The 10 Best Books I Read in 2023

Andrew Bacevich and Daniel Sjursen, eds., Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America's Misguided Wars. This is a fine and often (though not always) insightful collection of personal essays, all of which describe how the authors came to their criticisms of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past twenty years. All of the authors are veterans of these wars to one degree or another, and their range of experiences in and interactions with America's military establishment was probably the most informative part of the book to me. There are essays by deeply committed soldiers who fully embraced the bureaucratic realities of managing a global military presence, and came to oppose America's "forever wars" for strictly strategic reasons, their own positive experiences leading them spend a great deal of time explaining the how American generals failed to understand intricacies of counter-insurgency strategy, failed to appreciate and account for the logistics and costs of military technologies, and much more. But there are also essays by soldiers who were never on board with the rationales given for invading Iraq, or even Afghanistan for that matter; included in these essays are stories of the drug abuse, racism, incompetence, sexism, random violence, and massive waste and fraud on the part of their fellow soldiers--and sometimes themselves--while supposedly serving America's security interests and spreading democracy in the Middle East. Some of these authors look back on their time in these conflicts with pride but also deep regrets about all that went wrong; others look back with shame and horror; and others look back just grateful they escaped with their lives and limbs, when so many others did not. Ultimately, the largest point I take from these various multifaceted, but always militarily informed criticisms was simply: George W. Bush's time as president was a moral, a political, and a strategic catastrophe. By ordering the invasion of Afghanistan, and then keeping troops there beyond the immediate collapse of the Taliban, and much worse by ordering the invasion of Iraq, Bush's administration not only led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, but ruined millions of lives, and unleashed pathological regrets and resentments, in the USA and abroad, that may never be put to rest.

Stanley Hauerwas, War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity. Hauerwas definitely isn't everyone's cup of tea. A born essayist--in the most fundamental sense of the term, constantly "essaying" new ideas, rarely completing the one he had before the new one--his radical Christianity isn't developed carefully and consistently, thus leaving any remotely suspicious reader capable of dismissing his arguments as incomplete and unpersuasive. But for any of the tens of millions who can't help but recognize the radical, even absolutist, character of Christian teachings and expectations when it comes to matters of violence and peace, the many kernels of truth spread throughout Hauerwas's explication and explorations of theses basic doctrines are enormously valuable. His points about how we are addicted to violence and war in part because we don't want to cast impurity and guilt upon heroes of the past; about how violence and war is tied up in the very structures of state sovereignty and thus politics as we know of it today; about how American history can't help but associate war with idealistic causes which having been mythologized into the proper, "pure" understanding of our own identity...all of it is first rate. Hauerwas's reflections are, ultimately, an inspiration to Christians who want to understand a way to find in themselves a true conviction of peace, and that's a beautiful thing.

Peter Levine, What Shall We Do? A Theory of Civic Life. This is a top-notch work of analytical and practical political and social theory, one that I've been meaning to read for a year. Through a sharp analysis of Elinor Ostrom, Jurgen Habermas, and the civil rights activism of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Levine sketches out and concrete and deeply thoughtful set of insights and suggestions for people looking to engage in civic life, and make some democratic difference in their localities. He identifies key elements of each of the three above-listed traditions of participatory democracy and civic action, but also recognizes and explores the theoretical limitations of each, and from their provides a synthesis of recommendations. This is a book that, as a citizen and a teacher, I'm going to be pondering a while, considering how best to set boundaries, engage in deliberation, and model just behavior as I try to get local action to matter.

Warren Magnusson, Local Self-Government and the Right to the City. I finally got around to finishing this collection of essays by the political theorist Warren Magnusson, and I loved it. His insights are scattered, sometimes repetitive and not always well connected, but they remain brilliant all the same. His reconceptualization of "local self-government" in light of the "locality" of states in the international order, and the "locality" of individuals within a sovereign, contractarian state, is profoundly radical, opening up, to my mind anyway, all sorts of new ways of understanding the traditional definition of local government--specifically, its municipal form in towns and cities. Magnusson in these essays is a profound critic of sovereignty and subsidarity, seeing both of them as theoretical forms that define and delimit the kind of democratic mutualism and variability and practice that characterizes that huge, undefinable range of what I'll call "governmenting" (I'm definitely being influenced by David Harvey's use of the term "commoning" here) which takes place in cities. Magnusson wants us to think hard about a democracy, and right to self-government, that is not dependent upon territorialization, not dependent upon constitutional definitions. This puts him very much in the camp of left-libertarian or anarchist thinkers, but while he's familiar with the philosophical ideas behind those theories, he approaches their conclusions with a language all his own, and one that I find kind of brilliant. This man's thinking is a small treasure.

