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I have three books to talk about today. I've had a long interest in code breaking and the first two books deal with espionage and code breaking in the twentieth century. Third deals with the class structure of American society.
The first book is The Secret War by Max Hastings. It is a comprehensive look at "spies, ciphers, and guerrillas" during the Second World War. While a little skewed toward Britain in the war, I think it does a good job of investigating what was going on in secret warfare in all of the major belligerent nations. It gives good info on the successes and does not avoid talking about their failures. It points out flaws in whole intelligence systems. From failures on the data collection end, to those with the need to know either not getting the information at all, getting the information too late to make a difference, being unable to sort the pearls of information from the chaff or simply ignoring the information that was presented. The term snafu (situation normal: all fucked up) applies to military intelligence as much as it does to everything about military.
Basically Hastings found that espionage, direct spying on-the-ground in enemies nations, was virtually a complete failure across board. Either the spies were untrustworthy, the sources of information were untrustworthy, the information obtained at such great risk turned out largely to be trivial, or the spies simply were caught and eliminated almost as fast as they arrived. As Hastings points out the only truly successful spy network of the war was the Soviet one spying on its erstwhile allies. (I should say here again that the last book I talked about The Irregulars was about a group of Britains who were convinced they were engaged in espionage in the U.S. during the war, and at the time they might have been technically correct, but who these days would probably be classified more as perfectly legal foreign lobbyists. Indeed their status in the U.S. was singled out for legal protection during the war by the U.S. government as it was cracking down against foreign spying in the country in general.)
Guerrilla fighting except in the vastness of Russia and in the isolation of the rugged Norwegian country side, turned out to be next to impossible, and more dangerous to the local population than it was worth (witness the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the following Nazi reprisals).
Hastings brings out the details of Allied and Axis code usage and code breaking. There are books with a better description of the specifics, but The Secret War does a very good job of summing up what is known about the subject now in the early Twenty-first century.
Over all, the book was entertaining and informative, which is about all I ask of books.
The second book Code Warriors by Stephen Budiansky, fooled me. I was under the impression that it was a book primarily about code breaking after World War II till the end of the Cold War. In fact it was more a history of the United States' National Security Agency (NSA), a very different focus.
I probably would have had some interest in the book anyway. At the time I was finishing graduate school, it was one of those economic down turns that made the prospect of getting a job in academia fairly remote. Further I was struggling to work on my dissertation, and not at all convinced that if I got a job at a university I could gather enough energy to publish enough to keep such a job. Graduate school had taken a lot of drive and ambition, and I was just about worn out. It didn't take much to realize the market for people with Russian linguistic skills outside of the university setting was dominated by the US government and by the NSA in particular. Many people I knew in Russian both as an undergraduate and graduate student got jobs either with the CIA or the NSA. Unfortunately once people took such jobs they were not free to discuss what they were actually doing at work with anyone outside their own agency. So what I heard about working in the NSA was entirely third hand and not terribly encouraging. I always had the suspicion that with my math skills, I might get placed into code breaking. But the risk of getting assigned to something really tedious for the rest of my life led me to look elsewhere for work. (Yes, the possibility of being asked to spy illegally on domestic targets, then a distinct possibility that has been recently proven, also played a role in my choice to avoid working for the NSA.)
So I read the book with a bit of curiosity about what my life might have been like if I'd taken that path. The book paints far from a rosy picture: the usual bureaucratic nonsense, struggles for funding, and pretty much an unending failure to make any headway in cracking the important Russian codes. In fact most of the book is about NSA's failures. It's not as if I personally could have changed much within the agency. According to the book, the code breakers from World War II, who led that branch of the agency, were convinced that the old methods were the only ones that could work, and were not interested in exploring alternate solutions. Bureaucratic nonsense raised to a higher power.
The author does give some hints about NSA intelligence successes in other areas, but doesn't go into how that developed. Over all, the book was something of a disappointment. But I have to say it did ease my mind in that I made the right decision not to apply for work with the NSA.
I saw the third book, White Trash by Nancy Isenberg, in the history section of B&N about a week before I bought it. I had glanced then at it quickly and rejected it. But last week I had a soon-to-expire coupon in my hot little hand and decided to take the chance.
Subtitled as 'The 400-year Untold History of Class in America', White Trash is not exactly an easy book to classify. Nancy Isenberg is officially a historian, but I don't think this book actually qualifies as history. Perhaps one might call it 'historical sociology?' Generally when I think of history I think of the telling of a continuity, perhaps with a theory or evaluation of events in mind, or perhaps not, but definitly a continuous easy to follow flow of events. Isenberg's goal as she states early on is to demonstrate that the United States is not, nor has it ever been, a classless society.
