Anti-Summer Reading
This year, some of the most compelling nonfiction I've encountered has tackled dark and challenging themes: mental illness, nuclear weapons, and heinous crimes.
These are definitely not beach reads. Due to their heavy themes, I’m covering these books in a single email for those who might prefer to skip them. I’ll return in a couple of weeks with something more uplifting!
Michael Laudor appeared to have it all: a brilliant mind, degree from Yale, and job at a top consulting firms. But after he began to behave erratically, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia1 and spent a brief amount of time in a mental hospital. He went from being hospitalized to Yale Law School, where he had previously gained admission. There, he found a hugely supportive community of classmates and professors and fared relatively well. He sold the rights to his story to Hollywood, with Brad Pitt cast to play him, and began writing a memoir, all while living with his fiancée. Tragically, his worsening hallucinations led him to murder her.
While the story was well-covered at the time, The Greatest Minds is written by Jonathan Rosen, who was his close childhood friend. It’s very well written, with Rosen able to offer a unique perspective. Their friendship adds a different layer: it’s not just about Laudor’s story, but about Rosen’s feelings about Laudor and his story. It ends up a much more personal book and more relatable, covering their friendship and rivalry growing up.
The title refers to the “greatest minds” of psychiatry, who advocated against “institutionalizing” mentally ill people against their will, arguing that their communities, government programs, and medication could better treat them while respecting their autonomy. Rosen believes they went too far, and people who truly needed help or hospitalization are unable to access it. The government doesn’t care about your mental health, he points out, until you’ve committed a crime (and to wit, Laudor has spent the past decades in a facility after pleading insanity in the murder trial).
I don’t know enough about the issue to have a strong point of view, but it reminded me of Michael Shellenberger’s San Fransicko, where he speaks about how SF doesn’t we don’t force drug addicts to go through any kind of treatment. While respecting their rights on some level, it’s a far less sympathetic response - what if it was someone who you cared about and were close with?
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen
The book imagines what happens in the minutes and hours after a nuclear weapon is launched with the United States as its target. Despite its grim subject matter, it's a gripping, unputdownable read. I read it straight through on a flight. Without “spoiling” the book, here are some things I learned:
It is very hard to “shoot down” a nuclear missile. So if one is fired, it’s fair to assume that it will successfully land and explode somewhere
We have an incredibly robust monitoring system, though, and can pick up a potential attack via satellites seconds after launch
Given it only takes 30 minutes for a missile to travel halfway around the world, there isn’t enough time to evacuate a major city. But there is enough time to evacuate senior government officials and plan a counterstrike (which is entirely the President’s call, as only they have the authority to order a nuclear strike)
This is important as nuclear strategy revolves around deterrence, or convincing others that the consequences of attacking us are not worth it. To that end, the US (and other countries) have lots of redundancies and modes of retaliatory attacks:
There is the nuclear triad, the 3 different ways in which we can deploy nuclear weapons: land based (missile siloes), air based (bomber plans), and submarine based. Nuclear submarines are particularly effective given how hard they are to track
There is a bunch of discussion online whether the book over-exaggerates the risk of nuclear war. For example, missiles shot from US-based missile siloes need to fly over Russia to hit most other countries in Asia or the Middle East. Jacobsen sees this as massively risky and leading to potentially catastrophic misunderstandings. The critics would argue that there are other ways (planes, submarines) to deploy weapons which wouldn’t have this issue.
In either case, I’ve been thinking a lot about this book since reading it. Both because some of the science was interesting (who knew that some missiles navigate using the stars? Or that some of our missile systems relied on floppy disks until 2019?) and because of how truly destructive these weapons are. I spent time wondering what it’s like to work in a missile launch control center, hoping you never need to apply your training…
Other dark books I’ve “enjoyed” recently
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker. Story of a family with 12 children, of whom 6 were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Also falls into the category of “awful story but well written and compelling.”
Molly by Blake Butler. Blake Butler’s wife (Molly) ended her own life at age 39 and Butler soon learns shocking secrets about who she really was. When I wrote about “human cruelty” in Fortune’s Children, this book was on my mind.
Schizophrenia is a chronic mental disorder that distorts a person's thinking and perception, often causing hallucinations and delusions.