WOMEN IN INTELLIGENCE: The Hidden History of Two World Wars, solid history of how women have always contributed everything they have

WOMEN IN INTELLIGENCE: The Hidden History of Two World Wars
HELEN FRY
Yale University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the twentieth century onwards, women took on an extraordinary range of roles in intelligence, defying the conventions of their time. Across both world wars, far from being a small part of covert operations, they ran spy networks and escape lines, parachuted behind enemy lines and interrogated prisoners. And, back in Bletchley and Whitehall, women’s vital administrative work in MI offices kept the British war engine running.

In this major, panoramic history, Helen Fry looks at the rich and varied work women undertook as civilians and in uniform. From spies in the Belgian network ‘La Dame Blanche’, knitting coded messages into jumpers, to those who interpreted aerial images and even ran entire sections, Fry shows just how crucial women were in the intelligence mission. Filled with hitherto unknown stories, Women in Intelligence places new research on record for the first time and showcases the inspirational contributions of these remarkable women.

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My Review: Every machine has cogs. No machine moreso than the War Machine, and perhaps the total wars fought between 1914 and 1945 did more cog-making than any others in human history.

As men were perceived as more suitable to the killing parts of war than women, and as modern war is hugely more industrial than at any prior time, who did the admin? Who answered the phones, staffed the production lines, translated the intelligence intercepted in all the newfangled ways?

Women. Not that the men who mostly documented the wars, then wrote about the wars, ever gave them much credit for their work. Comme d'habitude. It does mean that there are tantalizing holes in the records. I hope generations of future scholars will feel the itch to fill them in.

This 2023 book set out to restore the women who worked in the ever-more-important field of military intelligence to their place in the historical record. Author Helen Fry had her finger on the pulse, a pulse that current powers-that-be are doing their best to still in every way possible. The crisis of the World Wars caused old attitudes about women, and society more broadly, to shift. These advances are what make the men (mostly, still men at the top) in charge so uneasy and eager to turn the clock back.

For my part I oppose this. After reading this chronicle of just how central women doing the work that needed doing, doing it well, and maintaining the everyday functioning of the world for the fighting men, you might just agree with me.

Reading the book is not always a joy...Author Fry's narrative voice is well-honed but not always euphonious in my reader's ear...but it's really the sources that let the reader down. Many aren't available, remaining "classified" for some variety of reason. Some were just never there in official records, needing tracking down and interpreting implied or obfuscated truths from elsewhere.

A fan of spy fiction would do well to look into how it was really done by those whose need of answers was pressing. A reader of women's history will find rabbit hole after rabbit hole. The resister of regression will find a pile of reasons not to give up, nor give in, to the regressive pressures on us all.

I want, perhaps naïvely, to believe there are enough of us unwilling to lose what we have all as a society gained to make that our reality.

THE HOUSE OF BEING, Poet Laureate Trethewey's entry into Yale's Why I Write series

THE HOUSE OF BEING (Why I Write series)
NATASHA TRETHEWEY
Yale University Press
$18.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: An exquisite meditation on the geographies we inherit and the metaphors we inhabit, from Pulitzer Prize winner and nineteenth U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey

In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, at the crossroads of Highway 49, the legendary highway of the Blues, and Jefferson Street, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. Before the land was a crossroads, however, it was a a farming settlement where, after the Civil War, a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home.

In this intimate and searching meditation, Trethewey revisits the geography of her childhood to trace the origins of her writing life, born of the need to create new metaphors to inhabit “so that my story would not be determined for me.” She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother’s collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be. With the clarity of a prophet and the grace of a poet, Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased.

