If you have decided to read some of my book reviews you will likely notice that I seem to have read most all of them on the same day. That’s not quite the case. On that one day (today – July 31, 2023) I corrected one of my more brilliant errors.

Over the months/years as I wrote reviews of books I had read I not only categorized them as “Book Summaries”, but also assigned them to other categories as well based on the central theme of the work. Ultimately that interspersed the book themes with my own thoughts and perspectives in a way that I just thought was not helpful and confused my thinking with that of various authors. So I decided I would maintain the book reviews only within that specific category and eliminate reference to them from other categories.

With that intention I proceeded to erase them from all categories other than “Book Summaries not realizing what I was doing erased them completely from all categories. As a result of my brilliance I had to reload them from a master fill that I fortunately keep. So therein lies the answer to why nearly all of them were published today.

For God and Country: The Christian Case for Trump – Ralph Reed

Ralph Reed is one of the founders of the Christian Coalition as well as the founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition. I chose to read this book because of its title and author. I had hoped to learn something to help me understand what made so many Evangelical Christians abandon the sacred values of their faith to support Trump in 2016 and why they still stand by him. This review may be shorter than most because after suffering through all 330 pages I learned virtually nothing of value.

The book is mostly a history of Trump’s transition (starting in 2010) from a marginally legal business mogul with amoral character to autocratic style politician, his run for the White House, and his presidency. In the very first couple of chapters my hopes of learning anything useful or honest were dashed. The author essentially regurgitated all the Trump and Republican talking points. He attacked Democrats as socialists bent on taking away Evangelicals’ right to free speech and religious freedom, promoting abortion on demand at any time during pregnancy and at tax payer’s expense, and stacking the court with judges who will not respect the Constitution. Trump and Evangelicals in general he claims are both victims of this extreme Left conspiracy.

Chapter by chapter the author repeats the Trump mantra:  crooked Hillary; liberal hypocrisy, fake news, no Russia collusion, perfect call to Ukraine. Mr. Reed does a brilliant job of lying, spinning, twisting, and misrepresenting the facts of President Trump’s tenure in office. He gives Trump a pass on every amoral, hateful, and vindictive act by Biblical rationalization or assigning it to the past. Sadly, the author advances and strengthens the proposition that national evangelical leaders’ goals are political rather than spiritual. He promotes the very intolerance and hatred too many of those leaders express toward anyone whose beliefs and goals even slightly challenge evangelicals’ right to force Americans to submit to their dogma.

Factfulness – Hans Rosling

The entire focus of this book is on demonstrating through publicly available statistical data that the condition of the world is much better than people think; further, that it is continuing to improve. The author was an internationally known Swedish physician, academic, and public speaker. He called himself a very serious “possibilist”. That means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason; someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview.

Professor Rosling starts off in the introduction with a 13 question test about how things are in the world. Here is just one of the questions:  “How many of the world’s one year old children have been vaccinated against disease?” 20%? 50%? 80%?  Rosling says he has asked this question of more than 12,000 professionals in meetings around the world – bankers, health scientists, academics, and members of the World Economic Forum, among many others. The correct answer is 80%, the most common answer is 20%. No group of professionals has done as well as 50% correct.

The author then follows up in subsequent chapters to explain the human and societal nature that makes people so wrong about what the real condition of the world is. He identifies the source of our wrong impressions in 11 human instincts. I will just list one such instinct here: The gap instinct – he says humans tend to see the world around them in binary terms. In our minds we divide the world into rich and poor countries; developed and under-developed; Western and the rest; as well as other binary assessments. We assume all countries fall into one category or the other with a large gap between them. The truth however is that most everyone actually lives somewhere in the middle with relatively few at the extremes.

The author says it is especially helpful in understanding the state of the world and its rate of change if one uses an explanatory model that divides world population into 4 income categories. While some assume culture and religion are key drivers of progress, Mr. Rosling says they have virtually no impact when compared to income. Income categorization is a central theme that he uses throughout the book.

The author further discusses how we tend to assume that what we learned about the world in earlier years is still true, and that there has not been significant change. The reality though is that there has been dramatic improvements in world health, economics, education, and adoption of technology in the past few decades. He suggests that we need to regularly test what we think we know against the latest information. In short we need to continue to educate ourselves throughout our lives. He stresses that he is not saying that things in the world are all good; in fact they are bad in many places, in most cases just much better than they used to be.

