12 books

Some of the books I liked this year

UK politics

I’m a total sucker for books on 21st Century British politics. This year, I read the third instalment of Tim Shipman’s series on Brexit - No Way Out. In at times excruciating detail, No Way Out begins in December 2017 with Theresa May battling for Brexit, and ends in July 2019 with Boris Johnson doing the same. Across 670 pages (more than a page per day of the period covered), no stone is left unturned in the melodrama.

Shipman is uniquely well connected in politics and a first port of call for the major players who want to cement their side of the story in history. If you read between the lines, it’s not too hard to tell who briefed what (if someone is ‘crackers’, it’s been briefed by Cummings or one of his allies). Equally as interesting is who is omitted - Rory Stewart, who perhaps deserves a place as a side character in the Brexit story, makes little more than a cameo.

For a different perspective, and perhaps for my sins, I also read Boris Johnson’s memoir Unleashed. There were very few surprises in there - a couple of headline-grabbing new details about the Queen’s illness and short-lived plans to invade the Netherlands. Otherwise, it was nothing we hadn’t heard from him before. If this was Boris unleashed, it’s hard to pinpoint when he was, exactly, leashed.

To his credit, Boris is an incredibly compelling writer. He’s also, surprisingly, not that disagreeable: he advocates for things like more environmental policies and more spending on infrastructure, for example. His two biggest flaws are in his advocacy of Brexit, and his character. He’s unsuited to the role of Prime Minister, and completely unwilling to acknowledge his own shortcomings or mistakes. He’d be best off sticking to the writing. At least now he has a lot more time for it.

One more: Tony Blair’s On Leadership. A good book, though not written for me - or for you. It is very transparently written for leaders of nations, and often its guidance or lessons are too niche to be applied to anyone except for a head of government. Tony Blair is perhaps the only specialist consultant for presidents and PMs, and this book was his route to cementing that legacy more than anything else.

Health

Among my top books this year was Dopesick by Beth Macy. It’s the heart-wrenching story of the opioid crisis in America, in particular focused on the role of Purdue Pharma and their drug OxyContin.

Purdue spent billions of dollars falsely claiming to doctors that OxyContin was less addictive than other opioids, leading to its widespread distribution across the States and the death and destruction that led to.

Addiction in all its forms is so often relegated to the shadows, but has an almost unbelievable prevalence both in the US and here. The support is so limited, and almost nobody is prepared to take responsibility.

Dopesick inspired a Disney+ series of the same name which, while narrower in focus than the book, is also great.

On mental health, I quite enjoyed Bad Therapy but with some caveats. Journalist Abigail Shrier makes the argument that mental health experts and widely applied therapeutic interventions for very young kids are exacerbating the mental health crisis. I think she’s not far off the right answer, and have said similar myself, but her book is flawed.

Firstly, she’s lacks credibility. The extent of her experience is that: (1) she has children who have been offered therapy, and (2) she has spoken to some experts. She is clearly not the best messenger for such a complex message. Secondly, and perhaps relatedly, her arguments too often rely on anecdotes or narrative-building, and not often enough on data and facts. For example: she had some pretty powerful stats on the growing number of young people cutting off relatives, which is bad for everyone, but then she leaped to the conclusion that it must be their therapists telling them to cut off those family members. It’s hard to be convinced by those mental gymnastics.

And thirdly, far too often her motivation is reactionary: “We didn’t have therapy in my day, and we turned out fine”. This ‘back in my day’ argument only appeals to a very narrow sect of Daily Mail readers who shudder at the thought of any generation having a marginally better life than they did.

I’m convinced that the mental health ‘industry’ is beset with problems: Shrier was right on that point, but she made it badly.

An interesting book on broader health reform was Radical Help. Written as a series of experiments by the ‘social entrepreneur’ Hilary Cottam, it explains how and why the welfare state is fundamentally failing (and inspired this post that I wrote earlier in the year), and a possible way out.

The experiments made sense and focused on human-centred approaches to things like unemployment, long-term health conditions, and supporting young people. The solution, in most cases, is to actually connect with individuals and give them what they need - rather than what the state wants to give them.

Her narrative does well to articulate how and why the welfare state is badly broken. A small number of families cost the taxpayer a huge amount in welfare interventions, yet they seem no better for it. The welfare bill in this country is ballooning, I expect it will soon start bankrupting local councils, and yet too often the people that should be benefiting from this spend are in the exact same circumstances as they were 10 years ago, and even as their parents and grandparents were.

Cottam is right in her diagnosis that our interactions with the state are too disconnected. Your doctor does not seem to talk to your social worker, who does not talk to your pain management team, who does not talk to the person that approves your benefits.

