 The Vikings: A New History
By Neil Oliver Published in March 2021 400 Pages Thibault’s Score: 3/5 The Vikings A New History is a short survey history of the vikings. I basically came in knowing almost nothing about them, and thought it was a good place to start my historical research. I enjoyed listening to it, and would recommend it as a good starting point. Oliver covers many different aspects of viking history. I liked that he starts by giving the context of Scandinavia - explaining the ethnic Sami and pre-viking peoples who lived in the region. He then explains their journey into Eastern Europe down the rivers, founding what later became Russia. He also discusses their raids in the North Sea, as well as their colonization of the Falklands, Orkney, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, and eventually the Americas. The first half was captivating; but I wasn’t able to focus very effectively on the second half due to personal issues I had to deal with in the real world. As a result I personally didn’t enjoy it for purely selfish reasons. I gave it a 3 even though I would recommend it due to my own weaknesses.
0 Comments
 A Brief History of Anglo Saxon Britain
By Geoffrey Hindley Published in January 2006 320 Pages Thibault’s Score: 2/5 A Brief History of Anglo Saxon Britain is a survey history of the Anglo Saxons starting with their arrival in the late Roman period until the Norman Conquest. What is remarkable about this book is how little of it I remember. I listened to the audiobook several days ago and somehow retained absolutely nothing. The book contains a survey of the facts, but gets lost in the many complicated relationships between warchiefs and kings. It spends significant time talking about the conversion of the Anglo Saxons to Christianity. I knew that the Anglo Saxons were pagan but didn’t realize that the Anglo Saxons retained their paganism for some time in England. I thought they immediately converted after conquering the culturally and technologically superior Britons. Instead, they maintained polytheism, only slowly converting over the course of two hundred years. By the time the vikings came, some groups were only still in the process of converting. The conflict between Celtic Christianity and Roman Christianity is very interesting as well. It also contains a detailed - and interesting - “hagiography” of King Alfred the Great. I didn’t know very much about King Alfred, just that he was deposed, and that when he was on the run, he burnt some pies. I knew that he beat the vikings. What I didn’t realize was that he built significant amounts of infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and most importantly, fortifications to stop future viking raids. I also didn’t know that he was a patron of arts and scholarship. He commissioned the creation of the Anglo Saxon chronicle. Finally, the last major part that I remember is what happened to the Britons after the Norman conquest. Initially, the Normans attempted to impose French culture on the Anglo Saxons. They explicitly attempted to raze Anglo Saxon churches and monuments in what the author calls “cultural genocide.” Despite this, they slowly adopted more and more Anglo Saxon customs over time. Within a century and a half, the Normans were speaking English and using it to write laws and deal with court cases. It is important to note that today we don’t talk about “Normano-Britons.” Instead, we talk about “Anglo Saxons.” Many cultures existed in England prior to the Anglo Saxons such as the Romans and Celts; many cultures existed concurrently such as the Scottish and Welsh; and many invaded after such as the Vikings and Normans. Despite all of the competition for cultural hegemony, Anglo Saxon culture won out. The writing style is boring but clear enough. There is nothing special about this book. It doesn’t waste too much time on pointless academic solipsisms. I do not recommend this book. If you are specifically studying this period of history in depth, it is likely too basic for you. It might be a decent study guide for a PHD student new to the period.  Treasury's War: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare
By Juan Zarate Published in September 2013 512 Pages Thibault’s Score: 3/5 Treasury’s War is an insider account of how the US government invented and deployed targeted sanctions. The book was written by Juan Zarate, a neoconservative who was appointed by Bush to lead his sanctions efforts in the US treasury. He held various other roles in the Bush and Obama administrations. Now he runs his own private intelligence and consulting firm. Prior to the 9/11 attacks most sanctions were embargos. They banned Americans from doing business with entire categories of goods or countries. After 9/11 the Bush administration leveraged new technologies to develop what it called “targeted sanctions.” After the September 11 attacks, the US government brought on board experts who had history fighting organized crime, rather than terrorism and nation states. These new experts developed targeted sanctions. Zarate was one of these anti-organized crime experts. Targeted sanctions target specific people or companies, rather than entire countries or industries. Targeted sanctions were enforced by fining and penalizing banks that did business with rogue states or terrorists. This had the advantage of being unilateral enforceable by US authorities without involving other companies. This meant that, for example, a Lebanese bank that banked Al Qaeda risked getting fined and cut off from the US financial system; as a result nearly all banks in the world including in countries like Russia and China would follow US sanctions. This history of targeted sanctions is one of incredible success, partial success, and finally reading through the lines, the ultimate collapse of the US dollar. Zarate, being one of the