Paul McCartney, 1964: Eyes of the Storm. I found 1964: Eyes of the Storm outside my front door this morning: a gift from a friend. I tore through the whole thing in a single day—of course, it's mostly photographs, so no big accomplishment, but still, it was a delight. I loved Macca's introductory essays; I felt as though I could see him sliding back and forth between repeating old stories automatically and being derailed by old memories he hadn't articulated in decades, if ever, obliging him to put words for the first time to the thoughts he remembers having had decades before. There's a good amount of unreflective, unimproved emotionality throughout the book, I think, in the short essays but also in the labels to his wonderful, candid photographs: the way he writes about his picture of George with the girl in the yellow bikini in Miami, for example, or a shot of a pensive Ringo leads him to write movingly about him as still the "new guy" in the band. And there's a two-page spread with photos of John and George where it's not hard to imagine the look of their faces weighing on Paul with all the weight of 60 years. The historical essay on 1964 by Jill Lepore is fine, but nothing special; just your standard coffee-table stuff, I suppose. But the photographs? An incredible treasure, and a delight.

Bernie Sanders, It's Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism. This is a politician's memoir, and so I expected, and forgave, the many moments in the book, especially in the first few chapters, in which Sanders tells the stories of his own presidential campaigns both uncritically and somewhat simplistically. What I didn't expect, and greatly enjoyed, was seeing Sanders elaborate upon the things that he is truly passionate about--most particularly, the fact that contemporary capitalism makes it impossible for so many working people to not only get by on what they earn, but to also feel any kind of attachment to or gain any kind of dignity from their work. For all Sanders's talk about health care and education and billionaires, it is in regards to work, and the communities of labor and mutual recognition and respect for effort which ideally make the world of work something other than just tragedy which we must endure to survive, where he comes closest to genuinely and consistently articulating a democratic socialist vision. There are elements of a true visionary in his otherwise often boiler-plate left-liberal positions, and that's something that I am certain that, whether they could articulate it or not, millions of voters were captured by: that Sanders was presenting not merely a list of preferences, and not merely a roll-call of enemies, but also a vision of a better society. It comes through in this book, and that makes it great.

Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. A brilliant update and expansion of an important book. He's really like a left-leaning Charles Marohn, someone able to concisely cut through the complicated institutional realities which have pushed our cities in directions that are not only unsustainable, but central players in all sorts of economic, racial, and environmental harms. All of his new material is wonderful, but because of the genuinely inventive way he ties terrible road design to invasive policing to basic questions of freedom, I have to say I liked "More Engineering Confessions" the best. 

 

 

Paul Thompson and Patricia Norris, Sustainability: What Everyone Needs to Know. A superb introductory book, which defines and lays out the broad usages of the ecological language of stocks, flows, feedback, and all the rest when talking about the environment, business, the economy, governance, and much more. Not a polemical book, and in fact one that probably bends too far over backwards to avoid taking a strongly anti-capitalist stance, but overall, one I can't believe I haven't been using in my Simplicity and Sustainability classes all along. 

 

 

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion. At the beginning of this year, before the school year started up again, I decided to read The Silmarillion, mostly because I was uncertain if I'd ever read the whole thing all the way through before. I still had on my shelf an old, taped with masking tape, paperback Ballantine edition of the book, which I remember being on my shelves when I was in high school, or earlier. I still have battered, paperback copies of LOTR too, but there's no mystery there; they're beat up because I read them to death. But The Silmarillion? Had I ever truly gotten through it? I honestly couldn't remember. Well, I've gotten through it now, and it's a masterpiece of romance and religion and myth. Tolkien's cosmology and legendarium includes echoes of all the great stories, whether humble or cosmic: Atlantis is here, and Rapunzel, and Oedipus. The rhythm of the writing sweeps you along; there's no way anyone who isn't an autistic savant can possibly keep track in their head all the names and places and dates through this multilayered imagined genealogy of thousands and thousands of years, but that's honestly not the point: the point is to be carried into an epic world, a world of a profound and tragic and romantic and heroic saga of elves and humans, monsters and gods, women and men. Tolkien carried me along, that's for certain, and I loved the journey.

Thad Williamson, Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship: The Civic Costs of the American Way of Life. A terrific dissertation-turned-book, stuffed full of good information an arguments, pointing towards the value (but also the limitations) of a civic republican perspective on addressing the problems of sprawl and its unjust, undemocratic effects on our civic life. The conversation about our built environment and how best to frame the ideological arguments about it have changed much in the nearly 15 years since this book was written, but as a primer to the basic theoretical arguments which surround the general topic of city life and transportation patterns and everything that flows from them, its value remains.