Book Time #6: Boeing, Soccer, Nazis
Welcome back to another edition of Book Time! Three announcements:
You can now view every book I have ever recommended at this link, which is more browsable than the Book Time archives or the Bookshop page. I'll also include a link at the bottom of each edition for easy access.
The American Urbanist starter pack was a success, based on my highly proprietary internal metric of Good Vibes. So I'm planning to keep the starter pack thing going, penciling in one new starter pack per year. That should give me time to consider at least 20 books on the subject without overloading my queue. 2024's starter pack will be New York City. I am taking recommendations for books to consider.
For those of you who follow my journalism, I am no longer at VICE. I have a six month contract at a new thing (announcement coming soon) but have no idea what comes after that. Exciting/scary!
I'd love to hear from you! Have any titles (other than The Power Broker, duh) that I need to consider for the NYC starter pack? Have any other thoughts about this or any other aspect of Book Time? Want to discuss future work opportunities/ideas? Give me a shout by replying to this email.
Now, it's Book Time.
Current Events Recommendation: Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, Peter Robison
I read Flying Blind in the fall of 2022 with low expectations. Books written by journalists about major news stories are all too often rush jobs that are little more than expansions on their original stories with some Behind The Scenes details and historical clips worked in. Not so with Flying Blind, which is more the product of a decade of reporting that Robison could finally sell a book on because people suddenly cared.
The end result is a spectacular and entertaining but disturbing look into how one of America's major corporations killed hundreds of people and suffered few consequences as a result. It is also not just about Boeing, as the business philosophy the airplane manufacturer adopted is common across big corporations. I still think about this book all the time, especially when I'm booking a flight. I know statistically speaking the safety difference is negligible, but since I read this book, I always book a flight on an Airbus if I can.
Related: Faster, Higher, Farther: How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud, Jack Ewing // Comeback: The Fall & Rise of the American Automobile Industry, Paul Ingrassia and Joseph White
Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution, Ryan O’Hanlon
Any idiot can write a book about how much they know, especially if they don’t know much. In Net Gains, Ryan pulls off the real trick. He wrote a book about how much he doesn’t know about the thing he’s spent his whole life thinking about.
Despite the obvious temptation, Net Gains cannot be described as “Moneyball for soccer.” Net Gains is much better than that. For all of Michael Lewis’s storytelling and character-building chops, Moneyball is an overconfident book by an overconfident guy about overconfident men. It is an easy book with an easy story and easy answers. Some people like that stuff because it’s comforting to think all the answers to our complicated problems are inside the brain of an especially clever person or at the bottom of a neatly-organized spreadsheet.
For my part, I’ll take Ryan’s self-aware deep dive into the burgeoning world of soccer analytics instead (I use his first name because, full disclosure, Ryan and I go back a while; ten years ago he edited a story I wrote about toilets). Rather than geniuses who have it all figured out, we meet a cast of brilliant, eccentric characters who feel compelled to try to answer one of the most vexing questions of our age: What makes a soccer team good? All these geniuses succeed in some sense, but in a larger sense, the more they figure out, the further away they get from the answer.
Related: The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer, David Goldblatt
Bonus Q&A with Ryan O'Hanlon, author of Net Gains
Book Time: What was the most influential book you read as you reported Net Gains?
O'Hanlon: I read every Michael Lewis book I hadn't read, just so I could have some of his little narrative tricks kind of just kicking around in my head as I actually wrote the book, but Christopher McDougall's Born to Run was probably the most influential. It's an incredibly controversial book and I'm not going to get into whether or not you should run barefoot—OK, I lied: don't run barefoot—but it served as a model for how to blend reporting, narrative, first-person essay, and scientific research into a compelling, book-length argument.
What's your favorite soccer book (that you didn't write)?
I love The Italian Job, by my colleague Gab Marcotti and the late Gianluca Vialli. It's about a hard-scrabble group of criminals who try to steal gold—just kidding. It's an examination of the differences between English and Italian soccer culture; the emotional vs. the cerebral, the physical vs. the technical. Vialli played most of his career in and for Italy, but he also played for and managed Chelsea, in England. It's fantastic.
What’s your favorite non-fiction book you read on any subject over the last year?
Easy: Buda's Wagon, the history of the car bomb, by the late Mike Davis. I want to be clear: this isn't a guide to making a car bomb! No, Davis examines the rise of the car bomb as a response to the rise of airborne artillery. Oppressors now could cause all kinds of damage by shooting from the skies, so marginalized groups developed the car bomb as a cheap way to efficiently cause similar levels of damage. Feels especially relevant today.
Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front, Charles Gallagher
For a book that was released in 2021, Nazis of Copley Square spends an awful lot of space trying to convince the reader why we ought to care about a domestic fascist organization that combined religious fervor with a personality cult and virulent anti-Semitism in an attempt to overthrow a democratically-elected government in the name of God and Freedom. Seems obvious to me.
The book is exquisitely researched using never-before-released documents from police and military agencies all over the world, but the book’s greatest flaw is that it doesn’t recognize its greatest strength. It possesses an utterly self-evident thesis. The fascists are back; they probably never left.
The Christian Front, a relatively small but fervent—is there any other kind of Nazi?—Catholic extremist organization based in Brooklyn and Boston during the late 1930s and early 1940s, had tangled theological roots on which the book spends more time than we need. I didn’t necessarily mind because I learned a lot about Catholicism, but none of it ultimately matters. Any Catholic tenet was the wax that fit their anti-Semitic, anti-Communistic mold. Less convincing is the portion of the book dedicated to the group’s links to a Nazi spy. The links are irrefutable; I’m far less convinced about the impact on the course of the war.
The real revelation of the book is just how many authorities looked the other way on the Christian Front, even as they were amassing bombs, rifles, and literally stealing automatic weapons from National Guard posts for their revolution. What interested me most was the extra-long leash the Christian Front was given by the authorities despite literally going around yelling “Heil Hitler” during World War II.
On this point, Gallagher spends just the right amount of time on why this historical amnesia matters. “It means that when those principles reappear in the mouths of citizens, they seem shocking, unrecognizable,” he writes, even though they’re anything but. “We are left to cope anew.”
Related: Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, Alan Brinkley // The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930, Kenneth Jackson