TOM PAINE'S WAR: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time, cursory look at a moment in history

TOM PAINE'S WAR: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time
JACK KELLY
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1776, one man's words—and the determination of American patriots—allowed our nation to survive its first crisis.

We think of the "Declaration of Independence" as the Revolution's defining document. But two essays appealed even more directly to Americans' feelings in 1776. Thomas Paine—a recent immigrant and self-taught writer—saw that America's rebellion was not simply about taxes and representation. It was a true revolution that could upend the fraud of monarchy and dismantle the aristocratic privilege that had dominated the world for centuries. His pamphlet "Common Sense" convinced Americans that the king had no divine right to rule them—they could rule themselves.

Having inspired patriots to declare their independence, Paine enlisted as a private in the militia. He saw Washington's army suffer defeats. He slogged through the mud with retreating troops to Pennsylvania. There, he wrote "The American Crisis," the most stirring rallying cry in our history. It began: "These are the times that try men's souls . . ." Washington and his men took heart, crossed the Delaware River, and prevailed to fight another day.

A tribute to the Revolution's 250th anniversary, Tom Paine's War is a riveting exploration of the earliest days of our nation's birth. This is a story of the power of words—and the power of belief—and how both speak as well to America's current crisis.

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My Review: I was eager to see how much I could add to my existing store of facts and ideas about the 1776 Revolution, particularly about Paine's role in both crystallizing its justification and fomenting its passions. I got enough interesting analysis regarding the impact, and the centrality, of Paine's expressive writing to find the read involving. Paine himself has left a small footprint in the records we know to exist. There could be others yet undiscovered. Adding new facts to the narrative, then, wasn't on the cards.

This is in no way the author's responsibility, and factors in my rating only very slightly as a tinge of disappointment. I'm not able to offer a higher rating because I found the read felt disorganized, with Paine's words mostly sidelined by accounts of ordinary soldiers' opinions. It's not uninteresting, it's quite involving to see the early days of the Revolution through their eyes. But why say it's "Tom Paine's war" when he's a small part of the larger picture? Is the author attempting to demonstrate that Paine's words ignited revolutionary fervor sufficient to cause the war? In that case, many more examples, or a much deeper dive on the examples included...which frankly feels impossible to me given the paucity of records about ordinary people in eighteenth-century America...would be necessary.

While interesting, this is a shorter, better monograph (honestly, the Author's Note and the Prologue say it all) lurking in a padded read. It would be ideal for a reader new to the topic of the Revolution discussed, or unfamiliar with mass-media's role in igniting war. I think it serves as a decent jumping-off point for other readers, as there are carefully attributed notes throughout as one would expect from this author.

It was not my most successful read, but I can't complain about the prose or the idea animating the book. It's just not quite the book I expected given the title and synopsis.

JACK KELLY'S PAGE: VALCOUR: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty; GOD SAVE BENEDICT AROLD: The True Story of America's Most Hated Man

VALCOUR: The 1776 Campaign That Saved the Cause of Liberty
JACK KELLY
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The wild and suspenseful story of one of the most crucial and least known campaigns of the Revolutionary War

During the summer of 1776, a British incursion from Canada loomed. In response, citizen soldiers of the newly independent nation mounted a heroic defense. Patriots constructed a small fleet of gunboats on Lake Champlain in northern New York and confronted the Royal Navy in a desperate three-day battle near Valcour Island. Their effort surprised the arrogant British and forced the enemy to call off their invasion.

Jack Kelly's Valcour is a story of people. The northern campaign of 1776 was led by the underrated general Philip Schuyler (Hamilton's father-in-law), the ambitious former British officer Horatio Gates, and the notorious Benedict Arnold. An experienced sea captain, Arnold devised a brilliant strategy that confounded his slow-witted opponents.

America’s independence hung in the balance during 1776. Patriots endured one defeat after another. But two events turned the tide: Washington’s bold attack on Trenton and the equally audacious fight at Valcour Island. Together, they stunned the enemy and helped preserve the cause of liberty.

