I’ve just published my annual round-up of my non fiction reading for 2021 here. Do go and read the whole list, but here I’ll just mention my absolute favourites for the year (or at least the ones I keep telling people to go and read). A variety of topics, from history, to feminism, politics and risk culture, so I hope you’ll find one you like. From each of the main themes I read this year, I’ve chosen one or two that I really loved.
How much insight can you get about today’s cities from looking at those that have been abandoned over history? Annalee Newitz looks at what we know about four very varied cities -Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia that stood beside the Mississippi River where East Louis is today. Çatalhöyük is the oldest known archeological site that could be called a city (about 20,000 people), and like Angkor and Cahokia, was gradually depopulated for reasons that are hard to discern from looking so many years later. It is fascinating to see what you can learn about how people lived just from the objects they leave behind – Çatalhöyük was before any real writing, and similarly Cahokia didn’t really leave behind a written record, but there is still a surprising amount that you can find out about cities.
The most interesting insight for me was when Newitz looked at the decline of all these cities – while the reason for Pompeii being abandoned is well known, the others gradually became less important – with it being hard to tell at what point they could be described as “abandoned”. Angkor seems the most relevant to us today, as it was gradually abandoned when the complex water engineering required to support the city and its food and water supply stopped working effectively, through a combination of bad climate and bad engineering.
The good test for a book is whether I find myself sharing snippets with my family – this one definitely passed that test.
A little bit of a cheat, calling this history, but it is really the history of mortality. I loved this, but that’s not surprising because it is the perfect intersection of my actuarial life and my historical interests. Johnson is a broad non fiction writer, having written on many different aspects of modern life. This book is much more numeric than his usual topics, which meant I liked it even more. Broadly, it looks at how humanity got from the prehistoric position, that the median human would live for around 30-40 years (life expectancy), to the modern position, where life expectancy is nearly double that.
The most fascinating section for me was Johnson’s ranking of what has really made that difference. He talks about three breakthroughs that have saved billions of lives: Artificial fertilizer, Toilets/sewers and vaccines, and then another five that have saved hundreds of millions: Antibiotics, bifurcated needles, blood transfusions, chlorination and pasteurization. But most traditional medical interventions only saved millions of lives. The book is organised around those big breakthroughs, and why they made such a difference, and it is a good reminder that vaccines were one of the big three. Particularly against smallpox, but against a whole lot of deadly diseases, vaccination has saved billions of people for a long and productive life.
Of course this year, books came out about Covid, and how our nations responded. My favourite of the ones I read was the The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis. 
Kate Ellis was an Australian Federal Labor politician. and a minister in Julia Gillard’s government, until she decided she couldn’t be both a parent to primary school aged kids and a senior parliamentarian who was away for half the year. In this book she interviews current and recent past female politicians about those experiences. Ellis had already written this book when Brittany Higgins’ allegations burst onto the political scene, so it was incredibly timely. Her reflection once she got out was to realise just how bad the Australian parliamentary culture is:
I’ve seen how much the culture in parliament is behind the rest of society. It is outdated, toxic, and often unfair, particularly for women. That cannot be the right environment in which to set the laws that impact us all, and nor does it reflect our values.
This is an insightful book, and a campaigning one. And I hope that everyone who has the ability to influence that culture of the place that makes laws for our country has the chance to read it and reflect on how they can change it.
Dead in the Water: A Very angry book about our greatest environmental catastrophe… the death of the Murray-Darling Basin, by Richard BeasleyThis book is quite different – a very funny, but also angry, book about the Murray-Darling Basin by the Counsel assisting the Royal Commission into the Murray-Darling. Despite the fact I’ve never really been there, I’ve been fascinating by the way our river systems work since friends of mine lived in Broken Hill many years ago. Outside Australia, the Murray-Darling is often held up by market economists as a great example of using price signals to manage a river system. Inside Australia, almost everyone knows that the Murray Darling is broken, possibly beyond repair. This book goes through how we got there, and, to some degree, apportions blame. The price signals aren’t completely the villain, but they have largely been applied incorrectly, by successive governments who didn’t want to do anything not supported by their stakeholders. The local indigenous people, and the natural environment, were rarely included in anybody’s stakeholders.