people who invented this sanctions technique, is very positive. Many of my judgments come from interpreting his information through the lens of my own outside information. Targeted sanctions may have been what ultimately led to US victory over Al Qaeda after 9/11. Al Qaeda was largely funded through donations from ideologically sympathetic Saudis and Muslim businessmen. When these businessmen faced targeted sanctions which threatened to cut them off from the global banking system, they withdrew their support for terrorists. As the funding dried up, so did Al Qaeda recruitment and attacks. Now Al Qaeda still exists, but is almost powerless. The Bush administration expanded targeted sanctions to target rogue states such as Syria, Iran, and North Korea. These had mixed results. On one hand, the US successfully seized billions of dollars of assets from rogue state leaders. This forced them to negotiate. On the other hand, political inconsistencies made them seem biased and unfair; internal US government disputes made their rollouts chaotic; and overuse allowed American enemies to slowly develop an immunity against these measures. Zarate’s book ends in 2013. However, these are the very same sanctions that would be used against Russia in 2014 and 2021. These targeted sanctions have completely failed to move Russian policy. In fact, it has significantly weakened the US dollar. Many nations now distrust the US, which is no longer seen as an impartial actor. Countries like Russia, Iran, and China are now building large parallel banking systems that bypass the US dollar entirely - and threaten the US economy. I decided to pick up this book after Trump’s failed “Liberation Day” where he attempted to force all US trade partners to renegotiate trade deals. Like targeted sanctions, Liberation Day has contributed to a significant weakening of the US dollar. Targeted sanctions have had their moments. For example, US officials waited to freeze Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s assets right when it was the most critical. Right before it came time for Gaddafi to pay his soldiers and mercenaries, tens of billions of dollars of his assets were frozen. The unpaid mercenaries and soldiers then refused to fight, contributing to his resounding defeat during the civil war. Zarate also details many underhanded and sketchy government tactics. First, Zarate describes how the treasury pressured SWIFT into monitoring transactions and handing over sensitive data. SWIFT is based in Belgium, and is supposed to be impartial. Zarate and the US government destroyed this partiality by politicizing it; but attempted to keep it secret in an attempt to preserve the appearance of SWIFT’s neutrality. Later, when the New York Times caught wind that SWIFT was being used to monitor the financing of potential terrorists, the US Treasury attempted to silence the New York Times journalists and pressured them to withdraw their coverage. Zarate also describes how US treasury officials used non-legal means to pressure banks to monitor their bank accounts and shut down terrorists. US Treasury officials will approach banks (including non-US banks) and tell them that they have intelligence that terrorists are operating within the bank. They will then send officials to meet with bank leadership and compliance officers, under conditions of strict secrecy. They will hand over intelligence to the bank that suggests terrorists are operating within it and make recommendations. Banks will then privately take measures to close accounts and freeze assets of suspected terrorists - without having received direct orders from the US government, which may not govern it. I can’t help but wonder if similar tactics were used to freeze the accounts of right wing commentators like Lauren Southern and Richard Spencer during the late 2010s. Although it wasn’t Zarate’s intention, this book explains to me why the US dollar is in the process of falling. The world reserve currency needs to be neutral. It also underscores the importance of neutral and apolitical cryptocurrencies which are outside of the control of nation states. This book will not be of interest to most average readers. However, due to a lot of my specific AML and CFT work, I found it very interesting. It also informed my geopolitical understanding and investments. I would recommend it to a narrow band of researchers studying money laundering and sanctions but not to a general audience.  The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age
By David E. Sanger Published in June 2018 386 Pages Thibault’s Score: 3/5 This book is an account of the beginnings of US Army Cyber Command. It chronicles how cyberwarfare came to play a major role in the United States’ foreign policy and strategic planning. David E. Sanger is a well known New York Times journalist, and the head correspondent for Washington DC. The Perfect Weapon is a very clearly written historical account of how cyberwarfare went from a neglected “side quest” during the George Bush administration to a mainstay of American strategy during the Obama administration. It perfectly captures how frustratingly incompetent the US government was during the early days of cyberwarfare, and how the American government was repeatedly caught off-guard by China and Russia. I would like to start this review by highlighting a side point - how heavily influenced Sanger’s thinking is by the US government. Sanger takes a very mainstream pro-government perspective. This somewhat stiffles his thinking. For example, he seems to believe that Edward Snowden is a traitor and that the US population would be better off not knowing that they were being spied upon. He goes as far to admit that he lets American intelligence officials review all of his articles, and censor them, before publication. In some cases, he proudly describes these censorship