Tag: Nonfiction

Review: The Road To Wigan Pier

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The Road To Wigan Pier

George Orwell’s 1937 book The Road To Wigan Pier is part travelogue and part philosophical book. It starts off with the wealthy southerner Orwell’s tour of northern mining/industrial England at the pit of the Great Depression. Not only are the struggles of the lower classes shown in gruesomely accurate detail, but one sentence is very darkly prophetic. “We may as well face the fact that several million men in England will – unless another war breaks out – never have a real job this side the grave.”

Now as it turned out, another war did break out. And after that, and not denying the struggles and serious lagging of northern England to this day, things got better for people like them. A lot better. (How much is capitalism and how much is the postwar welfare state is not the point of this review). So while outdated in hindsight, you could see why Orwell was a fervent socialist: Because he understandably thought that things had gotten so bad that a radical change of society was needed.

Yet if the first section of the book is outdated, the second part, where he tears into his fellow socialists, could not be more relevant. Look around every wealthy hard-leftist (but I repeat myself) today and compare them to genuine working class people (even fervently liberal ones), and one can see how little has changed in that regard. Probably the most telling part is his observation that for all their supposed desire to break down classes, most capital-S Socialists Orwell had seen were the most class, prestige, and reputation-obsessed people around.

The Sullivan Scams

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I’ve noticed a rather common type of scam done by therapists and caregivers that, as someone with a (comparably minor) disability, is incredibly infuriating. This is NOT accusing such people overall of being scammers-in fact, most therapists are rightfully the loudest voices against such terrible people.

I call this the Anne Sullivan Scam, or Sullivan Scam after Helen Keller’s caregiver. There’s been a lot of “Helen Keller fraud” videos going around the internet, but Sullivan is the real target and the titles are misworded. The disabled person is not the fraudster here-it’s not like they’re faking or exaggerating their own massively serious condition. The person “speaking for them” is. In the namesake, there’s massive amounts of evidence that Sullivan was “ghostwriting” on Keller’s behalf.

Yet the largest Sullivan Scam comes in facilitated communication. Every single legitimate therapist I’ve known has continually denounced it. Even if sincerely well-intended, it’s ineffective and contaminated by the “Ouija Board Effect” where the facilitator is unconsciously steering things. If it isn’t and the facilitator is knowingly steering things, it’s even more disturbing.

Most Sullivan Scams have the disabled person’s “speech” suddenly becoming beautiful, articulate, and mysteriously like that of someone with an advanced degree. Which is kind of telling, isn’t it?

Review: Downfall of a Revolutionary

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Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary

The book Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary is an excellent account of his final years in Mexico. Seeing the man increasingly decline physically and (arguably) in terms of influence just as much, it’s hard to avoid the impression that Stalin would have been better off letting him fade away instead of unleashing the mountain climbers axe (not an ice pick). Bertrand M. Patenaude tells a story full of tragedy, cruelty, and absurdity in equal measure.

We see the soap opera romance with Frida Kahlo, playing with fire given that her husband was the person most responsible for letting him into Mexico in the first place. Trotsky gets stir crazy being cooped up in an ever more restrictive lair. He gets involved in disputes with western communists who make it clear where Life of Brian got the idea.

The last part is where the book shines historically. Even the most sympathetic accounts of Trotsky have to come to terms with two facts. 1: He was not a liberal person (better than Stalin in that regard is like being better than the 2008 Detroit Lions), and any talk of greater social democracy came after his downfall for selfish reasons. 2: Trotsky was not a good politician and his downfall was near-inevitable because of that.

This is a very good history book that would be great for a movie adaptation ie The Death of Stalin.

Review: T-10 Heavy Tank

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T-10 Heavy Tank

Stephen Sewell’s deep dive into one of the Cold War’s most enigmatic tracked cryptids was a book I knew I had to get. I was not disappointed. Now you have to be interested in tanks to read a very long book about a tank that was only deployed in anger once (the Prague Spring). Thankfully, I’m very interested in tanks.

What makes this fascinating besides the detail is how it represents the end of the road for specialized “heavy” tanks. Yes, MBTs grew to outweigh the heavy tanks, but we see the unified end to one intentional design path taken as far as it went, with quirks like how the T-10 had a heavy instead of medium machine gun for a coax.

I love tanks. I love obscure tanks. So it’s no surprise I love this book.

Review: The Untold Story of China’s Nuclear Weapons Development and Testing

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The Untold Story of China’s Nuclear Weapons Development and Testing

This book with a very long name is a very good look at the often-underlooked Chinese nuclear weapons program. It’s a scientific chronicle of all its tests from the initial blast in 1964 to the latest known ones in the 1990s. And it’s very good. Without getting too technical and being willing to admit what he doesn’t know, author Hui Zhang sheds a lot of light on the secretive program.

