Nathan Bick

  I first encountered the book Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder when I was in high school. For a history project in the IB Program, I was tasked with engaging in some academic research into a historical topic to produce a written report or analysis. I had by that time attempted to read Thomas Pynchon due to the reputation as intellectually challenging. Specifically, this meant Gravity’s Rainbow . From my current vantage point I now realize I didn’t understand the wider context of the tradition in which that work sits. I think it is fair to say that at least in some ways Gravity’s Rainbow is part of Western attempt to grapple with and understand World War II from the Western perspective and experience. Not to get too diverted in this topic, one of the subjects Pynchon explores is the Herero genocide in Southwest Africa in the first decade of the 20th century, taken by him and many others as an epsiode that foreshadows the larger actions in Eastern Europe a few decades later. I myself to...

  Evicted is a fantastic book - it’s well written and highly enlightening. The author, Matthew Desmond, describes people and places as if he were writing a novel, meaning one can read and enjoy like one would popular fiction but also come away benefiting from the deeply researched and educational content on this serious matter. It has three parts; the main body of the work, a policy proposal epilogue, and a final self-reflection on the technical details of the project. The majority of the book, as mentioned, is written almost with a story-like narrative recounting the difficult housing and life journeys of several different figures across the city of Minneapolis after the Financial Crisis and Recession of 2008. Interspersed are more directly informative sections. Desmond follows several very poor people, Black and White, with no housing security and a couple landlords specializing in urban poverty housing. Particularly unique is the story of Sherrena, a Black woman landlord who al...

  In early 2022 I listened to an excellent podcast episode of Hardcore History by Dan Carlin on the Atlantic Slave trade. After finally finishing the long The Prize, I was able to select a new book to read. During a casual trip to the Politics and Prose bookstore and while perusing through my typical favorite section of history and biography, I noticed Black Spartacus. I immediately drew a connection with the Hardcore History episode because the culminary sketches and details of Carlin’s storytelling was all about the Haitian Revolution, a historical era and subject that I knew (and unfortunately still know) very little about. So to beef up on this, I got the book without any “due diligence” and got to reading.  First, a quick summary of the information from the Hardcore History episode is merited since it is linked in my mind to this book. Carlin has touched on slavery in the past, both directly and in the middle of other subjects (such as Assyria, etc), because generically ...

Tim Hwang in Subprime Attention Crisis exposes the markets that underlie the internet. These attention markets, where our attention is traded at hyperfast speed, highly parallel financial markets. This is no accident, as the tech and finance industries have been tightly connected since the beginning of the commercialization of the internet. And indeed, many executives in tech came from the finance world. The market for attention highly resembles more traditional commodity markets such as for oil, timber, or water. Hwang gives a very useful historical overview of the development of the market for wheat, where once farmers travelled to sell their individual yields at marketplaces in the city. Later, wheat was standardized by lot, quality, season, and other characteristics, and then turned into indistinguishable abstracted commodities. Eventually, futures and other financial derivatives developed on top of the underlying asset and became enormous markets.  Subprime Attention Crisis la...

I started reading The Prize by Daniel Yergin, which is a canonical account of the history of oil in global geopolitics and economics. To explain why it might be worth better understanding oil, pause and consider what oil really is. In a very real way, future anthropologists will view this era as the Oil Age in exactly the way we look back on the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. The realities of our personal lives, down to the contours of our simplest daily decisions, and our collective national prosperity, are almost wholly determined by the availability of oil and its products. Our gas powered car or plastic sneakers define us and our lives as much as or more than a stone-tipped spear defined our Stone Age ancestors. Cracking open this book in 2021 presents a fascinating dynamic since The Prize was released in the early 1990s. A transformative thirty years have elapsed, and while the earlier history up to 1990 recounted in the book is still the same history today, the author’s then-curre...

I started Mao in 2020 and finished on New Year's Day 2021. There is some symbolism in this because as I begin a new year I also will begin a new book on a new era after Mao, since I plan to read a book on Deng Xiaoping next. It is not a deep or unique observation that China is rapidly increasing in heft and influence in the world, and I personally am trying to react to this by studying China. I expect that for the rest of my life, China and its economy, policy, culture, and history will grow in its direct relevance in my daily life. An interest in geopolitics can sometimes appear like sports fandom - a great game played by its famous participants whose only direct impact on the viewer is that viewer's perceptual emotional response to a sense of "their team winning or losing." On the contrary, just as America and its economy, policy, culture, and history is directly relevant for many people in the world (think the daily life of Iraqis in the extreme), I see China doing...

Deng Xiaoping is a much more nuanced figure than Mao, and I believed at the outset of reading this book that he was also more important than Mao. In high school I read a large biography of Deng by Ezra Vogel which Pantsov and Levine address directly in this new biography. They suggest Vogel focuses sympathetically on Deng's time as Paramount Leader and his economic policies of modernization and opening up. Pantsov and Levine instead tackle Deng's entire biography and perhaps overcompensate in doing so. Similarly to their work on Mao, a relatively small portion of this work is spent on the man's time at the helm and a larger portion is spent on intraparty conflicts throughout his career. However, Pantsov and Levine here claim that this is done in order to present a holistic presentation of Deng, and there are episodes from Deng's earlier life that can be seen as early signs of features of his time as Paramount Leader. First, to address the comparative importance and rele...

  Life and Fate is the second half of the two part novel, the first part being Stalingrad which I reviewed above. Life and Fate, as previously mentioned, is the more famous portion of the overall work. It was completely censored in the Soviet Union by the editors rather than allowed to publish with state editing. In 1980, this book was smuggled out of the Soviet Union to the West where it was first published. The book became famous for this story, and further for its literary and political content. As a poignant critique of the Soviet Union, it was politically warmly received, and it may have represented an unleashing of previous Russian literature in the vein of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky rather than a work dominated by Soviet influence. Life and Fate is often likened to War and Peace , and I think this comparison is politically pointed as just mentioned as well as legitimate and obvious. This comparison is due to the wartime subject matter, the large cast of characters, and within the...