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Just finished The Escape Artist. Phenomenal!

The escape itself is extraordinary, but what stayed with me most was what happened afterwards.

Here was a first-hand account of what happened — detailed information about what was happening, how people were being transported and murdered. The length that was taken to verify its authenticity and then that information eventually made its way right up to the highest levels of Allied governments.

And yet the response feels so painfully inadequate.

Reports circulated. Meetings were held. Strongly worded letters and statements were issued. People debated what could or couldn’t be done. Meanwhile, the killing continued. Eventually something was done but it was done only for self interest.

I think that’s what makes the book feel so relevant today. We often look back at history and imagine that, if people in power had only known what was happening, surely they would have acted.

The Escape Artist challenges that comforting idea.

Sometimes they did know.

The information was there. The warnings were there. The evidence was there. And still politics, bureaucracy, competing priorities, misplaced trust and simple inertia could stand between knowing about an atrocity and actually doing something to stop it.

It’s very easy, with the benefit of history, to ask: “How could they let this happen?”

And yet it left me thinking about what is happening in the world right now that future generations will ask the same question about — and who are we trusting to tell us how to respond?

Phenomenal book. One that will stay with me for a long time.

Being in the tech space I’m always interested in books digital crime. Just finished Dark Wire by Joseph Cox and enjoyed it.

I’d heard of the encrochat and other busts so I was interested to hear how it happened.

The story is almost unbelievable. Rather than trying to break the encrypted phones being used by organised crime, the FBI essentially became the encrypted phone company themselves in a roundabout way. They helped distribute phones into criminal networks and then sat back while thousands of criminals unknowingly sent their messages straight to law enforcement.

It’s one of those true stories where you keep thinking, how did they actually pull this off?
Cox does a good job of explaining the technology without getting bogged down in it, and the best parts are watching ANOM spread almost entirely through trust.

Criminals recommended the phones to other criminals because they believed they were secure, which only made the network more valuable to the investigators watching it.

My only criticism is that the story is probably stronger than the characters. There are a lot of people coming in and out of the story due to the sheer scale of it and the ending was packed into the epilogue and rushed. Nobody really emerges as the central character you become invested in. ANOM itself almost becomes the main character. It’s clear that the author was limited to the public conversation of the criminals and nothing much more.

Still, it moves quickly, stays focused and, most importantly for me, actually builds towards something rather than wandering off into loosely connected side stories.

I really respect the author though for how he finished the book. In the last paragraph of the epilogue there is a great question.

If even an ambitious global operation such as this can’t lead to a tangible shift. What possibly can?

After all is said and done, it’s just pest control.

Now I know there was a post of this a few days ago but I decided to give it a go and ended up on the other side of the fence. Here is my 2c.

Gotta say I wasn’t overly impressed. In fact if I had not loved say nothing so much it would have gone onto my DNF pile at around the halfway point. It reads more like very good long-form journalism than a great narrative book. It is authoritative in an investigative sense and the story moves quickly, but it feels functional and the constant movement between incidents set me a drift emotionally from the story. The epilogue didn’t leave an impact with me and i can relate to the story of the golden venture people more than most.

Sister Ping’s is an interesting character but she never becomes quite as psychologically compelling as you expect. I could feel that he had limited access to her and when that happens it’s hard to build an attachment to the central character. I think more than anything that’s where it fell short for me. You understand what she did much better than who she was.

Sister Pings family dynamic screamed to be explored but wasn’t and most likely because he didn’t or couldn’t get access to that insight. Of what he did write, he could have cut by 100 pages and done without a lot of those had developed characters.

That being said it was published a decade before say nothing. You still see the investigative talent but perhaps not quite the narrative mastery that Say Nothing had.

I’ve just finished this book and I find it to be an amazing look into the mindset of those in command and/or in-action of a faction of that history in Northern Ireland. I love narrative non-fiction style and i think PRKs book to be exemplary.

I would like to find similar.

Based on a Reddit recommendation I am currently reading ‘some people need killing’ about the Philippines ‘government’s war’ on drugs. Absolutely mental stuff!

What books from your country would you recommend for an outsider in understanding the pulse of ‘that time’ ?

What a book!