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My Review: Her mother sang her John Brown's Body as a means of soothing the Chernobyl-level burn of racism as the mixed-"race" (how I hate that we still use that horrible, divisive pseudoscientific calumny by default!) family drove past confederate battle flags! (Frequently, then, in her home state of Mississippi...it's on their state flag.) Now, how horrifying an image is that, when that damn dirge that starts with the words "John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave" is soothing?! This is the absolute most powerful statement of the horrors the convulsively dying Jim Crow system of the US South inflicted on people of color (another digression: This locution is deeply uncomfortable to white people like me who, in the 1960s, were loudly excoriated for calling African-Americans either "black" or "colored" in the South).

Returning to my scheduled review: Poet Trethewey was unique, then, from birth forward. She was the product of miscegenation (that horrifying term I'm glad I need to define) as her parents were not legally married in her home state until Loving v. Virginia was decided a year after she was born. Her Black matrilineal line was stuffed with women who had embodied what can only be called triumphs of the will, and all the merrier to say that when I know that this application of that phrase will horrify Nazi true believers. The influence of her poet/professor papa is no doubt there somewhere, but Poet Trethewey does not work on one cylinder, she fires on all of 'em.

I can imagine some astute observers wondering what the devil is going on here. Mudge HATES poetry! some are thinking. Some are quite correct. I loathe the experience of reading poetry the same way I loathe the experience of riding the bus. It's crammed with stuff I don't want to know about, it's uncomfortably tight to sit in and in no way offers me enough room or seats designed for my spatial dimensions, it sways and janks and judders over each crack in the road, and the air conditioning almost never works until it suddenly blasts January-on-the-Siberian-steppe gales for a few seconds.

That does not mean I am insensible to its influence on most people. I see it, I get it, I am not of that group but they are quite clearly expressing their approval. And, lest we lose sight of this, the book is Poet Trethewey's *writing about writing*; that is always interesting. As I suspect all good writing must be, the life led by the child-poet became the matter of the adult; in her experiences of racism, white supremacy, and Southern culture, she speaks with a voice that reaches deep into the National Conversation of the US as well as into the emotional cores of many, many, many people.

At under 100pp, this is an afternoon's read for me. It was a pleasure to read...if you've read Memorial Drive, her memoir, you'll know that Poet Trethewey is gifted in prose writing, and if you haven't what is wrong with you?!...and measures her life against her need to write, like a learner sounding out words in a new language. The essay is part of Yale University Press's terrific series of writerly essays. I have only one cavil to report. I felt the origin of the essay as a lecture rather more than I would have liked. I put it down to the poet's innate aurality of expression. I ended up needing to read passages aloud to understand what was being said, and that was also the only way I felt I *got* the Southernness of the Trethewey household. (This also got me very dark glowers from my roommate who is hostile to things literary.)

Hardly a sin, but for this reader a discomfort I could've done without. So can I recommend it to you? Absolutely, and I do. I think anyone interested in writers as entities who transmute life into Art, people intrigued by the shocking dichotomies of Southern culture, and women who batten on reading the success and happiness of their fellows, will all be especially gruntled. I hope men who wonder what hell the fuss about this poetry thing is will give it a read, too, as well as any and all people of color looking to gladden themselves on the success of their own.

JOHN LEWIS: In Search of the Beloved Community, a "Citty Upon a Hill" longed from since the time of Winthrop

JOHN LEWIS: In Search of the Beloved Community
RAYMOND ARSENAULT
Yale University Press
$35.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The first full-length biography of civil rights hero and congressman John Lewis

For six decades John Robert Lewis (1940–2020) was a towering figure in the U.S. struggle for civil rights. As an activist and progressive congressman, he was renowned for his unshakable integrity, indomitable courage, and determination to get into “good trouble.”

In this first book-length biography of Lewis, Raymond Arsenault traces Lewis’s upbringing in rural Alabama, his activism as a Freedom Rider and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, his championing of voting rights and anti-poverty initiatives, and his decades of service as the “conscience of Congress.”

