By Ahsan Butt

Reviews of stuff I’ve read recently, in alphabetical order according to authors. As always, absolutely no poli sci books; this is stuff I read on the bus and subway and as such needs to be far away from the stuff I have to read.

Originally published by Asian Correspondent 

The Art of Captaincy by Mike Brearley

Brearley is most well known in cricket circles for being the captain of England during Botham’s test in the Ashes series of 1981. He is also widely acknowledged as someone who couldn’t bat to save his life, but was drafted into the team solely for his captaincy skills and his tactical nous.

Obviously, something similar happening today is nigh on unthinkable – for any team. What Brearley calls the “Australian model” — choosing a team, and then a captain — has been adopted worldwide, including England.

This book is kind of weird, especially for a Pakistani fan; it obviously wasn’t written for followers of a dysfunctional team. For instance, Brearley meticulously charts the tasks awaiting a captain, from inspecting the pitch (quite informative actually) to tactics on the field to organizing net sessions (it was written in the days before support staff and managers and 14 different coaches) to giving young players confidence when they get into the side.

But there is nothing, nothing at all, on what to do if a member of parliament calls you the night before the game and asserts that his neighbor’s nephew must play tomorrow. Or what to do if half your team is involved with bookies and you know exactly which ones but they happen to be friends with the board chairman. Or if you lose a World Cup game to a country that doesn’t play cricket and then your coach winds up dead in the hotel room the next day and the entire world suspects someone in your team killed him. Or something.

It’s an interesting book for cricket lovers, no doubt, especially because you can get a real sense of the atmosphere of the 1970s and 1980s, and how cricket was played back then. It’s also written in this typically British style, with an informed detachment, that sometimes makes you think of one of the supporting characters in a Mr Bean sketch.

Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics by John Derbyshire

Bernard Riemann was one of the greatest mathematicians in history, and this book describes the Riemann Hypothesis (all the non trivial zeroes of the zeta function have real part one half) and attempts to prove it. Trust me, it’s not as boring as it sounds.

Now obviously, if you’re not the slightest bit interested in math or prime numbers or number theory, you shouldn’t bother with this. But pure math is actually quite fascinating, as anyone who’s done Discrete Math or Linear Algebra at college knows. And more interesting than the math itself is the stories of mathematicians, who always seem to be quite kooky in some way.

This book is half a history of the mathematicians who gave rise to the Riemann Hypothesis as well as those who tried to prove it, and half a math book (but told in basically simple language for non-math people) about the zeta function and how it relates to the distribution of primes. Personally, I’ve always been really intrigued by prime numbers, their general properties and their distribution, so this book was right up my alley (until, I must confess, the last 20 pages or so, when the math got a touch difficult for me). You should give it a go if you have basically similar interests.

Bossypants by Tina Fey

Laugh out loud hilarious. Highly recommended. I finished this book in one sitting. It’s half an autobiography and half a window into the world of comedy which, let’s face it, very few of us know anything about. My only complaint, entirely parochial in nature, is that Fey doesn’t talk enough about her time at Second City.

One angle I wasn’t expecting was that this was kinda/sorta a feminist book. Actually it would be more accurate to say that you are very aware of the fact that it is a female comic writing this book, not just a comic, and that you gain a much greater appreciation for the pitfalls and obstacles in the way for females in that profession. Even in industries that outwardly seem “liberal” and imbued with equality, such as Hollywood and sketch comedy, it’s quite amazing the extent to which this stuff still exists. In a weird way, it’s a little bit like academia: populated overwhelmingly by liberals, but in some ways — relating to harassment — behaving as if it’s still the 1950s.

Mohajir Militancy in Pakistan: Violence and Transformation in the Karachi conflict by Nichola Khan

I really liked this book, if for no other reason than the fact that there is a serious dearth of quality academic and pop literature on Karachi (the contrast with Bombay, for example, is striking). Written by an anthropologist who married into a Muhajir family, it covers themes such as the production and reaffirmation of gender roles in Muhajir neighborhoods, how violence is a form of assertion of adulthood for young Muhajirs dealing with displacement and familial angst, and the modes of political mobilization the MQM employs to provide counterweight to the (perceived) marginalization and ostracization of Muhajirs and their identity in the social-political-discursive space in Pakistan. Some of the first person accounts of MQM activists are very, very powerful (an example here), and Khan should be commended for her fieldwork.

I would’ve preferred if the book said more about the meso-level causes of ethnic violence in Karachi rather than focus exclusively on micro-level stuff, but I think that’s a standard issue when a poli sci person reads an anthropology person.