In one of the final chapters the author addresses what he calls the urgency instinct – the need to act immediately. He says most urgent crisis really aren’t once factual data is examined. But then he identifies five urgent global risks that he thinks we should be worrying about and addressing more seriously than we are:  1)  A global pandemic – very appropriate for our current world situation. He sees a new flu-like pandemic as the most dangerous threat to global health. He says we need the World Health Organization to remain healthy and strong to coordinate a global response;  2)  A global financial collapse. He believes the current system is too complex to understand and control. We need a simpler one so we have a better chance of avoiding a future collapse;  3)   A world war. He believes we need to accelerate global interaction (trade, educational exchanges, free internet, global safety net, and other coalitions) to mitigate the risk of the terrible human instinct to violent retaliation and war;  4)  Climate change. The planet’s common resources can only be governed by a globally respected authority, in a peaceful world abiding by global standards; 5)  Extreme poverty. This one is not really a risk. The suffering it causes is well known and now, not in the future. Though much less today than decades ago 800 million people worldwide still suffer extreme poverty.

This book was really enlightening to me. I dare say you will be surprised at how little you really know about the worlds condition today and how it is actually improving in nearly every important metric.

Surviving Autocracy – Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen, is a Russian-American journalist, author, and activist who is an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin as well as President Donald Trump. He holds dual citizenship and has lived the political reality in both countries under both presidents. He currently lives in New York.

After Trump was elected in 2016, Gessen wrote that it was folly to regard him as a regular politician and predicted that he would attempt to transform America into a Putin-style autocracy. In this book he demonstrates how Trump has so far come closer to achieving autocratic rule than most people would have thought possible.

The author says that most Americans believe that our democratic institutions of governance and oversight – the electoral system, the judiciary, the free press, and others – will prevent autocracy. But most of those institutions are enshrined in political culture, tradition, and democratic norms rather than in law. Virtually all depend on the good faith of the politicians in-charge to fulfill their official responsibility and uphold the constitution.

He says Trump ignores virtually all historical convention and violates nearly every established precedent. And sadly there is no clear legal framework to prevent him from doing pretty much as he pleases. He has the biggest megaphone in the world and he uses it to bully and abuse anyone who dares not to immediately bend to his will. Worse, the Republican Party either endorses Trump’s autocratic tendencies or is paralyzed with fear of challenging him.

Gessen says Trump is showing that an autocratic attempt in the US has a credible chance of success, especially when his own political party refuses to hold him accountable. It shows such an attempt builds logically on the structures and norms of the American government: more and more concentration of power in the executive branch over the decades as well as the marriage of money and politics. Whether by fear or ideological agreement Republican politicians’ seem willing to endorse Trump’s every whim. He seems to be their only audience.

In order to actually survive Trump’s attempt at autocracy Gessen says we have to give up the idea that just getting rid of Trump will solve the problem. We can’t return to government as it used to be. Recovery from the damage of Trumpism will only be possible by reinventing our institutions; we have to more clearly define and memorialize what it means to be a democracy. He says we have to deal with some fatal flaws at the root of our system of governance. He suggests the protests we are experiencing are calling for an American reinvention – equal treatment before the law, equal opportunity, and less economic inequality. In short, protestors are demanding a more perfect union.

The SS officer’s Armchair: Uncovering the Hidden Life of a Nazi – Daniel Lee

Most histories of the Third Reich focus on its senior leadership. This book, on the other hand, is the story of one of the tens of thousands of lower level mostly anonymous SS officers; they were the ones who actually directed and oversaw the implementation of the policies of anti-Semitism, slave labor, property confiscation, torture, and executions in the Third Reich. This officer’s story would likely never have been known except for an accidental discovery 70 plus years later.

I first learned about this case and the imminent publication of Daniel Lee’s book from an op-ed in the Times of Israel. His book is factual and contains history, mystery, and human interest, in more or less equal parts. I won’t provide much detail here. The story is much too complex to do it justice. I will just present the central theme and leave the details to those who choose to read the book:

In 2011 a lady in the Netherlands (not related to the officer in any way) sent a chair that had been in her family for many years to an upholstery shop to be recovered. In the recovering process multiple Nazi documents belonging to an SS officer by the name of Robert Griesinger were found hidden in the seat cushion. That discovery started the author on a multi-year research and investigative mission to discover who Griesinger was and try to understand his story.

Griesinger was a lawyer by training and mostly served as a “desk perpetrator” of the crimes the Nazis carried out against humanity. That means this particular officer for the most part did not kill or commit other atrocities himself; he administered the laws, managed the process, and issued the orders for the inhuman abuses that others carried out. In his day job he used his position to confiscate property, requisition slave labor, and round-up people for torture or execution; then he went home to his wife and children as any normal office worker might.