Towards the end of this book there is a quote from Francis Bacon who once identified three inventions that, in his view, had transformed the world:

Printing, Gunpower and the compass.

They changed literature, warfare and navigation so profoundly that Bacon believed no empire or religion had exerted a greater influence on human affairs.

While they originated in China, it was thanks to the mongols that they seeped in Europe having being absorbed into the administrative machine of the vast Mongolian empire. That speaks to the greatest of Genghis as a strategist. He identities their own weakness as thoroughly as he did the enemy and evolved accordingly.

I picked this up expecting a biography of Genghis Khan and an account of the Mongol conquests. You certainly get that, particularly in the first half, but that isn’t really the book l. Genghis dies at the half way point. Weatherford spends the second have on the historiography of the Mongolian empire and how they connected the world.

The book is a perfect blend of history and historiography. It gives you the complete story of how he rose to power. How he turned his back on heretical rights in favour of meritocracy in all things from politics to battle. How he broke tribes apart, mixed their members into new military units and promoted people on ability and loyalty rather than simply ancestry. A man of relatively humble birth could rise through the Mongol system if he proved capable.

There is an almost modern ruthlessness to the logic of it. Genghis was remarkably uninterested in pedigree. He ignored nothing of value and absorbed knowledge. Set up schools of learning for children of every social order and promised all if you can be of value you would find work

The author talks to how the Mongols had no great interest in proving that Mongols were superior to Persian, that one religion possessed the truth, or that Chinese engineering should be rejected because it was Chinese.

If somebody knew how to build a better siege engine, they used him. The Persian administrators understood taxation, they employed them. The Muslim astronomers possessed useful knowledge, they brought them into the system. The Chinese engineers had superior technology, they moved them across the empire.

One of the ideas in the book that really stayed with me is Weatherford’s description of the Mongols as helping to ‘break the monopoly of thought held by local elites’ such as the wealthy and priests. That is a much more profound consequence of the empire than simply moving silk and spices along trade routes.

For most people throughout history, knowledge had been intensely local. What you knew about medicine, religion, astronomy, mathematics or the natural world was largely determined by where you happened to be born and by the institutions controlling knowledge in that society.

The Mongol Empire smashed enormous holes through those intellectual boundaries.

Chinese, Persian, Arab, European and Central Asian knowledge suddenly circulated through a political and commercial network stretching across much of Eurasia.

The Mongols helped create one of history’s great periods of intellectual cross-pollination.And Europe was one of its beneficiaries.

There is another fascinating contrast in the book:, armoured knights versus the mongol military system. European warfare still placed enormous cultural value on the individual warrior: aristocratic lineage, personal bravery, armour and martial honour.

The Mongols cared about winning.

They used intelligence networks, scouts, coordinated manoeuvres, feigned retreats, psychological warfare, engineers and specialist troops. They happily learned from their enemies and incorporated superior technology into their own armies.

The knight was an elite warrior while the mongols were an elite system.

One thing I would say in criticism is Weatherford walks a dangerous line throughout the book.There has been a centuries-long tendency to portray Genghis Khan and the Mongols as little more than bloodthirsty barbarians who descended upon civilisation and destroyed everything in their path.

Weatherford is deliberately trying to correct that picture.

At times I think he corrects it a little too enthusiastically.

The Mongols were astonishingly destructive. Entire cities were devastated. Populations were massacred. Terror was deliberately cultivated as a military weapon. Whatever their later contributions to trade, religious tolerance and cultural exchange, those achievements shouldn’t sanitise the means by which their empire was created.

Weatherford occasionally seems so determined to rescue Genghis Khan from the caricature of the barbarian that he comes close to creating another caricature: Genghis the enlightened meritocrat, champion of religious freedom and father of globalisation.

The truth is surely more uncomfortable. A conqueror capable of horrifying violence and the creator of political innovations that were extraordinarily effective.

An empire could destroy societies while simultaneously connecting civilisations.

In fact, one of the darkest parts of the book demonstrates precisely that contradiction.

The same network that allowed merchants, technologies and ideas to move across Eurasia also allowed something else to move. The plague.

The Black Death travelled through the interconnected world that Eurasian commerce had helped create. And in the end this was the force that finally stopped and imploded the Mongolian empire.