It makes it clear just how difficult it is now to get back to a healthy river system, at the same time as showing how at every turn successive governments have failed to take the tough decisions, and made things worse.
The other political book that I really enjoyed reading was 
And the central idea of this book is that Scott Morrison has made himself a “flat character”, as defined by novelist EM Forster.
In his Clark lectures, Forster put forward a theory of literary characters: there were two sorts: flat characters and round characters. Flat characters were sometimes called ‘types’ or ‘caricatures’, and were constructed around a single idea or quality. They could be described simply, captured in a sentence or two. Isn’t this a fine description of Morrison? When he became prime minister, we did not know much about him. Quickly, he set about helping us to know him, by making himself a flat character. We were given just a few details; we were given them over an d over again. These details gave us clues to other parts of his character, but, crucially, none that complicated the portrait.
There are many other fascinating insights into Scott Morrison and the political process in this book. If you are at all interested in the person running our country, this is highly recommended.
In going back to the book to write this review, I realized I had highlights all over this book. It is hard to summarise but it is about the power of reflection, even in the middle of a crisis. How do you work out when to rethink your initial preconceptions, and why does it make sense to question your initial thoughts? We tend to stick to our initial preconceptions through a combination of cognitive laziness and the discomfort of changing your mind. The part of the book I can see myself going back to is the part where Grant looks at how to help other people rethink their preconceptions. How do you engage with someone who thinks differently from you politely and constructively? How do you work out which parts of your thinking should be abandoned without abandoning the identity that goes with them? It’s hard to summarise the many interesting insights I gleaned from this book, but I definitely recommend it if you like that kind of thing.
A very thought-provoking consideration of cultural differences between the US and Australia, by a NY Times Australian correspondent. He and his family wholeheartedly joined the nippers (an Australian surf culture institution), and were taken aback both by how much risk everyone was willing to take in the sea, but also the much more community minded culture of collective action that came with it. He has a lot of interesting things to say about some of the less obvious differences (and advantages) of Australian risk and community culture over the US equivalents.
Australia’s experience [of Covid19] has been very different because, I came to understand, its approach to risk is very different. In general, the response had been more collaborative, careful, collective and nimble.
Long before the coronavirus hit, I was fascinated by the tension betwen individualism and collectivism in Australia and in the United states. Two colonial frontier nations settled with the same langauge and British backstory seemed to have diverged. …the US prioritised personal freedom and competition while Australia chose another path to what – communitarianism? Fraternalism? Democratic Socialism?
Cave is one of those overseas commentators who loves a lot of what makes Australia different. But I found myself reading this feeling as if much of what he was admiring was fading fast. I hope that we can keep that stronger sense of community, and pragmatic approach to risk that Cave admires, but even within Australia, he realised that the community he admired in upper-middle class Bronte wasn’t nearly as strong in poorer and differently diverse parts of the country.
This is the one fiction book that I’m putting in this post this year. This is a book set in the nearish future, when climate change has definitely already happened, and not nearly enough political action has been taken or is being taken to stop it. Many climate change people would hate this book, as it normalises the idea of climate change action by polluting the atmosphere with sulphur dioxide BUT it is a rollicking good tale, full of fun characters and excellent science.
Neal Stephenson is always original, and the bits of science he’s obsessed with a generally interesting to me, so I’ll always be lining up for his books.
“Extra Life” sounds interesting, and a overlaps a little with a book I read (“who ate the first oyster”) that talked about how the discovery of soap has had a huge impact on life expectancy!
Thanks, Jennifer – although my own backlog possibly precludes delving into most of your recommendations. But in the vein of “Four Cities” (only one of which I’ve visited myself) I thought I should mention “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond, in case you’d not come across it before. It also intersects somewhat with “Dead in the Water”. And, rejoice, I got given “Termination Shock” for Christmas, so will get into that with gusto (in due course). Cheers.