter path.

3. Some Chinese boss somewhere brings a foreign expert to a country only to ignore his advice/actively subvert the management process. (BEEN THERE, DONE THAT).

4. (p.400) "China has already invented everything that can be invented and has nothing to learn from anyone else." (You may laugh at this, but I have been told before that "we Chinese have such a long history we have already invented every word and there are no new ones to be invented.")  Foreign ways / ideas are the problem and traditional Chinese culture is the cure.

5. Playing foreigners against each other (p.450).
*******

Second order thoughts:

1. Some things are the same everywhere: when you have some men get into power, the first thing they do is set about the business of trying to mount every woman in the country. 

-Sun "Baby Daddy" Yat-sen was a whoremaster, and you "couldn't keep him off the women" (p.37). 

-CKS had several marriages and ultimately ended up sterile because of an STD contracted from one of his MANY liaisons. 

-If Chairman Mao didn't screw every single person in the country, it's not because he didn't try. 

-Honorable mentions: Zhang Zuolin (5 wives); Zhang Zongchang (so many concubines that he gave them numbers because he couldn't remember their names; French, Russian, Korean, Japanese, American, White Russian).

2. In terms of military coups / targeted assassinations /other attempts to take over: the Africans have NOTHING on the Chinese. Simple, matter of fact changes of government at periodic intervals are things that Chinese have not mastered even in 2,300 years of statecraft. 

3. The Chinese future is the past. And vice versa. The Nationalist Revolution (KMT) claimed to be about overthrowing imperial overlords and building a republic. But, Yuan Shikai set about the business of trying to make himself Emperor only 3 years after the collapse of Qing. And then CKS. And Mao *was* the emperor for 27 years.

4. Looking at these events just around the Republican revolution, I would say that in terms of terrorist attacks: the Arabs have NOTHING on the Chinese.

5. Who is who in this game of musical chairs? The KMT was trained by the Russians; CKS received his first military training in Japan; Ho Chi Minh (a.k.a. Nguyen Ai Quoc) was trained in China by the KMT (p.68); Communists were allowed to join the KMT as individuals but not as Communists; certain of the warlords model themselves on George Washington (p.104).

6. African levels of brutality. ("Wrapped in whiting and burned alive/slits made in their bodies in which candles were inserted and burned before they were hacked to death / the leader of a railway strike is beheaded on the station platform / two prisoners of battle are cut up in the streets and their hearts and livers hung in a cook shop" [p.104]. Or: "they found the decapitated, bound bodies of all Gu's family except for his younger son." [p.195]. Or: "The commander of the first unit was taken prisoner and tortured is he crawled around confessing his sins. His tongue was cut out, and his cheeks pierced before his head was cut off, wrapped in a red cloth, nailed to a board by the ears, and floated down the river toward the retreating forces." [p.198].)

7. African levels of kleptocracy. 27 taxes unsolved. Paper taxed 11 times going down the Yangtze to 160% of its value. 673 different types of land taxes. "Welcome subsidies." Central government trains robbed. President of China embezzles $20 million. Opium is outlawed but monopolies are leased to the highest bidder. Opium Suppression Bureaux raise money through fines.

8. Something that is unique about Communism in Asia is that the military is an arm of the party that controls the government. Let's be absolutely clear that: the fight between the Communists and the KMT  was not about controlling a government that owned / financed the military. Instead, it was about putting A Party in charge (p.197) whose military was the property of the party only. A similar story is told in North Korea.

9. There are lessons that the United States could learn (but they won't!), which are that: a) Hubris is not enough to build a country--and if it was, China would be the center of civilization; b) "Allies" are more properly understood as "fairweather friends" (p.310).

Interesting factoids:

1. CKS was actually initially trained in Japan and his military target at first was the Manchurians who were the sovereigns of the Qing dynasty.

2. Even as brutal and graphic as was the rape of Nanjing, over a full order of magnitude more people died just in the Great Famine.

3. Final death tolls (p.497): Civil war, 5 million; Sino-japanese conflict, 10 million; 3 million in other CKS campaigns. (18 million total). 