Her proposed cures are nice, but consistently impractical. The proof: as far as I can tell, none of the experiments she ran exist today - despite decent results on a micro-level. What Cottam often proves is not that there is a radical new way that the state is eschewing, but that with unlimited budget and access to masses of extremely talented people, you can produce limited effective results. Systems change it ain’t.

War and work

I absolutely sped through Nuclear War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen. Somewhere between a history and a thriller, Jacobsen walks the reader first through a very brief history of nuclear warfare, and then into a hyper-realistic scenario of a nuclear World War III. In her scenario, North Korea fires a ‘bolt out of the blue’ nuclear weapon at the United States.

The bulk of the book covers the first hour after North Korea presses their big red button, going - quite literally - second by second into the impact of that decision. It isn’t a spoiler to say: it doesn’t end well.

My biggest takeaway from the book: a small number of men have with them, at all times, the capacity to end 20,000 years of human development. A nuclear war would not so much change the course of humanity, as end it altogether. A lot more should be done to denuclearise: a grotesquely powerful weapon is one thing for a national leader to possess, but a doomsday device is another completely.

On changing the way we work, I read Bullshit Jobs - a tale of those jobs that don’t serve a purpose to anyone. There were a few too many references to PR Managers for my liking, though. I also never quite got a good explanation as to why being a human anthropology lecturer (as is the author) is a virtuous career, but being a data protection officer is inherently bullshit.

The book is worth reading for the theory alone, which carries a lot of truth. It gets a bit frustrating towards the end and the proposed solution, which boils down to socialist utopia and falls down all of the same holes that every variation of that proposal does.

Faith and thinking

The Surrender Experiment is a pretty gentle read on the value of letting go in life, and letting opportunities come to you. It’s slightly impossible to ignore that it was written from a place of great privilege, and it is much easier to let go when you have enough in the bank to grab back on if it all goes haywire.

But, regardless, it’s a reminder of the squiggly journey we all take in our lives and careers - and that it’s better to focus on taking opportunities than avoiding them. It’s also packed with strong advocacy for mindfulness, which is a good thing for everyone.

Why I am a Hindu was a great book, though something of a trojan horse. It starts as a book on the Hindu faith, but the bait and switch begins about halfway through when the book turns to Indian politics, and in particular the perils of the ruling BJP party’s ideology.

Fortunately, I like politics, and I agreed with most of author Shashi Tharoor’s political analysis. His main concern is with Hindutva, a political ideology that asserts Hinduism as intrinsically linked with India and Indian-ness. It manifests itself as Hindu nationalism, which is dangerous in a country that, while majority Hindu, is constitutionally secular and has a large population of Muslims and even Christians. I’m on board with the political case against any form of nationalism, but Tharoor does a good job of making a religious case against it, too.

Staying in India, I most recently finished reading The Story of my Experiments with Truth - the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi. It was a good insight into Gandhi’s innermost thoughts and motivations, but not a great introduction to his life - which I must admit to being ignorant on.

Regardless, he is driven most primarily by a strong sense of fairness and justice. He is consistently opposed to discrimination: racial discrimination most prominently - but I was also struck by his fight against religious discrimination, and against the deeply ingrained caste system that plagues India.

His other fights are slightly less relatable. He makes a lot of renouncing modern medicine in favour of unconventional remedies. He takes a vow to end all intimacy with his wife. There are also long sections on dietetics, a narrative that concludes with him deciding to follow an extreme form of veganism that restricts him to only eating fruit and nuts. A lot of pages - I dare say the majority - are dedicated to these three niche lifestyle choices.

For something completely different, I also read Steven Pinker’s Rationality. Pinker is best known as a popular science author, but I first came across him as a linguist who developed theories of child language acquisition. This book, though, is focused on the nature of thought.

It’s a reminder of how poor we are at logic and probability. The best example of this is the so-called Monty Hall problem: you’re a contestant on a game show with three doors. Behind one door is a car, and behind the other two is a goat. You select a door. The host then opens one of the remaining two doors and reveals a goat. He gives you a chance to change your mind. Should you?

The correct answer (which is yes - you should always change your mind) is counterintuitive, and speaks to the fact we overestimate our understanding of probability, and underestimate its complexities. (If you want to know why you should change your mind, you’d probably enjoy the book).

There is also a surprising political angle to Pinker’s analysis: he is critical of the age we’re in, where people can hold their own truth (“I’m speaking my truth”) regardless of the facts.

It’s deployed by sections of the left as much as it is by the right - after all, “alternative facts” have propelled Trump to the presidency twice. Pinker’s rallying cry is to give greater credence to logic, and less to emotion. It’s a nice idea, but one that perhaps ignores the sociological reality that most of us can’t switch off the irrational part of ourselves. The job of influencers is to change the mind and the heart, not complain that the world has only listened with one.