wahistorian's Reviews (506)

This book is as fresh and surprising as its title. American Chinese Xiaowei Weng explores the many ways tech is changing rural China, its small towns, agriculture, and work patterns. Essays look at food safety, blockchain chicken-raising, AI on pig farms, and pearl cultivation, among many other fascinating topics. Although they recognize that China is a repressive regime, nevertheless experiments with technology improve the lives of Chinese farmers and villagers—or do they pacify them? “Will a large, lumbering government truly manage to help scale up social trust, given the mistrust people have toward the government already?” Weng asks (44). 

An ingenious structure, in which stories told by acquaintances at a London men’s club unfold like a Matryoshka doll, one inside the other. The tales revolve around a Russian princess, a couple murders, and missing jewels. The *real* purpose? To detain an M.P. from taking an important vote. “We have been matching stories, that is all, pretending we are people we are not,” one tells him, “endeavoring to entertain you with better detective tales than… the last one you read” (77). 

The plot of this novel felt so disjointed to me, with short chapters that jumped around in time, seemingly without explanation. The characters were not very well-developed, so that I had difficulty keeping them straight. All a bit of a jumble to me. 

I am a historian of 19th-century culture, so I am embarrassed to admit that this is the first time I’ve read ‘Moby Dick.’ The novel lends itself to so many interpretations—environmental novel, political metaphor (as the intro by Andrew Delbanco points out), the Shakespearean fall of an ambitious man—that has made it a must-read American classic. Melville stimulates all the reader’s senses with his descriptions of life on the ocean. His characters are engaging and sympathetic. If there’s any flaw, it is the long digressive passages that break the flow of the plot. But still a fascinating reading experience. 

Christine L. Corton’s “biography” of London’s characteristic climate phenomenon is obviously deeply researched, so much so that it can be a bit plodding in parts, where runs out of superlatives for what was sometimes an extraordinarily dangerous cloud. She explores the worst of the white, yellow, and black fogs of the 1880s and the 1890s, and how they were captured in art and literature of the time. At the same time she has a handle on the growing trend toward data collection that will eventually help the government get control of it. (Londoners had difficulty picturing their cozy fireplaces without coal.) As a side benefit, the book has something to say about climate change, in that humans are loathe to give up habits invested with cultural meaning about home and family, but new consumer technologies can help. A fascinating read. 

Navalny recounts his career of opposition to Vladimir Putin’s corrupt government. His courage in the face of relentless oppression and imprisonment is inspiring; he even maintained his sense of humor. A example for all of us. 

I always marvel at Dorothy Sayers’s ability to juggle so much material—so many clues, alibis, double identities—and create out of them one coherent storyline. I have to admit that she loses me on the ciphers, and I certainly cannot fault the logic of Lord Peter Wimsey or Harriet Vane, even when they are initially on the wrong track. This famous novel turns on Vane’s discovery of a dead man who had bled out on a coastal rock feature; she does use her little Brownie to document the body, but by the time she returns with help, the tide has carried the body away, hence the title ‘Have His Carcase,’ or ‘habeas corpus.’ The deceased, Paul Alexis, is identified through her photos, and Wimsey and Vane begin to piece together his life. The plot involves a must unlikely cast of characters, which makes it all the more fun: some former actresses, some gigolo-ballroom dancers, an itinerant barber, and so on. Sayers’s references to the popular and high literature of the day—Ruritanian romances, Russian literature, Shakespeare, and penny novels, as well as some of her real-life fellow crime writers—make this an even more interesting read. All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable way for me to spend my spare moments during the Christmas season.