4. CKS ruled over Taiwan for 26 years come and he was buried above ground because he was waiting on the reunification of Taiwan with the Mainland. Taiwan has moved on from him, and they were starting to remove him from banknotes as of the time of this book's publication (2003).  20 years later, his picture has been removed from all of the bank notes and statues of him and Sun-Yat Sen are being relocated is Taiwan develops its own identity apart from the KMT. 

A few interesting things from each chapter:

1. CKS: a) A mama's boy; b) Yet, a woman beater (p.24)--at the powerful height of 5'6 and 130 lbs.

2. Taiping Rebellion= 20 million dead. Sun Yat-sen was baptized as an Xtian. Yuan Shikai as an 83-day emperor, and the commencement of another warlord/"regional general" period.

3 CKS picks up yet another wife (and he also courteously sterilized her with his STDs). He is Chief of Staff of the KMT at this point.

4. KMT (this is the era of Sun Yat-sen) was a *regional* party in control of Guangzhou, and they were extremely corrupt even then (extortion taxes, bribes, and "duties" all over the place). The Soviet Union is the one that did the training of the KMT army at Whampoa (Russians initially thought that they were a sure bet than the fledgling Communist movement), and it is at this point that CKS was able to demonstrate exceptional administrative talents. Sun Yat-sen died in 1925. 

5. CKS is Garrison Commander at this point, and later becomes the top KMT military figure --of Guangzhou-- after absorbing 30K troops from a Hakka Regional General. The national government of the Republic of China is proclaimed on July 1, 1925. There was a currency in use at that time just for the city of Guangzhou. Enter T.V. Soong, the Harvard trained finance minister. There is the typical Chinese trick of playing the foreigners (Russians in this case) one against the other.

6. A chapter on Chinese Regional Generals (a.k.a "warlords"), of which CKS was but one of many. We are introduced to the characters Zhang Zuolin, Wu Peifu, Yan Xishan, Zhang Zongchang, Feng Yuxiang. 

Soldiers<-->Bandits. Almost complete lawlessness and Hobbesian each against all. 4 to 6 million people dead in just one famine come in 1920-1921.

7. (p.201). WW2 started in Asia 8 years before hostilities broke out in Europe.

8. Characterization of that den of iniquity, Shanghai (as well as the foreign concessions). Opium dens and prostitution as far as the eye can see. Mafia and extortion as well. (If you want to understand the PRC Chinese aversion to opiates and why they execute smugglers so readily, you need to look no further than these historical events.)

9. The Nationalists cooperated with mobsters (Big Eared Du shows up a lot), and they summarily executed Communists and labor union rivals. KMT's links with the Chinese Mafia was helpful in extorting money from businessman by ransoming their children (p.150). By this point, the Nationalists still do not have the full cooperation of regional generals - - who are an active threat.

10. Disentangling the convoluted connections of the Soong--Chiang--Sun family. (In Hanyu Pinyin: Song--Jiang--Sun.) CKS coldly dumped Wife Number Three to marry Meiling Soong of the wealthy Soong banking dynasty. Sun-Yat Sen (intellectual architect of the Republican Revolution) married into the same family, making him the brother-in-law of CKS. T.V. Soong, Meiling's brother, was a wealthy man who took care of a lot of the financing of the KMT. (The Soong family was also strangely Westernized: 1. They were methodists; 2. Who ever heard of Chinese people willingly eating jellied consomme, pigeon breast, and mangoes?)

11. CKS overtakes several warlords, and several competing politicians. He pushes back the Communists. One famine after another (6 million died just in one).

12. Mukden (Shenyang) Incident. Japan engineered a pretext to take over Manchuria. CKS knew that the KMT military could not overpower Japan, but that caused Communists to see / portray the Nationalists as weak and accommodating.

13. More Sino-Japanese skirmishes, this time in nanjing. More shifting alliances between CKS and Regional generals. The Japanese setup lots of incidents to deliberately make Chinese government officials lose face (p.223)

14. CKS was conservative, Sinocentric, and committed to preserving the rural status quo of wealthy landlords lording over impoverished peasants (who were farming with poor techniques/technical competence and getting low crop yields - - in spite of claiming 50 centuries of farming). The situation in the country was so bad that even though CKS became leader, he could not remedy it dash dash which may have been a task too much to ask of any mortal.

