Booknotes 5.25

Dead Wake, by Erik Larson, published 2015, history, 440 pages. Really good, though my interest in ever going on a cruise may have plummeted. The conjecture toward the end about a possible and kind of horrifying reason why England didn’t send an escort for the Lusitania (and didn’t have the ship go around the north of Ireland, etc.) was fascinating. Recommended. In our current age of AI psychosis smothering the software development industry, this part also hit home for me and lined up nicely with how I feel:

In this she was very much in step with the Arts and Crafts movement, then in full sway, which held that craftsmanship provided both satisfaction and rescue from the perceived dehumanization of the industrial revolution.

Also found this of note:

Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors.

Life of Johnson volume 1: 1709–1765, by James Boswell (edited by George Birkbeck Hill), published 1791, biography, 980 pages. I’ve long wanted to tackle this but the whole thing was daunting in its full length. (In print it’s 1,400 pages of what has to be a fairly tiny typeface, but in my ebook reader — a standard 1,200 characters per page — it’s 4,200 pages long.) Turns out it’s very readable and so good. I’m glad I’m going with the unabridged edition, by the way, because I find the letters add helpful flavor. And the footnotes sent me off with loads more books I want to read, mostly old memoirs and letters. Mmm. Can’t wait to read the remaining volumes.

A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness, by Nassir Ghaemi, published 2011, nonfiction, 355 pages. The core argument is that some degree of mental illness (depression, bipolar disorder, etc.) is actually desirable in leaders during times of crisis, with examples pulled from Lincoln, Gandhi, MLK, FDR, JFK, Hitler, and a few more. I’m not sure how fully I agree with the thesis, and I do know for sure that I disagree with the part of the argument that says that in our leaders maybe we need to accept the vices (hypersexuality, etc.) that accompany mental illness, but I still found the book biographically interesting, and I agree that continuing to destigmatize mental illness is worthwhile and important.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, by Trevor Noah, published 2016, memoir, 320 pages. I read this because my kid’s English class is reading it and the teacher asked us parents to read along. (Though I’ve had it on my list for a while and would have read it anyway, to be clear. This readindg was not under duress.) Some of the stories are deliciously bonkers. Overall, it’s a funny, occasionally harrowing, and eye-opening look at life in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. I liked it.