Some of it I knew, like a nightmare when a bomb being tested on a Q-5 (light ground attack aircraft) got stuck to the launch rail and wouldn’t drop. Others I didn’t, like a failed test not due to anything physics related, but simply because parachutes failed and the bomb broke against the ground before it could implode. Either way, it’s extremely detailed and effective.

It does have the nitpicky intra-academic arguments I see weirdly often in books about nuclear weapons, talking about how the Chinese have had the capability to miniaturize warheads more than other sources have claimed. Since Zhang’s claimed shrinking is not particularly unreasonable, it feels a little-strange. My reaction was “so what?”

This is ultimately still a small nitpick of a very good nonfiction book.

The Betting Machine

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There’s a great Youtube documentary out on so-called “sports farms”

These are those bizarre table tennis and truncated other sports leagues that appeared in public consciousness in 2020 when everything else except a few Y-tier soccer leagues shut down. The video is great and shows OSINT geolocation coupled with a knowledge of how offshore books love to sponsor big-name teams for the sake of advertising.

Review: Speedrunning

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Speedrunning: Interviews With The Quickest Gamers

David Snyder in Speedrunning tackles the titular way of playing video games. It looks good on paper, interviewing numerous champion speedrunners and explaining how the basics work. The problem is its format and layout. It’s like trying to play Dark Souls on a drum set, and he doesn’t quite manage it.

So this first consists of explanations of speedrunning, which are a little cookie-cutter but still essentially accurate for an absolute beginning. Then Snyder gets to interviewing speedrunners, which isn’t really the best way to go about it. I might be a little stereotypical, but speedrunners are a group not generally known for their wit or sociability. More importantly and specifically, the interview subjects go straight into huge technical details which contrast with the basics given elsewhere in the book. I don’t blame them, but I blame Snyder for not integrating it better.

A bigger problem is that it’s using text to describe a visual medium. There’s no shortage of speedrun history/explanation videos , and almost all of the record speedruns themselves can be easily seen. Reading a book about it simply can’t compare, even if Snyder was a lot better. So that’s why I can’t recommend this.

Donks

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There is a type of car called the “Donk”. Usually but not always a large vintage car in its base, anything with four wheels can theoretically be “donkified”. It apparently started with hip-hop musicians in the American South, but the concept is universal.

A donk can be considered the inverse of a lowrider, in that it’s a “high-rider”. The car, usually ornate, is given very large wheels with thin tires and has its suspension raised as high as possible, the springs stiffened both for prestige and to ensure the chassis doesn’t bump the wheels.

Donks look good. But don’t expect them to handle like a formula one racer.

Review: Skygods

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Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

Written by aviator and former Pan Am captain Robert Gandt, Skygods is the most fun I’ve had reading a history book in quite some time. First, I want to get the small negatives out of the way: This is very much a David Halberstam style ‘History as Narrative’ book, so I’d recommend taking specific claims with even more grains of salt. That said, everything important I did find corroborating evidence for.

The good part of this “history as narrative” is well, it feels great to read, flowing smoothly and going into the minds of people in a way that Gandt can clearly write from personal experience. And what he says about Pan Am is both interesting and dismal.

Pan Am’s decline, arguably inevitably terminal, started long before Lockerbie. It started long before deregulation. The impression I got from Skygods was that Pan Am was basically to airlines what Harley Davidson is to motorcycles: A wheezing lummox with poor fundamentals whose longevity was/is due to mystique over any practical advantage. There’s also the “British Industrialization” problem Pan Am had where being the first to do big international routes meant they were stuck with the most baggage.

So this is a great book I highly recommend for anyone, not just aviation/history enthusiasts.

The UAV Illusion

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So RUSI fellow Justin Bronk has given focus to what I’ve kind of grasped but struggled to articulate myself: Small UAVs are not a panacea.

A smaller piece by the same author.

The short version is:

  • The weirdest analogy I have but one I believe is comparing FPV/etc… drones to B-17s and the like. There’s been a giant debate about the effectiveness of WW2 strategic bombing. The Western Allies had less a choice in it than one might think. Until 1944 it was the only direct offensive ability they had, and being shielded by water made it viable. Similarly, Ukraine’s use of drones, as Bronk explains, is a necessary one, just like that a result of desperate circumstance. But it’s not the circumstance and abilities that others, just like how no one had the WAllies circumstances there, will have.
  • Practical effects, which very few people are mentioning- namely, relying on drones against a force that’s spent three years optimizing against them is like relying on deep pass plays against the Lawrence Taylor Giants (ask yourself how the Joe Gibbs teams behaved offensively most of the time).
  • Finally and most crucially, Bronk brings up it’s the Walter Payton in Super Bowl XX / SA-2 not scoring that many direct kills in Vietnam problem. Which is that what’s causing drones to be effective is massive amounts of traditional weapons: Normal artillery, mines, missiles, and backed by UAVs in the traditional spotter role.

A very good splash of cold water. This isn’t to say these aren’t dangerous and won’t get better, but it helps to have perspective beyond highlight reels. Speaking of which, here’s a veteran talking about the side you didn’t see.