Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire **** 1/2

How to Hide an Empire is "a history of the Greater United States," meaning that it looks at US history through the lens of its non-state territories. In the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, much of the West consisted of undigested territories, notably including the ever-shrinking Indian Territory. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the United States started claiming sovereignty over uninhabited islands (for their guano), then won several colonies in the Spanish-American War. We fancy ourselves a republic not an empire, so that status of these territories has always been murky.

The introduction talks about how we "mainlanders" talk about "Pearl Harbor" on "December 7, 1941," despite the fact that the Japanese attacked the much larger US territory of the Philippines at the same time... where it was already December 8.

The book is full of fascinating stories that I was only dimly aware of. Immerwahr shows how things look different from the provinces, and how the federal government has been able to take advantage of the murky legal status to act like other imperial powers (which is to say beastly).

After the Second World War, the US was in a position to greatly expand its empire but instead started divesting itself of many existing territories. Immerwahr argues that empires in the traditional sense are unnecessary in the modern world, where you don't need to control territory to secure trade routes or fight wars. He doesn't note it, but the other imperial powers also gave up their colonies after the war; see Postwar.

The only thing preventing me from granting How to Hide an Empire five stars is that the final chapters try a bit too hard to tie all aspects of recent history to our hidden empire. I felt like I had to do more work on my own to see the key points.

Satu Rämö, The Clues in the Fjord ** 1/2

If you gave an AI chatbot the prompt Write a crime thriller that takes place in Iceland, with characters who will recur in subsequent installments, you'd get something pretty close to The Clues in the Fjord. 

The prose is full of exposition that sounds like it comes from a travel guidebook ("The Westfjords made up a fifth of Iceland's land area, but less than 2 per cent of the population lived at the end of the narrow road"; "the maximum speed on Iceland's roads was ninety kilometres per hour"). The plot is designed to give opportunities to reference traditional foods and cultural touchstones. The main characters have colorful personal quirks—Hildur loves surfing, Jakob knits—and buried traumas to provide an ongoing background through the series of novels.

The (first) murder isn't discovered until page 110, one third of the way through. The police repeatedly pause their investigation to pursue personal agendas. The big break in the case comes from a random tip rather than from detective work. The title and tag line ("Death waits in the icy depths") are generic and have nothing to do with the story.

Overall, the book felt like a typical episode of CSI: Ísafjörður.

Randy Baker, Half Fast ****

Half Fast is an unusual cruising memoir in that it features comparatively few sailing adventures. The first chapters deal with onshore tribulations: riding out Hurricane Andrew anchored in the Bahamas, repairing the damage when their boat is blown ashore, tracking down outboard motor thieves in Honduras, working for a season in the Virgin Islands, refitting for more than a year in Trinidad. Even the on-water stories are harrowing: rescuing smugglers in Saint Vincent, dealing with an aggressive sea lion, nearly getting run down by a Chinese fishing vessel. The book ends with their boat nearly destroyed in a tsunami. Where's the poetry about the call of the sea and the freedom of the cruising lifestyle?

I would say the target audience for Half Fast is fellow sailors rather than people dreaming about sailing the world. Baker's stories are exactly the kind you would share with crew mates out on the water. 

In the final third of the book, Baker and his wife sail through the Panama Canal and cross to the South Pacific. This section features more typical content about life on board and the remote exotic places they visit.

The title, by the way, is a pun.

Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter *** 1/2

This novel features two couples living in the West Country of England in the winter of 1962/3. The Big Freeze forces them to confront their insecurities and dissatisfaction.

The writing style and subject matter make it read like a book written in the 1960s rather than a work of historical fiction published in 2024. It seems like a British variant of an Updike or Cheever novel, addressing the discontents of the suburban class.

Yoko Tawada, Exophony ***

The word exophony refers to the experience of "existing outside of one's mother tongue." Tawada is a Japanese writer who lives in Germany and writes many of her books in German. In this collection of essays, she celebrates exophony as a source of creative inspiration. Non-native speakers notice aspects of a language that native speakers are blind to.

My experience reading Tawada's non-fiction was similar to my experience reading her fiction. She offers interesting observations, but they don't add up to larger points. 

Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore ***

Wild Dark Shore has an awesome setting: a mostly abandoned research station on a tiny island between Australia and Antarctica. The only human inhabitants are a man and his three children, left behind as caretakers when the scientists left due to encroaching climate change. Until, that is, a mysterious woman washes ashore.

McConaghy offers fantastic descriptions of the island, its abundant wildlife, its challenging weather, and its isolation. The characters, though, are unbelievable. Every one of them acts strangely due to traumatic secrets that will be revealed in due course. McConaghy exacerbates the believability problem by having characters narrate chapters in the first person; it makes their withholding of secrets more clearly a pure plot device.

The plot gets increasingly melodramatic as all secrets are revealed. The incongruous appearance of a copy of Jane Eyre forecasts one of the twists.

Wild Dark Shore is a thriller dressed in the clothes of a literary novel. Character's personalities follow from the demands of the outlandish plot rather than driving the action. I give McConaghy credit for exploring various emotional responses to climate change, but I was never able to accept the characters as real people.

Henry Threadgill, Easily Slip Into Another World ***

This memoir from a well-respected creative musician and composer seemed like the perfect accompaniment to attending the Big Ears Festival (a "celebration of musical and artistic adventure and discovery"). And it was. It introduced ideas about creativity in music, life as a working musician, interactions between bandmates, composition versus improvisation, and live performance versus recordings—all subjects relevant to the shows we were seeing in Knoxville.

While Threadgill offers ideas about the development of his music, most of the book is a straightforward memoir about his life experiences, including an intense period serving in Vietnam during the war. He (along with his co-author Brent Hayes Edwards) manages to convey his personal character, in ways both intentional and not. He credits his two grandfathers with providing him an uncompromising sense of dignity and restless experimentation. At the same time, he repeatedly tells stories in which he apparently innocently gets into trouble: he gets sent into combat for creating an avant-garde arrangement of patriotic American songs; he is twice dragged against his will into visiting prostitutes; his evolving quest to capture new soundscapes requires him to abandon existing projects. He has a suspiciously passive role in his interactions (good and bad) with band mates and musical heroes like Duke Ellington. I suspect he is more prickly than he lets on, and I applaud the authors' ability to include that character shading.