15. (p.262). The Long March started out with 80-100Kmen and 2000 women and ended 369 days later with 5,000 people. They were chased by the KMT and practiced survival by avoidance fighting only intermittent skirmishes

16. CKS prioritized getting rid of the Communists over fighting the Japanese. His strategy had been to let the huge country and the tenacious Chinese people slowly wear down the Japanese, but his hand was forced for political reasons: he had to appear to have nationalist character in order to claim legitimately leadership. The war dragged on for 8 years and casualties were somewhere between 10-11.7 million. CKS I had 31 divisions. Poorly trained and poorly equipped. Japan had 17 divisions, but properly manned. It took three fully staffed Chinese divisions to match even one Japanese.

17. Rape of Nanking. 300K civilian Chinese dead in 6 weeks. KMT lost somewhere between 180K and 300K as against the Japanese 70K. The farming area between Shanghai and Nanjing was the graveyard of nearly 1 million Chinese. The end result was forfeiture of China's wealthiest city and drawing the Japanese into the central government's base area. One scene after another of Japanese brutality.

18. CKS: "I am the state!" Madame CKS's flawless English and social skills help to charm Western diplomats and larger audiences. Chinese casuals up to this date were about 1 million, as against 62,000 Japanese (12,600 of whom died from illness). Apparently Japanese thought that death in battle was glorious (p.331).

19. The Generalissimo spent 6 years in Chongqing and brought ≈600K of Jiangsu refugees with him. Appalling conditions. Run by factions of regional generals, with an illiterate population that took drinking water from a river where 500 tons of sewage flowed each day. Rampant tuberculosis, dysentery, cholera, and smallpox.

20. Japanese made Chongqing the most heavily bomb city in the world as well as making use of biological warfare. Their campaign was total warfare: kill all, burn all, destroy all.

21. CKS, the idiot, and his interactions with Joseph Stilwell in the latter's attempt to train the Nationalist army and bring it up to speed. Stillwell was the highest Foreigner in the Chinese government of the time, but it was impossible for him to get his subordinates to follow orders and cks was simultaneously unable to delegate anything and unwilling to listen to expert advice. The beginning of a lot of unforced errors. 

22. Exposition of Madame CKS: a very charismatic figured that was able to endear the Americans to the Chinese cause. Because of her acting as interpreter, she was able to insinuate herself into processes for which she was not qualified (p.398). Famine in the heavily bombed Chongqing, and mother's exchanged children. ("You eat mine, I'll eat yours". p.398)

23. Unforced errors by CKS, one right after another: 200,000 Nationalist troops guarding 50,000 Red troops while Chongqing is raped; unwillingness to form a united front with the Communists. Unwillingness to fight in Burma to open up land supply lines for Chinese troops. 

Chinese troops were poorly trained, with a kill ratio of 40 Chinese to 1 Japanese. (Peasants also HATED the corrupt KMT troops, even burying them alive when they fled from the Japanese.) CKS would not send equipment to his soldiers (for fear of independent-minded generals), with the result that there was 1 gun for every 3 soldiers. 

Some of the provinces collaborated with the Japanese. Some of the Nationalist troops even sold food to Japanese as Chinese people starved. The KMT was fatally weakened by the Japanese "Operation Ichigo."

24. This is the period after the defeat and unconditional surrender of Japan, and the surviving world powers are recalibrating their strategy based on this new information. Patrick Hurley (about as mentally sharp as the Joe Biden of 2023) became the point man on China. His American colleagues describe him as a senile old man who couldn't keep his mind on any subject (p
438). The Communists are still relatively weak at this point.

25. CKS had ≈half a dozen fully operational divisions, each with 11,000 men. On paper it was one thing, but in reality it was another very weak thing. The junta government very determindely sets about making enemies of the common people (bad inflation / economic conditions / confiscatory taxes while the KMT lived in luxury). US tried repeatedly to get him to make friends with the Communists, but he would not. Several truces have the Communists time to regroup.

