On the downside, it blurs the (rather narrow) range of differences among the "American foreign policy establishment" (a more generous term which still conveys some sort of self-selected clique able to exert a consistent direction in administrations of both political parties). I tend towards a finer-grained taxonomy, chiefly: neocons (idealists in love with military power and little if any concern for how that impacts others), neoliberals (same, except they do claim to care, hence they're also known as "humanitarian interventionists"), and realists (non-idealists, who try to tie policies to material interests, not caring how they impact others except as that affects the possible success of the policies). This implies a 2x2 matrix, one dimension for ideologist vs. pragmatist, the other self-centered vs. respectful of others, but the Blob excludes the fourth corner (pragmatic but respectful of others). A proper taxonomy would find more variants: e.g., is Henry Kissinger a "realist," as neocons often charge, or something different, some kind of monarchist throwback, but for all practical purposes, he always winds up well within the Blob; or Ben Rhodes, who coined the term Blob to denigrate other people, but who winds up Blob-adjacent more often than not; or Peter Navarro, who we can use as a proxy for a Trumpist "America First" mindset that for Trump himself never developed beyond the stage of "irritable mental gestures." Still, the Blob coalesces at critical intervals, especially in the decision to invade Iraq.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Tuesday, April 19, 2022

I started working on this last week, hoping to sum up much of what we know about the Russia-Ukraine War: the context, including a look back at history; what the conflict tells us about military thinking and international institutions; and how I imagine the crisis can be resolved, and further crises averted. I originally thought of doing a set of numbered theses, but the paragraphs are probably too long to be so considered. Still, they feel rather schematic to me, as I touch on a lot of points.

1. Three great betrayals contributed to Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine on February 24. The bad faith from breaking these promises snowballed into future recriminations and fears. These were:

   • The US promise not to expand NATO beyond Germany when East and West merged in 1989. Bill Clinton broke this when he accepted NATO membership for Poland and other former Soviet satellites in 1997.
   • Russia's promise to respect Ukraine's borders and security in 1993, when Ukraine transferred its portion of the Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia. Putin broke this in 2014 when Russia seized and annexed Crimea, and armed a separatist militia in Donbas.
   • The Minsk Protocol was signed in September 2014 to settle the Donbas dispute, but soon failed, as did the subsequent Minsk II agreement. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, elected in 2017, renounced the treaty in 2021.

2. Perhaps the most important betrayal of all was the informal agreement no one dared write down. On December 8, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met secretly and agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union, leaving all 15 SSRs as independent states. This was a second coup attempt, after the reactionary "old guard" coup by elements in the military and party failed to depose Gorbachev in August 1991. By that point, the central government was weakened, and independence movements were rapidly advancing in many SSRs, including Ukraine. The coup dissolved the Soviet Union, with a "Commonwealth of Independent States" serving as a clearing house until the military and other shared resources could be divided. The unwritten part was the Yeltsin's assumption that once the dust cleared, nothing much would change: Russia would continue to dominate the periphery, as it had in the Soviet Union and before that in the old Empire. For a while, it seemed to work that way, but then Ukraine started to stray. The definitive break came in 2014, when the Ukrainian parliament impeached "pro-Russian" president Yanukovych, in an effort to realign Ukraine with the more prosperous EU. That's when Putin panicked and went to war.

3. The Russian Empire grew out of the Duchy of Moscow, founded in 1263 as a vassal state of the Golden Horde. It was initially ruled by the Rurik Dynasty, who before the Mongols interrupted had held power in Kyiv, in a state the Russians later called Kievan Rus (879-1240). Given this history, it's little surprise that Russians have come to think of Kyiv as theirs. The Duchy of Moscow broke free of the Mongols and expanded, in 1480 recasting themselves as the Russian Empire. But Moscow didn't conquer Kyiv until 1667, and it was not until the late 18th century when Russia extended control over most of modern Ukraine, and started a campaign to move Russians into Ukraine (which, to use a term Putin recently reiterated, they called Novorussiya; those Russians mostly moved to the south, which had been ruled by Turks -- the Crimean Khanate fell in 1783 -- and the southeast, a major coal area). Western Ukraine, including Lviv, was ruled by Austria-Hungary up to 1918, then by Poland until borders were redrawn after WWII. Ukraine was briefly independent 1917-20, with revolutions and civil war alongside Russia, before joining the Soviet Union in 1922.

4. Russian political culture shares a trait with most other declining empires: an exaggerated sense of their own wisdom and benevolence, which convinces them they are entitled to intervene in the affairs of their former subjects. We see this in France's recent interventions into former colonies like Mali, and in the UK returning (under US direction) to Afghanistan and Iraq. We even see this conceit in such long-gone empires as Turkey and Iran. We see a variant of this in the US, which given the global dominance the US has sought since WWII can be applied to countries with only tenuous or imagined relationships. In Russia, this is especially strong, perhaps because the former empire was compact and contiguous -- although Russians have also claimed a pan-slavic identity (such as their bond with Serbia). Their sense of bonds is further shored up by the Russian diaspora: as the Empire expanded (and as the Soviet Union recapitulated the Russian Empire), ethnic Russians colonized their subject territories, sometimes achieving majority status (as in Crimea and Donbas). They became a special focus for Russia's post-imperial chauvinism, in a way that has few parallels elsewhere (although Reagan sending the Marines to Grenada to "protect American medical students" was a supremely Putinesque move).

5. Americans tend to date the Russia-Ukraine War from February 24, when Putin commenced his "special operations," sending troops into Ukraine from both north (some via Belarus) and south (through Crimea). The invasion had been predicted by US "intelligence" leaks, accompanied by threats of escalated sanctions should Russia follow through on their threats. Ukrainians, on the other hand, date the war from February 2014, when Russia took advantage of widespread protests against the impeachment of Yanukovych to execute a coup in Crimea and an uprising in Donbas. Those regions had Russian majorities, and had reliably voted for "pro-Russian" candidates since 1991. The Crimean operation was over in an instant, and ratified in a referendum on March 16. The Soviet Union had its main naval base in Sevastopol (it retained base rights there until 2017, per an agreement following the independence), and quickly moved operatives in to orchestrate the transfer. Protests in other heavily Russian cities, like Odessa, fizzled out, but the Donbas area broke out into an armed revolt, which Russia backed (and to some extent led). The Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts declared their independence from Ukraine, and Ukraine's military moved to suppress the revolts, clawing back a little more than half of their territory. A cease fire agreement in 2015 effectively froze the conflict, but eight years some 14,000 people were killed. Both sides dragged their feet on implementing the 2015 Minsk Agreement, which called for Ukraine to repeal laws thought to discriminate against Russians, and offered Donetsk and Luhansk autonomy within Ukraine. Zelensky, who was elected in 2019 on a vague promise to resolve the conflict, felt that Minsk would give Russia greater power to meddle in Ukrainian affairs, making it harder to join EU and/or NATO. Meanwhile, from 2014 on, the US and its allies imposed increasingly strict sanctions on Russia's economy, and on individuals believed to have influence on Putin. The impact of the sanctions is unclear, but they were part of a more general American-led effort to marginalize Russia, which included expanding NATO and its armory.

6. After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, a number of conflicts arose over borders between the newly independent SSRs that hadn't been problems under strong central rule. Transnistria broke away from Moldova in 1991. Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia in 1993. Russia supported those independence movements, so its support for Donetsk and Luhansk wasn't unprecedented. On the other hand, when Chechnya tried to break away from the Russian Federation, the Russian Army was sent in to quash the uprising. The Chechen War (1994-96) failed, but when Putin rose to power in 1999, he launched the Second Chechen War, which ended independence, leaving 50-80,000 total dead. There is a theory, popularized by David Satter, that Putin orchestrated apartment bombings in suburban Moscow, killing more than 300, as a pretext for reopening the war against Chechnya. (As crazed conspiracy theories go, this one doesn't seem especially out of character.) Chechnya provided Putin with his first taste of war, and it felt good. The war lifted him from unknown to Russian hero.

7. The bigger problem with the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the economic catastrophe which followed. In Russia, the economy contracted by 40% between 1991 and 1998, and life expectancy dropped, as mortality for men rose by 60%. Similar problems beset the other former SSRs, although the Baltic states did better, by reorienting their economies to trade with Europe. Going back to Tsarist times, the Russian economy was designed to take advantage of the Empire's periphery. The bigger problem was rampant corruption, which fueled the rise of a class of oligarchs, and led many to classify the governments as kleptocracies. But Russians like Putin were easily alarmed when former SSRs pivoted away from Russia, and especially in 2014 when Ukraine signed a memorandum to join the EU. That was when Putin put pressure on Yanukovych to cancel the move, and mass protests emerged, leading to the impeachment of Yanukovych and the Russian operations in Crimea and Donbas. This wasn't the first time Russia perceived the threat of outside (especially American) political operations within their former sphere: the so-called Colour Revolutions of 2003-05 had overthrown pro-Russian cronies in Ukraine (Orange), Georgia (Rose), and Kyrgyzstan (Tulip, or Rose).

8. The most consequential of the Color Revolutions was the one in Georgia, as it brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power. He was outspoken in his desire to join NATO and the EU, while also plotting to retake the Russian-backed breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin responded to the threat by sending troops into Georgia, where they quickly won several battles, before withdrawing to new military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The war started on August 1, 2008, and was over by the 12th. American super-hawks John McCain (at the time the Republican candidate for president) and Lindsay Graham were livid, insisting the US should fight to defend Georgia, but cooler heads prevailed, and Condoleezza Rice oversaw the cease fire agreement. This was Putin's second brush with war, and it, too, felt good. The operations in Ukraine in 2014 would be his third.

9. Russia's operations in Ukraine in 2014 feel improvised, like Putin was trying various things, with a cautious eye toward figuring out just what he could get away with. The best solution for Russia would have been to undo the impeachment and return Yanukovych or some other pliant crony to power, but even if some in parliament were bribed to impeach, much popular opinion had swayed to the side of the Maidan protesters. And then Crimea fell right into his lap, and that was too rich a prize to let go. Crimea had originally belonged to the RSFSR, and was only turned over to Ukraine in 1954. The population was about 65% Russian (vs. 15% Ukrainian, and 11% Crimean Tatar). Russia had a naval base and troops stationed in Crimea. (Annexing Crimea saved Russia from having to build a new Black Sea naval port by 2017.) The land connection was very narrow, and easily severed. And in the east, the Kerch Peninsula came close enough to the Russian mainland that Russia has since been able to span it with a bridge. (The main drawback was that Crimea depended on a canal from Ukraine for water. After annexation, Ukraine dammed the canal. The first thing Russia did after invading this year was to destroy that dam.) Donbas also proved to be relatively easy to infiltrate and supply. There were repercussions for their operations, chiefly in the form of sanctions, which presumably have been a drag on Russia's economy (and oligarchs), but it's hard to say how much.

10. NATO was originally founded in 1949, not to fight a war with the Soviet Union but to deter one, while uniting western Europe under consistent American command. Deterrence was straightforward, because Eastern Europe had already been ceded as a Soviet sphere of influence at Yalta. Both the US and Russia were war weary, and the US had (and the USSR would soon have) nuclear weapons. NATO saved most European nations (especially Germany and Italy) from the burden of rebuilding their militaries. France and the UK still had foreign empires to lose, so the US cut them some slack. Russia allowed Austria and Finland to carry on as neutral nations. The US worked to suppress Communist movements in its sphere (most violently in Greece, clandestinely in Italy), but didn't lift a finger when the Russians put down rebellions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). The Cold War was an arms race, but the hot spots were in the so-called Third World. When Russia let go of its Warsaw Pact allies, the only cause for concern was East Germany, which wanted to unify with the West. Gorbachev reluctantly agreed that a unified Germany would be safer in NATO than as neutral. For one thing, Germany had all the tech it would need to build a nuclear arsenal, but as long as it was covered by NATO had no reason to do so. This concern to "keep Germany down" was the main reason for maintaining NATO after the Warsaw Pact disbanded. But as the 1990s progressed, NATO started finding more reasons to exist. They contributed to America's 1990-91 Gulf War. They reluctantly intervened in Yugoslavia, which had splintered into warring factions in 1991. In 2001 they voted to support America's war in Afghanistan. France, Germany, and Turkey sat out Bush's Iraq War, but in the search for "a coalition of the willing," the US sought allies from Eastern Europe, leading to a second wave of NATO expansion. (The first, in the late 1990s, was sold as a path for Eastern European countries to join the EU, but it could just as well be seen as an arms cartel scam. It's unclear whether fears of an increasingly nationalist Russia drove or were caused by NATO membership.) During the 1990s, Russia had objected to NATO expansion but hadn't seen it as a big threat. However, around 2010, as Obama was getting out of Iraq and winding down Afghanistan, the US military was looking for new budget opportunities, and remembering the Cold War fondly. They were originally talking about a "pivot to Asia," but after Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 it got easier to sell Putin as evil wizard -- and as Putin clamped down on dissent in Russia, to present him as a treacherous foe of democracy. With that, conjuring up ancient fears of Russia, especially in Eastern Europe, which had long felt the stifling force of Russian power, was easy. Why the US should go out of its way to antagonize Russia is hard to fathom. Could it be as simple as that expanding NATO created a new market for politically influential US arms merchants? Conversely, it took market away from Russian arms -- one of the few manufactures Russia could sell competitively. This had the effect of limiting Russian arms sales to countries barred from US arms, like Syria and Venezuela, effectively reproducing the Cold War division without any hint of ideological coherence.

11. Russians have long been attracted to the idea that a buffer zone of friendly or at least neutral nations around them provides a measure of security against foreign attack. This was tested early in WWII, and turned out to be worthless. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 allowed Germany to expand east without provoking Stalin, and encouraged Stalin to move west to the new German border, occupying territory that had been stripped from Russia after WWI. The additional territory proved to be useless in defense of the Soviet Union after Hitler broke the Pact and invaded in 1941. The Soviet gains of 1939 were wiped out almost instantly, and the Nazis found collaborators who were more anti-Russian than pro-German. Moreover, Russia attempted to recapture Finland in a fruitless war that only detracted from their defense against Hitler. Nonetheless, Stalin returned to the idea of a buffer zone when laying out the Warsaw Pact sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Russian dominance of Eastern Europe generated enough resentment the arrangement collapsed as soon as Gorbachev decided to let it go. Putin seems to have nostalgia for past empire, even when he allows that reconstituting it is impossible. This is clearest in his equation of anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine with Nazis -- hence his vow to "de-Nazify" Ukraine. The history of anti-semitism and Nazi collaboration in Ukraine makes it a bit too easy to charge Ukrainian nationalists with Nazism.

12. Then, in 2016, Putin did a very dumb thing: he deployed his hackers to try to tilt the US presidential election to Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton was tied to Obama's turn against Russia, and was clearly the more hawkish candidate, more committed to America's domineering role in world affairs. Trump, on the other hand, was the kind of guy Russian oligarchs were used to doing business with. And Trump seemed to admire Putin, while they shared many of the same prejudices and tastes. Unfortunately, Trump won, and Clinton used Putin's role as a scapegoat, encouraging her fans to become rabid Russophobes. Trump was as obsequious as expected, but he did Russia few real favors, mostly because he handed foreign policy over to neocons who grew up in the Cold War and only became more wedded to raw power in later years. Trump added to Russia's sanctions burden. He figured that a big part of his job was to sell arms abroad, and he tried to cajole NATO into buying more, and deploying closer to Russia. He tore up several treaties, the intent being to stimulate a greater arms race. He had little concern for Putin's affronts to democracy, but that didn't stop others from harping on them. His term corresponds to four years of frozen conflict in Ukraine, where he gave neither side reason to hope or to settle. He likes to boast now that Putin wouldn't have invaded if he were still president. He is probably right, but not for the reasons he offers. Trump likes to think of himself as a tough guy no one else would dare to cross. He isn't, but that doesn't matter. There is a limited number of things the US can do in a conflict with a nuclear power like Russia: sanctions are easy, cyber is iffy, arms are business, propaganda is a given. In such a conflict, both sides calculate carefully what they can get away with, and what they dare not try. Trump makes such calculation harder, because he's so unbalanced and unstable, or to put it more succinctly, stupid and crazy. That may have been enough to get Putin to err on the side of caution. But beyond that, Zelensky is also busy calculating what he can and cannot get away with, and he was able to play Biden for more support than had been possible with Trump (who famously withheld aid when Ukraine didn't dish up the dirt Trump wanted on Biden). So do the math: Zelensky is getting stronger, the US under Biden is more committed in supporting Ukraine, and Putin is getting nervous that his big play in Ukraine might collapse. That needn't have pushed Putin over the edge, but it certainly made it more likely that Putin would panic. While I suspect that Biden's warnings and threats were meant to deter Putin, they also felt like taunts. It's not at all clear that the Biden administration (or its more hawkish allies, like the UK) regards the invasion as the tragedy it plainly is. Rather, they'd like to take it as vindicating their long process of painting Putin into a corner.

13. All states implement a regimen of laws and rights to govern behavior, and enforce it through police and courts. In nations where the system is widely regarded as just, conflicts are rare and usually resolved without resort to violence. This creates a measure of safety and stability which allows commerce and culture to develop and flower. No such system exists to govern the behavior of states, although many have been proposed, treaties have been signed, and some toothless institutions created (like the League of Nations after WWI, and the UN after WWII). Powerful states refuse to submit even to normative rules, and no one (even collectively) can force them. After the UN was created, the US and USSR tried to use it to protect and advance their foreign policies, and failing that gradually withdrew, in favor of pressing their own local power advantages, or practicing subversion where that seemed the more advantageous path. After the Soviet Union dissolved, there was much glib talk about a "New World Order" with the US as the world's sole hyperpower presiding over a world of unfettered capitalism. But despite having the world's largest economy, with bases around the globe and enough firepower to destroy all life on earth, Americans failed to grasp the first principle of anarchy: when no one has the power, the only viable approach is to seek mutually satisfactory understanding. Even during the Cold War, the US was much more successful in offering generosity -- think of the Marshall Plan, or the deficits the US ran to build up the economies of its allies -- than by bullying. After all, no one likes to be pushed around, and over time the offenses add up into deep resentments: Russia is a seething bed of persecution and paranoia, where each sanction further exacerbates open wounds. US affronts to Russia go back as far as the Civil War, when the US sent troops into Siberia to try to overturn the Revolution. After WWII, they became increasingly regular. The US jihad in Afghanistan was expressly meant to kill Russian soldiers -- the only way they could have been more explicit is if they offered bounties for scalps. Even after Gorbachev and Yeltsin bent over backwards to appease Reagan-Bush-Clinton, the insults kept coming: the "Star Wars" system, which had it worked (not that it ever could) would have allowed the US to launch a "first strike" with no fear of reprisal; the indifference to the Russian collapse in the 1990s; the advance of NATO, playing up anti-Russian fears, not least by separating former trading partners from Russia; then came sanctions as the US felt entitled to judge and punish every Russian infraction.

14. The triumph of capitalism wasn't very satisfactory either. The elections of Reagan and Thatcher ushered in a meaner and greedier cult, where exploitation became even more predatory. As Communists, Russians already have suspected that capitalism was a criminal enterprise, so when they tried their hand it, it's not so surprising that their new class of oligarchs rose out of the old class of black marketeers. The easiest way to get rich was to steal, and the way that worked in Russia was only slightly more thuggish than in America. (One might be tempted to blame this on the authoritarian bias the Communists inherited from the Tsardom, but capitalism in America's Gilded Age was pretty thuggish too.) Corruption aligned the forces of government with predation, and in a society embracing "greed is good" corruption is rife. Even America, with all the high-minded talk of democracy and women's rights, was easily satisfied with "allies" as autocratic as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Given how doggedly the American right fought against the moderating effect of democracy, they were all the more determined to make sure that no international agreements and institutions would emerge to regulate their game. And in that they had a shared interest with the world's other oligarchs. They even sought to rig trade agreements to prevent governments from putting "public interest" above private profits.