I don't know when if ever the idea of the U.S. being a classless society started being believed. But it certainly hasn't been a deeply ingrained idea. As kids starting school in the mid 1950s we were taught some pretty outlandish things: Like someone might land on the moon in our life time. Like a girl our age might grow up to be President of the United States. Like, there was upward mobility in the U.S. You know kids. We were pretty gullible and believed those things. Of course it was only a decade and a half before someone landed on the moon. It took more than sixty years, but a woman about my age may well be elected President soon. And that last one, well, it didn't take long to see that because our school district had a preference for hiring teachers from the teacher's college closest to the very poorest region in the state known as the Bootheel. The very teacher spouting those 'outlandish things' might well have come from a 'white trash' family and we learned in the most natural way possible not to hold that against them.
It was not as if there were no reminders back then that social class existed. Rock and roll music was full of class conflict as we understood it, songs about kids falling in love across class lines and suffering because of it. The most obvious popular song was "Down in the Boondocks." Though it was originally sung by a young guy I think the song has more power as sung by a young woman:
Everything is here. The sad story. The girl with the accent that marked her among Midwesterners as being lower class. The hope for upward mobility. The misuse of the word 'boondocks,' which those of us in the middle class might well not find odd coming from a lower class girl from the Ozarks or the Bootheel. (For those not in the US, 'the boondocks' or sometimes 'the boonies' is a term coming from the US occupation of the Philippines. The word refers to any place inconveniently far away, or difficult to get to, and by extension, among urban snobs, a place far from the city's 'civilizing influence.' The very common phrase is 'out in the boondocks,' and it never refers to anything inside the same town. The most used slurs for where the girl in the song is from are 'the wrong side of town,' which is referenced in the song, and 'the wrong side of the tracks.')
Every kid my age knew that the things the song expressed were real. Yes, there was a white family so low in the social scale nearby that even my parents would likely have balked at inviting one of their daughters into our house. Yes, there were families in our county who were so far above us socially that I would have felt massively awkward about entering their houses as their daughter's date. Under other circumstances there would be no problem entering, but as a potential suitor for one of their daughters, oh yes, awkward and out of place.
So, one big problem I have with the book is that, at my age, I'm not sure how much serious argument Isenburg would get over that goal of proving there are class differences in America. If the point needs proving, it seems she proves it quite nicely within a few scant pages, leading me to believe it might have been better as a short scholarly article or series of articles, than as a mass market book, a 400-page book including 80 pages of detailed notes. The second big problem I have is that there is little continuity in the book. Isenberg starts out showing that a sizable white underclass existed everywhere in colonial America and then she jumps awkwardly to a point in her work where somehow most of these people, according to her, are living in the South as the Civil War approaches. For the rest of the book the focus is on the Southern poor, which is what one might expect from the book's title. The third problem I have with this book is trying to decide who it is aimed toward. For the first hundred pages or so I could imagine it being used as one of those texts that would be good for Freshman college students to read to broaden their outlook. It's definitly not a book for high school age kids and I think many upper level university/college students would not stand for getting preached at the way this book starts out. (Yes, I'm afraid I have to say, I seriously doubt I'd want to be enrolled in a class taught by Nancy Isenberg.) Maybe it's aimed at her political/philosophical friends who will dutifully nod along with everything she says. The fourth and perhaps killing problem for the book is Isenberg's attitude toward her subject. She looms in the background, an angry presence, grumbling at everyone and everything she talks about in this book, both those who despise the white poor and the white poor themselves. Given the summary of her book, I'd guess she's an angry socialist, with the same kind of anger issues as Bernie Sanders, but seemingly without his sense of humor. Her politics aren't the issue. The fact that her book doesn't show much organization and she seems disgusted with the topic are issues.
I worked hard as a graduate student spending hour after hour, week after week, trying to find rare and interesting grammatical forms in 900 year-old Russian documents. That would be appalling enough for most people. But for me envisioning pouring over historical documents week after week to find awful things various famous and semi-famous people said in the past about poor people, would be more than I could take. So I do have some sympathy with Isenberg. But I have to question why beyond her politics she chose this topic and why she covered it so erratically.