One thing I would note for casual readers interested in Karachi and its politics is that the book is quite dense and academic. There’s as much about Foucault as Federal B Area in here, so proceed with caution. (Actually, I don’t see anyone buying this book anyway, since Amazon strangely increased the price from a still-quite-pricey 40 bucks to a scarcely believable 120; I have no idea what they were thinking!)

The Big Short:Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

This has become the standard account of the 2007-08 financial crisis that basically destroyed the entire world. And I won’t lie: it’s really fun to read, very clear, and very precise in describing aspects of high finance that escaped even experienced Wall Streeters back in the period in question. It looks at the handful of people who saw the crisis coming, mainly because of the insane expectations built into the housing market, and traces their story from early in the 2000s to when the crisis hit. And since it’s Michael Lewis, it’s an obviously arresting account.

However, the one issue I had reading this book is that it largely ignored — until the epilogue — the structural factors that gave rise to the crisis. When your focus is on a handful of individuals, you’re necessarily going to ignore larger forces at work. There is very little in here about the hand-in-glove relationship between government regulators and the upper echelons of Wall Street firms. Very little about the changes in tax law and the regulatory environment since the early 1980s that gave rise to some perverse incentives that made the crisis more likely. And so on.

Lewis’ brilliance lies in his ability as a writer, and the stories he tells are seriously entertaining. But as an analyst, this book does not cover the causes of the crisis adequately, in my opinion. It tells only part of the story, and should be read as such.

Donnie Brasco by Joseph D. Pistone

This book was highly recommended by the author of Codes of the Underworld (which I mini-reviewed here). I’ve really gotten interested in gangs and urban politics in the last couple of years, so I eagerly dove into it.

First, the good stuff: it’s a pretty good account of how this FBI agent infiltrated the mob in the late 1970s, and the types of tactics Pistone had to employ to make sure that the mafia did not suspect he was an agent. In that sense, it gives you a great feel for the daily lives these guys lead.

The bad stuff: it’s written horribly. No, seriously, I felt like this was a 14-year-old’s essay in social studies. Also, Pistone is not skeptical enough of himself. Throughout the book, we are told how smart and cunning he was in his interactions with the mob. But not once — or very rarely — are any mistakes owned up to, or is any real reflection evinced.

Then there’s simple things like the recording of conversations with gangsters. Pistone claims he never kept written notes or tape recordings of his conversations for fear of being caught. Okay, fair enough. But then he narrates conversation after conversation with these people, with no account of how he “remembered” them. The book, after all, was written years after the operation, and we are led to believe his memory is just that good.

I get that Pistone did something never done before and something never repeated since (in part because of Pistone’s success, the mob started a rule that new members would have to kill someone to demonstrate their non-affiliation with law enforcement — this is a costly signal if I’ve ever seen one). I get it, trust me. But if he was a little less “Look at how awesome I am and how smart I was!” and a little more “Hmm this happened, and I think that it says this about the wider relationship between law enforcement, gangs, and local neighborhoods”, then I would’ve much preferred it.

I do know this became a movie with Johnnie Depp and Al Pacino. I’m definitely going to watch it and see if it fares better, because the story itself is really interesting.

Brilliant Orange: The neurotic genius of Dutch football by David Winner

My favorite book on this list, bar none. This book is not just about Dutch football. It’s about Dutch art and Dutch architecture and Dutch politics and Dutch farming and Dutch culture and Dutch irrigation. To be more precise, it’s about how the concept of space, and how space permeates through everything the Dutch do.

Winner starts with the premise that Holland is a small country, below sea level no less. This means that they have to be very creative and organized in the way they think about utilizing physical space to live in. He then draws a connection with this to Dutch football, and the many amazing advances they’ve given to the sport by thinking creatively about space. Obviously Total Football features prominently, but so do accounts of Van Gaal’s Ajax, and Sacchi’s Milan (whose three best players were Van Basten, Rijkaard and Gullit). There’s a whole lot about their multiple failures at international tournaments, how they always underachieve, why they keep failing at penalty shoot outs, and why Johann Cruyff might be the single most influential figure in world football since World War II. Through it all, he keeps coming back to the concept of space, and how creatively the Dutch think about it, and how that influences the type of player they produce, the type of football they play, and the type of football they lose to.

For me personally, this book taught me as much about the Barcelona way of football as anything I’ve read, including Jonathan Wilson’s book or Phil Ball’s or Jimmy Burns’. Some renditions of Cruyff’s Ajax or Van Gaal’s Ajax or the famous 1974 Dutch team are eerily similar to today’s understanding of Barcelona. This book makes it very clear just how much Catalunya owes Holland. And more generally, it is a must-read for all football fans. I absolutely can’t emphasize this enough: buy this book and read it.