The last couple of years of the war Griesinger, with his family, was stationed in Prague, Czechoslovakia where he practiced his criminal Nazi duties and eventually met his end. As the war ended his wife and children became refugees trying to walk through the Alps to Liechtenstein.

Much of the value of this book is the insights we get into the character and internal workings of the feared SS/Gestapo organization as well as the typical life of a lower level SS officer. The author, with almost heroic effort, uncovered much of Griesinger’s life as well as how he fit into the broader Nazi regime. He also provides short glimpses of the anti-Semitic attitudes of the German population during the war, their belief in ultimate victory even toward the end, and a bit of insight into their plight afterwards.

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men – Caroline Criado Perez

This book should be required reading for every male before he can get a drivers license or register to vote.

The author is a British writer, broadcaster, and feminist activist. In this volume she documents gender inequality and its root causes worldwide. She makes the case that a massive data gap exists between the assumed “default human” (an average male) on which the whole world has been built since the beginning of human history and the reality that the “atypical” (or female) half of the population’s uniqueness is generally ignored. That gap leads to dangerous patterns in women’s lives, including compromised safety in cars, medications, public spaces, as well as increased political and domestic abuse. She uses strong correlation statistics to prove her point.

Ms. Criado Perez’s book is broken into 6 parts:  1) Daily Life; 2) The Workplace; 3) Design; 4) Going to the Doctor; 5) Public Life; 6) When it Goes Wrong. In each section she touches on ways that modern life negatively impacts the health, happiness, fulfillment, and safety of women. She unearths a dangerous pattern in data collection, analysis, and sex dis-aggregation (or lack thereof) and its consequences on women’s lives.

She identifies how product designers use a “one-size-fits-all” approach for everything from cars to cell phones to musical instruments to voice recognition software. Everything is designed to fit men. And consciously or not cities and other political jurisdictions prioritize public transportation, roads, and other public spaces and facilities primarily to meet the needs of men. In so doing they neglect to consider women’s needs, safety, unique responsibilities, and travel patterns.

Similarly in medical research, women have been mostly excluded from studies and textbooks, leaving them chronically misunderstood, mistreated, and misdiagnosed. For instance women are frequently just assumed to react to medications the same way men do, though there is clear evidence that often is not the case. In fact women are frequently excluded from medical studies because they don’t react the same as men. That difference will somehow corrupt the results! Women are also frequently misdiagnosed in heart attacks and other life threatening conditions because their symptoms are not what are seen in men and as such are not “normal” or necessarily even studied in medical school.

When it comes to working life, the author discusses in detail a number of issues and realities that stack the work environment against women. Among other challenges, she explores the concepts of encumbered versus unencumbered labor and its impact on women’s wellbeing; she covers discrimination against women in pension systems as well as child care responsibilities. She makes the point that all industrialized countries except the US guarantee paid maternity leave; the US is one of only 5 countries in the world with no guaranteed paid maternity leave. Besides the US the other 4 countries are Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

She also effectively demonstrates the myth of meritocracy in the job market. Reviewing employment opportunities as diverse as music, tech, and academia, she shows that women are at a distinct disadvantage simply because they are women. This section is rich with other solid examples of male bias against women in the workplace from things as simple as office temperature settings to as serious as sexual harassment and abuse.

In a section called Design, Ms. Criado Perez discusses the issue of design of buildings, work environments, machinery, tools, and even musical instruments. She points out that virtually all such facilities and systems are made for the “default human” which to repeat is an average sized male. Cars are made for default humans; most other products are also designed around that default human, even including crash dummies used in testing vehicle safety. And when protective equipment is made specifically for females, the product is usually simply a smaller size of the male version without taking into account that women’s bodies have a fundamentally different shape.

The author also has a lot to say about how the political system excludes, minimizes, or demeans women even if/when they are elected to public office. The “good old boy” network works tirelessly to ignore or work around women politicians and community leaders to undermine or minimize their issues and effectiveness. If they press their ideas they are considered too ambitious and power hungry. Strong willed men are praised for being assertive; strong willed women are bitches. And of course when there is a public catastrophe like a flood or hurricane, recovery planning and prioritization decisions are usually done by men without input or consultation from women, or consideration of female victims’ needs.

I have always felt that we get better governance when women are in positions of power. Similarly, probably because my kids are mostly girls, I thought I was fully tuned in to gender discrimination. But this book was an eye opener for me. The author has done an outstanding job of laying out gender discrimination reality in areas I had never even considered. I know she has her own bias on the subject but she has earned the right; she documents the truth of her point beyond any doubt. If I were the Secretary of Education I would order that this book be the basis of a semester-long course on gender inequality required to graduate from high school and well as college.