Isenberg isn't terribly concerned with checking her facts. She talks about white trash as being virtually all Anglo-Saxon, meaning in her own words, from families identifiably from England. Considering the number of poor Scotch-Irish in Appalachia, she's using the term far too loosely and as a general pejorative. She reports someone writing in the 1840's who said that Daniel Boone's problems with land deeds in Kentucky led to him being driven 'into exile' and his family into perpetual poverty. Isenberg didn't show she investigated far enough to know that wasn't true then or now. I'm from St. Louis. I know what actually happened and where Daniel Boone landed. The Spanish government gave him a land grant in the next county over from us to encourage settlement. In doing business in that county, I met a lot of Boones, every one of them Daniel's descendents, and all of them as far as I could tell as middle-class as I am. Isenberg says flatly and without support that a 'hilly billy ghetto' popped up in St Louis in the 1950s and 1960s. I never heard of such a place, and don't have the faintest idea where it could have existed in that area. There were plenty of working-class neighborhoods all over. But an area *predominantly* of poor Appalachian/Ozark whites? In a town where people asked adults where they went to high school before they asked about their jobs, I think a 'hill billy ghetto' would have been a lot more well known. Maybe Isenberg heard from a very affluent friend or relative from St. Louis about some place full of 'hill billies.' Hell, the super wealthy might have mistakenly thought that about my end of the county. But Isenberg should have checked it out before she published such a thing.
Even Isenberg's first example of the book is something of a reflection of her inadequate treatment of her subject. She brings up "To Kill a Mockingbird," as an illustration of how class is ever present in the US. She's right when she says the trial underlines that it isn't just the blacks who are the bottom of the barrel in town. The accusers, the Ewells, are just as marginalized as the blacks, held in a separate despised class purely because of their skin color. But she doesn't mention the other really poor folk at the trial, the Cunninghams, some of whom, if I remember correctly, sit on the jury after others from the same extended family nearly lynch the black defendant, Tom. The Cunninghams are nearly as poor and just as uneducated as the Ewells, but the thrust of the story of the trial is that Atticus believes he can reason with them if he can just say the right words. He knows the chances of getting Tom acquitted are very slim, but he has hopes. There is no hope in his mind for the Ewells. The point is that Isenberg pretty much lumps the Ewells of the world in with the Cunninghams. Yes, there were and are class distinctions in our world, but they are more subtle and less rigid in many parts of the country than Isenberg wants to make out. In my large semi-rural neighborhood as a kid there were three very poor families. Two of them were like the Cunninghams, white trash by Isenberg's general standards. But would I have been embarrassed about bringing one of their daughters home as a date, knowing full well they weren't of our social class? Not at all. But the third family was like the Ewells. Let alone my parents, I personally would not have been comfortable with their daughter in our house, though she never did or said anything herself to offend me.
The first book is The Secret War by Max Hastings. It is a comprehensive look at "spies, ciphers, and guerrillas" during the Second World War. While a little skewed toward Britain in the war, I think it does a good job of investigating what was going on in secret warfare in all of the major belligerent nations. It gives good info on the successes and does not avoid talking about their failures. It points out flaws in whole intelligence systems. From failures on the data collection end, to those with the need to know either not getting the information at all, getting the information too late to make a difference, being unable to sort the pearls of information from the chaff or simply ignoring the information that was presented. The term snafu (situation normal: all fucked up) applies to military intelligence as much as it does to everything about military.
Basically Hastings found that espionage, direct spying on-the-ground in enemies nations, was virtually a complete failure across board. Either the spies were untrustworthy, the sources of information were untrustworthy, the information obtained at such great risk turned out largely to be trivial, or the spies simply were caught and eliminated almost as fast as they arrived. As Hastings points out the only truly successful spy network of the war was the Soviet one spying on its erstwhile allies. (I should say here again that the last book I talked about The Irregulars was about a group of Britains who were convinced they were engaged in espionage in the U.S. during the war, and at the time they might have been technically correct, but who these days would probably be classified more as perfectly legal foreign lobbyists. Indeed their status in the U.S. was singled out for legal protection during the war by the U.S. government as it was cracking down against foreign spying in the country in general.)
Guerrilla fighting except in the vastness of Russia and in the isolation of the rugged Norwegian country side, turned out to be next to impossible, and more dangerous to the local population than it was worth (witness the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the following Nazi reprisals).
Hastings brings out the details of Allied and Axis code usage and code breaking. There are books with a better description of the specifics, but The Secret War does a very good job of summing up what is known about the subject now in the early Twenty-first century.
Over all, the book was entertaining and informative, which is about all I ask of books.
The second book Code Warriors by Stephen Budiansky, fooled me. I was under the impression that it was a book primarily about code breaking after World War II till the end of the Cold War. In fact it was more a history of the United States' National Security Agency (NSA), a very different focus.