15. Despite all the provocations, Putin alone bears responsibility for the invasion, and for all the deaths, disruptions, and destruction his army has produced, and also for the damage elicited as Ukrainians have tried to defend themselves. He could have chosen differently. He could have negotiated a reasonable solution. Or he could have simply kept the status quo, more or less indefinitely. NATO was never going to attack Russia. It's unlikely Ukraine would have mounted a serious offensive against his Donbas position, but defending Donbas would have been much easier than attacking Kyiv, and even if Donbas surrendered, he'd still have influence within a democratic Ukraine. And while losing Donbas might have been a blow to his ego, it's effect on Russia's balance sheet would have been negligible. He took a big, unnecessary gamble, and even if he persists and eventually ekes out some concessions, he'll never regain the good will he's lost.

16. I'm not a big believer in a "right to self-defense," and not just because it's often claimed to justify counter-offense (often going beyond any sense of proportionality). But self-defense is an understandable reaction, and in response to such a calculated and systematic invasion as Putin has launched, it is hard to see any other way to repel the invader. I could even go so far as to assert that military aggressors never learn necessary lessons except in abject defeat -- as, for instance, Germany and Japan did in WWII (a second essential requirement is that they recognize and accept their own nation's responsibility for the war they lost). Given this, I understand Zelensky's desire for arms to help beat back the invaders, and as long as he's not the one responsible for prolonging the war, I wish him success. But I do worry that the US and NATO have their own selfish reasons for prolonging and escalating the war. One must recognize that the only way this ends is through an agreement with Russia. Russia is too big to be bled to death by their losses in Ukraine, and there's no way Ukraine could effectively take the war onto Russian soil (after all, Napoleon and Hitler tried that and failed, even before Russia built a nuclear arsenal).

17. There is much talk in high places about war crimes, and even the word "genocide" is bandied about. I suspect this is tied to the rather dubious legal theory that when a party is guilty of genocide, other nations are obligated to intervene to protect those being killed. I say this is dubious because any military intervention will result in more people being killed, compounding the original crime. That's just how militaries go about doing their business. Zelensky may think he wants the US to join him, to implement a "no-fly zone" and add to his offensive capabilities, but everywhere the US military enters, atrocities are sure to follow. "War crimes" may seem like a simpler case to make. Indeed, I'd be happy to posit that all acts of war should be considered crimes, but given the anarchy that prevails between nations, there is no practical way to prosecute a side that is not utterly defeated (as Germany and Japan were in WWII, but as Russia will not be here). As such, loose talk of war crimes only muddies the issue, which is reaching an agreement both sides can live with.

18. It's long been clear what a settlement would look like. It could have been negotiated years ago. The war makes negotiations more difficult, because wars open wounds that confound reason, but the relative balance of "wins" and "losses" in the war barely affects what needs to be done. The disputed territories need to be decided by a fair vote of the people who live there. Before the war, it seemed likely that the separatist-held parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, and even more so Crimea, would have voted to join Russia. How the war might shift such a vote is anyone's guess (the Mariupol seems to be meant to expand Russian control of Donetsk, especially along the Sea of Azov). Exactly how one organizes such a vote will be a tricky thing to negotiate, but I think Ukraine -- at least those who want closer integration into Europe -- should be happy to let go of any regions that would rather rejoin Russia. The second bit is to remove Russian troops from those parts of Ukraine that don't want to join Russia, with credible security guarantees that Russia will not attack or threaten again. Before the war, one might have taken Putin's word for this, but that is harder now. The third part is to unwind the sanctions against Russia. This is where the US and EU need to negotiate, since they're the ones responsible for the sanctions. It's important here that they offer clear criteria for removing all sanctions, allowing a better-behaving Russia to rejoin the community of nations. It's also important that the criteria not require regime change, reparations, and/or prosecutions (even though under any reasonable system of justice, that is exactly what would be required). Moreover, Russia should not be prohibited from anything the US and EU are not also prohibited from. Finally, there should be further negotiations on reducing armed threats worldwide, but nothing specific to Ukraine should depend on such negotiations.

19. One thing that should be obvious is that prevailing security theories have been proven false, much to our peril. A show of strength does not guarantee the other side will submit. It is just as likely that strength will elicit cunning resistance. This is partly because strength is complex and fallible. This is especially true in the case of nuclear weapons, where the potential danger is so great that the power becomes practically impossible to use. Russia's nuclear weapons effectively took the options of US troops and/or air power off the table (which the US had resorted to several times when facing non-nuclear foes), yet Russia was able to operate conventionally without fear of US nuclear weapons. So-called economic weapons are also problematic. We are running a massive experiment in the efficacy of sanctions, with no real understanding of how they work, what the impacts are, how they might be circumvented, etc. Past experience with sanctions shows that they often backfire, precipitating the escalation they're meant to deter, or that they will prove ineffective beyond polarizing the conflict. I expect that a reasonable analysis of the threats and weapons deployed in this war will show them to be severely wanting. The way forward is not to double down on arms -- the lesson those most invested in NATO would like you to take away -- but to work to rebuild cooperative bonds between nations: an important step there would be to starve conflicts of arms by negotiating mutual arms reduction treaties.

20. Focus now should be on a cease fire, to limit further harm and encourage negotiations. The lack of emphasis on this by the US and EU, as well as major "neutral" powers like China and India, is not just disconcerting, it's evidence of bad faith. Critics of US policy have accused the hawks of being so obsessed with knocking Russia down, they're willing to fight to "the last dead Ukrainian." Russia and Ukraine, at least, are paying for their intransigence: the former thinking they can still win something worthwhile, the latter unwilling to make concessions that appear inevitable. But the longer the war goes on, the more sunk costs add up, the nastier and more brutal it gets. Warring parties may start with different principles and concerns, but in short course they find themselves in the same rut of terror and vengeance. It is possible that when they first invaded, Russians expected to be greeted as liberators -- much as Americans expected in Iraq and Afghanistan. They certainly didn't plan on committing atrocities against people they hoped to reorganize as allies, but they did, because that's what armies do. Americans, having aspired to "make the world safe for democracy," entered WWII with a moral critique of indiscriminate slaughter, but wound up fire-bombing whole cities, and obliterating two with atomic bombs. Every day without a cease fire continues to propel all sides down that moral slope.

21. When Yugoslavia started to break up, US Secretary of State James Baker explained American indifference with the line, "we don't have a dog in that fight." Baker clearly had no reticence about fights the US did have dogs in, like Panama, Kuwait, and Somalia (a parting poison pill Bush left for Clinton to throw up). Such benign neglect didn't last: taunted by hawks like Madeline Albright ("what's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?"), NATO took on Bosnia as a make-work project, and secured a treaty ending the war rapidly enough it looked to many like some kind of good deed. The contrast between their "success:" in Yugoslavia and the tragedy in Rwanda the US had neglected created a storm of "humanitarian interventionism" scouring the earth for wars they could stroke their sense of moral superiority by joining. They never really had enough clout to get into a war the neocons didn't already want (Haiti may be the exception here), but they were always ready to add their high-minded propaganda to other war projects (Afghanistan and Iraq, obviously, but they were more prominent in Libya and Syria, which the neocons were happy with but couldn't really explain; Syria was especially a mess, because the US had several dogs in that one, and they were mostly fighting each other). Benign neglect made a comeback under Trump, who couldn't be bothered with "shithole countries," nor did he care what US clients like Israel and Saudi Arabia did with American weapons. Biden has brought ideology back into the mix, but one thing no American foreign policy wonk has considered for decades is the notion that war itself is unbearable in the modern world, and that foreign policy should be dedicated above all else to preventing war. This is an especially difficult concept for a nation that prizes the cult of profit-seeking (capitalism) above all else. It's hard to find anyone in American foreign policy that isn't pursuing or advancing some kind of greedy algorithm. Yet in the anarchy of international affairs, the only thing that works is cooperation, which necessarily starts with a willingness to see others do better.

22. Robert Wright quotes a very disturbing Biden tweet:

    We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy. Between liberty and repression. This battle will not be won in days or months either. We need to steel ourselves for the long fight ahead.

    Recasting this war as one between competing worldviews allows no room for compromise. In claiming higher principles, Biden is setting out on a crusade to destroy not some idea of "autocracy" but Russia itself -- a nuclear-armed state with extraordinary depth and reach, and by his own reckoning a callous disregard for human life. If his goal isn't to get us all killed, he should dampen down the hyperbole. On the other hand, one can sympathize with Biden's sense of the need to defend democracy. But his (and our) enemy there isn't Putin, but the majority of Republican politicians, their financiers and media flacks. Putin's only role in this is as an example of what can happen when right-wingers -- and despite all the ex-KGB nonsense, Putin is pure right-winger on any scale that matters -- get too much power. Nor should we be surprised that he would use that power to start a tragic waste of a war. There are many precedents, like GW Bush.

23. Which leads me to a final point (for now): American foreign policy needs to stop trying to interfere in domestic political affairs elsewhere, except perhaps to make it clear that we would welcome more progressive, more pacific, more democratic governments everywhere. The reasons for this are myriad, well beyond what I can enumerate here. The world currently faces problems that can only be addressed through cooperation, and that starts with social justice at home.

Apologies for not even trying to provide links. The Robert Wright post is here, and it includes a link to the actual tweet. It's in the free part of the post -- I haven't read the rest because it's subscriber-only (my wife pays him but I don't seem to have the password; there must be a better way than keeping useful reporting and analysis exclusive to the few people who can manage to pay for it -- especially given how ubiquitous misleading propaganda is). Many other sources were consulted in writing this (at one point I had more than 50 Wikipedia tabs open). Recent Speaking of Which posts include numerous links on Ukraine. I imagine I'll do another in the next week or two to follow up on themes here. But there's something nice about keeping this uncluttered.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, April 18, 2022

April archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 37739 [37689] rated (+50), 128 [130] unrated (-2).

I've been trying to write a piece on Ukraine. Yesterday I got so frustrated with it, I decided I'd post it that night regardless of what state it was in. It's not as if I expect anyone to read it or care. But I wrote another couple points last night, getting as far as this:

One must recognize that the only way this ends is through an agreement with Russia. Russia is too big to be bled to death by their losses in Ukraine, and there's no way Ukraine could effectively take the war onto Russian soil (after all, Napoleon and Hitler tried that and failed, even before Russia built a nuclear arsenal).

That seemed to require at least one more paragraph, on what such an agreement should (really, must) look like. So instead of rushing the post out last night, I decided to give myself another day, and post it tomorrow. But first Music Week.

Robert Christgau interrupted his 80th birthday holiday to post a Consumer Guide. Fourteen albums, seven I had already reviewed:

• Amyl and the Sniffers: Comfort to Me (ATO '21) [A-]
• Jon Batiste: We Are (Verve '21) [B+(**)]
• Cheekface: Emphatically No. (New Professor '21) [B+(***)]
• Ray Wylie Hubbard: Co-Starring Too (Big Machine) [A-]
• Pony: TV Baby (Take This to Heart) [B]
• Spoon: Lucifer on the Sofa (Matador) [B+(***)]
• Superchunk: Wild Loneliness (Merge) [A-]

The rest are caught up below (the Lenny Kaye comp assembled into a nearly complete songlist, the other two songs sampled from YouTube). I have no recollection at all of TV Baby. Christgau also published a 41-song playlist to mark 80 years. I can't describe how awful I felt when I got up this morning, but the piece came with a Spotify playlist (thanks to Joe Levy), and I figured that might pick me up a bit. First 11 songs were all classics from the 1950s, then after Ray Charles, he threw a curve and picked up bits by Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk before trying to cover the 1960s in 8 tracks, and skipping through the 1970s way too fast (4 songs), followed by a break for 2 African pieces. After that there's nothing I would have come close to picking (although "That's the Joint" and "It Takes Two" sounded great, and it would be hard to improve on the James McMurtry and Robyn songs). The only WTF pick was the Brad Paisley. I'm lukewarm on the Selo i Ludy album below, but "It's My Life" ended this list, and sounded pretty good after 38-40.

New records reviewed this week:

Teno Afrika: Where You Are (2022, Awesome Tapes From Africa): Young (22) South African DJ/producer, second album, works in a style called amapiano, which seems to draw as much or more from deep house as South African hip-hop variants like kwaito or gqom. Eight beatwise pieces, five with shared or featured credits, not that any of them seems much different. B+(***)

Priscilla Block: Welcome to the Block Party (2022, InDent/Mercury Nashville): Country singer-songwriter, from North Carolina, first album after a couple EPs. Good voice, fairly generic songs, not without interest but not worth much thought. B+(*)

Sergio Carolino: Below 0 (2021 [2022], Clean Feed): Portuguese tuba player, invented something called the Lusophone "Lucifer" (a picture looks like an overgrown tuba bell at the end of an oversized saxophone with a couple of trombones up top), played solo here. B+(*)

Hugo Carvalhais: Ascetica (2021 [2022], Clean Feed): Portuguese bassist, fourth album since 2010, original pieces with three co-credited to pianist Gabriel Pinto. Sextet also includes Liudas Mockunas (tenor sax/clarinet), Fabio Almeida (alto sax/flute), Emile Parisien (soprano sax), and Mário Costa (drums). B+(**)

Pastor Champion: I Just Want to Be a Good Man (2018 [2022], Luaka Bop): Outsider gospel artist Wylie Champion (1946-2021), brother of soul singer Bettye Swann, left Louisiana for Oakland, recorded this one album, a homey affair with his electric guitar, basic band, sing-alongs and handclaps, then delayed release by refusing to talk about it. No raising the rafters, no sublimated ecstasy, but down to earth faith to see you through hard times. Got to respect that. A-

Chicago Farmer & the Fieldnotes: Fore!!!! (2022, Chicago Farmer, EP): Folkie singer-songwriter Cody Diekhoff, "from a small town in Illinois," albums since 2005. Last couple were pretty impressive. Goes for slow and soulful here, which rarely beats fast and/or funny. Four songs, 19:09. B+(*) [sp]

Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer: Recordings From the Åland Islands (2022, International Anthem): Chiu, from Los Angeles, plays keyboards, although that's only fourth on his list of occupations, after "community organizer, graphic designer, artist." Bandcamp page shows six other recordings, at least one LP. Honer plays viola, synthesizer, and hand chimes. There is also a bit of guest flute. The Åland Islands are in the Baltic, south of Finland. Although there are bits of field recordings (e.g., birds), this is minimalist ambient music, the sort of thing you might be delighted to find from Jon Hassell. A- [sp]

Confidence Man: Tilt (2022, Heavenly): Australian electropop band, second album, I thought the first one was pretty great, starting with its title (Confident Music for Confident People). Two singers that go by Janet Planet and Sugar Bones, backed by a masked band. B+(***)

Natalie Cressman & Ian Faquini: Auburn Whisper (2022, Cressman Music): Faquini is Brazilian, moved to Berkeley at age 8, plays guitar, wrote or co-wrote all of these songs, and sings most of them. Cressman shares three writing credits, sings some, but mostly plays trombone, which adds some gravity to the froth. Turns out to be surprisingly beguiling. B+(***) [cd]

Dedicated Men of Zion: The Devil Don't Like It (2022, Bible & Tire): Gospel vocal group from North Carolina -- the lead group on 2021's Sacred Soul of North Carolina -- backed by the Sacred Soul Sound Section. Second album. B+(***)

Stro Elliot: Black & Loud: James Brown Reimagined by Stro Elliot (2022, Republic): Remix album, I've seen Brown on the artist credit line, as the music (especially the vocals) is uniquely his, but he's dead, and this particular mix is new. Elliot released a hip-hop instrumental album in 2016, joined the Roots in 2017, playing keyboards and beat machines. The shifts seem trivial at first, then subtle, then eventually they sweep the entire edifice into somewhere new. A-

Ensemble 0: Music Nuvolosa (2022, Sub Rosa): French group, nominally avant-classical but open to whatever. I noticed them last year with a version of Julius Eastman's Femenine, then got their name wrong in my review. Two compositions here: Pauline Oliveros: "Horse Sings From Cloud" (19:12); and György Ligeti: "Musica Ricercata" (27:39). B+(**) [bc]

Ilhan Ersahin/Dave Harrington/Kenny Wollesen: Invite Your Eye (2022, Nublu): Ersahin plays sax and keyboards, was born in Sweden to a Turkish father, moved to New York in 1990, owns the bar Nublu and its label, has a dozen or so albums since 1996. Harrington plays guitar, electronics, bass, and percussion, and Wollesen is a well-known drummer. B+(*)

Mané Fernandes: Enter the Squigg (2021 [2022], Clean Feed): Portuguese guitarist/bassist, third album. Group with alto sax (José Soares), flute, synth/piano, synth/accordion, and drums. B+(**) [bc]

Ricky Ford: The Wailing Sounds of Ricky Ford: Paul's Scene (2022, Whaling City Sound): Tenor saxophonist, from Boston, debut 1977, recorded for Muse and Candid up to 1991, intermittently since, strong sides with Abdullah Ibrahim and Mal Waldron. Quartet with Mark Soskin (piano), Jerome Harris (bass), and Barry Altschul (drums). Mostly standards, some pointed to South Africa. B+(***)

Freakons: Freakons (2022, Fluff & Gravy): Joint venture by countryish bands Freakwater and Mekons. Freakwater, from Kentucky, recorded 8 albums 1989-99, but only two since. Mekons started as a punk-political band Leeds, UK, in 1979, made a country move in 1985 (Fear and Whiskey), and continued to reconvene periodically even after Jon Langford moved to Chicago and created the Waco Brothers. They find common cause here in "songs about heroic union organizers, deadly mine disasters, wailing orphans, or mining's grim history of economic and ecological devastation." A-

Clay Harper: They'll Never Miss a Five (2022, Clay Harper Music): Singer-songwriter from Atlanta, started in the 1980s in a band call the Coolies, has several solo albums since 1997, also has written a children's book, and opened a number of restaurants (including a barbecue chain called The Greater Good). Seven songs (35:37), opening with an instrumental. B+(*)

Ibibio Sound Machine: Electricity (2022, Merge): London-based Afrofunk band, led by UK-born singer Eno Williams, fourth album since 2014. Groove takes off midway, which makes all the difference. B+(**)

Terry Klein: Good Luck Take Care (2022, self-released): Folkie singer-songwriter based in Austin, third album, recorded this one in Nashville, opener rocks so hard I filed it there, but he mostly goes mid-tempo, so you can follow words that mean something. A-

Lavender Country: Blackberry Rose and Other Songs & Sorrows From Lavender Country (2019 [2022], Don Giovanni): Led by Patrick Haggerty, claims their 1973 debut as "the first openly gay country album." Second album 49 years later. Nothing as explicit this time as "Cryin' These Cocksucking Tears," or maybe I'm just a bit slow on the uptake. I did notice that he sounds like he's been taking voice lessons from label mate Peter Stampfel. Also some politics, like "she loves Karl Marx more than she loves me." Last song is called "Eat the Rich." B+(**)

Lights: PEP (2022, Fueled by Ramen): Canadian pop singer-songwriter Valerie Bokan (née Poxleitner), eighth album since 2009. B+(***)

The Linda Lindas: Growing Up (2022, Epitaph): Four teen girls from Los Angeles (well, three: drummer Mila de la Garza is 11; Bela Salazar is oldest, at 17), play punk, released a 4-song EP in 2020, got a bigger push when their video of "Racist, Sexist Boy" went viral. First LP (10 songs, 25:30), cartoon cover suggests a nod to bubblegum. Wish they were as consistently great as they sometimes are. B+(***)