26. Hyperinflation creates more official corruption, and the Communists make friends with land reform. Nationalists stay in cities and ignore the vastly more numerous countryside. More missteps cost CKS 100,000 men and the numerical advantage in favor of the Nationalist shrinks from 3:1 to 2:1. By mid November, the Communists were in control of all of Manchuria. At this point, CKS has used up all of his chances, and Truman is aware that the aid ends up mostly in the bank accounts of the "Four Families" (Songs/Chiangs/Kungs/Chen brothers).

The Communists had more boots on the ground in the countryside, and therefore more contacts. They also believed in total annihilation.

The Americans (yet again) have a confused policy and poor understanding of the facts on the ground.

The Huai-Hai campaign (Xuzhou) cost the Nationalists 200,000 men.

Epilogue: Final collapse and flight to Taiwan. (A cute play on the famous Jewish phrase: "Next year in Jerusalem" as "Next year in Nanking.") Final assessment of CKS, and speculation about counterfactual scenarios.

FINAL VERDICT: A very tough read. Not for the faint of heart.
 
Vocabulary:

Comprador
Satrap
Puttee
brigandage
incommoded
strafe
marcelled hair style
flapper dress
pine marten
solar topi
Yalta agreement

Book Review
"Why Black Men Love White Women."
0/5 stars
"Painful updating of Frantz Fanon's 'Black Skin, White Masks '"
-17 chapters over 252 pages; 15 pages per chapter.
-Possibly 4~5 hours worth of reading time, but it was so bad I did not finish it all.

Recently, I purchased a series of books about interracial relationships, and the last book that I read was written from the perspective of Black ladies who were interested in White/non-Black men.

I'd thought that this book would be something like that, except maybe from the male perspective.

As it turns out, it was nothing even close. (Not even a single interview from a real couple.)

Lot of problems with this book (which is written by a washed-up/ never-was comic of whom I don't find a single video on YouTube), and I don't want to get into all of them because I don't want to invest any more time necessary in this already DREADFUL book.

I started out reading the first chapter and it was so bombastic and silly that I decided to go back and read the conclusion as well as one midpoint chapter to see if it was worth it.

It emphatically was not worth it.

§PROBLEM: The absolute deal breaker was his citation of the Willie Lynch letter--which everybody over 13 years old knows is a hoax.

§PROBLEM: There are 236 citations in the book, but 72 of them are "ibid." (Down to 164 sources.)

11 of the citations are to sound recordings. (Stevie wonder, etc).

7 of the citations are TV interviews.

Frantz Fanon is cited over and over again (along with Nikki Giovanni and Eldridge Cleaver).

§PROBLEM: a lot of the book is empirically false. Mixed relationships between black men and white women are not new, and in fact the first mixed marriage between a black guy and a white girl in the United States happened in 1680. ("Black man and white women are just getting to know each other." p.147)

§PROBLEM: a lot of these things don't depend on race. (p.146: "More often than not, the women are looking for it liberation, a better financial situation, or just to be taken care of.") Who didn't know that some women are looking for a better financial situation? Or that broke guys have a harder time attracting mates? 

§PROBLEM: The author wants to try to convince us that black guys like white ladies because they're suffering from some type of racial trauma / internalized self-hatred (blah blah blah).

It's like nobody has any agency.

Or, that nobody could prefer one thing as opposed to another just because. (Who could ever guess WHY some guys would think that a woman with no pubic hair was desirable? Could I make to the case those guys "You only feel that way because of something that somebody has told you and that you have internalized; And if you want to undo this sickness then you need to visit wearehairy.com)

If you did it by the numbers, and you were a black guy who had 2,000 ladies to choose from, 1000 white and 1000 black.

Let's say that you do not want to deal with a lady that was.... not so smart (and that is an extremely laborious task) and you wanted to set your IQ cut off to 100.

1000 White ladies would turn into 500 White ladies.

1000 Black ladies would turn into about 150 Black ladies.

Then, let's say that you were somewhat sensitive about, um, feminine odor. (I think you can imagine how it would ruin a sexual encounter if all the paint peeled off the walls and the plants died when your lady shed her underwear.)

Bacterial vaginosis rates: 51% for Black and 23% for White.

150 black ladies would reduce to 74 and 500 white ladies would reduce to 385.