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My Review: I've never really understood how very much the existence of the USA is contingent on the deep stupidity of the British before reading this book. It's shocking just how little we're taught about Arnold's real contribution to the existence of the US. Valcourt, without exaggeration, was central to the success of the war effort as it denied the British possession of an extremely strategic fort.

So why is the name of the battle only a dim clang of a memory-bell in my history-loving brain? Because Arnold won it. And the reputation-destroying politicos in the Continental Congress who feared the success of anyone not named "Washington" would result in disruption of their narrative...and threaten their power...knew it. What they did after Valcourt was inexcusable, but only the first of many such slapdowns issued by politicians to military men. (They were all men; History is not satirized as "his story" for no reason.) Denying Arnold a richly merited promotion was pusillanimous.

This story of Valcourt is heavily slanted towards the naval parts of the story, with mountains of details I never knew I didn't know about ships, their functioning, their strengths and weaknesses in battle, their command structures...it's a lot to take in. I wasn't always sure I cared, while being unwilling to skip over the data because the author's sneaky and uses these facts to good effect in battle anecdotes. An old didactic trick that never fails to trip up the facile reader/student. (In college I had an entire letter knocked off my essay grade because I knew the material, but skipped class the day it was applied to a specific place so did not relate it to that place despite that being clearly stated as part of the requirement.)

Author Kelly is clearly setting a course into microhistory, prioritizing deep-but-narrow slices of the giant, continent-spanning contests facing the British and the French in the wake of their first-ever world war (The Seven Years' War, 1756 to 1763). If Valcour had not stopped the British from failing at Saratoga, it is doubtful Louis XVI would have funded the war for the American revolutionaries. It is easy, then, to see why someone with an historian's eye for the results of a conflict and a novelist's sense of story would light on this underknown event with glee.

It is both strength and weakness in this story. If one is not au fait with the Revolution and its roots already, this is not the place to start that journey. Too much will slow the reader's pace that the author's at pains to set...looking people up, finding out who did what to whom before the events described. As it never pretended to be an introductory text to the conflict I'm only mentioning it as a fact for y'all to be aware of in deciding about the read's suitability for your taste. I felt I knew enough to be fully engaged in the material completely new to me without worrying about the background. It is, in fact, a favorite genre of mine. Microhistories suit my own readerly desire to dig into *why* if I already know *what* happened.

I found the author's use of notes added to my interest but didn't point me in new directions for reading further about the subject. It's the reason I stopped at a fourth star. A five-star history read needs to blow me right away and/or point me in new or unexpected directions. None of that happened here. The notes demonstrated the author's superior command of archives, and his selections from those archives definitely were apt and germane.

On balance I'll recommend the read to those already interested in the Revolutionary War, and familiar with its broad strokes, who seek more colorful aspects of its story.

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

GOD SAVE BENEDICT AROLD: The True Story of America's Most Hated Man
JACK KELLY
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Benedict Arnold committed treason—for more than two centuries, that’s all that most Americans have known about him.

Yet Arnold was much more than a turncoat—his achievements during the early years of the Revolutionary War defined him as the most successful soldier of the era. God Save Benedict Arnold tells the gripping story of Arnold’s rush of audacious feats—his capture of Fort Ticonderoga, his Maine mountain expedition to attack Quebec, the famous artillery brawl at Valcour Island, the turning-point battle at Saratoga—that laid the groundwork for our independence.

Arnold was a superb leader, a brilliant tactician, a supremely courageous military officer. He was also imperfect, disloyal, villainous. One of the most paradoxical characters in American history, and one of the most interesting. God Save Benedict Arnold does not exonerate him for his treason—the stain on his character is permanent. But Kelly’s insightful exploration of Arnold’s career as a warrior shines a new light on this gutsy, fearless, and enigmatic figure. In the process, the book offers a fresh perspective on the reasons for Arnold’s momentous change of heart.

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My Review: I love this description of Benedict Arnold:

In many ways, he was a typical American—cocky, restless, grasping, perpetually optimistic, quick to take offense. He was a vivid example of the self-reliance and rugged individualism that would be celebrated by Americans from Ralph Wales Emerson to Ronald Reagan. But self-reliance can beget arrogance.