Mazam: Pilgrimage (2020 [2022], Clean Feed): Portuguese quartet: João Mortágua (alto/soprano sax), Carlos Azevedo (piano), Miguel Ângelo (bass), Mário Costa (drums). B+(**) [bc]

Brad Mehldau: Jacob's Ladder (2022, Nonesuch): Pianist, specialized in trios for his first decade, before starting to branch out with larger-scale works and even a splash of fusion. This is a sprawling tableau of prog rock with biblical motifs and allusions, covering Gentle Giant and Rush, and ending in 10:07 of "Heaven." I got turned off by the opening vocal, and nothing that came later changed my mind, but the rare bits of piano impress, and the broad swathes of synths remind me that I once fancied prog rock. But even then I had no use for liturgy, and all the less so here. Still, could be a wondrous piece of work, were one so inclined. B

Gurf Morlix: The Tightening of the Screws (2021, Rootball): Singer-songwriter, from Buffalo, moved to Texas, where he performed with Blaze Foley and Lucinda Williams. Thirteenth album since 2000. B+(*)

Keith Oxman: This One's for Joey (2021 [2022], Capri): Tenor saxophonist, mainstream, based in Denver, dozen albums since 1995. Quartet with Jeff Jenkins (piano), bass, and drums; mostly Oxman originals, with Jenkins contributing two songs, plus a couple standards. Joey is Pearlman, the late bassist who appears on the final cut. B+(***) [cd]

Rich Pellegrin: Passage: Solo Improvisations II (2019 [2022], OA2): Pianist, lives in Seattle when he's not teaching in Florida, fifth album, solo, minor bits and bobs. B+(*) [cd]

Marek Pospieszalski: Polish Composers of the 20th Century (2021 [2022], Clean Feed, 2CD): Polish saxophonist, has a previous album tribute to Frank Sinatra, not sure how much else. Octet here, with a second saxophone, trumpet, viola, guitar, piano, bass, and drums, only two names there I recognize (Tomasz Dabrowski and Grzegorz Tarwid), playing 12 pieces by as many composers (Andrzej Panufnik is the only one I sort of recognize; total time 110:08). Strikes me as a little heavy. B+(*) [bc]

Joel Ross: The Parable of the Poet (2022, Blue Note): Vibraphone player, third album, his appearance on Blue Note gave him visibility that his peers will be unlikely to match. Still, ambitious album, styled as a 7-part suite played by an 8-piece ensemble, led by Immanuel Wilkins (alto sax), Maria Grand (tenor sax), and Marquis Hill (trumpet), with trombone, piano, bass, and drums. B+(**)

Sault: Air (2022, Forever Living Originals): British group, sixth album since 2019, line-up still something of a mystery (one name seems to be Dean Josiah Cover, aka Inflo). Change of pace here, lots of spacey orchestration and choral singing, not much beat. They lost me. B [sp]

Selo I Ludy Performance Band: Bunch One (2019, self-released): Ukrainian band, from Kharkiv, offers a bunch of covers of western pop songs, some in English, some in German, the accordion and balalaika offering just the right amount of exoticism, along with the rhythmic drive of the bass and drums, to what is otherwise pure corn. B+(**)

André B. Silva: Mt. Meru (2021 [2022], Clean Feed): Portuguese guitarist, has a previous album as The Rite of Trio. Group includes alto sax, bassoon, bass clarinet, cello, bass, and drums, but feels like less. B+(*) [bc]

Jon Spencer & the HITmakers: Spencer Gets It Lit (2022, In the Red): Garage rocker, recorded a dozen-plus albums with Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (1991-2015), went solo for the 2018 Spencer Sings the Hits. Harsh and erratic, nothing remotely hitbound (even the James Brown). I never bothered with him before, and probably won't again. B-

Survival Unit III: The Art of Flight: For Alvin Fielder (2018 [2022], Astral Spirits): File under Joe McPhee (tenor sax), the link to previous Survival Unit iterations (although not to the metal band of that name, which had 15 albums 1999-2007): Survival Unit II was active in 1971, and this trio -- with Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello & electronics) and Michael Zerang (drums) -- has seven albums since 2006. Fielder (1935-2019) was a drummer with Sun Ra, and a charter member of the AACM. His last appearance was on the same three-act bill as this set. A little rough for my taste. B+(*) [bc]

Vasco Trilla/Liba Villavecchia: Asebeia (2020 [2021], FMR): Spanish duo, drums and alto sax, Trilla has been prolific since 2013. Title defined as "criminal charge for desecration and disrespecting of divine objects." B+(*) [bc]

Jordan VanHemert: Nomad (2021 [2022], Origin): Korean-American tenor saxophonist, second album, teaches at Schwob School of Music. Mainstream, trio with Rodney Whitaker (bass) and David Alvarez III (drums), with extra guest spots, including two Sharon Cho vocals. B+(*) [cd]

Liba Villavecchia Trio: Zaidan (2021 [2022], Clean Feed): Spanish saxophonist, from Barcelona, records go back to 1999, trio with Alex Reviriego (bass) and Vasco Trilla (drums). B+(***) [bc]

Fabian Willmann Trio: Balance (2021 [2022], CYH): German tenor saxophonist, has credits back to 2014 but this appears to be the first album under his own name. New Swiss label stands for Clap Your Hands. With Arne Huber (bass) and Jeff Ballard (drums), plus alto sax (Asger Nissen) on two tracks. Mainstream, nice tone, closes with a "No Moon at All" that lingers long past the record. B+(***) [cd]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Dave Brubeck Trio: Live From Vienna 1967 (1967 [2022], Brubeck Editions): As one who usually listens to Brubeck records for Paul Desmond's gorgeous alto sax, it's easy to forget how brilliant a pianist the leader could be, so this is a wake up call. Brubeck rarely made trio records, and this one was an accident: Desmond missed the flight to the last stop of a tour, so the rest -- Eugene Wright (drums) and Joe Morello (drums) -- went on as a trio, their set shifted to mostly standards. Opens with a rousing "St. Louis Blues" followed by Brubeck's "One Moment Worth Years." Second side gets even hotter with Brubeck extemporizing on "Swanee River," and wrapping up with "Take the A Train." A- [cd]

Lenny Kaye Presents Lightning Striking (1934-2013 [2022], Ace, 2CD): Compilation of 48 songs, mostly from 1955-1979 with a few outliers (mostly metal later), tied to Kaye's new book, Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll: the ten chapters are: Memphis 1954; New Orleans 1957; Philadelphia 1959; Liverpool 1962; San Francisco 1967; Detroit 1969; New York 1975; London 1977; Los Angeles 1984/Norway 1993; Seattle 1991. The last two are represented by 8 tracks I have no idea how to evaluate (LA hardcore/Norwegian metal is highlighted by a later Japanese cut; Seattle grunge is barely represented by Mudhoney and Mark Lanegan). Up through Kaye's own minor fame in New York 1975 (he was Patti Smith's guitarist, before that mostly known as the compiler of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era), there's no doubting his expertise or his knack for picking out obscurities that help illuminate the better known hits (not easy for me to figure out the ratio, but 1:1 to 1:2 is ballpark). I have doubts about how useful this is: a better solution might be to program a whole CD for each chapter, adding depth while keeping the periods/styles separate. No doubt Kaye could have found the songs, if only the economics were viable. [From Napster playlist, so some versions may differ; 2 missing songs found on YouTube.] B+(***)

Old music:

Amyl and the Sniffers: Amyl and the Sniffers (2019, ATO): Australian punk rock band, fronted by Amy Taylor, first album after a couple of EPs. I put their second album (Comfort to Me) on my 2021 A-list, but didn't bother looking back to see what else they had done. Maybe the album cover looked crude, or the length (11 songs in 29:00) insubstantial? Christgau marked it down ("sound a little thin in the end"), but that strikes me as a formal choice, and few bands have followed it more rigorously. As for statement: "Some Mutts (Can't Be Muzzled)." A- [sp]

Horace Andy: In the Light (1977, Hungry Town): Fifth album, regarded as one of his best, and I can't quarrel with that. Has an even flow, nothing really great, but plainly enjoyable. B+(***)

Mark Charig With Keith Tippett/Ann Winter: Pipedream (1977 [2010], Ogun): Cornet player (also tenor horn), started with Long John Baldry's Bluesology along with Elton Dean, went on to play in Soft Machine, King Krimson, and various projects with Dean, Barry Guy, Chris McGregor, and/or Tippett (organ/piano here; Winter sings; both also play bell). B- [bc]

Stro Elliot: Stro Elliot (2016, Street Corner Music): LA-based hip-hop producer, not sure how he balances that with membership in Philadelphia-based Roots, which he joined in 2017 after releasing this set of beats with occasional vocal samples. B+(*)

Terry Klein: Great Northern (2017, self-released): First album, short (8 songs, 29:43), deep thinking about life, from "they say life is wasted on the living" to "there is joy in this life if you're willing to make a mess." B+(***)

Terry Klein: Tex (2019, self-released): Second album, got himself a band, still I don't find myself hanging on every word, and the often slack music has something to do with that. B+(*)

Lavender Country: Lavender Country (1973 [2014], Paradise of Bachelors): Originally released by Gay Community Social Services of Seattle, Inc., which was leader Patrick Haggerty's day job. Music is fairly stock, but the lyrics aren't. B+(**)

Louis Moholo-Moholo Septet/Octet: Bra Louis - Bra Tebs/Spirits Rejoice! (1978-95 [2006], Ogun, 2CD): First disc is a previously unreleased 1995 set, with Evan Parker and Tobius Delius (tenor sax), Jason Yarde (alto/soprano sax), Claude Deppa (trumpet), Radu Malfatti (trombone), Pule Pheto (piano), Roberto Bellatalla (bass), and Francine Luce (vocals). I'm no more happy with the vocals here than elsewhere. However, the reissue of Moholo's 1978 album Spirits Rejoice! is something to savor. B+(***) [bc]

Soft Head [Hugh Hopper/Elton Dean/Alan Gowen/Dave Sheen]: Rogue Element (1978, Ogun): Ex-Soft Machine bassist, used "Soft" for several later group names, with Dean (another Soft Machine alumnus) on alto sax, plus keyboards and drums. Packaging poses a number of problems: group name not on cover, misspelled on spine (Soft Heap is a real Hopper group, just not this one, and the elephant picture caused me to mistype the title). The rhythm section isn't extraordinary on its own, but they really turn Dean loose. A- [bc]

Keith Tippett's Ark: Frames: Music for an Imaginary Film (1978, Ogun, 2CD): Orchestra 22 strong: 8 horns, 6 strings, double up on piano (Tippett and Stan Tracey), bass (Peter Kowald and Harry Miller), and percussion (Louis Moholo and Frank Perry), with two vocalists (Maggie Nicols and Julie Tippetts). Originally 2-LP, but totals 83:58, so needs 2-CD. Massive, generates a lot of motion with some cacophony. B+(*) [bc]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Milen Kirov: Spatium (Independent Creative Sound and Music) [06-05]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, April 11, 2022

April archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 37689 [37641] rated (+48), 130 [137] unrated (-7).

Continued with the Ogun Bandcamp. Several readers singled out Chris McGregor's first two Brotherhood of Breath albums for praise, so I started there. Aside from new jazz from my queue (topped by Whit Dickey and Kalí Rodríguez-Peña), plus some of the links I had downloaded and neglected, almost everything else came from sifting through lists, collected in my metacritic file.

Exception: Old records by Bob Andy, Chic, and Soft Machine showed up in research on other records, and seemed like holes in the database ratings. The Soft Machine albums were ones I actually owned, but hadn't remembered well enough to include in my first cut of the ratings list. I probably never owned any Chic before Believer, but C'Est Chic was the only one still unrated.

Thought about writing a theses-type piece on Ukraine, but got lost trying to sort out the ancient history: the arrival of various Slavic groups, Byzantine influences, the Khazars and other Turkic groups, the Varangians (Vikings), the Mongols, the encroachments from the north (Poland, Lithuania, Russia) and the south (Ottomans), the Cossack revolts and mercenaries, more Russians (with its Pale of Settlement), the Germans in the World Wars. Russia clearly dates back through the Tsars to the Grand Duchy of Moscow (1263-1480), or perhaps to Kievan Rus (879-1240), given that both were ruled by the Rurik dynasty, but it's not clear how or when Ukrainians became distinct from Russians (or vice versa) -- only that they did by the late 18th century, when Catherine the Great extended Russian control over most of Ukraine, and started a campaign of Russification (going so far as to refer to Ukraine as Novorussiya -- a term recently credited to Putin), and the breaks from Russian rule in 1917-20 and after 1991 have only added to the separation. That Putin thinks Russia knows best can be credited to the myopia that shields the progeny of former empires from seeing the harm those empires caused. Even Russian leaders who knew better have tended to revert to the mindset of Tsars.

The big question at this point is why do none of the principals (and I think we have to include the US and UK on that list) seem concerned with getting a cease fire? More war means more destruction, but also deeper scars that will take longer to heal. Meanwhile, I think it's clear that many of the assumptions of post-WWII defense strategy have proven to be wrong -- something which NATO powers have missed, given their recent pledges to spend even more money on arms, and place them even more aggressively to threaten Russia. Few seem to recognize that the famous "madman theory" depends on the other side reacting sanely, an assumption Putin has shown to be no longer operative.

Some serious rethinking is called for.

New records reviewed this week:

Mike Allemana: Vonology (2018-21 [2022], Ears & Eyes): Guitarist, grew up near Chicago, moved there and found a mentor in Von Freeman, the subject of and inspiration for these compositions. Octet. Greg Ward and Geof Bradfield are the saxophonists, Victor Garcia (trumpet), Kendall Moore (trombone), Tomeka Reid (cello), bass, and drums, plus a choir, which I don't regard as a plus. B+(*) [cd] [04-15]

Horace Andy: Midnight Rocker (2022, On-U Sound): Reggae singer Horace Hinds, recorded regularly since his 1972 Studio One breakthrough (Skylarking), at least up to 2010. Still not all that old (71). B+(*)

Chief Keef: 4Nem (2021, Glo Gang/RBC): Chicago rapper Keith Cozart, fourth studio album, lots of mixtapes back to 2011 (when he was 15). Gangsta-ish, doesn't seem worth the risk. B

Rob Clearfield & Quin Kirchner: Concentric Orbits (2019 [2022], Astral Spirits): Piano and percussion duo, from Chicago (although Clearfield has since been described as "France-based"). Two pieces, 30:25 (the digital adds a few more minutes of excerpts). Each build into a strong statement. B+(***) [dl]

Denzel Curry: Melt My Eyez, See Your Future (2022, PH/Loma Vista): Florida rapper, fifth album since 2013. B+(**)

Kady Diarra: Burkina Hakili (2021, Lamastrock): Singer from Burkina Faso, a wedge of former French colony tucked below Mali and Niger, and above Ghana, formerly known as Upper Volta. Third album, title translates as "Spirit of Burkina," songs in four languages, including Bwaba ("her native") and Bambara (more common in Mali), as well as French. I can't speak to the "political elements," but clearly a strong force with a solid groove, propped up by rock guitar toward the end. A- [bc]

Whit Dickey Quartet: Astral Long Form/Staircase in Space (2021 [2022], Tao Forms): Drummer, more than a dozen albums since 1998, long association with Matthew Shipp, including a spell in the David S. Ware Quartet. With Rob Brown (alto sax), Mat Maneri (viola), and Brandon Lopez (bass), offers adventurous improvs with superb mix and balance. A- [cd] [05-06]

Jean Fineberg: Jean Fineberg & JAZZphoria (2022, Pivotal): Bay Area tenor saxophonist, first album as leader, website credits her with side credits on 50 albums, including some that date her: We Are Family (1979, Sister Sledge), C'est Chic (1978, Chic) and Young Americans (1975, David Bowie), and the 1974-77 all-female band ISIS. Octet, mostly women, leans toward swing. B+(**) [cd] [04-08]

Asher Gamedze With Xristian Espinoza and Alan Bishop: Out Side Work: Two Duets (2019-20 [2022], Astral Spirits): South African drummer, debut album 2020. Two duo sides, each with a fierce saxophonist: Espinoza (tenor) in London, Bishop (alto and voice) in Cairo. B+(**) [dl]

Josean Jacobo Trio: Herencia Criolla (2022, self-released): Dominican pianist, leads a trio with Daroll Méndez (bass) and Otoniel Nicholás (drums), plus guests on 4 (of 8) songs, including Miguel Zenón (alto sax). B+(**) [cd]

Mike Kuhl/Dave Ballou/John Dierker/Luke Stewart: Kraft (2021 [2022], Out of Your Head): Part of the label's digital-only "Untamed" series, a word (plus ellipsis) prominent enough on the cover to tempt one to include it in the title. Drums, trumpet, reeds, bass. Sharp, impressive freewheeling quartet. B+(***) [dl]

Ben Markley Big Band With Ari Hoenig: Ari's Fun House (2021 [2022], OA2): Pianist, teaches at University of Wyoming, plays in Denver area, Discogs credits him with a couple albums in the 1970s which clearly belong to someone else. Hoenig wrote the pieces here, also plays drums, to Markley's arrangements. Very energetic, splashy even. B [cd] [04-15]

The Muslims: Fuck These Fuckin Fascists (2021, Epitaph): Second line to the title song is "they can kiss our asses." Punk band from North Carolina, "black + brown queer muzzies," name calculated to offend, but they're serious enough they enunciate clearly, so you can tell how political they are, and they're jokey enough (cf. the Rezillos) you wonder how serious they really are. B+(***) [bc]

Ivo Perelman/Tim Berne/Tony Malaby/James Carter: (D)IVO (2022, Mahakala Music): All-star saxophone quartet, playing tenor, alto, soprano, and baritone, respectively, all improv pieces, but safe to say that Perelman is the prime mover here. I've never been a big fan of the format -- something about the sound of the horns all by themselves -- and nothing here overcomes my reservations. B+(**) [sp]

Raw Poetic & Damu the Fudgemunk: Laminated Skies (2022, Def Pressé): Rapper Jason Moore, from Virginia, half dozen albums, most (as here) with DC DJ Earl Davis. B+(**)

Kalí Rodríguez-Peña: Mélange (2019 [2022], Truth Revolution): Trumpet player, from Cuba, moved to New York in 2014, a lot of print in the package that I'm having trouble reading, but seems to be his first album. Impressive trumpet, crackling rhythm, scattered vocals. I doubt I'll hear a better Latin jazz album this year. B+(***) [cd]

Shenseea: Alpha (2022, Rich Immigrants/Interscope): Jamaican dancehall singer, 40 singles since 2016, 4 of them on this debut album. Her networking offers lots of guest spots, which can make the difference, or not. B+(***)

Somi: Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba (2022, Salon Africana): American-born jazz singer Somi Kakoma, of Rwandan-Ugandan descent, also an actor and writer, albums since 2007, pays tribute to the legendary South African singer. B(*) [cd]

Luke Stewart's Silt Trio: The Bottom (2021 [2022], Cuneiform): Bassist, from DC, active in a number of groups including Heroes Are Gang Leaders and Irreversible Entanglements. Group debut with Brian Settles (tenor sax) and Chad Taylor (percussion). Taylor's opening rhythm on mbira sets up an enchanting groove, which the sax colors delicately, although later on Settles gets to strut his stuff. A- [dl]

Luke Stewart: Works for Upright Bass and Amplifier Vol. 1 (2021, Astral Spirits): Not a promising title, especially for a single song title (58:12), divided for vinyl purposes into four parts. B+(*) [bc]

Luke Stewart: Works for Upright Bass and Amplifier Vol. 2 (2022, Astral Spirits): Presumably the bass is the sound source, but the amplifiers are where the action is (if you can call it action). B+(*) [bc]