(Source: https://www.cdc.gov/std/bv/stats.htm)

So, discounting whatever your opinions are about what is / is not attractive, you would conclude that:

1. Dating pool of White compared to an equal number of Black women already has 5.2 more suitable of one than the other.

2. Most of either race are not suitable, but the differences are dramatic. 38.5% of a random sample of white would be suitable as opposed to 7.4% of a sample of black.

And that is just based on those two factors.

The operative question becomes: how much "chaff" you want to sort through for some amount of "wheat" that is completely fungible. ("You turn them upside down and they all look the same.")

It's also interesting that this author is very obviously the product of an interracial relationship (he has an Indian name, so I guess his mother was the black partner), and could have a negative opinion on something like this.

Verdict: Emphatically NOT RECOMMENDED.

Book Review
"White women, Black men"
Martha Hodes
5/5 stars
"The film content of West Coast Productions has been happening in the US for about four centuries now."

*******
The book is set between 1680 and 1880, and broken into two parts: before slavery and after slavery. The idea/observation is that mixed sexual relationships became a problem *after* the Reconstruction in the South, but that they experienced varying degrees of tolerance before that time.

This only deals with certain parts of "the South." For instance: not Louisiana, because there were a lot more mulattos there who were a separate class. (Roughly analogous to today's South African Coloureds.)

This book is a little bit wordy for the bit that it has to say (and that is what I have come to expect from books that are written on University presses), but it serves a very useful purpose which is: the debunking of myths that seem VERY entrenched in the black collective unconscious in the United States.

1. Many like to imagine that the presence of European ancestry in so many black Americans is ONLY because of the slave system. (And the theme of the Innocent Black Bed Wench with the Vile White Massa has been shown on television so many times that it is something beyond hackneyed.)


That's far from the case: Race mixing happened before / during / after the slave system. Sometimes the guy was white and other times the girl was.

2. NO, not every instance of a black guy with a white girl turned into an episode of "To Kill a Mockingbird." Apparently, these things were treated in a very matter of fact way in most cases before the Reconstruction. One partner happened to be black, and the other happened to be white.

3. No, the "one drop rule" was not a thing before the Reconstruction. And it seems that what race one person was depended very much on local context. (Are we talking about inheritance rights? Or the right of a cuckolded husband to be divorced?)

4. As quiet as it is kept: a) A lot of lighter skinned black people were (and are) very happy to disassociate themselves from their darker cousins; b) Some free people of color even owned slaves; c) The majority of white Southerners did not own slaves (and it is from this lower class of whites that a lot of black men found women). NO, it is not because of the done to death speculation that house slaves were chosen because they were light skinned and treated better than darker ones.

5. There was no easy way to make all blacks slaves nor all whites slave owners during the pertinent historical time period - - although current generations have done just that. (White indentured servants and free people of color slave owners created this impossibility.) So, most of these cases deal with the determination of status for the purpose of inheriting property or supporting children of disputed paternity. 

6. The KKK was not a one-trick pony. It is not only that they wanted to lynch and terrorize black people, but that they thought themselves the moral arbiter even of transactions between whites. (One Northern man who married a Southern woman had his horse disfigured. One Alabama white man was beaten for being cruel to his wife and told to "practice more proper customs in his domestic habits.")

*******

Second order thoughts:

1. As quiet as it is kept, apparently white ladies and black guys have been doing The Booty Up for many centuries. (I wonder if they were fat back then, too?) The earliest case in here is in 1681 of a married couple (Irish Nell and Negro Charles).

2. It's easy to surmise that even wwwaaayyy back then black guys were shopping on the discount rack for white ladies.  The author does note (p.49) that ".... And other lowly white women also consorted with black man, both slave and free" (Lindy effect: it has been three centuries, so I guess there's no reason it couldn't go on for another three.)

Appallingly (p.50), "Mulattoes are not a rare article and the wives and daughters of slaveholders are oftener are the mothers of them than are poor women." I guess that movie Mandingo may have had some basis in reality. 

3. There are just as many lustful women as there are men: for some of these cases, the women had three and four slave boyfriends at a time because one of them just could not keep up with her. In one case, one white lady was with her black boyfriend on the very morning of her wedding to a white guy and she gave birth to mulatto child nine months later. (p.127).

4. There are several actual court cases brought down where the black guy was accused of rape of a white lady--and acquitted (p.62)!