Both in the streets and in Congress, Lewis promoted a philosophy of nonviolence to bring about change. He helped the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders plan the 1963 March on Washington, where he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial. Lewis’s activism led to repeated arrests and beatings, most notably when he suffered a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama, during the 1965 police attack later known as Bloody Sunday. He was instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in Congress he advocated for racial and economic justice, immigration reform, LGBTQ rights, and national health care.

Arsenault recounts Lewis’s lifetime of work toward one overarching realizing the “beloved community,” an ideal society based in equity and inclusion. Lewis never wavered in this pursuit, and even in death his influence endures, inspiring mobilization and resistance in the fight for social justice.

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My Review: Almost six hundred pages. That is a lot of reading time. It is also, peculiarly enough, less than I would have liked it to be because the life of Representative Lewis took place in such interesting times, and among such towering figures of US history, that I would gladly have read more.

Most all my readers know I am a committed atheist, and either know or can guess why. It is people like John Lewis, who used their christian beliefs to leave the world a better, more equitable place for as many as he could advocate for, that make me especially bitter about the sleazy rotten souled creeps who embody my idea of christians and christianity. Lewis was such a committed christian that he, the victim of a violent attack by a racist who later regretted his actions and sought forgiveness from Lewis, referred to the man as his brother in a television appearance they made together. This is a prime example of what a friend of Lewis’s called his "moral jujitsu," a means of wrong-footing the hate-spewing opponents who confidently expected him to return fire.

Author Arsenault sites Lewis in his historical milieu with thorough, fully attributed research. He has relied on personal sources who knew him. Thus they, who were there, can give him the real flavor of a Jim Crow rural Alabama upbringing, one filled with the ritual humiliations and deprivations so beloved of our scumbag brethren the white nationalists. While this did radicalize young Lewis, his christian beliefs channeled his radicalism into a serach for justice, fairness, equitability, and all achieved without the rage and hate that marked his opponents. Admirable to me, and to generations of voters who returned him to Congress for much of his adult life.

His skills as a politician were honed in the arena of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which he was instrumental in forming and from whom he broke away after they began calling for "Black Power," which he saw as provocative and counterproductive with its inherent message of conflict. Lewis opposed the simple reductive sloganeering of the Civil Rights Movement in its post-MLK era. This was, after all, one of the folk who thought they would be murdered in public on Bloody Sunday, in a protest on a bridge now named after him.

What that pointed to was a fact that I, no scholar of Representative Lewis’s life and career, had never known or even considered: John Lewis was not uniformly admired among his colleagues because he favored the cause of human rights over narrowly construed civil rights. He was, for example, taken to task for his vocal opposition to the confirmation of the Supreme Court’s first Black justice, Clarence Thomas...and how right he was about that! He was also a QUILTBAG ally in a community that does not, as a rule, support gay rights...at least not publicly. He very much did, and also supported the ongoing Jewish struggle against antisemitism.

John Lewis emerges from this telling of his life’s story as a man of high principles and powerful moral certainty. It did not make him universally loved, in fact made him a figure of hatred for many, but it gave him the grace of convictions not merely held, but lived. I hope you will spend some hours with John Lewis’s spirit by reading Author Arsennault’s wonderful telling of it. There are illustrative images in the text that enrich the older reader’s memory of the times he helped shape. It is a life worth knowing more about lived in times we still feel reverberations of...though not as positive a feedback as I myownself would prefer.

LITTLE JEWEL: A Novel, a very different kind of storytelling from 2014 Nobel Laureate Modiano

LITTLE JEWEL: A Novel
PATRICK MODIANO (tr. Penny Hueston)
Yale University Press
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A mesmerizing novel by Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano, now superbly translated for English-language readers

For long standing admirers of Modiano’s luminous writing as well as those readers encountering his work for the first time, Little Jewel will be an exciting discovery. Uniquely told by a young female narrator, Little Jewel is the story of a young woman adrift in Paris, imprisoned in an imperfectly remembered past. The city itself is a major character in Modiano’s work, and timeless moral ambiguities of the post-Occupation years remain hauntingly unresolved.