I probably would have had some interest in the book anyway. At the time I was finishing graduate school, it was one of those economic down turns that made the prospect of getting a job in academia fairly remote. Further I was struggling to work on my dissertation, and not at all convinced that if I got a job at a university I could gather enough energy to publish enough to keep such a job. Graduate school had taken a lot of drive and ambition, and I was just about worn out. It didn't take much to realize the market for people with Russian linguistic skills outside of the university setting was dominated by the US government and by the NSA in particular. Many people I knew in Russian both as an undergraduate and graduate student got jobs either with the CIA or the NSA. Unfortunately once people took such jobs they were not free to discuss what they were actually doing at work with anyone outside their own agency. So what I heard about working in the NSA was entirely third hand and not terribly encouraging. I always had the suspicion that with my math skills, I might get placed into code breaking. But the risk of getting assigned to something really tedious for the rest of my life led me to look elsewhere for work. (Yes, the possibility of being asked to spy illegally on domestic targets, then a distinct possibility that has been recently proven, also played a role in my choice to avoid working for the NSA.)
So I read the book with a bit of curiosity about what my life might have been like if I'd taken that path. The book paints far from a rosy picture: the usual bureaucratic nonsense, struggles for funding, and pretty much an unending failure to make any headway in cracking the important Russian codes. In fact most of the book is about NSA's failures. It's not as if I personally could have changed much within the agency. According to the book, the code breakers from World War II, who led that branch of the agency, were convinced that the old methods were the only ones that could work, and were not interested in exploring alternate solutions. Bureaucratic nonsense raised to a higher power.
The author does give some hints about NSA intelligence successes in other areas, but doesn't go into how that developed. Over all, the book was something of a disappointment. But I have to say it did ease my mind in that I made the right decision not to apply for work with the NSA.
I saw the third book, White Trash by Nancy Isenberg, in the history section of B&N about a week before I bought it. I had glanced then at it quickly and rejected it. But last week I had a soon-to-expire coupon in my hot little hand and decided to take the chance.
Subtitled as 'The 400-year Untold History of Class in America', White Trash is not exactly an easy book to classify. Nancy Isenberg is officially a historian, but I don't think this book actually qualifies as history. Perhaps one might call it 'historical sociology?' Generally when I think of history I think of the telling of a continuity, perhaps with a theory or evaluation of events in mind, or perhaps not, but definitly a continuous easy to follow flow of events. Isenberg's goal as she states early on is to demonstrate that the United States is not, nor has it ever been, a classless society.
I don't know when if ever the idea of the U.S. being a classless society started being believed. But it certainly hasn't been a deeply ingrained idea. As kids starting school in the mid 1950s we were taught some pretty outlandish things: Like someone might land on the moon in our life time. Like a girl our age might grow up to be President of the United States. Like, there was upward mobility in the U.S. You know kids. We were pretty gullible and believed those things. Of course it was only a decade and a half before someone landed on the moon. It took more than sixty years, but a woman about my age may well be elected President soon. And that last one, well, it didn't take long to see that because our school district had a preference for hiring teachers from the teacher's college closest to the very poorest region in the state known as the Bootheel. The very teacher spouting those 'outlandish things' might well have come from a 'white trash' family and we learned in the most natural way possible not to hold that against them.
It was not as if there were no reminders back then that social class existed. Rock and roll music was full of class conflict as we understood it, songs about kids falling in love across class lines and suffering because of it. The most obvious popular song was "Down in the Boondocks." Though it was originally sung by a young guy I think the song has more power as sung by a young woman:
Everything is here. The sad story. The girl with the accent that marked her among Midwesterners as being lower class. The hope for upward mobility. The misuse of the word 'boondocks,' which those of us in the middle class might well not find odd coming from a lower class girl from the Ozarks or the Bootheel. (For those not in the US, 'the boondocks' or sometimes 'the boonies' is a term coming from the US occupation of the Philippines. The word refers to any place inconveniently far away, or difficult to get to, and by extension, among urban snobs, a place far from the city's 'civilizing influence.' The very common phrase is 'out in the boondocks,' and it never refers to anything inside the same town. The most used slurs for where the girl in the song is from are 'the wrong side of town,' which is referenced in the song, and 'the wrong side of the tracks.')
Every kid my age knew that the things the song expressed were real. Yes, there was a white family so low in the social scale nearby that even my parents would likely have balked at inviting one of their daughters into our house. Yes, there were families in our county who were so far above us socially that I would have felt massively awkward about entering their houses as their daughter's date. Under other circumstances there would be no problem entering, but as a potential suitor for one of their daughters, oh yes, awkward and out of place.