The man behind the victory detailed in the book reviewed above, and the consequential actions he committed later, comes fully alive in Author Kelly's telling of his subject's character. It's not a biography, in the sense that the focus is not on Arnold the man and his life, but a political biography of the deeds he did and the responses of others that impacted him for good and ill.

I was not at all familiar with the details of the very real grievances Arnold harbored against the men who, I agree, wronged and slighted him. I'm caught up with it now. As a person, the picture of Arnold that I got from the extensive quotations from period sources is of an eighteenth-century Elon Musk, someone who can make enemies much more readily than friends while delivering results. I suspect he was as thin-skinned as he comes across in these pages because he really was a better strategist than tactician.

Ultimately his rage-quit of the Revolutionary War was completely understandable, predictable and preventable. The mediocre men who resented him for his strengths handed him the rope he used to hang himself. His own angry demons led him to use it; what he gained was material, what he lost was the lasting capital of reputation.

As I've come to expect of Author Kelly, he uses period sources galore. I'm impressed with his notes because he is scrupulous in citing the sources of opinions not leaving us to wonder if this is his opinion or something considered to be fact in the period. When it's his opinion, I see it presented as such; when it's his analysis of period opinion the same applies.

I don't suddenly like this traitor to the cause of American independence. I do empathize with him, understand "why" better, and still disapprove of his actions. A man of such tremendous capability and capacity for foresight, undone by the niggling ugliness of his character flaws.

Where have we seen that story repeated here lately....

Not a five-star, blow-me-away read, but a much better than average, really interesting story about an unjustly reviled but still critically flawed man.

ROPE: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization, enjoyable, informative microhistory of an invisibly ubiquitous invention

ROPE: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization
TIM QUEENEY
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A unique and compelling adventure through the history of rope and its impact on civilization, in the vein of single subject bestsellers like Salt and Cod

Tim Queeney is a sailor who knows more about rope and its importance to humankind than most. In Rope, Queeney takes readers on a ride through the history of rope and the way it weaves itself through the story of civilization. Considering Magellan’s world-circling ships, the 15th century fleet of Admiral Zheng He, or a Polynesian multihull with crab claw sails, he shows how without rope, none of their adventurous voyages and their discoveries would have been possible. Time traveling, he describes the building of the pyramids, the Roman Coliseum, Hagia Sofia, Notre Dame, the Sultan Hasan Mosque, the Brooklyn Bridge and countless other constructions that would not have been possible without rope.

Not content to just look at rope’s past, Queeney looks at its future and how the re-invention of rope using steel strands to make wire rope and later synthetic fibers will likely provide the strength for cables to support elevators into space. Making the story or rope real for readers, Queeney tells remarkable nautical stories of his own reliance on rope to survive—“While approaching Buzzard’s Bay in the dark of night, we were hit by a fierce squall…The wrong line was eased, and the 200-pound hunk of wood that holds the top of the sail, went flying out of control, swaying wildly and threatening to knock us into the inky ocean. Finally, the proper ropes were located in the dark, firm hands hauled them taught and the gaff was brought under control. It was a sobering display of rope’s often unacknowledged role and uncredited importance.” Rope is history, adventure and the story of one of the world’s most common tools that has made it possible for humans to advance throughout the century.

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My Review: Tim Queeney is treading on Mark Kurlansky's and Mary Roach's territories with this historical and sociological survey of rope, its development, its role in society, and its future uses.

While many short lengths of rope helped countless individuals through the centuries, rope also was a tool of human innovation writ large through collective action. Just as many small strands come together to form a rope, so, too, did many people gather to perform the biggest of tasks. The exemplar of this from the ancient world is the Egyptian pyramids. While we don’t know exactly how these human-built mountains were assembled, we can be sure that rope was an essential tool in their construction. In this way rope stands as both a tool and a symbol of humans working together to achieve the greatest things.

He sets his sights high. The book is even organized into "strands" not chapters, which seemed cutesy to me at first...it's not, it is in fact subtle and informative. I'm happy to report he succeeds in the rope-climb to success.