One day in the corridors of the metro, nineteen-year-old Thérèse glimpses a woman in a yellow coat. Could this be the mother who long ago abandoned her? Is she still alive? Desperate for answers to questions that have tormented her since childhood, Thérèse pursues the mysterious figure on a quest through the streets of Paris. In classic Modiano style, this novel explores the elusive nature of memory, the unyielding power of the past, and the deep human need for identity and connection.

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My Review: I understand that many Modiano fanciers find this to be a slight, even a negligible, entry into his oeuvre. I am, of course, required to bow to their expertise since I do not have it. I will say, though, that if this is a slight entry into Author Modiano's catalog, the Nobel committee slept on this award by leaving it unawarded until 2014.

Thérèse, in common with most of us whose mothers weren't all that motherly, sees and feels the present with intensity and immediacy that our better-grounded peers seem to lack. It's a hypervigilance, an awareness of things that aren't always notable or even noticeable to others.

Thérèse's mother abandoned her for that most selfish of reasons, addiction, and so Thérèse can never really find her mother in her memories. We, listening to Thérèse, don't know what images among the blurry watercolors inside her head are real. Is her mother dead? Did she abandon Thérèse in that absolute and final way? Thérèse doesn't seem to know, so we don't know.

But that's the nature of the child of loss: We don't know what, if any, of our memories are valid, externally valid that is, and that is all we've come to trust. Validation must come from outside when your life has consisted of things you simply can't control, can't even influence...they just Happen, from the outside. So that is where Reality lies.

And lie she does, does Reality.

That is the genius of this work. It's not the usual third person exploration of the Idea of Identity, the Scenes of Paris, that Modiano is so very very good at. Thérèse is telling us about the grey, grim Paris of her life. Thérèse is putting herself in the frame deliberately, and that is unique. To Modiano, whose work is always at a very French remove from the immediacy of American novels. To Thérèse, whose marginal life is never even the center of her own thoughts...that position belongs to her mother. (That there is a father is self-evident, but one it never treated to a thought centering him. He exists only because The Mother got pregnant by him, whoever he was.)

We, the audience, see that there are men...an older pharmacist, a young student...who care for the waiflike Thérèse. She remains unable to process their proffered affection. It is here that Modiano achieves something I am absolutely stunned by: In a novel told all in first person, he manages the feat of making the emotional reality of other characters as clear to the reader as are Thérèse's disordered thoughts. It is a rare stylistic attempt, and it succeeds more often than not.

Why, you'll be excused for asking, isn't this a five-star review? Because, ma amie, Thérèse is nineteen and solipsistic in the extreme as are all emotionally abandoned children. It grows wearisome to trudge around after this yellow-raincoated woman to no avail, with no closure, by no authority empowered to address her. I don't for an instant think this is Thérèse's mother. I'm familiar with the trajectory of addiction and it's unlikely that someone lied to the girl Thérèse about her mother's fate. That's the sort of lie that comes with good intentions. No one's ever had an intention towards Thérèse, good or bad.

The ending of this novel is not really an ending. It is a place where we can leave Thérèse, like a safe street-corner near a police station, but knowing that we're out of there and no longer responsible to looking on at her life's messy, pale, unlikely to come into focus, trajectory. It's the proper place to leave her. It's what the entire trajectory of the story demands.

It feels a bit like we, the only people who will ever see Thérèse from the inside, are repeating the cruelty and abandonment that has been and will be her lot.

Brilliant. Unsettling. Evoking the eternal question that consuming art, novels in particular, wrenches forth from the sensitive: Is this just fancied-up voyeurism? Am I not being the low-life peeper that I condemn when she's listening at bedroom doors, he's got one eye on the braless busty babe?