Wet Leg: Wet Leg (2022, Domino): British indie rock duo from Isle of Wight, Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers, first album, but hugely anticipated after six singles/videos (33 AOTY reviews first week out). Doesn't quite do it for me, but the second half gets sharper, or at least more distinctive. B+(***)

Jack White: Fear of the Dawn (2022, Third Man): Roots rocker, started in White Stripes. Some solid licks, but more annoying than not here. B-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Blue Notes: Blue Notes in Concert (1977 [2022], Ogun): Original South African group minus trumpet player Mongezi Feza, who died at 30 in 1975, leaving Chris McGregor (piano), Dudu Pukwana (alto sax), Johnny Dyani (bass), and Louis Moholo (drums). Recorded live at 100 Club, originally released in 1978, this expanded version finally appearing in The Ogun Collection in 2008, finally appearing as a digital in 2021, with a CD coming 2022-04-22. B+(***) [bc]

Son House: Forever on My Mind (1964 [2022], Easy Eye Sound): Delta blues legend, b. 1902, recorded a handful of sides in 1930, got a more extended hearing from Alan Lomax in 1941-42, then got on with his life, working as a railroad porter and chef, until he got rediscovered in 1960s folk-blues revival. Robert Santelli, in The Best of the Blues: 101 Essential Blues Albums, ranked his 1941-42 sessions at 17, and a 1965 session at 41. This previously unreleased set was recorded just before his "rediscovery," and is as strikingly authoritative as anything he ever did. A-

Lèspri Ka: New Directions in Gwoka Music From Guadeloupe 1981-2010 (1981-2010 [2022], Séance Centre): No names I recognize. Takes a couple cuts for the groove to kick in. B+(**) [sp]

Sal Mosca: For Lennie Tristano: Solo Piano 1970 & 1997 (1970-97 [2022], Fresh Sound): Pianist (1927-2007), from upstate New York, student and disciple of Tristano, fairly thin discography which includes albums with Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. All standards, six cuts from 1970, including two medleys, plus two short ones (7:54) from 1997. B+(**)

Bernardo Sassetti Trio: Culturgest 2007 (2007 [2022], Clean Feed): Portuguese pianist, died 2012 at 41 (fell off a cliff). With Carlos Barretto (bass) and Alexandre Frazão (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Soft Machine: Facelift: France & Holland (1970 [2022], Cuneiform, 2CD): Canterbury rock group, originally with singer-songwriter Kevin Ayers, who left after their debut album, leaving a prog-oriented trio (Mike Ratledge, Hugh Hopper, Robert Wyatt), adding saxophonist Elton Dean for their Third album. Dean has joined for these January (Amsterdam) and March (Paris), along with a second saxophonist, Lyn Dobson. Dean puts on a bravura performance on the second disc, before it goes south again. B [dl]

Summer of Soul ( . . . Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised): A Questlove Jam [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack] (1969 [2022], Legacy): Soundtrack to Questlove's documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of six free concerts held on Sundays from June 29 to August 24. The Festivals ran yearly from 1967 to 1974, and this particular one was filmed by Hal Tulchin, leaving Questlove 40 hours of video to choose from. The soundtrack offers 17 performances by 14 artists (The 5th Dimension, Sly & the Family Stone, and Nine Simone get two shots each; Mavis Staples appears in a piece with her family, then returns to join Mahalia Jackson in a gospel sequence). Sound is a bit rough in spots, but feels real and immediate. Film won an Oscar, but the soundtrack stands on its own. A- [sp]

Old music:

Horace Andy: Skylarking (1972, Studio One): First album, backed by Coxsone Dodd's studio band, led by Leroy Sibbles. shows up in several top/greatest reggae lists. Somehow he never strikes me as all that great. B+(**)

Chic: C'Est Chic (1978, Atlantic): Funk/disco band, second (and highest charting) of seven 1977-83 albums, the singles (especially their big hit, "Le Freak," but also "I Want Your Love" and "At Last I Am Free") familiar from best-ofs, the filler readily forgotten. B+(**)

Alexander Hawkins & Louis Moholo-Moholo: Keep Your Heart Straight (2011 [2012], Ogun): Piano-drums duo, one of the prolific pianist's first albums. B+(**) [bc]

The Chris McGregor Group: Very Urgent (1968 [2008], Fledg'ling): Reissue of album released by Polydor in 1968, with the original five Blue Notes plus Ronnie Beer (tenor sax). Outsiders finding their footing in the rapidly evolving British avant scene. B+(**) [sp]

Chris McGregor Septet: Up to Earth (1969 [2008], Fledg'ling): Previously unreleased, four pieces, 38:01, transitional step between McGregor's South African Blue Notes and the much larger Brotherhood of Breath he formed in 1970. Built around his piano and Blue Notes Mongezi Feza (trumpet), Dudu Pukwana (alto sax), and Louis Moholo (drums), plus two young British saxophonists (Evan Parker and John Surman), with bass split between Barre Phillips and Danny Thompson. More avant than expected, with a bit of circus-like delirium, and the piano: well, in a blindfold test I would have said Keith Tippett, who ran in the same circle and was sometimes this brilliant. A- [sp]

The Chris McGregor Trio: Our Prayer (1969 [2008], Fledg'ling): Piano-bass-drums trio, common among pianists but the only one I'm aware of with McGregor. Group includes Barre Phillips (bass, contributes one song) and Louis Moholo (drums). B+(***) [sp]

Chris McGregor: Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath (1970, RCA): South African pianist, came to England with his group Blue Notes. Before that group dissipated -- bassist Johnny Dyani moved to Denmark, trumpeter Mongezi Feza died in 1975, McGregor and alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana died in 1990 -- McGregor formed this larger group, with Harry Miller taking over bass and Louis Moholo on drums, plus a lot of breath: two trumpets (Feza and Harry Beckett), corner (Marc Charig), two trombones (Malcolm Griffiths and Nick Evans), five saxophones (Pukwana, Alan Skidmore, John Surman, Mike Osborne, Ronnie Beer), with Feza and Osborne also on flute. Township jive with avant drive and distortions, a marvelous formula McGregor sustained for two decades. A- [sp]

Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath: Brotherhood (1972, RCA): Second album, sax section down to four (Pukwana, Osborne, Skidmore, and Gary Windo). Opener is one of their more rambunctious South African romps, followed by a dicey piano solo, then more chaos. B+(***) [sp]

Chris McGregor: Sea Breezes: Solo Piano - Live in Durban 1987 (1987 [2012], Fledg'ling): First time back in South Africa since leaving with the Blue Notes in 1964. B+(**) [sp]

Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath/Archie Shepp: En Concert A Banlieues Bleues (1989, 52e Rue Est): Closing in on 20 years since the group's debut, only the pianist and Harry Beckett (trumpet) remain, although at 14 musicians plus singer Sonti Mndébélé, the group is larger than ever. McGregor's South African themes get them going, and Shepp solos mightily and shouts some blues. B+(***)

Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath: The Memorial Concert (1994, ITM): No date or venue given, but McGregor died in 1990, and it's likely this was recorded soon thereafter, with Roland Perrin taking over the piano spot. Even so, only 7 (of 16) musicians returned from their 1989 live album -- the 9 adds having no previous association I'm aware of with McGregor. Not as spirited as I would have liked, but they do have choice picks from the songbook, including two Dudu Pukwana tunes. B+(**)

Louis Moholo-Moholo's Five Blokes: Uplift the People (2017 [2018], Ogun): Drummer, live at Cafe Oto in London, with two saxophonists -- Jason Yarde from the old days, and newcomer Shabaka Hutchings -- plus Alexander Hawkins (piano) and John Edwards (bass). B+(*) [bc]

The Soft Machine: Volume Two (1969, Probe): English prog rock group, from Canterbury, founders included Daevid Allen, who left in 1967 and went on to found Gong, and Kevin Ayers, who wrote most of Odd Ditties (a later compilation title) on their first album but left in 1968 for a solo career. That left Mike Ratledge (keyboards), Hugh Hopper (bass), and Robert Wyatt (drums and vocals), plus a bit of sax from Brian Hopper, for an album of amusing and/or pretentious fragments (at one point jumping from Schoenberg to Hendrix without properly crediting either). B

Soft Machine: 5 (1972, Columbia): Saxophonist Elton Dean joined in 1970, for Third. Drummer Robert Wyatt left in 1971, after Four, and was replaced by Phil Howard, who plays on the first half here, replaced by John Marshall for the second half (which also includes a double bassist, Roy Babbington, in addition to bass guitarist Hugh Hopper). After Wyatt's departure, no one much wanted to sing, and Dean remade them as a credible jazz band. [UK title: Fifth.] B+(*)

Soft Machine: Six (1973, Columbia): Karl Jenkins takes over on sax (also oboe, keyboards, celeste), with Ratledge, Hopper, and Marshall settled in. Double album, split between live and studio. B

Soft Machine: Seven (1973, Columbia): Hugh Hopper left to pursue a solo career, leaving Roy Babbington as the bassist. The last of the numbered albums, although the band kept plugging away, with further albums in 1975 and 1976, and occasional revivals later. B+(*)

Keith Tippett Septet: "A Loose Kite in a Gentle Wind Floating With Only My Will for an Anchor" (1984 [2009], Ogun): Four-part suite, brimming with ideas, followed by "Dedication to Mingus," which captures the tone if not quite the excitement. Timings vary between the original 1986 LP release (77:38) and the CD reissue (77:00). With Marc Charig (cornet), Elton Dean (alto sax/saxello), Larry Stabbins (tenor sax), Nick Evans (trombone), Paul Rogers (bass), Tony Levin (drums). B+(***) [bc]

Keith Tippett Octet: From Granite to Wind (2011, Ogun): British pianist, major, accompanied here by wife Julie Tippetts (voice, often not my thing), four saxophonists (Mujician-mate Paul Dunhall by far the best known), bass, and drums, for one 47:00 suite. B+(*) [bc]

Limited Sampling: Records I played parts of, but not enough to grade: -- means no interest, - not bad but not a prospect, + some chance, ++ likely prospect.

Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath: Country Cooking (1988, Venture): Ex-LP, at least some kind of B+; title song is one of McGregor's classics, and the band has impressive saxophone power in Julian Argueles and Steve Williamson, as well as the ever-dependable Harry Beckett. ++ [yt]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Miles Okazaki: Thisness (Pi) [04-29]
• David Virelles: Nuna (Pi) [05-27]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, April 4, 2022

April archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 37641 [37597] rated (+44), 137 [128] unrated (+9).

Another week. Surprised that the rated count held up, given that I took a day off to cook, and that it feels like I often got stuck looking for new things to play. Also spent a lot of time (4 plays) with Bouvier before I decided it didn't quite click -- easily the most tempting of an admirable bunch of B+(***) albums below. But I guess I got a solid start with the Ogun Bandcamp, which I still haven't exhausted.

Woke up this morning realizing it was already April and we hadn't done anything about income taxes. Tried calling the person who has done them for 20+ years, only to find out that she died last May, so we need to find someone else. Taxes are always a great psychic strain for me, although the relief once it's done is considerable.

I haven't had the slightest inclination to do Wordle, although my wife has a winning streak since her second game (and only loss), and has sought out variants, including the daily Quordle, which appears at midnight, interrupting our television time, so I occasionally consult. Sometimes I think of words, but mostly draw on letter frequencies, which somehow I know a bit about.

The game I have gotten into the habit of is Worldle, which also appears daily, giving you a Rorschach blob claiming to be the borders of a country or territory, which you get six guesses at. Each false guess gives you a distance and direction to the answer. Geography was my subject as a child: by age 10 or so I could rattle off not just all the states and their capitals, but the provinces of Canada and Australia, the SSRs in the Soviet Union, and virtually every nation-state on a continent. I've retained most of that, and have found most of these puzzles instantly recognizable. Today's Latvia took two guesses but less than 5 seconds (my first was Turkmenistan, off by 3224km NW, and while I don't think in metric, that seemed about right for the Baltic area, and the shape excluded every other nation in the area). Monaco took three, and much more time. Only problem has been with islands. Anguila eluded me, although it would have been easy with a map of the Lesser Antilles (I did narrow it down between Antigua and the Virgin Islands). I recognized Kerguelen (after an initial guess of Svalbard), but the name wasn't accepted, so I had to look up French Southern and Antarctic Lands. I can't say as I've ever heard of Heard and McDonald Islands (though consulting maps using directions and distances got me there in three). Christmas Island also took an open book approach, though I sort of recognized it once I got there. I view the game as sort of a two-tiered test: first of what you recognize and recall; second, if I didn't get the answer within a minute, of what you can figure out. My 8th Grade US History teacher was a big believer in open book tests, and I learned more there than I did in practically all the rest of grades 7-9 combined.

No Speaking of Which last week, as I put most of my effort into yesterday's big Book Roundup. I have zero interest or concern in the Will Smith slap that dominated our fickle media's limited attention span. Meanwhile, Republicans have been so puerile it's getting hard to dignify them with scorn. (Madison Cawthorn seemed to top them all last week, but not without stiff competition from Cruz, DeSantis, and Graham.) And Ukraine slogs on, rerunning tragedy inside the country and farce everywhere else. I'm sure I'll have more to say about that at some point. I suppose I could at least link to Jeffrey St. Clair's Roaming Charges, but it's a pretty mixed bag, more reliably on point about WWI than Ukraine. I particularly like a line in a longer Bertrand Russell quote: "The English and French say they are fighting in defense of democracy, but don't want their words to be heard in Petrograd or Calcutta."

What I wanted to mention in the Book Roundup but ran out of time for was how stimulating I've been finding Louis Menand's The Free World. The book, at least as far as I've read, consists of a series of portraits of seminal figures, starting with George Kennan, whose prescription for containment of the Soviet Union was always more nuanced than the policies of his followers. An important nuance was his insight that Stalin's efforts to secure the perimeter around Russia had nothing to do with communist ideology and everything to do with Tsarist Russia's fear and pride. We see this same attitude today with Putin asserting Russia's right to save Ukraine from itself -- as we also see Americans ignoring this crude conceit in favor of ideological and/or psychological explanations.

The book follows with pieces on George Orwell, James Burnham (and C. Wright Mills), Jean-Paul Sartre (and Simone de Beauvoir), Hannah Arendt, and David Riesman. I thought that Riesman's critique of Arendt was particularly timely: "Might Arendt be mistaking the ideology of totalitarianism for the lived reality? Might she be imagining that totalitarian systems are more coherent and all-powerful than they really are? . . . Riesman's suggestion that underneath the ideological swagger, the Soviet Union was a klutzy bureaucracy run by thugs was just the kind of inability to take totalitarianism seriously that she had written her book to warn against." Riesman also has a critique of democracy, where polling is mudied by people insisting on having opinions even when they know nothing, but ignorance itself is some kind of virtue. Still makes for messy politics -- which corresponds rather well to history.

Next up was Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock, so finally we get into art. I barely recognized Greenberg's name, but found I could unpack a lot of my own experience from his "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" essay. This was, after all, the world I was born into, even if it took a while for their ideas to sink down to the lower-class Wichita I was desperate to escape. But isn't the avant-garde a vector you can trace back to bourgeois revolution (even as the bourgeoisie themselves elected for kitsch)? And isn't part of the motivation the feeling of superiority you get from mastering the rare and esoteric in a world that is otherwise leveling? I got into avant-garde art and left-wing politics more/less simultaneously, and reconciled the two by insisting that nothing prevents leftists (or anyone) from also enjoying the avant-garde, but experience suggests it's not often that easy.

Quite a bit of unpacking this week. Most pleasant surprise was a package of 577 Records that don't appear to be out yet (although they look like product. On the other hand, it seems like it's gotten much harder to stream their records, so my coverage has gotten spottier.

New records reviewed this week:

Nia Archives: Forbidden Feelingz (2022, Hijinxx, EP): British jungle producer-singer, from Manchester, 6 songs, 16:53, impressive start, runs a bit thin. B+(**) [sp]

Lynne Arriale Trio: The Lights Are Always On (2021 [2022], Challenge): Pianist, from Milwaukee, 15+ albums since 1994, all originals here, backed with bass (Jasper Somsen) and drums (EJ Strickland). B+(**) [cd] [04-08]

Aaron Bazzell: Aesthetic (2022, self-released): Alto saxophonist, born in Boston, grew up in Atlanta, studied at Michigan State, based in Brooklyn. Debut album, all originals, backed by piano-bass-drums. Nice tone, impressive flow. Rachel Robinson sings one track, for radio programmers who are into that sort of thing. B+(**) [cd] [04-22]

David Binney Quartet: A Glimpse of the Eternal (2021 [2022], Criss Cross): Alto saxophonist, mainstream, started c. 1990, quartet with Craig Taborn (piano), Eivind Opsvik (bass), and Dan Weiss (drums). Mostly originals, covers not obvious standards (Vince Mendoza, Jan Garbarek, Michael Cain) aside from Harry Warren ("I Had the Craziest Dream"). B+(*)

Bouvier: Blachant (2022, Renewell): Singer Dr. Jackie Copeland, "social finance and justice innovator," taps into her South Carolina Gullah-Geechee heritage, touches on Yoruba and other points in the African diaspora, for a debut album. Striking voice, erudite, not sure why it doesn't quite grab me. B+(***) [cd] [04-13]

Club D'Elf: You Never Know (2022, Face Pelt): Boston group, since 1998, core group includes Mike Rivard (bass), Dean Johnston (drums), and Brahim Fribgane (oud/vocals), with others rotating in and out, most of their records live to capture whatever the combination of the moment is (this is an exception, but the cast is still varied). Half Rivard originals ("following a near death experience in the remote jungle of the Peruvian Amazon"), the rest covers of Miles Davis, Joe Zawinul, Frank Zappa, Nass el-Ghiwane, and traditional Gnawa. B+(**)

Avishai Cohen: Naked Truth (2021 [2022], ECM): Israeli trumpet player, not the same-named bassist, brother of Anat Cohen, records since 2002. Backed by piano (Yonathan Avishai), bass (Barak Mori), and drums (Ziv Ravitz). B+(**)

Armen Donelian: Fresh Start (2020-21 [2022], Sunnyside): Pianist, born in New York City, "reinvents himself at age 71," in a trio with Jay Anderson (bass) and Dennis Mackrel (drums). Sings one song. B+(**) [cd]

Jacob Garchik: Assembly (2021 [2022], Yestereve): Trombonist, from San Francisco, albums since 2005, this a quintet with Sam Newsome (soprano sax) and Thomas Morgan (bass) joining his long-running trio with Jacob Sacks (piano) and Dan Weiss (drums). B+(***) [cd] [05-13]

Giacomo Gates: You (2022, Savant): Jazz singer, 8th album since 1995, 18 songs with "You" in the title ("Exactly Like You," "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," "You're Blasé," "You've Changed," "You Never Miss Your Water 'Till the Well Runs Dry") backed by Tim Ray's piano trio. B+(***)

Aldous Harding: Warm Chris (2022, 4AD): Hannah Sian Topp, singer-songwriter originally from New Zealand, based in Wales, fourth album, produced by John Parish. B+(**)

Walker Hayes: Country Stuff: The Album (2022, Monument): Country singer-songwriter, from Alabama, got a music degree with "an emphasis on piano," moved to Nashville 2005, released his first EP in 2010, followed by an LP in 2011. Third album, recycled all six songs from 2021's EP. I rather liked the EP [B+(**)], with guest spots by Carly Pearce and Lori McKenna, so was surprised to find this is one of the most widely loathed albums of 2022 (not many critical reviews, but 28 user score on 93 ratings at AOTY, while 174 at RYM give it 1.51 of 5 stars). Country fans may object to the production, which eschews conventional Nashville styles (neotrad, countrypolitan, or arena rock): the rhythm and choruses remind me more of pop rap like Nelly, only, you know, dumbed down for white folk. Lyrics can get dumber still (except, you know, when McKenna wrote them). B