Its cultural significance is revealed by a parade of expressions: “roped me in,”“rope it off,”“tied in knots,”“rope-a-dope,”“roped and branded,”“give him/ her enough rope,”“at the end of my rope,”“throw me a rope,”“give me some slack,”“on the ropes ,”“go piss up a rope,”“learn the ropes,”“a rope of sand.” This incomplete list of everyday sayings just shows how deeply into our consciousness rope has entwined itself.

Readable, relatable, illuminating, and fun to learn about, who knew rope was so culturally significant? I've reached the end of my rope more than once, and still had not thought about the rope I was running out of. I've had enough fun in my life finding the men who live by the old gay truism, "if you can rope me, you can ride me," that I ought to be far more alert to how ropey my grasp of the subject is.

I have a greatly expanded respect for how many metaphors and concepts tie back to rope and its variants, starting with "religion"...re- (back to, again)+ligare (to tie, to rope onto)= "religion." A concept hiding in plain sight, one that could not exist without that extremely early invention of humankind, the rope.

The development of rope was surprisingly technological; in fact if we had not been scientists by our very nature rope could not exist. Many aspects of its creation were impossible without trial and error based on what we today would describe as "materials science"...does grass get stronger or weaker when bundled together? is green grass more or less useful than dried grass? exactly how dried is optimal for making cordage?...a tiny, tiny peek into the huge variety of questions Author Queeney introduces us to as he explicates the scientific process as we developed it.

No tool is not also a weapon: "string him up" and its variants did not come about as a common phrase because someone was decorating a loved one in a string vest. Author Queeney does not shy away from elucidating the horrifying, evil uses humanity put its early invention the rope to. The details are stomach-churning, but the facts are incontrovertible. We love to be hatefully cruel. I'm sure some readers will skip right over these parts in order not to lose sleep. I strongly caution those highly averse to animal cruelty to pay close attention to prefatory language used as they read along.

I'm carrying on about a five-star read but there's not a whole fifth star. The half-star lost got hung up on that pesky thing, the content warning. The fact is there's not much human awfulness I haven't read about or seen in the past *mumble*ty-five years. I still felt blindsided by the overly-careful enumeration of the nasty uses we use rope for. Lingering on these unpleasantnesses slowed my roll through the story of rope. Don't get tied up in these things if you're at all squeamish; fresh strands await.

A thoroughly noted and sourced elucidation of the importance of an invisbly ubiquitous invention. Its many pleasures for the broadly curious reader require some common-sense personalization of the reading experience. Those who need chew-toys for their brains are going to batten on the trivia embedded in the long strand roping human history together.

WHACK JOB: A History of Axe Murder, does more than just titillate with true-crime gore

WHACK JOB: A History of Axe Murder
RACHEL McCARTHY JAMES
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant and bloody examination of the axe's foundational role in human history, from prehistoric violence, to war and executions, to newspaper headlines and popular culture.

For as long as the axe has been in our hands, we have used it to kill.

Much like the wheel, the boat, and the telephone, the axe is a transformative piece of technology—one that has been with us since prehistory. And just as early humans used the axe to chop down trees, hunt for food, and whittle tools, they also used it to murder. Over time, this particular use has as the axe evolved over centuries to fit the needs of new agricultural, architectural, and social development, so have our lethal uses for it.

Whack Job is the story of the axe, first as a convenient danger and then an anachronism, as told through the murders it has been employed in throughout from the first axe murder nearly half a million years ago, to the brutal harnessing of the axe in warfare, to its use in King Henry VIII's favorite method of execution, to Lizzie Borden and the birth of modern pop culture. Whack Job sheds brilliant light on this familiar implement, this most human of weapons. This is a critical examination of violence, an exploration of how technology shapes human conflict, the cruel and sacred rituals of execution and battle, and the ways humanity fits even the most savage impulses into narratives of the past and present.

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My Review: End-noted to a fare-thee-well, this rollicking romp through axes as historical objects isn't academic and dry, or deeply in-depth; it's a mountaintop view into the foothills and valleys of human material culture. Using the axe as our viewpoint stand-in makes a lot of sense. In anthropology classes I took in the 1980s, stone tools came in varieties like flakes, blades, and scrapers, all discovered by the carloads; a hand axe was treasure indeed. The knack of flintknapping is easier to acquire for smaller objects. An axe was high tech indeed.