meetings in detail. Although it isn’t the main point of the book, reading through the lines really allowed me to see firsthand how the New York Times is directly censored and influenced by the American government. Sanger doesn’t make any effort to hide this. In my mind, this is extremely discrediting, because I was taught that the role of journalists was to speak truth to power. Once you accept this book for what it is - a sort of “officially sanctioned history” of US cyberwarfare, it is very interesting. The US has had several incredible cyberwarfare successes. The most famous - and obvious - example is the deployment of Stuxnet. Stuxnet is a computer virus which caused serious physical damage to Iran’s nuclear reactors by making them overheat. There are two types of cyberwarfare. One is obvious - sabotage, espionage, cyber-ransoming, stealing secrets, etc… This is what most people think about. There is a second - far more insidious - type of cyberwarfare. This type of cyberwarfare relies on using social media to spread deceptive propaganda to get them to act in ways that damage an enemy government. The Russian government’s Internet Research Agency is a semi-privatized online troll group set up by Yevgeny Prigozhin - the same person who also established the legendary Wagner Group. The Internet Research Agency would cause chaos by doing things such as using Facebook to organize a Black Lives Matter protest in Texas from afar; and organizing a white nationalist rally using 4Chan nearby. They would then observe to see if anyone showed up and if fights broke out. Their efforts may have had a significant impact on the 2016 election of President Trump. In Sanger’s mind, influence campaigns organized by groups such as the Internet Research Agency justify government-encouraged censorship of social media. Although Sanger doesn’t directly make any policy prescriptions, he seems to envision a model where the government publishes vague “responsible social media” guidelines; and it's up to private companies to decide how to specifically enforce them. This book was valuable to me, because it helped me get into the minds of the people who are driving US cyber warfare policy. Professionally, I am working for a Venture Capital syndicate which finances some projects which may have some cybersecurity implications. I don’t recommend this book for casual observers because it's not great. But if you really want to go deep into cyberwarfare, this could be part of your journey. It just wouldn’t be the most important or first part. Finally, cyberwarfare evolves quickly. 2018 is a very long time in the past in that world. This book has lost a lot of relevance post-COVID and post-Trump’s second term. I think it will be completely irrelevant in two or three years due to the implications of AI.  How the Irish Saved Civilization
By Thomas Cahill Published in March 1995 246 Pages Thibault’s Score: 2/5 This book is entertaining but stupid. I enjoyed reading it. Something about the writing style is amusing. The historical anecdotes are entertaining. However, based on everything that I know about history, this book gets a lot of stuff wrong. The big picture is correct - there were some Irish monks in the early Middle Ages who played a key role in the preservation and transmission of ancient literature to the present. These Irish monks travelled across Europe, founding dozens of monasteries, including (weirdly enough) in St. Gallen Switzerland, where I used to live. However, the detailed step by step narrative made me cringe. At some points I laughed. My favorite stupid claim is when the author goes on a very long diatribe about how St. Augustine was the first person to write a first person narrative autobiography. He acknowledges that while St. Augustine isn’t the first person to use the word “I” ; he is the first to write about his own psychology and feelings. This is a stupid claim. Some of the oldest pieces of writing we have are written in the first person. Shocker: as soon as people can write, they write about themselves. We have some fragmentary tablets from Sumeria dated to 3400 BC called the Kushim tablets which contain some accounts of people talking about doing business. The first detailed autobiography is the Cuthean Legend of Naram-Sin written in 1900 BC. By the time of classical Greece, there are countless autobiographies. The favorite that I have read is Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Although I haven’t read them fully, I have listened to clips on YouTube from Herodotus’ History and Xenophon’s Anabasis. These are all autobiographies with deep psychological self reflections. Some Roman autobiographies - such as Cesar - did use the third person, but likely out of respect. Cesar was dictating to a scribe, and the scribe didn’t want to claim glory for Cesar’s acts so the scribe wrote “Cesar crossed the Rubicon” etc… That being said, only about 40 Roman books have survived in full, and about 150 in fragmentary form. So if you narrow the category of book arbitrarily to “fully intact autobiography written in the first person with deep psychological reflections about spiritual themes that don’t primarily seek to give advice to others” then St. Augustine might be a first. This book is full of weird bold claims like that which completely fall apart under scrutiny. There are sweeping claims about the role of women in Ireland and the rest of Europe. The author makes the claim that women in Ireland had many rights while they were enslaved in Europe. Once again, some context is needed. That may be true to an extent, but the Irish practiced sex slavery. On the other hand, there were many great women in antiquity. On the political side, women like Livia (the wife of Augustus) and Theodora (the wife of Justinian) essentially governed many aspects of the Roman state. On the scientific side, there are thinkers