Benji Kaplan: Something Here Inside (2021 [2022], Wise Cat): Nylon-string guitarist, Brazilian, fourth album, moves into American Songbook standards, done with rare delicacy. B+(*) [cd] [05-06]

Kyle: It's Not So Bad (2022, self): Last name Harvey, from California (Ventura), started as a soft-edged rapper but mostly sings here (softer than ever). B+(*)

Loop: Sonancy (2022, Cooking Vinyl): English new wave band formed in 1986 by Robert Hampson in Croydon, recorded three albums through 1990, broke up, reformed in 2013, released an EP, and finally this year their first album in 31 years. With its drone and grind, this reminds me of some other 1980s English band I'm having trouble placing -- not the Fall (which had a singer), nor New Order (which had a more compelling groove), or the Three Johns (which had songs); maybe Red Lorry Yellow Lorry? B+(***)

Yuko Mabuchi: Caribbean Canvas (2022, Vista): Pianist, from Japan, studied in Los Angeles, looks to be her sixth album, a venture into easy-going Latin jazz, although most of the pieces are originals. Ends with "Of Freedom," following Coltrane. B+(**) [cd]

Paul Messina: Blue Fire (2021, GVAP Music): Saxophonist, also plays flute and keyboards, grew up in Miami, Discogs shows a previous album from 2014, website lists seven more. Scott Yanow notes his "warm melodies, catchy rhythms, and excellent playing." Can't say that adds up to much. B- [cd]

Maren Morris: Humble Quest (2022, Columbia Nashville): Country singer-songwriter, three early albums on a label called Mozzi Bozzi (2005-11), then caught a break with a major and went platinum. I didn't care for her last two albums, but this one sounds sweet and rings solid all the way through. B+(***)

Josh Nelson/Bob Bowman Collective: Tomorrow Is Not Promised (2021 [2022], Steel Bird Music): Leaders play piano and bass, backed by Larry Koonse (guitar) and Steve Houghton (drums), with guest spots (4 of 11 songs) for trumpet (Clay Jenkins) and sax (Bob Sheppard). B+(**) [cd]

The Nu Band: In Memory of Mark Whitecage: The Nu Band Live at the Bop Shop (2018 [2022], Not Two): The alto saxophonist died last year at 83. He founded this quartet in 2001 with Joe Fonda (bass), Lou Grassi (drums), and Roy Campbell (trumpet). After Campbell's death in 2014, they brought in Thomas Heberer and carried on, but this looks to be their swan song. There's a nice symmetry to it, given that their debut album was live at this same Rochester, NY venue. B+(***)

Danily Peréz: Crisálida (2022, Mack Avenue): Pianist, from Panama, studied at Berklee, joined Dizzy Gillespie's United Nation Orchestra. A dozen-plus albums since 1993, this one featuring The Global Messengers, with musicians and singers from around the world. Not the sort of project I can easily follow, but some fine piano. B

Dave Rempis/Elisabeth Harnik/Michael Zerang: Astragaloi (2020 [2022], Aerophonic): Alto/tenor saxophonist, in a trio with piano and drums. Harnik is Austrian, has appeared several times with Rempis and Zerang (both from Chicago). A- [cd]

Huerco S.: Plonk (2022, Incienso): Electronica producer and DJ Brian Leeds, originally from Kansas, based in Germany, fourth album. Odd song out is "Plonk IX" thanks to a SIR E.U. vocal. B+(*)

Mark Turner: Return From the Stars (2019 [2022], ECM): Tenor saxophonist, one of the "tough young tenors" who broke through in the 1990s. Quartet with Jason Palmer (trumpet), Joe Martin (bass), and Jonathan Pinson (drums). B+(***)

Years & Years: Night Call (2022, Polydor): British singer-songwriter Olly Alexander, seems to have a reputation as an actor, third album with his pop group, catchy enough. [Standard edition; at least two more longer ones exist.] B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

John Coltrane Quartet: Song of Praise: New York 1965 Revisited (1965 [2022], Ezz-Thetics): Two live set, belatedly released as One Up, One Down: Live at the Half Note on 2-CD in 2005, reordered and trimmed a bit to fit onto one 79:52 CD. Coltrane plays four long pieces with great intensity, but the Quartet (most especially Tyner) sounds like it's on the verge of breaking. B+(***) [bc]

Sun Ra Arkestra: Nothing Is . . . Completed & Revisited (1966 [2022], Ezz-Thetics): Revisits the 11-piece group's 1966 ESP-Disk album, reordered and expanded from 39:15 to 64:46. Peak period of their space race. B+(***) [bc]

Old music:

Elton Dean Quintet: Welcomet: Live in Brazil, 1986 (1986 [2017], Ogun): Alto saxophonist, also plays saxello, leads a quintet with trumpet (Harry Beckett), trombone (Paul Rutherford), bass (Marcio Mattos), and drums (Liam Genockey). Album appeared on Impetus in 1987 with just the 43:41 title track cut up. Reissue adds a second track, "Rio Rules" (33:53). Rutherford is most impressive. B+(***)

The Dedication Orchestra: Spirits Rejoice (1992, Ogun): Large orchestra organized to pay tribute to the Blue Notes shortly after pianist Chris McGregor's passing (1990), with only one original member (drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo) but practially everyone else who crossed paths with McGregor, which is to say a "who's who" of the British avant-garde: 21 musicians + 3 vocalists (Phil Minton, Maggie Nichols, Julie Tippetts). As advertised: "a mighty recording, in every way." Gets weird at the end. B+(***) [bc]

The Dedication Orchestra: Ixesha (Time) (1994, Ogun, 2CD): Credits list up to 27 names, haven't checked to see who's come and gone, but Steve Beresford signed on as arranger and musical director. I'm more impressed by the flow, at least until the singers take over and slow down "Lost Opportunities." Runs 90:06. Vocals return at the end. B+(***) [bc]

Radu Malfatti/Harry Miller: Bracknell Breakdown (1977 [1978], Ogun): Trombone player from Austria, duo with South African bassist. Two pieces, 38:21, fairly austere pleasures. B+(*) [bc]

Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath: Live at Willisau (1973 [1994], Ogun): South African pianist's post-Blue Notes band, recorded from 1970 up to his death in 1990. The South African rhythm section (McGregor, Harry Miller, and Louis Moholo) backed three saxes (Dudu Pukwana, Evan Parker, Gary Window), three trumpets (Mongezi Feza, Harry Beckett, Marc Charig), and two trombones (Nick Evans, Radu Malfatti). They can get pretty far out, but South African roots run deep, and when they get the jive working (e.g., "Andromeda") it's quite some party. A- [bc]

Chris McGregor: In His Good Time (1977 [2012], Ogun): Solo piano, recorded in Paris, CD greatly expands upon the 1979 album. The African themes sound especially good here. B+(**) [bc]

Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath: Procession: Live at Toulouse (1978 [2013], Ogun): Another hot set, not least because it hews closer to the South African melodies that all the horns (4 saxes, 2 trumpets, 1 trombone) brighten up. Maybe also with Johnny Dyani joining Harry Miller on bass. A- [bc]

Harry Miller: Children at Play (1974, Ogun): Bassist, from South Africa, came to England young and played in Manfred Mann (originally a group led by South African keyboardist Manfred Lubowitz, who assumed the group name as his own). Moved into free jazz circles, taking over bass in Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, and leading his own group, Harry Miller's Isipingo, with many of the same musicians. He founded Ogun Records with his wife, but died in a car crash in 1983. First album under his name, solo but multi-tracked, with percussion, flute, and effects dubbed in. B+(*) [bc]

Harry Miller: Different Times, Different Places (1973-76 [2013], Ogun): Starts with a short set (23:33) from London with Mike Osborne (sax), Nick Evans (trombone), McGregor (piano), and Louis Moholo (drums), then adds a longer one from Chateauvillon (53:53) with Osborne and Moholo, plus Mark Charig (trumpet), Malcolm Griffiths (trombone), and Keith Tippett (piano). A- [bc]

Harry Miller's Isipingo: Family Affair (1977, Ogun): Bassist-led sextet, only album they released at the time, although a couple more have appeared since. Familiar names: Mike Osborne (alto sax), Mark Charig (trumpet), Malcolm Griffiths (trombone), Keith Tippett (piano), Louis Moholo (drums). B+(***) [bc]

Harry Miller: In Conference (1978, Ogun): Features two saxophonists -- Willem Breuker (soprano/tenor, bass clarinet) and Trevor Watts (alto/soprano) -- with Keith Tippett (piano), Julie Tippetts (voice), and Louis Moholo (drums). Terrific version of the South African "Orange Grove." I'm less delighted by the vocals, which enter on the third track. B+(**) [bc]

Harry Miller: Different Times, Different Places: Volume Two (1977-82 [2016], Ogun): Seven tracks from three sessions. The opening delight takes off on Bernie Holland's guitar, with Alan Wakeman chasing on sax. Wakeman returns with Keith Tippett (piano) on three dicier 1978 tracks. The final three tracks feature Trevor Watts (alto sax), with extra brass. More than a few rough edges. B+(***)

Louis Moholo/Evan Parker/Pule Pheto/Gibo Pheto/Barry Guy Quintet: Bush Fire (1995 [1997], Ogun): Three South Africans -- the Phetos play piano and bass -- with two giants of the English avant-garde on sax (tenor/soprano) and bass. B+(**) [bc]

Louis Moholo-Moholo Meets Mervyn Africa/Pule Pheto/Keith Tippett: Mpumi (1995 [2002], Ogun): Piano-drums duos, one each with two fellow South Africans (13:47, 17:32), the last in three "chapters" totalling 45:28. Mpumi was Moholo's wife. [Nompumelelo Ebronah Moholo, 1947-2001; they met in South Africa in 1973; lived in England until they returned to South Africa in 2005. Moholo adopted the double name around 2002, when the death of a grandmother elevated his tribal status. Some earlier albums have picked up the later name.] B+ [bc]

Louis Moholo-Moholo/Stan Tracey: Khumbula (Remember) (2004 [2005], Ogun): Drums and piano duo. Tracey (1926-2013) has a huge discography I've barely scratched the surface of, and probably slighted (aside from his justly celebrated 1965 Jazz Suite: Inspired by Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, a full A). He is quite remarkable here, and in good company. A- [bc]

Louis Moholo-Moholo Unit: An Open Letter to My Wife Mpumi (2008 [2009], Ogun): Sextet, the usual mix of South Africans and English avant-gardists -- Jason Yarde and Mtshuka Bonga on saxophones, Pule Pheeto (piano), Orphy Robinson (vibes), and John Edwards (bass) -- plus vocals by Francine Luce. The drummer seems to thrive on chaos, of which there is a bit much. B+(*) [bc]

Louis Moholo-Moholo Unit: For the Blue Notes (2012 [2014], Ogun): Last surviving member of the legendary South African jazz band, although saxophonists Jason Yarde and Ntshuka Bonga played with the band after arriving in England in 1964. Octet, including younger UK stars like Alexander Hawkins (piano) and John Edwards (bass), also Francine Luce (voice). B+(*) [bc]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Pepper Adams With the Tommy Banks Trio: Live at Room at the Top (1972, Reel to Real) [04-23]
• Mike Allemana: Vonology (Ears & Eyes) [04-15]
• Dave Brubeck Trio: Live From Vienna 1967 (Brubeck Editions) [04-15]
• Dan Bruce's Beta Collective: Time to Mind the Mystics (Shifting Paradigm) [04-29]
• Daniel Carter/Evan Strauss/5-Track/Sheridan Riley: The Uproar in Bursts of Sound and Silence (577) [??-??]
• Natalie Cressman & Ian Faquini: Auburn Whisper (Cressman Music) [04-15]
• Sture Ericson/Pat Thomas/Raymond Strid: Bagman Live at Cafe Oto (577) [??-??]
• Heroes Are Gang Leaders: LeAutoRoiOgraphy (577) [06-17]
• Amanda Irarrázabal/Miriam van Boer Salmón: Fauces (577) [??-??]
• Josean Jacobo Trio: Herencia Criolla (self) [03-04]
• Ben Markley Big Band With Ari Hoenig: Ari's Fun House (OA2) [04-15]
• Jessica Pavone/Lukas Koenig/Matt Mottel: Spam Likely (577) [??-??]
• Rich Pellegrin: Passage: Solo Improvisations II [04-15]
• Kali Rodriguez-Peña: Mélange (Truth Revolution) [03-04]
• Ches Smith: Interpret It Well (Pyroclastic) [05-06]
• Somi: Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba (Salon Africana) [03-04]
• SSWAN [Jessica Ackerley/Patrick Shiroishi/Chris Williams/Luke Stewart/Jason Nazary]: Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disorder (577) [??-??]
• The United States Air Force Band Airmen of Note: The 2022 Jazz Heritage Series (self-released)
• Jordan Vanhemert: Nomad (Origin) [04-15]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, April 3, 2022

It's been a year since my last round of Book Roundups -- I posted two sets in 2021, one on April 4, the other on April 18. The format is to provide 40 one-paragraph review/blurbs, followed by an arbitrary number of one-or-zero line notices: books I felt like noting the existence of but didn't feel like writing up anything more substantial (although I may return to them later). The main section has also grown of late, ever since I started listing "related" books in a bullet list under the main reviews. These are books that might otherwise have dropped to the second section, but are more usefully grouped in the first. I used to do a section on paperback reprints of previously mentioned books, but haven't kept those listings up to date.

The Book Roundups are useful for me inasmuch as they give me a broad survey of what's recently available, and what we know about the world. I mostly follow politics, economics, and history here, because that's almost always my current reading. (It's less that that's what I'm interested in than that's what little I have time for.) The reviews eventually get stuffed into a big file. I had a reader once inquire about setting up a database for reviews like that, I expressed some interest, but he never got back to me, so it's still just an idea.

Needless to say, I've hardly read any of these books -- a more or less accurate list of what I have read is here. I mostly find these books by browsing through Amazon, reading the blurbs there, sometimes the reviews, and sometimes bits of the books ("look inside"). That, along with whatever previous information I've accumulated, gives me a rough sense of what the book is about, and what sort of angle it takes.

As with last year, I wouldn't be surprised to follow this with a second post. I have a couple dozen more reviews written, but also have accumulated a list of about 200 books in my scratch file (before adding the second section here), so I have plenty of material to work with.

I'm struck by how many of the entries below provoke thoughts about how to understand the Putin invasion of Ukraine. The big one, to which I've hung another 24 books, is ME Sarotte's book on NATO expansion, Not One Inch, where most of the books now read as obsolete, and many as totally unhinged. The following bit on Peter Schweizer's Red-Handed shows you that American misunderstanding of China is if anything even more dangerous and deranged. Still, it's pretty easy to predict that once the shooting stops in Ukraine, the result is going to look a lot like the status quo ante (aside from thousands of people killed, millions displaced, and many billions of dollars of physical damage, none of which had to happen) -- although the only prediction more certain is that none of the participants will learn the right lessons from the ordeal, mostly because they didn't ask the right questions before.

Yasmeen Abutaleb/Damian Paletta: Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History (2021, Harper). Washington Post reporters, evidently had a fair degree of inside access to the White House and its "toxic environment of blame, sycophancy, and political pressure" -- very characteristic of the president himself, whose concerns never went beyond appearances, and whose instincts were almost always wrong. The result was that the US response to the pandemic was the worst, at least in terms of outcomes, of any large/wealthy nation anywhere, but he left the entire issue so politically polarized that his idiocy continued to plague the nation a year later. We're starting to see books on various aspects of the pandemic, like these:

• Brendan Borrell: The First Shots: The Epic Rivalvies and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine (2021, Mariner Books).
• Albert Bourla: Moonshot: Inside Pfizer's Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible (2022, Harper Business): Pfizer CEO, bragging. Note that Moderna delivered a similar vaccine is almost the same time frame.
• Ryan A Bourne: Economics in One Virus: An Introduction to Economic Reasoning Through COVID-19 (paperback, 2021, Cato Institute).
• Alina Chan/Matt Ridley: Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 (2021, Harper).
• Mike Davis: The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism (paperback, 2020, OR Books): Looks like a short (240 pp) update of the author's 2005 book, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, with occasional notes from his substantial 2001 magnum opus, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. He's entitled, as the threat he saw in Avian Flu has finally materialized, with the short-sighted profiteering of hegemonic capitalism accelerating and deepening the crisis.
• Scott Gottlieb: Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic (2021, Harper).
• Richard Horton: The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again (2nd edition, paperback, 2021, Polity): Editor of The Lancet, short (180 pp).
• Michael Lewis: The Premonition: A Pandemic Story (2021, WW Norton): The first Covid book to appear, following several public health workers as they first assessed the pandemic and worked to try to stop it -- not very successfully, I'm afraid, but credit their foresight. Short enough you should also go back to his The Fifth Risk, about how the Trump administration's contempt for expertise in general and the civil service in particular has made the world much more dangerous.
• Debora MacKenzie: COVID-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One (2020, Hachette).
• Sharri Markson: What Really Happened in Wuhan: A Virus Like No Other, Countless Infections, Millions of Deaths (2021, Harper Collins).
• Joe Miller/Ozlem Tureci/Ugur Sahin: The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic (2022, St Martin's Press).
• John Nichols: Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis (2022, Verso).
• Nicole Saphier: Panic Attack: Playing Politics With Science in the Fight Against COVID-19 (2021, Broadside): I'm sure that various Democratic governors and mayors can be faulted for "political" responses to the pandemic, and that the politicization of many issues around it and them has been tragic, but the author loses me when she blames "knee-jerk anti-Trumpism" for making it all worse. Trump played a singularly unhelpful role, which only got worse as he instinctively cheered on the anti-lockdown, anti-mask, and anti-vax mobs. Knee-jerk implies no reasoning was involved, but there are so many sound reasons to oppose Trump that enumerating them is exhausting.
• Andy Slavitt: Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response (2021, St Martin's Press).
• Rob Wallace: Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19 (paperback, 2020, Monthly Review Press).
• Gregory Zuckerman: A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine (2021, Portfolio).

Spencer Ackerman: Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (2021, Viking). I don't doubt that the War on Terror has taken a tragic toll on the nation's psyche, both in its leaders' blind faith in the efficacy of force and the sense of superiority possession of such terrible firepower has engendered. On the other hand, that the author could see Trump as the endpoint of such rot and degradation suggests a lack of imagination. Or perhaps it only reflects what a disaster Trump's election and administration was.

Kai Bird: The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter (2021, Crown): Big book (784 pp), a major attempt to provide a fresh reading on an often-maligned one-term president -- in my division of US history into eras I group him with Buchanan, Hoover, and Trump among the dead-ends opposite Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan -- by a skilled writer who's never stooped to routine political biography before. With one exception, his books have dealt with security cases: Robert Oppenheimer, McGeorge and William Bundy, John J McCloy, Robert Ames. The exception is Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978, a memoir from growing up there -- his father was a US Foreign Service Officer, so he also has Beirut, Dhahran, Cairo, and Mumbai experiences -- expanded into a sharp history, but that may have drawn him to Carter. It's often said that the New Deal/Great Society model had run its course by 1980, and Americans were hungry for some kind of change. In retrospect, it looks like Carter paved the way for Reagan, hurting him with old Democrats while unable to find a new coalition. But Carter was much smarter and much less glib than Reagan, and he had real empathy with people, who Reagan and the Repubicans treated like suckers. Whatever complaints one has about Carter as president, it's clear that he's been a remarkable ex-president -- a credit to a country that has too few of them left.

Mark Bowden/Matthew Teague: The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It (2022, Atlantic Monthly Press): Bowden is a bestselling author of nonfiction thrillers like Black Hawk Down (on Somalia), Killing Pablo (drug kingpin Escobar), and The Finish (on killing Osama Bin Laden). So he wasn't an obvious journalist to expose Trump's efforts to deny and steal victory after losing the 2020 election, but he can be counted on to bring breathless energy to the subject. Trump's scheming to overturn the 2021 election, including his call to Washington on January 6 to storm the Capitol, has produced yet another wave of Trump books, along with a few more latecomers:

• William P Barr: One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General (2022, William Morrow): Sucked up to Trump enough to get appointed, entered with his own agenda, mostly did what he hoped to do, got out when he realized the end was nigh.
• Michael C Bender: Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost (2021, Twelve): Wall Street Journal reporter.
• Walter Frank: Do We Have a Center? 2016, 2020, and the Challenge of the Trump Presidency (2019, Walter Frank).
• Stephanie Grisham: I'll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House (2021, Harper): Trump campaign flak, promoted to White House Press Secretary in 2019, where she famously took very few questions.
• Josh Hawley: The Tyranny of Big Tech (2021, Regnery): US Senator (R-MO), book canceled by Simon & Schuster after Hawley's salute to the storming of the Capitol. Slim (200 pp).
• Elie Honig: Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor's Code and Corrupted the Justice Department (2021, Harper).
• David Cay Johnston: The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family (2021, Simon & Schuster).
• Jonathan Karl: Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show (2021, Dutton): Previously wrote Front Row at the Trump Show (2020), which evidently needed another chapter.
• Julie Kelly: January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right (paperback, 2021, Bombardier Books): Shameless attempt to portray the rioters and their idol as victims, "being exploited by the Democratic Party and the national news media to criminalize political protest and free speech in America."
• Carol Leonnig/Philip Rucker: I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J Trump's Catastrophic Final Year (2021, Penguin Press): Washington Post reporters, wrote A Very Stable Genius: Donald J Trump's Testing of America (2020).
• Mark Meadows: The Chief's Chief (2021, All Seasons Press): Trump unindicted co-conspirator (White House Chief of Staff).
• Peter Navarro: In Trump Time: My Journal of America's Plague Year (2021, All Seasons Press): Senior Trump aide, long-established China basher.
• Jamie Raskin: Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy (2022, Harper): Congressman, led impeachment of Trump following Jan. 6.
• Adam Schiff: Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could (2021, Random House): Congressman, led first impeachment of Trump.
• Nick Timiraos: Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic -- and Prevented Economic Disaster (2022, Little Brown).
• Michael Wolff: Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency (2021, Henry Holt): Curious how many of these rush jobs on Trump's big lie start with ironic titles from the man himself. Wolf previously wrote Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018) and Siege: Trump Under Fire (2019).
• Bob Woodward/Robert Costa: Peril (2021, Simon & Schuster): Third book from Woodward on Trump, titles reduced to short words like Fear and Rage.

Andrew Cockburn: The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine (2021, Verso): Back in (and slightly before) WWII, the US military directed private companies to build weapons, and paid them handsomely (with a guarantee of costs +10% profit). Still, capitalism has a genius for exploiting margins, so over time the arms industries went from taking orders to dreaming up and selling products to an ever-eager defense bureaucracy, the result being Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex." Since then, it's only gotten worse, especially as the hybrid war machine scours the world for conflicts to sell into, with extra profits whenever the shooting and bombing starts.

Donald Cohen/Allen Mikaelian: The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (2021, New Press). It's long been argued that government-owned firms are inefficient, incompetent, and/or simply political, and that many such functions could be taken over by private firms, which were touted as so much more efficient they could save taxpayers money as well as earning a profit. This has been done hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and the track record has been abysmal, yet the onslaught of lobbyists and profiteers is relentless, and the political system is so prone to corruption that ordinary people wind up spending a lot of time fighting their scams. But rather than having to deal with them on a case-by-case basis, we need to wise up to the fundamental flaw at the root of all these plots.

Jack E Davis: The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea (paperback, 2018, Liveright): Environmental historian takes a broad and deep look at the Gulf of Mexico, starting 150 million years ago, but mostly since 1513, and most of that since 1945. Won a Pulitzer Prize.

Mike Davis/Jon Wiener: Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties (2020, Verso): Big book (800 pp). Davis has written many, wide-ranging books, including a previous one on Los Angeles, City of Quartz (1990), and Planet of Slums (2006). Wiener has written a number of books, including Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (2000), and How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America (2012). The new book focuses on social and political movements in the 1960s. Both authors are in their upper 70s, and have slowed down. Chances are they see this book as where their careers have been heading.

Alan Dershowitz: Cancel Culture: The Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process (2020, Hot Books): Famously liberal Democrat, but always willing to lend a helping hand to rapists and murderers, as long as they're filthy rich. Consequently, the blurbs here skew a bit to the right: Steve Forbes: "Alan Dershowitz is a living profile in courage." Benjamin Netanyahu: "The truth has no greater defender than Alan Dershowitz." Ted Cruz: "Courage and principle are rare today. Professor Dershowitz has them both." But "cancel culture" isn't about free speech. It's about power, and how much the powerful whine when someone questions their judgment. First time I heard the phrase was from Ivanka Trump, who somehow wangled an invite to speak at a Wichita State University commencement, then got disinvited when nearly everyone who heard about it said, "what the fuck?" Let's face it, no one gets "canceled" unless they got scheduled in the first place. Also (later):

• Alan Dershowitz: The Case Against the New Censorship: Protecting Free Speech From Big Tech, Progressives and Universities (2021, Hot Books). [04-20]

Joseph Fishkin/William E Forbath: The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy (2022, Harvard University Press): A substantial effort (640 pp) not just to re-examine the US Constitution as an effort to limit oligarchy, but also reviewing the major progressive moments in American history (including Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and a final chapter on "Building a Democracy of Opportunity Today." The founders have taken a beating recently, both from the mythmaking "originalists" and from critics of their repeated failures to challenge racism, but within limits at key junctures the best (and best-remembered) of them opposed conservative impulses to harden the stratas of inequality. Also by the authors:

• Joseph Fishkin: Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity (2014; paperback, 2016, Oxford University Press).
• William E Forbath: Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (paperback, 1991, Harvard University Press).

Catherine Coleman Flowers: Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirty Secret (2020; paperback, 2022, New Press): The single most effective public health measure US government has taken, by far, has been the construction of modern sewage systems, but evidently they haven't been built everywhere, and you won't need many guesses as to which people and places got left out. The author grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, and this is the story of her fight to get help there, and elsewhere.

Lily Geismer: Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality (2022, Public Affairs): "The 40-year history of how Democrats chose political opportunity over addressing inequality -- and how the poor have paid the price." Actually, not just the poor: the so-called middle class has gotten hit pretty hard as well (debt for college has been a major factor there, as has the loss of unions and the consequent loss of jobs). Geismer is correct that Democrats have been complicit in this -- especially the New Democrats who supported Clinton and Gore, but also politicians who went with their flow like Obama, Cuomo, and Rahm Emmanuel. So while Republicans wholeheartedly plotted to pump up the rich, they could also point to Democrats as corrupt elitists, out of touch with the downtrodden working class (at least the white part). Those Democrats can point to higher rates of growth under their administrations, but by overlooking equity, they've weakened their own political base -- perhaps fatally, had Republicans not been working so hard to represent themselves a public menaces, a threat so dire that Democrats could count on votes from people they almost never paid any attention to. I suspect that the worst of this wasn't what Democrats actually did but how they tacitly legitimized concerns and approaches that Republicans claimed for purely tactical reasons (e.g., market-oriented carbon trading credits, or the sloppy patchwork reform that came to be known as Obamacare).

Amitav Ghosh: The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021, University of Chicago Press): Indian novelist and essayist, originally from Kolkata, Ph.D from Oxford, lives in New York. His novels are historical, exploring stories related to colonialism, with several set around Britain's Opium War with China. He has a recent essay collection called The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017), and ties many of his interests together here, starting with the Dutch slaughter of natives to corner the nutmeg trade, extending to today's climate crisis, with much emphasis on wisdom native peoples have despite (or because of) being trampled in the mad rush to empire.

Peter S Goodman: Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World (2022, Custom House): New York Times global economics correspondent, previously wrote Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy (2009), which was about more than the "masters of the universe" as the economy collapsed. This time he singles out five "Davos men" (defined as "a member of the global billionaire class," named for the ritzy resort "where the species is known to gather annually to cleanse its reputation"), but realizes you can't understand their significance without looking at the devastation they leave behind. I suppose one could complain that the anointed five are famous Americans (Jeff Bezos, Stephen Schwarzman, Larry Fink, Jamie Dimon, Marc Benioff) but the species is truly global, as are their victims.

David Graeber/David Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Major project, posthumous for Graeber, a famous anthropologist and political activist -- Debt: The First 5,000 Years is his major work -- co-written with the British archaeologist, reviews much of the factual record around the early development of agriculture, cities, states, and classes, finding many bones to pick with previous popularizers of the age, but mostly concluding that anything is possible, and nothing is inevitable. I've cited most of Graeber's books, at least since Debt (2011), but here are ones I missed:

• David Graeber: Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (paperback, 2001, Palgrave Macmillan).
• David Graeber: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (paperback, 2004, Prickly Paradigm Press).
• David Graeber: Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (paperback, 2007, AK Press).
• David Graeber: Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (paperback, 2007, Indiana University Press).
• David Graeber: Direct Action: An Ethnography (paperback, 2009, AK Press).
• David Graeber: Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art and Imagination (paperback, 2011, Autonomedia).
• David Graeber/Marshall Sahlins: On Kings (2016; paperback, 2017, HAU).
• David Wengrow: What Makes Civilization? The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West (2010; paperback, 2018, Oxford University Press).
• David Wengrow: The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction (paperback, 2020, Princeton University Press).

Nikole Hannah-Jones: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021, One World): Eighteen essays exploring the not just the history of slavery but its lasting legacy, combined with 36 poems and works of fiction "illuminating key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance," and an archive of photographs. As history it may go a bit overboard into alternative mythmaking, but the right had already seized on this book as the one they most wanted to make sure young people in America won't get exposed to. And it's not because they don't want young people to be made to feel bad for being Americans. It's because they recognize how little they have done to overcome slavery's legacy, and fear that young people will blame them for their inaction. I'm reminded of how older Germans never talked about Nazism and the Holocaust after 1945, but in the 1960s a new generation of postwar babies grew up and learned to face the past, largely because they were never part of it. That could happen here, but not if the vested political interests of the right have any say.

Jason Hickel: Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2021, paperback, Windmill Books): Capitalism demands infinite growth, but nothing can continue infinitely, so the real question is when and how those expectations break down. Add this to the growing literature on ecological limits and post-capitalism. Other books:

• Jason Hickel: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions (paperback, 2018, Windmill Books).
• Andreas Malm: How to Blow Up a Pipeline (paperback, 2021, Verso): A "lyrical manifesto," appears to argue for "strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence." I'd prefer to read it as a cautionary plea for non-violent reforms.
• Andreas Malm: Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (paperback, 2020, Verso).
• Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective: White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (paperback, 2021, Verso).

Elizabeth Hinton: America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s (2021, Liveright): The "race riots" of the 1960s are remembered much more than the acts of police violence that triggered many of them (and that conditioned the rest). Hinton not only surveys root causes, she shows how the "riots" can be reframed as rebellions, as acts determind to affect change. Looks like an important book, as does her previous From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2016).

Bradley Hope/Justin Scheck: Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power (2020, John Murray; paperback, 2021, Hachette): In recent decades, the Saudi crown has been passed through a line of elderly brothers, who took a cautious role, dishing out money to buy stability, anything to not rock the boat. That changed in 2017 when King Salman promoted his 32-year-old seventh son to Crown Prince, and gave him effective control over the government. Initially touted as a reformer, MBS is now best known for his cruel war in Yemen and for ordering the murder of critical journalist Jamal Khashoggi -- acts which have started to erode US support (although nothing Trump wasn't comfortable with). Lately, MBS has conspired with Russia to prop up oil prices, which got to be a problem with the Ukraine War. With its vase oil reserves, the Saudi dictatorship has long been a potential threat to world peace, but with MBS in control, that threat is becoming real.

Martin Indyk: Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (2021, Knopf): Hard to think of a less appealing pairing of author and subject. Kissinger did a bit of what was called "shuttle diplomacy" between Israel and various Arab states, but had nothing to show for it, which was exactly the way Israel liked it. It was not until Jimmy Carter before Israel was willing to take a deal with Egypt that basically took the risk of a future war with Arab states off the table. Kissinger's own interest rarely strayed from his Great Game with the Soviet Union -- the main effect in the Middle East was his scheme to line up Saudi Arabia and Iran as proxy partners. The former took the alliance as license to proselytize their fundamentalist brand of Islam, leading to jihadists volunteering first to fight the Soviet Union, then America. Meanwhile, close association with the Shah in Iran turned the revolution against America. Indyk is small potatoes compared to Kissinger, which may be why he's so deferential, but he was one of the Clinton people who helped wreck the Oslo Accords.

Edward-Isaac Dovere: Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump (2021, Viking): Atlantic staff writer, got stuck with covering the Democratic side of the 2020 election, and seems to be taking his bad luck out on us. You'd think that every election would produce at least one major chronicle, something following the line of tomes Theodore H White wrote for 1960, 1964, and 1968. Yet while there were tons of books published on Trump in and after 2020, including several major ones on his post-defeat shenanigans, the only other one I've noticed so far was the Jonathan Allen/Amie Parnes quickie, Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency -- the title suggesting not just that their hearts weren't into the book, but their brains weren't engaged either. This is ironic, because virtually all of the substantive policy arguments that surfaced during 2019-20 occurred within the diverse Democratic Party field. But then, after the hotly contest Iowa/New Hampshire contests were settled, making Bernie Sanders the front-runner, with Michael Bloomberg the "great white hope" of the oligarchy. When it became clear that Bloomberg had no more appeal to Democrats than Trump did, Democrats panicked and threw their personal and policy preferences aside, making Joe Biden the compromise no one wanted. Someone who cared could have mined those stories for meaning, especially compared to the superficiality of the mainstream media, but no one did. Rather, we spent the last six months of the campaign whether a majority of voters were insane enough to give Trump four more years, and hoping Biden didn't further embarrass himself. Still, with billions of dollars in play, against the unprecedented pandemic backdrop, there's a big story to be sorted out. It deserves something deeper than a cliché like "battle for the soul." Aside from Lucky (previously reported), this is all I could find (not explicitly focusing on Trump):

• Andrew Busch/John J Pitney Jr: Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics (paperback, 2021, Rowman & Littlefield).
• Larry J Sabato/Kyle Kondik/J Miles Coleman, eds: A Return to Normacy? The 2020 Election That (Almost) Broke America (paperback, 2021, Rowman & Littlefield).

Fred Kaplan: The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War (paperback, 2021, Simon & Schuster): Military affairs columnist for Slate, not as hostile to the world of arms as I am, but clear-headed enough to useful -- e.g., his 2008 book Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, which picked apart the neocon conceits (RMA, for "revolution in military affairs") led to the catastrophe in Iraq. He starts this with mention of Trump's "fire and fury" threat, then goes back to show that such thinking has been common since 1945, even if rarely exposed from a figure with so little grasp of reason and consequences. The chapter on "Madman Theories" brings to mind Nixon, who coined the term, but also Putin putting Russia's nuclear forces "on alert," in the latest gambit to fight a conventional war shielded by intimations of apocalypse. At least between Nixon and Brezhnev (or Kennedy and Krushchev) the underlying assumption was that both sides could be depended on to act rationally. It's hard to be so confident now: Putin's invasion of Ukraine is at least a species of madness; on the other hand, while Biden is much saner than Trump, what passes for sanity when "thinking about the unthinkable" is pretty shady, especially since the 1990s, when the neocons reformulated American policy to justify "preventive war" against any potential challenge to American "hyperpower." Some other books on nuclear weapons:

• Vipin Narang: Seeking the Bomb: Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation (paperback, 2022, Princeton University Press).
• Ankit Panda: Kim Jong Un and the Bomb: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea (2020, Oxford University Press).
• Chris Wallace/Mitch Weiss: Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World (2020, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).

Michael E Mann: The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet (2021, PublicAffairs): Must it be a war? Everyone loses in war, initially by being foolish enough to think winning is possible. Mann has several books on the dangers of climate change. This one reviews how vested interests have deflected reform by an intense campaign of denial and/or deflection ("misinformation and misdirection"). You probably know that, although some sections (e.g., "It's YOUR Fault," "Put a Price on It. Or Not.") have yet to become commonplaces. Of course, he offers hope at the end. And of course, his next book will be even more dire. Many more books on climate change have appeared since my last roundup:

• Kate Aronoff: Over Heated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet -- and How We Fight Back (2021, Bold Type Books).
• Alice Bell: Our Biggest Experiment: An Epic History of the Climate Crisis (2021, Counterpoint).
• Dipesh Chakrabarty: The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021, University of Chicago Press).
• Aviva Chomsky: Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice (paperback, 2022, Beacon Press).
• John Doerr: Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis (2021, Portfolio).
• Christiana Figueres/Tom Rivett-Carnac: The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis (2020, Knopf): UN negotiators for 2015 Paris Agreement.
• John Freeman, ed: Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World (paperback, 2020, Penguin Books).
• Paul Hawken: Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation (paperback, 2021, Penguin Books): Updates his Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (2017).
• Katharine Hayhoe: Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World (2021, Atria/One Signal): Chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy.
• Eric Holthaus: The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming (2020, Harper One).
• Andreas Karelas: Climate Courage: How Tackling Clilmate Change Can Build Community, Transform the Economy, and Bridge the Political Divide in America (paperback, 2020, Beacon Press).
• Sarah Jaquette Ray: A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (paperback, 2020, University of California Press).
• Ayana Elizabeth Johnson/Katharine K Wilkinson, eds: All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis (paperback, 2021, One World).
• Stephen J Pyne: The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next (2021, University of California Press).
• James Gustave Speth: They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis (2021, The MIT Press).
• Sally Weintrobe: Psychological Roots of the Cliate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare (paperback, 2021, Bloomsbury).

Louis Menand: The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (2021, Farrar Straus and Giroux; paperback, 2022, Picador): Author won a Pulitzer for his major intellectual history of America in the late 19th century, The Metaphysical Club (2001), here tackles an even larger subject: the period from WWII to Vietnam he grew up in, one of extraordinary vigor for American industry, one which finally shrugged off the feelings of being second to Europe, yet one that was circumscribed by censorious politics. Sample line: "If you asked me when I was growing up what the most important good in life was, I would have said 'freedom.' Now I can see that freedom was the slogan of the times. The word was invoked to justify everything." I'm not sure how he winds up squaring that off, but the period is rich in material. And he does devote much of the first chapter to George Kennan, who we rarely think of as an intellectual figure but who more than anyone else set the course of the Cold War. That chapter ends with a John Adams quote: "Power always thinks it has a great Soul."

Edward S Miller: Bankrupting the Enemy: The US Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor (2007, Naval Institute Press): I normally don't note books this old, but I hadn't noticed this one before, and it turns out to be timely. This is the story of sanctions the US imposed on Japan before the attack on Pearl Harbor -- some that I was aware of, but with more details that I didn't know. Japan had invaded and conquered Manchuria in 1929, and was fighting in eastern China from 1937 on. The US wasn't formally allied with China, but Chiang Kai-Shek (or at least his wife and her family) had important ties in the US, and that's where Roosevelt's sympathies lied. Japan had no domestic oil, and under sanctions could no longer buy oil or arms from the US, so they could either back down on the war effort, or double down on it, which for oil meant capturing Dutch Indonesia. And that's what they did, in a clear example of sanctions leading to much broader war.

Nicholas Mulder: The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (2022, Yale University Press): History of early efforts (1914-45) to formulate economic weapons both as implements and as alternatives to war. The first iteration, of course, was Winston Churchill's blockade of Germany, by which he hoped to inflict mass starvation, thinking that might lead the German people to revolt against their leaders and sue for peace. Blockades returned with a vengeance during WWII, war so total that economic forces were decisive. In between, it was hoped that the mere threat of economic deprivation could influence the behavior of nations. It rarely, if ever, did. Another much larger book could be written to cover the post-WWII period, again redolent of folly and spitefulness, but the critical chapter on Ukraine is still unclear. Biden has promised not to engage troops, but vowed to impose he most costly sanctions ever as punishment for Russia's rogue behavior. That's certainly a saner course than escalating toward Armageddon, but will it be effective, or just another exercise in callous disregard for the people at the bottom of the political pyramid?

William Neuman: Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela (2022, St Martin's Press). I'm skeptical of anything Americans write about Venezuela, but it's also clear to me that the Chavez-Maduro regimes have made some mistakes, especially in their handling of oil resources -- e.g., they've "shared the wealth" by selling gasoline locally cheap, rather than investing the profits in things that would actually raise living standards. Neuman's bias is evident in his framework, "tragic journey from petro-riches to poverty." It's not like there was no poverty before Chavez, when the "petro-riches" belonged to foreign capital and their local lackeys. All along, Chavez and Maduro have had to struggle with those economic elites and their increasingly vicious support from the US (especially under Trump, but Biden hasn't done much different).

George Packer: Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal (2021, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Journalist, still bitterly remembered for his non-trivial role in promoting war in Iraq, has usually written more thoughtfully about American society, although I have to wonder about his conceptual skills when he tries to divide America up into four tranches: Free America ("individuals serving the interests of corporations and the wealthy"), Smart America ("the professional elite"), Real America ("the white Christian nationalism of the heartland"), and Just America ("members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression") -- not, of course, that he approves of such division and polarization. But if America is so afflicted, what on earth justifies the title cliché?

Jeremy W Peters: Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted (2022, Crown): Reporting on "how did the party of Lincoln become the party of Trump?" but as he only starts with Sarah Palin, the real subject is the rise of extreme crazy in the GOP, and cutting the story off with the 2020 election leaves him a few chapters short. Previous histories of the Republican far right move tend to focus on dark money forces, and they still deserve credit and blame. But there seems to be a psychological force driving Republicans inexorably to the right, even as they prove more and more inept at solving problems. Some more recent books on the right-wing fringe (for more, especially pointing toward violence, see Barbara F Walter below):

• John S Huntington: Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (2021, University of Pennsylvania Press): History on how/why right-wing parties tend to get taken over by their farthest right-wing factions, which of course leads us to Donald Trump, not that earlier examples weren't as far gone.
• Edward H Miller: Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy (paperback, 2016, University of Chicago Press).
• Edward H Miller: A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism (2022, University of Chicago Press).
• Brynn Tannehill: American Fascism: How the GOP Is Subverting Democracy (2021, Transgress Press).

Adrian Phillips: Fighting Churchill, Appeasing Hitler: Neville Chamberlain, Sir Horace Wilson, & Britain's Plight of Appeasement: 1937-1939 (2019, Pegasus Books): Poor Neville Chamberlain, savaged again for being a silly peacenik despite being the Prime Minister who ultimately plunged the UK into a world war it was unprepared for, which ultimately broke the bank and the empire that built it. His rival Churchill revived his career on second-guessing Chamberlain, who has remained the butt of pro-war fantasists ever since. This book is clearly partisan, faulting Chamberlain from every conceivable angle. Related:

• Tim Bouverie: Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War (2019, Tim Duggan Books).
• Erik Larson: The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (2020; paperback, 2022, Crown).

Serhii Plokhy: Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (2021, WW Norton): Ukrainian historian, teaches at Harvard, previous books include The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015), and Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. I've recently read several writers try to draw constructive precedents from the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), but I'm more struck by this: "more often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe." When he writes his inevitable history of Russia's attack on Ukraine in 2022, he will likely be able to recycle that line.

Elizabeth D Samet: Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (2021, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Professor of English at West Point, has written books about teaching soldiers to read literature, like Soldier's Heart (2007), and No Man's Land (2014). I find this bizarre, but Tom Engelhardt (as steadfast a war critic as we have) praised her, and reading a few pages exploding myths about WWII (Studs Terkel's subject in The Good War) is interesting, even if she's more ambivalent than I would be.

ME Sarotte: Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (2021, Yale University Press): Putin's invasion of Ukraine will soon be written about by many people, but those writers will have to start with the enlargement of NATO, which is the subject here. Except we now know that what it led to wasn't a stalemate, and that those who figured that Putin wouldn't do anything crazy as he was boxed in calculated badly. The backlash NATO and other attempts to flip Ukraine provoked has already caused an enormous amount of pain and suffering, and risks much greater disaster. This is as good a place as any to hang a list of other recent books on NATO, Ukraine, and Putin (including a couple books I've mentioned earlier, but have more to say about now):

• Catherine Belton: Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West (2020, Farrar Straus and Giroux).
• Bill Browder: Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (paperback, 2015, Simon & Schuster): Improbable oligarch, got rich in Russia, turned on Putin when his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered, lobbied for the law used to sanction individual oligarchs.
• Bill Browder: Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath (2022, Simon & Schuster). [04/22]
• William J Burns: The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal (2019; paperback, 2020, Random House): Former State Department official, Ambassador to Russia (2005-08), now Biden's CIA Director.
• Samuel Charap/Timothy J Colton: Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (paperback, 2016, Routledge).
• Stephen F Cohen: War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate (paperback, 2019, Hot Books): One of the few Russia experts to warn against demonizing Putin and risking restarting the Cold War, he died in 2020 after this book came out. He's likely to be dismissed today as "pro-Putin," but his direst predictions have clearly come true.
• Isaac Stone Fish: America Second: How America's Elites Are Making China Stronger (2022, Knopf): CEO of Strategy Risks, where the main product is fear of China.
• Timothy Frye: Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia (2021, Princeton University Press): "Looking beyond Putin to understand how today's Russia actually works."
• Keir Giles: Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (paperback, 2019, Brookings Institute Press/Chatham House): British security wonk.
• Andy Greenberg: Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers (paperback, 2020, Anchor): Until the Ukraine invasion, cyberwarfare struck me as the greatest danger Russia posed, mostly because there seemed to be few inhibitions against its use. As such, it seemed like a good reason to reduce conflict stress.
• Fiona Hill: There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century (2021, Mariner Books). Memoir, testified against Trump in impeachment.
• Seth G Jones: Three Dangerous Men: Russia, China, Iran and the Rise of Irregular Warfare (2021, WW Norton): Defense hack, author of In the Graveyard of Empires (2010, on Afghanistan), hedging his bets on where the next war bonanza will appear.
• Rebekah Koffler: Putin's Playbook: Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America (2021, Regnery): Russian-born CIA asset, "has led 'red' teams during wargames," which makes her a significant source of Washington's delusions about Russia's interests and motives.
• Oscar Jonsson: The Russian Understanding of War: Blurring the Lines Between War and Peace (paperback, 2019, Georgetown University Press): Director of a Swedish "foreign and security policy think tank."
• Michael McFaul: From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia (2018, Houghton Mifflin): Under Obama, had a great deal to do with poisoning relations between US and Russia. Since then has been a front-line anti-Russia hawk.
• David Murphy: The Finnish-Soviet Winter War 1939-40: Stalin's Hollow Victory (2021, paperback, Osprey): Short (96 pp.), not necessarily germane to Ukraine, but was a senseless exercise in Russia asserting imperial attitude just because Stalin thought he could get away with it. Finland had zero strategic value in the coming fight with Nazi Germany.
• Constantine Pleshakov: The Crimean Nexus: Putin's War and the Clash of Civilizations (2017, Yale University Press).
• Andrei Soldatov/Irina Borogan: The Red Web: The Kremlin's Wars on the Internet (2015; paperback, 2017, Public Affairs).
• Kathryn E Stoner: Russia: Its Power and Purpose in the New Global Order (2021, Oxford University Press): Associate of McFaul's, with another attempt to paint Russia as implacably anti-American.
• Alexander S. Vindman: Here, Right Matters (2021, Harper): Ukraine specialist, testified against Trump in impeachment.
• Joseph Weisberg: Russia Upside Down: An Exit Strategy for the Second Cold War (2021, PublicAffairs): Former CIA officer in Russia during the collapse, creator of TV series The Americans, argues that the New Cold War model is wrong and needs to be changed. Fat chance of that now.
• Tony Wood: Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War (2018; paperback, 2020, Verso).
• Joshua Yaffa: Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia (2020, Tim Duggan; paperback, 2021, Crown): New Yorker writer, promises a "rich and novelistic tour of contemporary Russia."
• Marie Yovanovitch: Lessons From the Edge: A Memoir (2022, Mariner Books): Former US Ambassador to Ukraine, testified in first Trump impeachment.

Peter Schweizer: Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win (2022, Harper): Right-wing hack, started with hagiographies of Reagan and the Bush Family, has a remarkable ability to see virtue in conservatives (who "work harder, feel happier, have closer families, take fewer drugs, give more generously, value honesty more . . . and even hug their children more") and evil in liberals (one subtitle is Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy). Still, his hatred for the latter occasionally leads him to do some actual reporting -- e.g., Clinton Cash (2015), even if (as Clinton described his own welfare bill) it's "wrapped up in a sack of shit." This is another such sack, but sure, a lot of Americans have cozied up to China over the years, and some of them may well be liberals, still it's more likely that they did so not to "help China win" (whatever that means) but simply to make money -- not an exclusively liberal trait. The bigger problem is how this sort of red-baiting fits in with the arms-funded great power games that have been trying to increase tensions between the US and China (as they have between the US and Russia). Some samples (not all from the right, but you can probably figure out who's in the business of stoking this conflict):

• Kerry Brown/Kalley Wu Tzu Hui: The Trouble With Taiwan: History, the United States and a Rising China (paperback, 2021, Zed Books).
• Joanna Chiu: China Unbound: A New World Disorder (paperback, 2021, House of Anansi Press).
• Mark L Clifford: Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China's Crackdown Reveals About Its Plasn to End Freedom Everywhere (2022, St Martin's Press): The key word here is "everywhere," which is a massive projection beyond the actual subject at hand.
• Elbridge A Colby: The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (2021, Yale University Press): Lead architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, "showing how the United States can prepare to win a war with China that we cannot afford to lose."
• Rush Doshi: The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (2021, Oxford University Press): China strategist at Brookings.
• Elizabeth C Economy: The World According to China (2022, Polity).
• Clive Hamilton/Mareike Ohlberg: Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping the World (2020, Oneworld).
• Sam Kaplan: Challenging China: Smart Strategies for Dealing with China in the Xi Jinping Era (2021, Tuttle).
• Clyde Prestowitz: The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and the Struggle for Global Leadership (2021, Yale University Press).
• Erich Schwartzel: Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy (2022, Penguin Press).

Brendan Simms/Charlie Laderman: Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany's March to Global War (2021, Basic Books): As I understand it, Franklin Roosevelt was more desirous of entering war with Germany than with Japan, although the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, gave Roosevelt the opening he had been waiting for. Still, it was Germany that declared war first, on Dec. 11, saving Roosevelt the trouble. This book focuses on Hitler's thinking in that five-day window. Hitler and WWII remain a popular book subject. Some recent titles:

• Rüdiger Barth/Hauke Friederichs: The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic: The Rise of the Third Reich (2020, Pegasus Books).
• Richard J Evans: The Hitler Conspiracies: The Protocols/The Stab in the Back/The Reichstag Fire/Rudolf Hess/The Escape From the Bunker (2020, Oxford University Press).
• Peter Fritzsche: Hitler's First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (2020, Basic Books): The "100 days" concept was grafted onto Hitler from Franklin Roosevelt's early legislative blitz, which was unprecedented and despite becoming a journalism staple has never come close to being matched. Still, Hitler's consolidation of his grasp on power was remarkably quick and brutal, and that initial power grab made all the rest pretty much inevitable.
• Robert Gellately: Hitler's True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis (2020, Oxford University Press): Looks dubious, as author has bounced back and forth writing books against Hitler and Stalin.
• Harald Jähner: Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955 (2022, Alfred A Knopf).
• Stephan Malinowski: Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance (2021, Oxford University Press).
• David McKean: Watching Darkness Fall: FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise of Adolf Hitler (2021, St Martin's Press).
• Andrew Nagorski: 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War (2019, Simon & Schuster): Previously wrote The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler, and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II (2007), which stretched from late 1941 into Spring, 1942, and deflected the German advance south, toward defeat at Stalingrad. Also: Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (2013).
• Michael S Neiberg: When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance (2021, Harvard University Press).
• Volker Ulrich: Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich (2021, Liveright): Author of the two-volume Hitler: A Biography.

Astra Taylor: Remake the World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions (paperback, 2021, Haymarket Books): Author of two fairly major books I read recently -- The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (2014), and Democracy May Not Exist: But We'll Miss It When It's Gone (2019) -- with a couple of documentary movies to her credit, collects 15 substantial essays on matters that interest her, especially debt ("Wipe the Slate Clean" -- a project, the Debt Collective, that grew out of her involvement in Occupy Wall Street), but also "activism" vs. organizing, education, democracy, listening, capitalism as "The Insecurity Machine," social media ("The Dads of Tech"), automation, "Who Speaks for the Trees?" I'm often blown away by the depth of her reading, the breadth of her travels, the quality of her thinking, and her commitment to making this a better world. [PS: Looking at her Wikipedia page, I see that she was "unschooled" until entering 9th grade at 13, then "abandoned high school" at 16 to attend college classes, and did a year at Brown. Much I can relate to there, especially dropping out of high school at 16, although it took me much longer to move on, and I'll never have as much to show for my troubles.] Some other books she's involved with:

• JD Beresford: A World of Women (paperback, 2022, MIT Press): New edition of a novel from 1913. Introduction by Astra Taylor.
• Debt Collective: Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition (paperback, 2020, Haymarket Books).
• Stephanie DeGooyer/Alastair Hunt/Lida Maxwell/Samuel Moyn: The Right to Have Rights (paperback, 2020, Verso): Reflections on a concept put forth 60 years ago by Hannah Arendt. Afterword by Astra Taylor.
• Brittany M Powell: The Debt Project: 99 Portraits Across America (2020, Graphic Arts Books): Foreword by Astra Taylor.
• Astra Taylor, ed: Examined Life: Excursions With Contemporary Thinkers (paperback, 2009, New Press): Interviews with eight philosophers, tied to her film: Kwame Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt, Martha Nussbaum, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Cornell West, Slavoj Zizek, with her sister ("disability rights activist") Sunaura Taylor.
• Astra Taylor: Unschooling (2012, n+1): 19 pp essay, starting with a memoir of not going to school, aided by brilliant parents and siblings. From an Amazon review: "This is a 2 dollar hand grenade you can toss in the direction of the cookie cutter masses."

Adam Tooze: Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (2021, Viking): Economic historian, made his reputation with The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2007), and since then has only gotten more ambitious -- The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (2014) -- and more timely -- Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018). This time he's first out of the gate, his book rushed out a mere year after the first virus lockdowns, so he has nothing like the decade accorded to Crashed. Still, the events were unprecedented, and revealed several cracks in prevailing neoliberal theory that had managed to withstand the 2008 collapse, so he has plenty to write about, and is likely to be as comprehensive, measured, and insightful as always.

Barbara F Walter: How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them (2022, Crown): An attempt to develop a typology of civil war genesis from dozens of recent conflicts (but not really including our own familiar Civil War, except as a data point on one of her scales). She certainly shows that the chances of civil war are higher now then they've been since the late 1960s, when we went through the upheavals and reactions over civil rights, race relations, war, and other issues. Whether that makes civil war likely now is hard to say, but a high point of the book is Walters' prescise description of the January 6 riot/insurrection. Related, including several items on white supremacists, since they seem to be the most keen on triggering violence:

• Philip S Gorski/Samuel L Perry: The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (2022, Oxford University Press).
• Jonathan Greenblatt: It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping From Hate to the Unthinkable -- and How We Can Stop It (2022, Mariner Books): Anti-Defamation League CEO.
• Alexander Laban Hinton: It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US (2021, NYU Press).
• Robert P Jones: White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity (2020, Simon & Schuster).
• Sara Kamali: Homegrown Hate: Why White Nationalists and Militant Islamists Are Waging War Against the United States (2021, University of California Press).
• Talia Lavin: Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy (2020, Legacy Lit).
• Stephen Marche: The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the Future (2022, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster): Speculative scenarios.
• Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (2020; paperback, 2022, Princeton University Press).
• Malcolm Nance: They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency (2022, St Martin's Press). [07-12]
• Arie Perliger: American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism (paperback, 2020, Columbia University Press).

Isabella M Weber: How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (2021, Routledge): The 1980s saw much debate in both Russia and China, at least in elite circles, about economic reform, market development, and political freedom. In Russia, Gorbachev tended to look toward liberal European models, imagining a transition to a more democratic socialism. The debate in China is less known, partly due to the opaque cloaking of the ruling circles, but it's easy to imagine them looking more at Russia, but more in fear than envy. When Russia finally broke for "shock therapy," China recoiled and tightened central control, allowing markets and entrepreneurialism to develop but without political power. The results were a disastrous economic collapse in Russia, followed by a slow recovery owned by oligarchs, versus exceptionally long and strong growth in China. One suspects that a big part of recent American antipathy toward China is rooted is the fear that China may gain influence abroad by exporting their development model.

Craig Whitlock: The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (2021, Simon & Schuster): Washington Post reporter put his name to this, but my impression is that the raw sources were compiled by the Pentagon in a fit of introspection much like their history of the Vietnam War, better known as The Pentagon Papers. The book was reported on before the US withdrew and the Taliban took over, but didn't appear until days later. It shows what some of us knew all along: that the war was destined for failure, and that the military and the politicians lied systematically to mask their failures. Some more (but not many) recent Afghanistan books:

• Antonio Giustozzi: The Taliban at War: 2001-2018 (2019, Oxford University Press): New paperback edition forthcoming May 1, with dates adjusted to 2001-2021.
• Annie Jacobsen: First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance (2021, Dutton).
• Christopher D Kolenda: Zero-Sum Victory: What We're Getting Wrong About War (2021, University of Kentucky Press): Retired army colonel, "goes far towards explaining why President Biden chose to pull US forces out of Afghanistan."
• Carter Malkasian: The American War in Afghanistan: A History (2021, Oxford University Press): US military advisor, came out in July, so unlikely to have had a clue about August.
• Wesley Morgan: The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley (2021, Random House).

Vladislav M Zubok: Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (2021, Yale University Press). Supposedly a "major reinterpretation" of the Gorbachev years, starting with the death of Brezhnev and the elevation of KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who supposedly wanted to reform the Soviet system but (unlike his protege Gorbachev) would brook no dissent along the way. Describing Gorbachev's reforms as "misguided" tells us little. More telling is the charge that he "deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism." One can imagine Andropov plotting a course similar to what the Chinese actually did: economic reforms while not allowing any independent political voice. It's worth remembering that Gorbachev survived a major coup effort from prominent elements in the military and party apparatus, but fell to a second coup, this one launched from the SSR level, after Yeltsin got the leaders of Belarus and Ukraine to join him in breaking up the Soviet Union -- a coup which looked like further reform in the direction Gorbachev had already established by allowing dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, but which was actually a conservative power grab by officials in the old hierarchy. (The Baltic states, Armenia, and Georgia were already agitating for independence, and would likely break away, but in all other cases local party leaders discovered the spoils of privatizing their local fiefdoms.) This matters because nominal independence didn't threaten Russia's sense of superiority, until with Ukraine it finally did. Zubok, who teaches at the London School of Economics, previously wrote:

• Vladislav Zubok/Constantin Pleshakov: Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Krushchev (paperback, 1997, Harvard University Press).
• Vladislav M Zubok: A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev (paperback, 2009, University of North Carolina Press).
• Vladislav Zubok: Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (2009, Belknap Press).
• Serhii Plokhy: The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014; paperback, 2015, Basic Books).

Other recent books of interest, barely noted (I may write more on some of these later):

Theodor W Adorno: Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (paperback, 2020, Polity): Lectures, from 1967.

Anne Applebaum: Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020; paperback, 2021, Anchor).

Joshua Bloom: Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2013; paperback, 2016, University of California Press).

Anthony Bourdain/Laurie Woolever: World Travel: An Irreverent Guide (2021, Ecco).

Ron Chernow: Grant (2017; paperback, 2018, Penguin Books): 1104 pp.

Noam Chomsky: The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (paperback, 2021, Haymarket Books): Interviews by CJ Polychroniou.

Ron Formisano: American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class (paperback, 2017, University of Illinois Press).

Hannah Gadsby: Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir (2022, Ballantine Books): Australian comedian.

Janet M Hartley: The Volga: A History of Russia's Greatest River (2021, Yale University Press).

Heather Havrilesky: Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage (2022, Ecco).

Martin Jay: Splinters in Your Eye: Essays on the Frankfurt School (paperback, 2020, Verso).

Walter Johnson: The Broken Heart of America: St Louis and the Violent History of the United States (2020, Basic Books).

Zachary Karabell: Inside Money: Brown Brothers Harriman and the Amerian Way of Power (2021, Penguin).

Amy Klobuchar: Antitrust: Taking on Monopoly Power From the Gilded Age to the Digital Age (2021, Knopf).

Elie Mystal: Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution (2022, New Press).

Nick Offerman: Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside (2021, Dutton).

Thomas Piketty: Time for Socialism: Dispatches From a World on Fire, 2016-2021 (2021, Yale University Press): Compilation of short (op-ed?) pieces.

Thomas Piketty: A Brief History of Equality (2022, Belknap Press). [04/19]

Ben Rhodes: After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made (2021, Random House).

Donald A Ritchie: The Columnist: Leaks, Lies, and Libel in Drew Pearson's Washington (2021, Oxford University Press).

Sarah Smarsh: She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs (2020, Scribner).

Rebecca Solnit: Orwell's Roses (2021, Viking).

Elizabeth Warren: Persist (2021, Metropolitan Books): US Senator (D-MA).

Joby Warrick: Red Line: The Unraveling of Syria and America's Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World (2021, Doubleday): Syria's chemical weapons?

Alexander Zevin: Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist (2019, Verso Books).

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Monday, March 28, 2022

March archive (done).

Music: Current count 37597 [37555] rated (+42), 128 [125] unrated (+3).

Failed to get my Book Roundup post done last week, or even to make any significant headway on it. Instead, I wrote a fitful Speaking of Which, which left me in a very bad mood. I'm not sure I can explain why, or whether I even want to, so let's leave it at that.

Meanwhile, I listened to some records last week, as you can see. For much of the week, I had little trouble deciding what to listen to next. I have a rather limited but functional metacritic file, which urged me to waste time on the likes of Alt-J and Animal Collective (neither as bad as I feared, but with different redeeming merits). I noticed that Best of Jazz has started a New Jazz Releases 2022 page (they cite me in their intro), which led me to identify several prospects. Among the things they pointed me to were Bandcamp reissues from Enja/Yellowbird -- misidentified as new releases. I've also spent a good deal of time on the Ogun Records Bandcamp, which I discovered last week, when I went looking for Blue Notes for Mongezi (and found the even better Blue Notes for Johnny). I expect to continue with Ogun next week. (A quandary there on reissue dates: many are new enough by Bandcamp dates to qualify for this or last year's lists, but I've generally gone with either the original LP date or the most appropriate CD reissue -- hence they're showing up under "Old Music" here.) Other records came from various Facebook EW lists, including Gonora Sounds and Hailey Whitters.

The odd record out in many ways is Nova Twins, a 2020 release (too new for old? too old for new?). I probably noticed it at the time -- barely, it got 10 points in my 2020 EOY Aggregate -- but what brought it to my attention was that the daughter of a friend of a friend of my wife's was in it, a good old word-of-mouth grapevine. Not something I expect to go back to often, but exemplary in a fairly unique way, enough so I gave it the benefit of the grade.

The March, 2022 Streamnotes file (link above) is wrapped up (except for the Music Week excerpts), with 169 records (123 new music, 109 of them 2022 releases).

New records reviewed this week:

Alt-J: The Dream (2022, Infectious Music): English band, won a Mercury Prize for their 2012 debut, fourth album, flows comfortably, kind of like Pink Floyd but has yet to interest me. B

Animal Collective: Time Skiffs (2022, Sub Pop): Experimental pop band, founded 2000, seemed likely to be a big thing with 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion (at least with critics, as it won the Pazz & Jop poll, leading a long list of albums I more/less hated: Phoenix, Neko Case, Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Flaming Lips, Avett Brothers; however, the album peaked at 13, not even gold, the follow-up sold a quarter as many copies, and later albums have come out at increasing intervals -- this 6 years after its predecessor). Usual complaints here: loose sense of time, excess pseudo-psychedelic shimmer. B

Steven Bernstein's MTO: Good Time Music (Community Music Vol. 2) (2022, Royal Potato Family): Trumpet player, formed his Millennial Territory Orchestra in 2005 after working on Robert Altman's Kansas City, recreating the blues-based "territory bands" of the 1930s. Ten-piece band plus featured singer Catherine Russell. B+(***) [bc]

Black Flower: Magma (2022, Sdban Ultra): Belgian quintet, led by Nathan Daems (sax/flute), half-dozen albums since 2013, "mixing Ethio-jazz and oriental with afrobeat and dub." One spoken vocal by Meskerem Mees. Enticing grooves with rich textures. B+(***) [sp]

Black Lives: From Generation to Generation (2021 [2022], Jammin' Colors, 2CD): Produced by Stefany Calembert, with bassist Reggie Washington prominent, "new work on the subject of racism and Black realities," out on a Belgian label. Some pieces are explicitly political (e.g., "Existing Conditions"), others content to explore grooves and tones. Mostly names I recognize come from jazz, but too eclectic to really follow. B+(**) [cd] [03-25]

Stephan Crump: Rocket Love (2020-21 [2022], Papillon Sounds): Bassist, impressive list of albums since 2001, mostly in trios with guitar or piano. This one is solo, curated from a year-long subscriber-supported series, not planned as a pandemic project but it worked out that way. B+(**)

James Gaiters Soul Revival: Understanding Reimagined (2021 [2022], self-released): Drummer, from Columbus, Ohio, leads a soul jazz quartet with Robert Mason (organ), Kevin Turner (guitar), and the magnificent Eddie Bayard (tenor sax, I recognize him as Edwin from many Mark Lomax albums). Six covers, ranging from Sonny Rollins to Isaac Hayes. B+(***) [cd]

Dave Gisler Trio With Jaimie Branch and David Murray: See You Out There (2021 [2022], Intakt): Swiss guitarist, third Trio album with Raffaele Bossard (bass) and Lionel Friedli (drums), the second adding Branch on trumpet, this one also joined by the tenor sax legend. They get messy fast. B+(**) [sp]

Gonora Sounds: Hard Times Never Kill (2022, The Vital Record): Led by singer Daniel Gonora, a "family band that has been busking on the streets of Zimbabwe since 2004," present their debut album. I don't buy the title for a minute, but they're so vital and so compelling you can excuse, perhaps even delight in, their sense of indestructibility. A

Joy Guidry: Radical Acceptance (2022, Whited Sepulchre): Plays bassoon and electronics. Starts with a spoken word piece called "Just Because I Have a Dick Doesn't Mean I'm a Man." Then wanders off into dark ambience and strings, sax, and drums, with a brief dip into "Down in the Valley." B+(**)

Michael Leonhart Orchestra: The Normyn Suites (2019-21 [2022], Sunnyside): Trumpet player (credits here include many instruments), son of bassist Jay Leonhart, won a Grammy while still in high school, tenth album since 1995, side credits have mostly been in rock and soul. Several different things here. Normyn was a dachshund and the two suites were written during her last days, They're lovely. In between there is a spoken word piece, "Radio Is Everything," read by Elvis Costello, with Bill Frisell and Nels Cline. Costello sings a couple more songs. Ends with two quartet tracks, featuring Donny McCaslin, dedicated to Kenny Dorham and Wayne Shorter. B+(***) [cd]

Rudresh Mahanthappa: Animal Crossing EP (2022, Whirlwind, EP): Alto saxophonist, reconvenes his 2020 Hero Trio, with François Moutin (bass) and Rudy Royston (drums), for four songs, 22:39. B+(**) [bc]

Vic Mensa: Vino Valentino (2022, Roc Nation, EP): Chicago rapper, sings here, father from Ghana (where the famous name is Mensah). Mostly EPs, this one 4 tracks, 11:31. B+(*)

Tony Monaco: Four Brothers (2022, Chicken Coup/Summit): Columbus, Ohio organ player, has a dozen albums going back to 2001, wrote the title piece here and a reprise with little thought to the Jimmy Giuffre standard, but to celebrate his exceptional quartet, sharing Kevin Turner (guitar) and Edwin Bayard (tenor/soprano sax) with James Gaiters' group. Bayard, again, is superb, his surprise turn on "Lush Life" a revelation. B+(***) [cd]

Sean Nelson's New London Big Band: Social Hour! (2022, MAMA): Trombonist, New London is a town in Connecticut (but this was recorded in Waterford), big band, plus some extra flutes and harp in spots, the trombone section swelling to nine on one tracks. Nelson wrote 6 (of 12) tracks, with other band members contributing pieces, so the only standard is "When You Wish Upon a Star." B [cd]

Nova Twins: Who Are the Girls (2020, 333 Wreckords Crew): British post-punk duo, Amy Love (guitar/vocals) and Georgia South (bass/keyboards), debut EP 2016, first album, short (10 songs, 30:22). Hard, in your face, full of spit and fire, not exactly metal, but look out for flying shrapnel. A-

Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono (2022, Canvasback): Unlike many, I didn't hate her when she broke up the Beatles, but I've never gotten into her own records, respecting a couple HMs -- Season of Glass (1981), and Take Me to the Land of Hell (2013) -- while disliking other, most of all the Walking on Thin Ice "best-of" (1971-85, graded A by Christgau but C+ by me). So I didn't expect to recognize any of the 14 songs here, or many of the artists: familiar names all, but mostly David Byrne, Yo La Tengo, and Stephin Merritt, with Deerhoof and Faming Lips typical of the second tier (and having more fun). B+(*)

Punkt. Vrt. Plastik: Zurich Concert (2021 [2022], Intakt): Piano-bass-drums trio, names on the cover -- Kaja Draksler, Petter Eldh, Christian Lillinger -- third album since 2016. Rhythm jumps around a lot, a perpetual motion machine. B+(***)

Cécile McLorin Salvant: Ghost Song (2022, Nonesuch): Jazz singer, from Florida, father Haitian, mother French, debut 2010, wins polls plus a Macarthur Genius Grant, sixth album, first time she wrote most of her songs. Still, the covers are where her skills are most evident: a Kate Bush opener, an a cappella "Unquiet Grave" to close, best of all a Brecht/Weill song, "The World Is Mean." B+(**)

Lisa Ullén/Elsa Bergman/Anna Lund: Space (2021 [2022], Relative Pitch): Born in South Korea, studied classical music in Stockholm, switching to free jazz in the 1990s. Trio with bass and drums. B+(***)

Hailey Whitters: Raised (2022, Big Loud/Pigasus): Country singer-songwriter, originally from Iowa, moved to Nashville, fourth album. Songs reflect back to her native corn fields, but she finds country everywhere, even where "The Grass Is Legal." A-

Yung Kayo: DFTK (2022, Sevensevenseven/YSL): Rapper Kai Green, from DC, based in LA, first album after an EP and a bunch of singles. B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Rabih Abou-Khalil: The Flood and the Fate of the Fish (2017-18 [2019], Enja): Oud player, from Beirut, based in France (Cannes), has two dozen albums since 1982, building jazz from Arabic traditions and finding common threads around the Mediterranean. Group includes ney, soprano sax, violin, accordion, and drums, with Portuguese Fado singer Ricardo Ribeiro on three tracks with old texts. B+(**) [bc]

Old music:

The Blue Notes: Legacy: Live in South Afrika 1964 (1964 [1995], Ogun): South African jazz group, gained some fame at the 1963 National Jazz Festival in Johannesburg, but ran afoul of the Apartheid order -- pianist Chris McGregor was white, the others black -- so went into exile in 1964, joining the burgeoning avant-garde scene in England. This is what they sounded like originally, with two saxophones (Dudu Pukwana on alto and Nikele Moyake on tenor), trumpet (Mongezi Feza), bass (Johnny Dyani), and drums (Louis Moholo-Moholo). B+(***) [bc]

Lol Coxhill: Coxhill on Ogun (1977-78 [1998], Ogun): British soprano saxophonist (1932-2012), also credited with "loose floorboard" here, on the 16:24 solo "Diver." This combines two albums, The Joy of Paranoia (1978, with multiple guitars on the first side, Veryan Weston's piano on the second), and Diverse (1977, one side solo, the other adding cello, bass, and percussion). B+(***) [bc]

EDQ [Elton Dean Quartet]: They All Be on This Old Road (1977, Ogun): Saxophonist (alto/saxello), got his start in Bluesology (1966-67), led by Long John Baldry, remembered mostly as the sources for their piano player Reginald Dwight's stage name. Dean went on to play with Michael Tippett from 1968, and Soft Machine 1969-72. Quartet here with Tippett (piano), Chris Laurence (bass), and Louis Moholo (drums). Finishes very strong. A- [bc]

Elton Dean's Ninesense: Happy Daze + Oh! For the Edge (1976-77 [2009], Ogun): Nine-piece band, doubling up on sax (Dean and Alan Skidmore), trumpet (Harry Beckett and Mark Charig), and trombone (Nick Evans and Radu Malfatti), with Keith Tippett (piano), Harry Miller (bass), and Louis Moholo (drums). Reissue combines their first two albums. B+(***) [bc]

Elton Dean: Elton Dean's Unlimited Saxophone Company (1989 [1990], Ogun): Three saxophonists -- Dean (alto/saxello), Paul Dunmall (tenor/baritone), and Trevor Watts (alto) -- backec by bass (Paul Rogers) and drums (Tony Levin). B+(***) [bc]

Dusan Goykovich: Swinging Macedonia (1966 [1983], Enja): Serbian trumpet player (b. 1931), from a session in Germany which basically kicked off a long and illustrious career (latest album 2014). Sextet includes two saxophonists (Nathan Davis and Eddie Busnello), Mal Waldron (piano), bass, and drums. B+(**) [bc]

Louis Moholo Octet: Spirits Rejoice! (1978, Ogun): Five tunes, all by South Africans (including three former Blue Notes: Moholo, Mongezi Feza, and Johnny Dyani), but the drummer (with two bassists and two trombonists) fell in with the cream of the British avant-garde: Evan Parker (tenor sax), Kenny Wheeler (trumpet), and Keith Tippett (piano). After the roughness, closes with a solemn piece that translates to "Times of Sorrow." B+(***)

Louis Moholo-Moholo/Dudu Pukwana/Johnny Dyani with Rev. Frank Wright: Spiritual Knowledge and Grace (1979 [2004], Ogun): Live set from Eindhoven, Netherlands, a trio of South African Blue Notes (drums, alto sax, bass), joined by a tenor saxophonist from America -- never seen him referred to as Rev. before, but he's always been a disciple of Albert Ayler -- with Pukwana and Dyani also playing some piano (which seems to pick the other up). B+(**) [bc]

Louis Moholo's Viva-La-Black: Exile (1990-91 [1991], Ogun): South African drummer, following up his 1988 Viva La Black album, group a septet, starts off with two pieces by tenor saxophonist Sean Bergin and one by guitarist Frank Douglas, followed by four Moholo originals. B+(**) [bc]

Louis Moholo-Moholo Quartet: 4 Blokes (2013 [2014], Ogun): With Jason Yarde (sax), Alexander Hawkins (piano), and John Edwards (bass). B+(***)

Mike Osborne Trio: All Night Long: The Willisau Concert (1975 [2012], Ogun): British alto saxophonist (1941-2007), major figure in the British avant-garde (though he tends to get overlooked -- I see 4 Penguin Guide 4-star albums in my database). Backed by South Africans Harry Miller (bass) and Louis Moholo (drums). Sax is intense, a little rough, but quite a performance from the drummer. Reissue adds two previously unreleased traks (26:36). A- [bc]

Mike Osborne Trio/Quintet: Border Crossing/Marcel's Muse (1974-77 [2004], Ogun): Combines two albums on one CD (79:31), the first a trio with Harry Miller and Louis Moholo, the second adding Mark Charig (trumpet) and Jeff Green (guitar), replacing the drummer with Peter Nykyruj. A- [bc]

Alan Skidmore/Mike Osborne/John Surman: S.O.S. (1975, Ogun): Three British saxophonists (tenor, alto, baritone/soprano and bass clarinet), Surman also plays synth and the others add some percussion, so it's not purely sax choir. B+(**) [bc]

John Stevens/Evan Parker: Corner to Corner + The Longest Night (1977-93 [2007], Ogun, 2CD): Drums and soprano sax duo, Stevens also playing cornet. The 1976 session was originally released as two volumes of The Longest Night, edging over into the second disc here. The balance of the second disc is the 1993 album. Remarkable, but at length the limited sonic range wears thin. B+(**) [bc]

Aki Takase: St. Louis Blues (2001 [2020], Enja): Japanese pianist, moved to Berlin 1988, joined Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, married German avant-garde founder Alexander von Schlippenbach, has a substantial discography of her own, including several looks back at the jazz tradition, like this one. Reprises six W.C. Handy classics, with two of her pieces, plus contributions by band members Rudi Mahal (bass clarinet) and Nils Wogram (trombone). Also with Fred Frith (guitar) and Paul Lovens (drums). Too erratic, although "Memphis Blues" makes the chaos work. B+(**)

Keith Tippett/Julie Tippetts/Harry Miller/Frank Perry: Ovary Lodge (1975 [1976], Ogun): All improv, group played together for three years but only recorded this one album. All but Miller (bass) credited with voice, although that's mostly Tippetts' domain (she was married to the pianist, who was born with the 's' but dropped it early in his recording career. Aside from percussion (Perry), other instruments: harmonium, recorder, er-hu, sopranino recorder, hsiao, sheng. B [bc]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Martin Bejerano: #Cubanamerican (Figgland) [05-27]
• Will Bernard: Pond Life (Dreck to Disk) [05-27]
• Jean Fineberg: & Jazzphoria (Pivotal) [04-08]
• Stephen Philip Harvey Jazz Orchestra: Smash! (Next Level) [06-17]
• Charles Mingus: The Lost Album: From Ronnie Scott's (1972, Resonance, 3CD) [04-29]
• Yu Nishiyama: A Lotus in the Mud (Next Level) [05-20]
• Keith Oxman: This One's for Joey (Capri) [04-15]
• Fabian Willmann Trio: Balance (CYH) [04-15]

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