There's a reason an axe centers the fasces in Roman art; there's a reason the axe was buried as often as a sword in Viking graves. They're not just useful, they're mightily impressive and have always been difficult to fashion until fairly recently. A sharp axe is a supremely useful tool for the agricultural way of life. Splitting logs to burn for warmth, making fenceposts to contain cattle and demarcate property, etc etc, are all made trivially easy with ownership of a good, sharp axe.

Splitting wood is, of course, not the only splitting an axe does with effectiveness and relative ease. Author Rachel starts us with split skulls in Neanderthal prehistory, when possession of an axe was a major symbol of power. As the reasons humans kill each other really haven't changed over the millennia (spoiler alert: we enjoy it), the means we choose to do it with haven't either. Whatever is handy, be it rock, knife, or axe. What we don't know in any detail is why the owner of a particular skeleton was deprived of the ghost driving it, though the remains are clearly damaged in specific, tell-tale ways. So Author Rachel talks about axes more in the first third of the book than murders. (Seriously, stop at 30%...chapter six...if details of what happens are not to your taste.)

In historical times, as details become available, they are vouchsafed you.I do not find this particularly bothersome, but if you do, understand this is not going to be an easy book for you to read. We're still focusing on the axes, though, which is what enabled me not to feel queasy. The weapon of choice is contextualized to the extent possible based on the records surviving, be they legal, social, or religious in nature. And has Author Rachel done her archive diving! Literal hundreds of endnotes could probably result in a visit from the spooks if I followed them all up on Google. The thing I appreciate most in a history like this one, focused on a reasonably narrow bit of human behavior, is that sense the author's done a lot more than the minimum. That is definitely the case here.

I don't classify this as a microhistory to myself. It has a narrow focus. It doesn't, however, confine itself to just one bit of History like The Forger's Spell or Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, both estimable books. I suppose when your topic is something as universal or as ancient as an axe, one can't feasibly stay in the micro.

Speaking of micro, Author Rachel does not spare us Y-chromosome-havers in her analysis of why axes represent authority. There's a good bit about male insecurity as it relates to symbols of power and status. If I felt she was factually incorrect, or grinding an academic axe (!) too finely to make her point, I'd say so. Instead I shrank a little more every time the topic arose. Well done, madam, point well made. Dealing with how the labrys became a feminist/matriarchal symbol was fascinating.

The structural elements of the book are largely thematic. We're in chapters called things like "In Truth, An Enemy and a Man of Violence" (chapter four, the 500s BCE) and "Five Axes in the Cellar, One Axe on the roof" (chapter nine, Lizzie Borden). Author Rachel's style lends itself to hooks, positioned carefully at the ends of chapters. It makes the read hard to portion out; I usually read a chapter of a book, take a few notes, move to a different book; not here. I read through five chapters in a long afternoon. That's not common for me. I simply didn't want to stop, and the hook-y chapter ends (can't quote them, the Spoiler Stasi will trade their hoses and chains for axes) were designed to keep the reader engaged.

So what happened to the fifth star? It's half there, and deserves to be. I can't offer the full five only because the way Author Rachel mixes it up felt at times as though there were topics she could not go into that she wanted to. That left me wishing for an extra hundred pages and more ridden hobbyhorses.

No matter about cavils so minor as that. If you're interested in anthropology and history through a narrow but deep time-lens, have a good tolerance for murderous acts, and enjoy sly witticisms, this is a solid read for you.

EMPTY VESSEL: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge, the best kind of economic microhistory

EMPTY VESSEL: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge
IAN KUMEKAWA
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

LISTEN TO THE AUTHOR ON SMARTY PANTS!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The rise of globalization and financialization as seen from a barge—one Swedish barge, to be exact, built in 1979

What do a barracks for British troops in the Falklands War, a floating jail off the Bronx, and temporary housing for VW factory workers in Germany have in common? The Balder, a single barge that served all three roles. Though the name would eventually change to Finnboda 12. And then to Safe Esperia. And later on, to the Bibby Resolution. And after that . . . in short, a vessel with so many names, and so many fates, that to keep it in our sights—as the protagonist of this fascinating economic parable—Ian Kumekawa has no choice but to call it, simply, the Vessel.

