Category: reviews

coins

I recently read The CIA Book Club: The secret mission to win the cold war with forbidden literature by Charlie English. It describes a covert program to fund underground publishers and cladestine efforts to provide access to information from the West to people behind the Iron Curtain. But is primarily focused on Poland.

I had become aware of the CIA covert support for sending books behind the Iron Curtain years ago. A number of Esperanto books were published and shipped to Eastern Europe with money from the CIA. I picked up this book to learn more about the program, but I was a little disappointed when it turned out that the book is almost entirely about the effort in Poland in the 1980s.

The events in Poland, from the coup in 1981 until the collapse of the communist regime in 1989, were at least minimally known to me. I graduated from high school in 1981 and I remember seeing reports on the television news about Poland. At that time, however — as a callow youth — I was not particularly paying attention to international or political events.

The book focuses on the events principally following Mirosław Chojecki, an independent publisher. He had been publishing an anti-government newsletter and was imprisoned shortly after the coup. After engaging in a hunger strike, he was released and subsequently went into exile in the West. In the United States, he became aware of the CIA efforts, met a number of important political figures, and was brought into contact with the agent who was running the largest part of the operation with respect to Poland.

The contributions of many of the other members of the underground publishing movement are also recognized: Helena Łucywos and the other women who published Wazovia Weekly, Jerzy Giedroyc — who ran the CIA front in Paris — and many many others. The book ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the CIA book operation. But it never really talks about any of the other parts of the operation, since it’s really just about Poland.

It was an interesting read for me. Since I was only vaguely aware of these important events, it was nice to have a primer that provided a lot of the back story. But I would still like to know more about the CIA book program in general — and not just the parts related to Poland.

fossil sharks teeth

Palace of Deception by Darrin Lunde describes the lives of three men, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Roy Chapman Andrews, and William Akeley, who were instrumental in the creation of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The book seeks to marry and intertwine what are really four separate stories into a coherent narrative. Each of the stories was interesting: but I felt the whole didn’t quite do justice to any of the stories.

I’ve always been a fan of Roy Chapman Andrews. I first learned of him as a graduate student when I attending a workshop at Beloit College. Chapman grew up in Beloit, graduated from Beloit College, and became an adventurer who was, in many ways, the inspiration for Indiana Jones. When I saw this book that aimed to describe his amazing stories of adventure, I was hooked.

The AMNH was actually founded by Albert Bickmore, who had trained with Louis Agassiz, with money raised from wealthy New York robber barons. But it was under Osborn that the AMNH grew and took shape as an institution.

Osborn was a follower of Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton was a statistician who extended the thinking of Darwin to create eugenics and social Darwinism. Osborn — not unlike racists today — became convinced that immigrants were endangering the “superior” race, and he began to use the museum to propagandize this theory. He was also suspicious of laboratory science, and preferred the term “naturalist” for people who were studying the natural world. He hired both Roy Chapman Andrews and William Akeley as part of his plan to develop the museum.

Roy Chapman Andrews, unlike Indiana Jones, was primarily a field biologist. He wanted to document and collect specimens of animals in regions of the world that had not yet been studied by Western science. He was successful at raising money for long expeditions to Asia (Japan, Korea, China, and Mongolia) that collected animals, and later fossils, to bring back to the AMNH. His exploits were extraordinary and the book touches on a number of them.

William Akeley was a taxidermist. He developed a number of innovative techniques to create elaborate dioramas that showed animals in their natural setting and also went on long expeditions, principally to Africa, to collect big game (elephants, lions, and gorillas). Many people believed that Africa would be settled by white people, much as North America had been, and that all of the large animals would be driven to extinction.

Each of the four stories, about the museum and these three men, is interesting in itself. There is a lot of fascinating detail, and the book does a good job of showing the complexity of the history around the subject. The book is also timely, given the current fascist push toward expelling immigrants and promulgating a racist “great replacement” theory.

At the same time, the whole doesn’t quite hang together as a coherent story. The individual stories have the feeling of being incomplete as each has been subordinated to the overarching narrative. It’s still a good read, however.

Money

The History of Money by David McWilliams (2024) is subtitled “A story of humanity.” It skims over a vast landscape, dipping in now and again for a deeper dive into moments when innovations in how societies created and managed money (or failed to do so) contributed to world-changing events. The complexity of our current world economy has grown up guided and constrained by the cautionary lessons of history, but ever spurred on by people’s greed and prurient interests. This book provides an enjoyable and useful introduction with a lot of fascinating details along the way.

He begins with the earliest known examples of commercial tallies, records of values, and transactions, going back to the stone age. The theme of money shifting between measures of commodities (e.g. grain or precious metals) or value (as anchored by fiat and monetary policy) plays out over and over throughout the book.

Many important historical figures are introduced with the roles they played in advancing innovations in monetary practice and policy. I’ve always lamented that, as someone in the sciences, I had little flexibility to study history and classic literature. McWilliams has prompted me to consider reading at least two important books out of history: Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, the foundational text of economics and Liber Abaci by Fibonacci.

The books ends with a pretty harsh dismissal of cryptocurrencies:

Over the years we have seen that money is a technology designed to solve a problem. I’m scratching my head as to what problem Bitcoin in particular and crypto in general actually solve. Despite the small foothold Bitcoin has gained in the mainstream US investment market, crypto looks set to remain on the fringes, a source of obsession for its supporters and aficionados, but not very useful or practical in reality. Bitcoin is to money what Esperanto is to language.

Other than the slur against Esperanto, I am in complete agreement. I mean, he’s not actually wrong about Esperanto either, but I would have preferred he slander Volapük rather than Esperanto to make his point.

If you’re curious about understanding how money works in practice and how it came to be the way it is, this book is a great place to start.

Recently, I was gratified to receive two extremely generous reviews of Revin’s Heart. Reviews are critical for getting the word out about new books.

The first was by The Faerie Review. The reviewer, Lily Shadowlyn, had read the entire Revin’s Heart series at the time the final novelette came out and had written a series of enthusiastic reviews about each of them. In the last review, she had said, “I would love to see all the stories compiled into one larger book or even a box set bundle someday, although it would be a hefty tome, the stories it would contain would be worth it!” So, when the collected edition came out, she reread the stories and the additional material had many nice things to say.

[T]hink Treasure Planet with magic and LGBTQIA+ rep. The story moves along smoothly, and the action will get your heart racing. The characters are unforgettable, and you won’t see the twists coming.

Lily Shadowlyn

The second review was a complete surprise to me. Damian Serbu wrote a review for Queer Sci Fi. In his review, he speaks glowingly about the worldbuilding, story structure, and pacing of Revin’s Heart. But his description of Revin made me feel wonderful that someone really got what I was aiming for.

Revin himself is a fabulous character. You pull for him from the first. He possesses a charming combination of hurt because of not being accepted for his true nature with a hope for a better future and acceptance for those around him, no matter who they are. And Revin blends a youthful naïveté about the world, especially within the realm of the pirates, with a bravery and courage in his exploits.

Damian Serbu

I’m so grateful for the excellent reviews. It’s really hard to get reviews. Every author wishes that more people who read books would share a review — even if only to say, “I read this and it was OK.” But to get such lengthy, positive reviews is extraordinary and I hope they lead to more people discovering Revin’s Heart and enjoying it.