So, one big problem I have with the book is that, at my age, I'm not sure how much serious argument Isenburg would get over that goal of proving there are class differences in America. If the point needs proving, it seems she proves it quite nicely within a few scant pages, leading me to believe it might have been better as a short scholarly article or series of articles, than as a mass market book, a 400-page book including 80 pages of detailed notes. The second big problem I have is that there is little continuity in the book. Isenberg starts out showing that a sizable white underclass existed everywhere in colonial America and then she jumps awkwardly to a point in her work where somehow most of these people, according to her, are living in the South as the Civil War approaches. For the rest of the book the focus is on the Southern poor, which is what one might expect from the book's title. The third problem I have with this book is trying to decide who it is aimed toward. For the first hundred pages or so I could imagine it being used as one of those texts that would be good for Freshman college students to read to broaden their outlook. It's definitly not a book for high school age kids and I think many upper level university/college students would not stand for getting preached at the way this book starts out. (Yes, I'm afraid I have to say, I seriously doubt I'd want to be enrolled in a class taught by Nancy Isenberg.) Maybe it's aimed at her political/philosophical friends who will dutifully nod along with everything she says. The fourth and perhaps killing problem for the book is Isenberg's attitude toward her subject. She looms in the background, an angry presence, grumbling at everyone and everything she talks about in this book, both those who despise the white poor and the white poor themselves. Given the summary of her book, I'd guess she's an angry socialist, with the same kind of anger issues as Bernie Sanders, but seemingly without his sense of humor. Her politics aren't the issue. The fact that her book doesn't show much organization and she seems disgusted with the topic are issues.
I worked hard as a graduate student spending hour after hour, week after week, trying to find rare and interesting grammatical forms in 900 year-old Russian documents. That would be appalling enough for most people. But for me envisioning pouring over historical documents week after week to find awful things various famous and semi-famous people said in the past about poor people, would be more than I could take. So I do have some sympathy with Isenberg. But I have to question why beyond her politics she chose this topic and why she covered it so erratically.
Isenberg isn't terribly concerned with checking her facts. She talks about white trash as being virtually all Anglo-Saxon, meaning in her own words, from families identifiably from England. Considering the number of poor Scotch-Irish in Appalachia, she's using the term far too loosely and as a general pejorative. She reports someone writing in the 1840's who said that Daniel Boone's problems with land deeds in Kentucky led to him being driven 'into exile' and his family into perpetual poverty. Isenberg didn't show she investigated far enough to know that wasn't true then or now. I'm from St. Louis. I know what actually happened and where Daniel Boone landed. The Spanish government gave him a land grant in the next county over from us to encourage settlement. In doing business in that county, I met a lot of Boones, every one of them Daniel's descendents, and all of them as far as I could tell as middle-class as I am. Isenberg says flatly and without support that a 'hilly billy ghetto' popped up in St Louis in the 1950s and 1960s. I never heard of such a place, and don't have the faintest idea where it could have existed in that area. There were plenty of working-class neighborhoods all over. But an area *predominantly* of poor Appalachian/Ozark whites? In a town where people asked adults where they went to high school before they asked about their jobs, I think a 'hill billy ghetto' would have been a lot more well known. Maybe Isenberg heard from a very affluent friend or relative from St. Louis about some place full of 'hill billies.' Hell, the super wealthy might have mistakenly thought that about my end of the county. But Isenberg should have checked it out before she published such a thing.
Even Isenberg's first example of the book is something of a reflection of her inadequate treatment of her subject. She brings up "To Kill a Mockingbird," as an illustration of how class is ever present in the US. She's right when she says the trial underlines that it isn't just the blacks who are the bottom of the barrel in town. The accusers, the Ewells, are just as marginalized as the blacks, held in a separate despised class purely because of their skin color. But she doesn't mention the other really poor folk at the trial, the Cunninghams, some of whom, if I remember correctly, sit on the jury after others from the same extended family nearly lynch the black defendant, Tom. The Cunninghams are nearly as poor and just as uneducated as the Ewells, but the thrust of the story of the trial is that Atticus believes he can reason with them if he can just say the right words. He knows the chances of getting Tom acquitted are very slim, but he has hopes. There is no hope in his mind for the Ewells. The point is that Isenberg pretty much lumps the Ewells of the world in with the Cunninghams. Yes, there were and are class distinctions in our world, but they are more subtle and less rigid in many parts of the country than Isenberg wants to make out. In my large semi-rural neighborhood as a kid there were three very poor families. Two of them were like the Cunninghams, white trash by Isenberg's general standards. But would I have been embarrassed about bringing one of their daughters home as a date, knowing full well they weren't of our social class? Not at all. But the third family was like the Ewells. Let alone my parents, I personally would not have been comfortable with their daughter in our house, though she never did or said anything herself to offend me.