Despite its sturdy steel structure, weighing 9,500 deadweight tons, the Vessel is a figure as elusive and abstract as the offshore market it comes to a world of island tax havens, exploited labor forces, free banking zones, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and mass incarceration, where even the prisoners are held offshore. Fitted with modular shipping containers, themselves the product of standardized global trade, the ship could become whatever the market demanded. Whether caught in an international dispute involving Hong Kong, Nigeria, Indonesia, and the Virgin Islands—to be settled in an English court of law—or flying yet another foreign “flag of convenience” to mask its ownership—the barge is ever a container for forces much larger than even its hulking self.

Empty Vessel is a jaw-dropping microhistory that speaks volumes about the global economy as a whole. In following the Vessel—and its Sister Vessel, built alongside it in Stockholm—from one thankless task to the next, Kumekawa connects the dots of a neoliberal world order in the making, where regulation is for suckers and “Made in USA” feels almost quaint.

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My Review: I love microhistories. They're so sweeping. They explain so much of life, and politics, and economics. Marc Levinson's terrific THE BOX: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, for a foundational read in this subject, is another sweeping microhistory to read and enjoy. Or maybe "value" is a better word; the prose in a microhistory is of secondary importance. Clarity is, or should be, the author of a microhistory's primary aim.

Author Kumekawa, Harvard historian by day, read that lesson, internalized it, and applies it to every piece of this complex-but-not-complicated story of the modern world using one barge's life history. The interconnectedness of the global economy, the ways and means of the greedy to avoid scrutiny...always, always it boils down to greed...and detailing the astonishing accumulation of profit from unglamourous quotidian needs-meeting.

What makes the story of a floatel/mobile military barracks/overflow prison as engrossing in this book is the carefully constructed mental diagram of interconnections of the barge's redesigns and refits and destinations. It was, however, that very complexity that knocked off my fifth star. Just too much work needed to follow them all to derive the full import of his points will cost even the most felicitous of writers a star. Shopping for the least profit-trimming places to "register" the barge...that's code for "who will take a small enough bribe for it to be cheaper than actual safety maintenance?"...as seaworthy and owned by a legitimate business has kept the author's research interesting. I expect his search history caused the FBI, NSA, and other initialism-yclept shadow dwellers a good deal of curiosity.

Why I myownself want you to read it is that it uses something very simple as a lens to focus attention on the quiet parts of capitalism that very badly need saying out loud. The money the owners of this barge collected was never huge, but was "protected" from taxation so greater in effect than simple face value. It is the fundament...double sense very much intended...of international capital's business model.

In case you're new here, I do not subscribe to the "greed is good" mindset.

Author Kumekawa's done us a solid in getting curious one day when he heard of a prison barge moored in New York City's river. (I think it's the East River, but can't be sure...could be the Bronx River, could be Long Island Sound, but I'm too lazy to look it up.) Where it's led him is the place I hoped it would go: The bank lobby where the capitalsts hide their ill-got gains from the people whose labor produces them.

Good choice for a read in the present political climate.

THE BOX, demystifying the invisible world-changing role of shipping

THE BOX: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
MARC LEVINSON
Princeton University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. "The Box" tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about.

Published on the fiftieth anniversary of the first container voyage, this is the first comprehensive history of the shipping container. It recounts how the drive and imagination of an iconoclastic entrepreneur, Malcom McLean, turned containerization from an impractical idea into a massive industry that slashed the cost of transporting goods around the world and made the boom in global trade possible.