like the mathematician Hypatia or Plato’s female student Diotima. Although much has been lost, we have some fragments of many great female scholars in antiquity - there is an early chemist called Cleopatra (not to be confused with the Egyptian queen), a grammarian and historian called Agallis, and a philosopher and mathematician called Aesara. Just as today some women in some places live horrible lives, and others live good lives. To me the hallmark of bad history is when authors make very bold sweeping claims about “the first” or “there were no cases before” which can very easily be contested after about 15 minutes on Google. Good history might instead say “a remarkably early example” or “one of the earliest.” I find that a lot of popular history books tend to fall into this trap. Although I don’t know much about Irish history, there are enough mistakes in the parts of the book that I do know about that it casts a shadow of doubt on the rest. That being said, the book is very well written. At the time, in 1995, it was a best seller. The writing was so engaging that I finished it, and was able to chuckle and overlook the many mistakes or inaccuracies. I wouldn’t recommend this book. It will be boring for historians because its very basic. As for non-historians, the book is dangerous because it is well written but full of mistakes. If you want to read it, be sure to do so with a very skeptical mindset.  The Lazarus Heist: From Hollywood to High Finance: Inside North Korea's Global Cyber War
By Geoff White Published in August 2022 304 Pages Thibault’s Score: 3/5 I remember growing up learning about the insane isolated state of North Korea. However, what most people do not realize is that under Kim Jong Un, North Korea significantly began opening up. North Korea opened up by becoming a hub of global organized crime. North Korea has pivoted several times. First, it started printing “superdollars.” Superdollars are very high quality US dollar counterfeits. They were developed in North Korea’s labs by the country’s top scientists. Later, Korea began getting involved in the production of illegal drugs. North Korea would finally hit the jackpot when it discovered cybercrime. The communist educational system produced many high level computer scientists but no private sector to employ them. The government provided a select hand picked few with work opportunities, where they would get access to the uncensored internet. North Korean hackers would spend the 2010s doing a wide variety of crimes. They would hack Sony in retribution for a film that satirized North Korea’s leadership. They would steal money from Bangladesh’s central bank. They would unleash ransomware which would hold people’s computer files hostage unless they ponied up Bitcoin. They would create mock credit cards and use runners to withdraw cash. I found that accounts of North Korean money laundering to be the most interesting aspect of this book. Learning the details - and how investigators uncovered said details - kept me on the edge of my seat. Something about the book’s writing felt very sterile. The author felt very removed from the action. Simultaneously, there was sometimes too much of a focus on the humans involved and not the big picture. I would recommend this book to people who want to learn more about North Korea’s cyber operations.  King Arthur's Wars: The Anglo-Saxon Conquest of England
By Jim Storr Published in June 2016 302 Pages Thibault’s Score: 2/5 This book is a boring and poorly paced account of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain. I did not finish it. Roughly 20% of the book consists of an explanation of the methods the historian will use for the remaining 80% of the book. When you finally get past the many warnings, and into the actual history, you get a disorganized jumble of facts that do not connect well to each other. This book falls into a very uncomfortable niche: it is too simple for professional historians, but too technical for casual readers. Writing history books is hard, and sometimes they flop.  Permanent Record
By Edward Snowden Published in September 2019 352 Pages Thibault’s Score: 5/5 This book is an absolute must read book to understand how the American deep state works. Edward Snowden was a high level CIA and NSA contractor. In 2013, he revealed to Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald what is now common knowledge - that the government collects all data on the planet, and stores it forever. All phone calls, text messages, Facebook posts, Twitter DMs, Discord conversations, word documents, internal business memos, powerpoint presentations, video calls, and other files you may have are stored and monitored by the NSA. At the time of his revelations Snowden had everything - a 6 figure salary, a beautiful fiancée, and a house in tropical Hawaii. He would lose everything after his revelations. The government would cancel his passport while transiting through Russia, exiling him there. Although the government had forced him to go to Russia in the first place, it would then use his exile there as proof of his treason. Snowden’s revelations were probably the single biggest news story of 2013. Now, they have all been forgotten. However, since then something major has changed. In 2024, everyone understands that the internet is not a free place. It is somewhere you will be monitored, tracked, and manipulated. Snowden has been forgotten by the younger generation. To my shock, many educated, smart Gen Z kids have never heard of him. They couldn’t believe me when I told them about Snowden, and asked me about what this guy’s “theory” was. The fact that the government propaganda would train the kids to think that Snowden was just some bargain basement conspiracy theorist rather than an actual insider shows how insidious propaganda is. But there is some significant