What I’ve been reading

Jill Ciment, Consent: a memoir.  A good short book on how you can have a creepy life for decades, and not be so aware of it.  In this case, a 17-year-old girl (Ciment) ends up marrying a man who first slept with her when he was 47 and married.  They had an apparently normal marriage for decades, or did they?  How much does “creepy” matter anyway?  She doesn’t seem to be complaining about unhappiness.  But is it just wrong anyway?

Hugh Warwick, Cull of the Wild: Killing in the Name of Conservation.  A well-written and subtle account of the tensions and paradoxes involved in attempts to conserve nature.  What if conserving one animal leads to the destruction of others?  I am slowly learning how many British people are obsessed with hedgehogs.  And I hadn’t known how much the importation of earthworms in the 18th century, from Britain to North America, shaped the environment.

Ebbe Dommissse, Anton Rupert: The Life of a Business Icon is a very favorable biography of who was probably South Africa’s richest man, with cigarettes being the central part of his business empire.  For a contrasting perspective, read Pieter h de Toit, The Stellenbosch Mafia: Inside the Billionaire’s Club.

Charles King, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah.  This is what you would want from a book on Handel’s Messiah.  I hadn’t known that Handel was briefly supported by the Medici in Florence.  By the way, Suzuki will be conducting the Messiah in DC in late December, be there or be square!

Phumlani M. Majozi, Lessons from Past Heroes: How the rejection of victimhood dogmas will save South Africa.  A libertarian Zulu approach to what the subtitle promises.

David Albright with Andrea Stricker, Revisiting South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program: Its History, Dismantlement, and Lessons for Today.  It is odd how little-mentioned this episode in world history has become, in any case this is the go-to book on it, interesting throughout.

Still in my pile is Nathaniel Popper’s The Trolls of Wall Street: How the Outcasts and Insurgents are Hacking the Markets, which covers the WallStreetBets phenomenon.