But the container didn't just happen. Its adoption required huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports that aspired to be on the leading edge of a new technology. It required years of high-stakes bargaining with two of the titans of organized labor, Harry Bridges and Teddy Gleason, as well as delicate negotiations on standards that made it possible for almost any container to travel on any truck or train or ship. Ultimately, it took McLean's success in supplying U.S. forces in Vietnam to persuade the world of the container's potential.
Drawing on previously neglected sources, economist Marc Levinson shows how the container transformed economic geography, devastating traditional ports such as New York and London and fueling the growth of previously obscure ones, such as Oakland. By making shipping so cheap that industry could locate factories far from its customers, the container paved the way for Asia to become the world's workshop and brought consumers a previously unimaginable variety of low-cost products from around the globe.

Many thanks to the publisher for my ARC of the second edition

My Review: Technological disruptors play an immense role in human history. None more so than the humble shipping container, the subject of this four-hundred-page study by Economist and Author Levin. What began, I gather, as an interest in the life of Malcom McLean (no, I didn't misspell "Malcolm"), whose 1956 shipment of twenty-eight containers of his own design onto ships also modified to his design, to Houston, Texas, began the era of rapid globalization, turned into an economist's dream: a chance to study the economic and social and political impact of a disruptive technology before its fiftieth year of existence arrived. (2021 NOTE we are now in the sixty-fifth year of the container revolution, and even the pandemic can't stop the trains, ships, and trucks from rolling.)

It will surprise few that McLean's efforts to bring the container-shipping revolution to the world were opposed by the vested interests of the day, from the Interstate Commerce Commission to the International Longshoremen's Association. These behemoths, unstoppable and uncontrollable at the time, did their damnedest to impede, derail (!), and alter the disruptor into a new, toothless, challengeless arm of the status quo:

On domestic routes, government policy discouraged competition among ship lines. On international routes, rates for every commodity were fixed by conferences, a polite term for cartels, and the most important cargo, military freight, was handed out among U.S.-flag carriers without the nuisance of competitive bidding. Decisions about buying, building, or selling ships, about leasing terminals, and about sailing new routes all depended upon government directives.

So the bosses, the workers, and the government weren't on board with this containerization idea...but guess who was?

The United States Armed Forces.

As longshoremen collectively rolled over after an initial three-year contract negotiated in 1959, it was a signal of doom for The Labor Movement in US politics. The Armed Forces needed huge amounts of stuff, all kinds of stuff, in unprecedented mountains. And unlike World War II, there weren't strong backs everywhere glad to do it. But containers? Now, these babies would damned near do all the work that men used to do, and for a highly recoverable investment. SeaLand, as Malcom McLean had renamed his trucking outfit metastasized into a shipping conglomerate, stepped up to do the job. Cheaply, safely, efficiently.

That's a really exciting chapter in shipping history...followed by the urpsome evil profiteering regime we see today, unregulated shippers and deregulated producers of the poisons we're told we need to exist (and sadly enough, they're correct often enough to make re-regulation into a donnybrook the environment isn't likely to win). This is where reading Economist Levinson's American triumphalism become less pleasurable. While I wasn't old enough to fight in Vietnam, I was old enough to know I didn't like eating my dinner with Uncle Walter (Cronkite, for the younger crowd) intoning the number of dead boys rotting in a place I knew nothing much about and cared less for. The fact that they ate US-grown food and shot US-made bullets at an unprecedented rate was transparent to me then, and the subsequent use of that fact as a stick to bludgeon ever-more-pusillanimous "regulators" into loosening what protections are left for labor is illness-making.

As one would expect from a former editor of The Economist magazine, Author Levinson doesn't dawdle among the stylistic stargazer lilies. Also as one would expect from a book written by an economist, there are tables, equations, maps and graphs...all the accoutrements of learnèd academical case-making. But, and this is a key realization to learn, the author's sentences (while tending towards the sesquipedalian) are limpidly clear. He is tendentious, but not tedious, and this is a rare, delightful conjunction of traits.

Among this book's most merited accolades, according to his publisher's page for this title:

Winner of the 2007 Anderson Medal, Society for Nautical Research
Winner of the 2007 Bronze Medal in Finance/Investment/Economics, Independent Publisher Book Awards
Shortlisted for the 2006 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year
Honorable Mention for the 2006 John Lyman Book Award, Science and Technology category, North American Society for Ocean History
One of Financial Times (FT.com) Best Business Books of 2013 (chosen by guest critic Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft)