Books That Stuck With Me in 2022
Books That Stuck With Me in 2022
Two changed my thinking; two were just really good!
It’s the end of the year — time to scroll through the list of what I’ve read in the last 12 months and reflect on what I’ve learned.
I’ll be honest — 2022 wasn’t a great year for me and books. This year’s list didn’t have as many great books as some other years for some reason. Maybe I was worse at picking books to read, or maybe I’ve burned through most of what will really interest me. A lot of what I read this year was pretty skimmable.
But I did read at least four really good books this year. Two of them made me realize things that should have been obvious to me, and two were incredibly well-executed.
Makers and Takers by Rana Foroohar
Makers and Takers shouldn’t have been as interesting to me as it was. It’s from a genre of book I’ve read a lot of — Why Wall Street Is Bad — and I’d electronically checked it out from the library and returned it without reading several times before I dug in. Plus, it’s a little bit old (2016), and as such it’s really framed by the 2008 financial crisis, so it doesn’t quite capture the chaotic weirdness of our current economy.
But the book is very well-written and has one of those arguments that seems blindingly obvious to you after you’ve read it.
In the book, Foroohar (a writer for the Financial Times) delves into the “financialization” of the economy with lots of great anecdotes that make complex financial operations legible to dummies like me. She starts the book with a tale of how Apple took out a loan to buy back its stock rather than using the hundreds of billions of dollars they had sitting around in bank accounts. Why? Because actually using their money (which was stashed offshore) would force them to pay U.S. taxes on it. Cheaper to pay the interest on loans and let their savings sit in a tax haven.
This story is Foroohar’s argument in microcosm. Companies like Apple have become addicted to financial maneuvering that will boost their profits and stock prices. The short-term incentives of the stock market push them away from research and development, which means that companies are innovating less and not really making much of anything. And the international financial system allows these companies to skirt their responsibilities to their workers, their customers, and their fellow citizens.
Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
Here’s another one that framed something I’ve thought a lot about in a new way. We’ve all recognized that our attention spans have crumbled in the last few decades. But almost all of the things I’ve read about attention have focused on how I can reclaim my attention. Hari wants you to focus on how we can reclaim our attention from the people who have stolen it from us.
The shift in thinking is similar to how a lot of us think about climate change now. Sure, you should do what you can about your personal carbon footprint. But it’s just as important to focus on the system that incentivizes you to emit lots of carbon in the first place. Same with attention. Hari spends some time talking about personal habits that we can adopt to strengthen our attention — lock your phone in a safe! Meditate! — but you can tell that he’s most interested in taking on the larger actors that are destroying our attention spans.
Basically, Hari makes the argument that trying to preserve your attention span without joining some sort of collective effort to stop the tech companies that are profiting from destroying our attention spans is like bailing out a sinking ship with a thimble.
I’ve been thinking about this book a lot as Twitter — the tech company that stole my attention the most over the last few years — has become a dumpster fire. I’ve quit Twitter, and couldn’t feel better about it. And I don’t think I’m going to be giving my attention to another social-media company whose business model is to manipulate me into wasting my time.
Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan Katz
This book, an exploration of the life of General Smedley Butler, is just really well executed. Butler has long been one of my historical interests; in fact, one of the first things I wrote on Medium (before Katz’s book came out) was about him.
Smedley Butler not only had one of the greatest names in American history, but he also lived a fascinating life. He was one of the most decorated Marines in American history. He served in the early twentieth century, during the peak of American imperialism, and found himself fighting for American hegemony all over the world — China, the Philippines, Panama, Haiti, Mexico, Cuba, and more. Then he realized what he’d been a part of and spent the last years of his life touring the country, railing against the imperialist foreign policy he had served. Butler also found himself tangled up in the weird “Business Plot,” in which enemies of Franklin Roosevelt tried to recruit him to lead an insurrection. Butler turned them in.
Katz does an excellent job of bringing to light a strange and neglected period in American history. We’ve mostly forgotten the invasions and interventions that Butler and his fellow Marines carried out on behalf of the American empire. But American foreign policy shaped a lot of places around the world in ways that the residents of those places have not forgotten.
Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer
Ferrer won the Pulitzer Prize for this one, so I don’t know that she needs me to boost her book, but I will anyway because it’s that good. Cuba’s another place I’ve long been interested in (and would love to visit legally, Joe Biden, if you’re reading this). Ferrer tells the story of Cuba and the way its history has always been tangled up with that of its gargantuan neighbor 90 miles to the north.
The book hits the parts of Cuban history that Americans are familiar with — the Spanish-American War, Fidel Castro, and the Cuban Missile Crisis — but I most enjoyed the parts that don’t often get a lot of coverage in mainstream American history. Ferrer does an excellent job of explaining the ways in which the sugar trade and slavery shaped the island, for example, or the ways in which American “settlers” inundated the island after the Spanish American War ended.
Ferrer does a wonderful job of letting the reader see all of these events from both the Cuban and American points of view. Best of all, the book just flows — it’s exceptionally well-written.