THE TWITTER PAGE: TWITTER: A Biography, love-letter to bygone days & TWITTER AND TEAR GAS: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, what we're losing even now

TWITTER AND TEAR GAS: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
ZEYNEP TUFEKCI
Yale University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.54 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From New York Times opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, a firsthand account and incisive analysis of the role of social media in modern protest

To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an anti–Wall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in today’s social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protests—how they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.

Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and culture—and offer essential insights into the future of governance.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY. USE THEM OFTEN, OUR PATRONAGE IS THEIR JOB SECURITY.

My Review: What with Musky Twitter becoming a real thing and then "reassuring" advertisers that "Twitter cannot become a free-for-all hellscape" while then saying that "Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise," all of which pretty much add up to something just like a hellscape to me, minus the "free" part.

What went right about this read for me as a reader was its blend of "I-was-there" anecdotal reports and a sociologist's academic assessment of what leads the riled-up masses to fail in achieving their aim. As they are not conflated, as in attributing to her eyewitness statements the weight and force of academic analysis, I found them mutually enriching to my read. I was equally convinced that the author was, in openly acknowledging her left-leaning bias and explaining why it informed her analysis, transparent in reaching her conclusions.

Since the advent of social media in the Aughties, we've undergone a startling tectonic shift in the public conversation about politics and current events. Loud voices (eg Alex Jones) predominate; their usually right-wing extremism (save the both-sides and what-about crap, it's more effort than I care to spend to debunk their fundamental wrongness politely) echoes and echoes while picking up force without ever gaining any meaning or truth. Alex Jones's lies about Sandy Hook are going to cost him nearly a billion bucks which he doesn't have, and is proof that Author Tufekci's central thesis is correct: Attention is the main currency of social-media movements, not information which was at the heart of previous propaganda drives. If Jones's grip on the attention of millions hadn't been so finely tuned and thus successful, the bogus information he was peddling would've vanished in its own ripples. Revolutionaries using social media to spread their word have succeeded insofar as they've grabbed attention and even inspired action based on it...but have failed to make consolidatable gains in opposition to their enemies because that step requires information to reach people ill-equipped to comprehend or act on it.

This last fact, evidenced by the failures of many current social-media-driven movements, are failures to create systems and get buy-in from the protestors. There are no "network internalities," a term I learned from reading the book that's basically the opposite of the well-known term "network externalities", derived from the easy and showy online "organizing" that barely outlasts the social media post. In olden days, when organizing was a rough and effortful slog of meeting after meeting after committee upon speech-giving bloviation, the fact that 500 people showed up to a protest said something very loud about how this message they organized around resonated with them. Now that the message is reduced to an attention-grabbing snippet to get your engagement to it in place of simply doomscrolling on, there's very little investment on the consumer's part.

Another signal failure on the reliance of protests on social media is the interruptibility of attention-based engagement as opposed to information-based buy-in. The model she uses for this is the Tea Party...an online scattering of loudly outraged racist scum (my term, not the author's) whose "movement" (in the same sense as "bowel" in my never-humble opinion) transcended the attention-based group's ephemerality by embracing older techniques of protest: accepting hierarchical thinking, coalescing their ideas into clearly stated goals, etc. They've been stunningly successful in fomenting their ignorant, evil, putrid "ideas" and getting mainstream buy-in for them. More's the pity. The strength they rely on for their success is pounding away at the attention-grabbing "messaging" while accepting the behind-the-scenes scaffolding of disciplined application of information-based knowledge.

It's a model for success against the effective countering of the attention-grabbing social media rebellion: Drown the attention out in a flood of irrelevant, often false, and designed to distract "information." It is a very effective technique, as current political tragedies have shown again and again. Records, as in "lists of factual things," are judged fake insofar as they disagree with the hearer's agenda, and thus require time and effort to deny, explain, or simply distract from in return. That's time not spent doing the real job. And that is he entire plan for success of the right-wing nightmare machine.

Academics aren't going to like this abbreviated treatment of the topics the author covers, or appreciate the absence in-book of notes and a bibliography. Lay readers aren't going to be thrilled that the author doesn't spoon-feed them conclusions that agree with their established prejudices. But if you invest in the author's central thesis, the revolution that can be televised is doomed to co-opting and failure, there is a lot to be learned from discovering why and why you should care. That's the point of the book. It makes its point very well indeed. And, as #Midterms2022 approach, it behooves us all as voters to learn what our manipulators want us *not* to see, to attend to.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TWITTER: A Biography
JEAN BURGESS and NANCY K. BAYM
NYU Press
$13.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The sometimes surprising, often humorous story of the forces that came together to shape the central role Twitter now plays in contemporary politics and culture

Is Twitter a place for sociability and conversation, a platform for public broadcasting, or a network for discussion? Digital platforms have become influential in every sphere of communication, from the intimate and everyday to the public, professional, and political. Since the scrappy startup days of social media in the mid-2000s, not only has the worldwide importance of platforms grown exponentially, but also their cultures have shifted dramatically, in a variety of directions. These changes have brought new opportunities for progressive communities to thrive online, as well as widespread problems with commercial exploitation, disinformation, and hate speech.

Twitter's growth over the past decade, like that of much social media, has far surpassed its creators' vision. Twitter charts this trajectory in the format of a platform biography: a new, streamlined approach to understanding how platforms change over time. Through the often surprising, fast-moving story of Twitter, it illuminates the multiple forces—from politics and business to digital ideologies—that came together to shape the evolution of this revolutionary platform. Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym build a rich narrative of how Twitter has evolved as a technology, a company, and a culture, from its origins as a personal messaging service to its transformation into one of the most globally influential social media platforms, where history and culture is not only recorded but written in real time.

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My Review: The hashtag. The @. RTs and subtweets and "blue" (actually white) checkmarks. All of the detritus, or furnishings if one is feeling charitable, of social media are Twitter-invented or -popularized. It's a simple, basic idea, Twitter: Let people bloviate for a limited space (pictures added sometime in the 10s) about anything they want and let them find each other, build communities (and form lynch mobs), coordinate revolutions, all via the hashtag. TikTok was called Vine, and introduced by Twitter before their idiot management shuttered it. I got my Twitter account in 2007. Reading a tweet of mine is most likely why you're reading this review.

Now #MuskyTwitter is trending and this very concise book, only two-and-a-half years old, needs a second edition.

What I enjoyed most about the authors' treatment of the history of Twitter is that they were as focused as a good tweet-thread. They didn't succumb to bashing or whitewashing Twitter's many quirks. Aesthetically Twitter's changed itself, and the social-media world, the most. It's not like it's a design-heavy UI, right?

Wrong.

Twitter's look, and its effect on your engagement, is carefully calculated. It's part of a subtle message...stay, look, seek and find...that messages a deep sense of satisfaction with the activity itself, the results really are secondary to Twitter. So why is Twitter so awful at generating money from advertising? Ask Elon, he seems to know...but seriously, Twitter's main issue has always been about defining itself, when the authors contend (and I agree) that the three features in the first line of my review actually made Twitter a mutiple personality. There's a way to use each of those features to reinforce one's group identity...BookTwitter, HorrorTwitter, BlackTwitter...and thus make a broad-based ad-watching public pretty elusive. Creating ads for small, not-very-numerous communities isn't usually cost effective.

And here's Elon, steppin' into the buzz-saw. Heh.

What these Australian academics set out to do was set a protocol for biographizing (my ugly word, not theirs) technology. Take it innovation by innovation, look at the drivers of the innovations and the results from their adoption and/or morphing uses. They'll lead to larger conclusions about the platform, its users, and the social-media-verse we and they all exist within.

My idea of a well-presented technology book. Not too long, not loaded with tedious jargon, and not so basic as to cause me to wish it was just an owner's manual not an actual book. I liked the read, I liked the methods the authors used, and I enjoyed myself all the way through. (Except the endnotes, I didn't read those.)