5. The average black American has between 19 and 29% European ancestry (it depends on which DNA testing service you follow), and 80% of black Americans do have at least some white ancestry. With this many interracial couplings, how can anyone be surprised that the lady was white in some fraction of them?

6. It's interesting that even (post-Reconstruction) Jim Crow/ anti-miscegenation laws did not reduce the number of black guy white girl couplings to zero. It seems like a very effective way to make somebody want to do something is to make it illegal--even in that case.

7. In spite of the amount of history that has passed, black Americans have learned little from it: people at the bottom are more likely to want to differentiate themselves from blacks than they are to see them as allies--the pronouncements of Idiot Academics be damned. (Caribbeans/Africans/Arabs/Mexicans/etc, as a rule in the United States, DO NOT like black people. Take my word for it.)

7a. The fact that these whites of that era wanted to find a way to distance themselves from blacks were white is coincidence: I live near Dearbornistan and Hamtramckistan, Michigan. Lots of Arab/Pakistani/Bangladeshi Muslims and ZERO of them with black men, so it's pretty clear that they don't want to be around black people all that much either.

8. Seems like there's always *somebody, *somewhere* interested in Black guys. Seems like white ladies have been loving in the black guys even at the risk of death.

*******
Verdict: This is a helpful and informative book, and it's probably worth it at the price of about $10. Or, the time that it takes for it to be interloaned.

Chapter synopses:

Representative cases (only a subset of all quoted within each chapter):

Chapter 2, Marriage. An Irish woman and a black man were married (in 1681) and their descendants became slaves. A few generations later they petitioned for freedom, and it is at this point that the status of the long dead Irish Nell came up. (Free or slave?)

Chapter 3, Bastardy. Polly Lane and Jim (no surname) were boyfriend and girlfriend back in 1825. Polly finds out that she is pregnant and cries rape. Jim X is eventually acquitted by a White governor after vocal support from White witnesses

Chapter 4, Adultery. Dorothea Bourne is married to a much older plantation owner, but she just cannot keep her hands off the Colored Help. She bears one or two kids but her actual husband, and another 4 (!) with some slave guy named Edmond from 1823. And even after all that, the court would not Grant her poor cuckolded husband a divorce.

Chapter 5, Color. The "one drop rule" makes for good television and a lot of nothing conversations, but the reality was nothing like that. Even by 1860, quadroons were considered "free persons of color." The case of Joseph Nunez makes us believe that what color someone was depended only on context. (If everybody in a certain city believes that this guy is white......then he for all intents and purposes is, and he will behave chemically that way.) The Franklin Hugly case was ruled in such a way as to allow a White family the polite fiction that the mother wasn't turned out by Some Black Guy. So, the mulatto child was "really" white. 

Chapter 6, Wartime. Set at the tail end of the slave system. The interesting case of Tempie James, who fell in love with the slave coachmen (Squire). When her parents would not allow the marriage, she ran away and purchased him, changed his last name to "Walden," changed her identity to "mulatto" (she drank whiskey mixed with some of husbands blood so that she could truthfully swear that she had Negro blood in her, p.138) and had 15 (!) children with him.

Chapter 7, Politics. This chapter is essentially written in Early Critical Race Theoryish. (It seems like the word "patriarchy" is used on every other page.) More objective texts written before the Woke Craze (think of authors like C.Vann Woodward) have essentially noted that: after the Reconstruction political power changed over to poor sharecropping whites and the fortune of blacks changed dramatically thence. Then (and going into the 1890s) was the time during which the Jim Crow/anti-miscegenation laws were passed. Nathan Bedford Forrest (Grand Wizard).

Chapter 8,  Black men, White women, and lynching. Seems that lynching only became popular after the Civil War. Rape was not even the most popular reason for lynching. (The purpose was to maintain an atmosphere of terrorism.) Ida Abercrombie and Peter Stamps. 

*******

Vocabulary:

1.Left hand marriage

2. "First step by construction" (p.120, legal term)

3. amative

Ida Wells-Barnett Quotes: 

1. "Dead men tell no tales, and living ones will not voluntarily do so when it means an exposure of their crimes."

2. "If Southern white men are not careful, a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women"