hope. Millennials still believe in the institutions of America. My generation thinks that although there is some corruption, the government and its institutions are fundamentally benevolent. Gen Z kids assume that the government and its institutions are fundamentally corrupt. The single most interesting revelation to me in the book was about the structure of the deep state. Snowden often worked for companies such as Dell or Perot Systems. He rarely directly worked for the NSA. The deep state has been privatized. The very word “deep state” is a misnomer - it implies that the government is in the driving seat, making all decisions. In Snowden’s case, the private contractors were the technologically advanced elites. The government employees were just the help desk workers and bureaucrats. He reveals that the private contractors would drive policies, carry out plans, and make the key decisions. There is a tripartite hierarchy within the deep state. At the bottom, there is the private sector - everyone outside of the three letter intelligence agencies and the regulatory state. In the middle, there is the actual government - the agencies like the CIA or NSA as well as economic regulatory bodies. At the top are the small number of private parties that benefit which dictate policy. This book is very well written. Snowden comes off as someone that I would be friends with. It reads like a thriller. If you want to learn about the deep state, start here. My own intellectual journey, in part, started with Edward Snowden. No matter how much you think you know about the shadow government, whether its nothing or a lot, I still recommend reading this book.  A Brief History of King Arthur
By Mike Ashley Published in April 2010 384 Pages Thibault’s Score: 3/5 Although I enjoyed this book, it is probably not for you. This book is, for the most part, a very detailed discussion of the historiography surrounding the historicity of King Arthur. The author assumes that the reader already has extensive knowledge of King Arthur, the time period, and the specific legends surrounding post-Roman Britain. I have actually read several of the primary sources upon which the author draws - namely Gildas, Bede, and Nennius. I also have already extensively studied the time period. Finally, I also am very familiar with academic history. As a result, this book was comprehensible to me - even though at times I still struggled with some parts, especially when he discusses the calculation of dates and easter cycles. The book isn’t a history per say. Instead, it is an in-depth discussion of the merits and dismerits of various sources. I find historiography very interesting, and liked the book. The chapters concerning the dating methods relative to the various sources were the most interesting. The writing style is good. A lot of the time academic writing is full of bullshit filler text. There is no thanking of professors, no arguing against imaginary opponents, and no use of unnecessarily technical or pseudo intellectual language. As far as academic histories go, this one had some of the best writing. I probably do not recommend this book. If you are a professional historian who is already familiar with the legends, sources, and history, then reading this could be a nice way to go into depth and disentangle myth from fact. But if you are a casual student of history, this isn’t a book for you.  When McKinsey Comes to Town
By Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe Published in October 2022 624 Pages Thibault’s Score: 2/5 This book is a very mediocre leftist attack piece against a target that deserves much more serious criticism. The book jumps hastily from example to example about why McKinsey is evil. I agree with the authors and overall also think that McKinsey is probably evil. However, we have completely different reasons why. I’ve worked with companies very similar to McKinsey, and although I haven’t worked with McKinsey I’ve interacted with their people quite a few times. The authors blame McKinsey for behavior such as firing workers, offshoring, and high executive pay. However, all of these are natural results of market forces and government regulations outside of the control of McKinsey. Blaming individual companies for responding to government regulations is like blaming drug dealers for the war on drugs (when in fact drug dealers only exist because drugs are illegal in the first place). At the same time, the authors argue that McKinsey lobbies for Ayn Rand’s dog-eat-dog form of capitalism. Every McKinsey report that I have seen, every single LinkedIn post, and every employee suggests the opposite to me. As far as I can tell, they are all crypto-Marxists pushing for an economic system predicated on state control of industry. McKinsey’s front page is full of SDG language indicative of government regulations. The authors suggest that McKinsey makes companies more profitable, at least in the short term, but destroys them in the long term. I’ve come to the conclusion that McKinsey is a scam company that just takes money without doing anything. When my father worked at Apple, he came right after McKinsey had consulted. He, and other executives, discovered that McKinsey had been charging Apple high consulting fees for copy-pasted templates that they circulated at other Bay Area companies. He was ecstatic when Steve Jobs did not renew their contracts. I quit reading halfway through this book because it is clearly written by people who have not done any business at a high level. It is written by outsiders, rather than insiders. The authors don’t understand how McKinsey actually works, or how business works, and are trying to piece together a narrative based on sob stories and news reports. |
Thibault SerletMost of my articles are book reviews, but I also write about many other topics. Archives
June 2025
Categories |
RSS Feed