Books of 2024: History/Social Science

As you might observe, I found it difficult to identify this cluster of books.  They both compile history, but they also layer social analysis and - in one case - economics in with the facts and dates.  My competent wife loves it when I read non-fiction like this due to all of the side-stream facts she gets to hear.  

More surprising than the above similarities, these books both broke my heart in their own way.  Scientology continues to ruin lives every day.  American parking laws still ruin communities.  Those laws seem more likely to change than the chances that Scientology will lose its grip on its adherents.  Finally, America, itself, is kind of gross especially in the way it exploits its territories and off-shore holdings.

Books of the Year: History and Social Science

Going Clear; Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright, 2013

This book had been on my booklist for so long that I forgot where I first heard about it. Likely an interview, possibly on Marc Maron's podcast. Wright, a chronicler of religious sects including the Amish and Al Quaeda takes on the violent cult of Scientology, exposing many things the "church" wishes weren't public. In Wright's carefully-researched telling, the organization comes off as a secretive, brutal human trafficking organization chiefly organized to financially benefit its founder and his successor, who basically performed a coup at age 21 in L. Ron Hubbard's last days. I'm delighted to be finished with this book because the story of the cult made me really sad. It's hard to believe that people want so badly to have something larger than themselves to believe in that they will give up everything - family connections, education, freedom, their self-respect - to follow a bunch of claptrap authored mainly in the 50s by a madman loser. He must have been the most charismatic person born in that century because lacking all evidence to his claims that Scientology helped him or anyone else, people flocked to him and the religion. That held true even when the group had become persona non grata in so many countries that it functioned entirely from three decrepit ships. In its current incarnation, the group regularly imprisons its members for arbitrary offenses and has gotten away with the deaths of mutliplle members due to neglect and fear of healthcare, especially mental health care. 

The book's footnotes chiefly document how the church denies behaviors and events that Wright backs up with reports on the record from multiple people. Without those who have left Scientology, Wright would not have been able to compile this book. Everyone who's still in comes across just as deluded as you might think. Still, my heart goes out to them. At the top of that pyramid, of course, stands Tom Cruise. Having read this, I may never watch a movie featuring him again. 

Although I can't try to convince anyone that reading the book will be fun, I do believe that everyone should know about these criminals.

Paved Paradise; How Parking Explains the World, Henry Grabar, 2023

The Atlantic reviewed this book in a summer 2023 issue. I can think of one omnibus book about a topic that I've enjoyed before - about ocean shipping - but I feel like there have been others. When I read one, I derive pleasure from the whole "what you don't know about x"-ness of it all. Grabar has written a highly readable example of the genre. Much of the book covers the destructive power of parking minimums in building codes. Space for cars drives up the price for human space. Car space can also eat into space for humans, making less of it. He tells tales of woe in which developers try for literally years to build affordable or even middle-class housing only to end up trapped between erecting a luxury building or abandoning the project. Often, they choose the latter. So parking ends up contributing to the general housing crisis. A funny thing happened to Grabar's book project, however: a global pandemic that made a lot of people rethink devoting quite all of our curb space to parking. He points out the outdoor dining, parklets, bike storage and other uses to which this linear space got put to use when cars didn't dominate for a brief window of time. Parking, he argues in the end, is just long-term storage of cars, which get driven less than we think. Americans worst of all, but societies in general have given parking more of a right to space than other equally valuable or more valuable uses.

How to Hide an Empire; A History of the Greater United States, Daniel Immerwahr, 2019

My friend Jason Hansen recommended this book to me a few years ago.  Despite my interest in it, it felt like a project to take on.  That turned out to be true.  Immerwahr has written a comprehensive history of the American empire (which refuses to call itself that). He asserts that as fraught as the US's relationship is with places beyond the 48-state "logo map," the one-time rebel colonies have long held and exploited other territory.  He identifies so many interesting chapters, and almost all of them made me sad or angry.  As much as racism defines America's ongoing history, Immerwahr tells a long-silent story of dominion over people in places that didn't ask for it.  I learned tons about Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and lots of other holdings.  All Filipinos should hate the United States, full stop.  That they don't necessarily is just one part of this complicated and surprising history.  On the one hand, I don't like to recommend that readers find more to dislike about America.  On the other hand, Immerwahr would argue that knowing it could make us better Americans and make America better.