Looks like it's time for another new book list, even though I posted the last batch of 40 roughly two weeks ago, on July 23. Next one is likely to come shortly, given how much I have left over. The previous posts have been collected here.

John Anderson: Follow the Money: How George W Bush and the Texas Republicans Hog-Tied America (2007, Scribner): Michael Lind's Made in Texas: George W Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics is probably the most convincing Bush book I've read thus far, and this seems to be along those lines. Bush and his Texas political cronies managed to take over the Republican national machine, suddenly pushing the country far right. The more behind the money behind the better.

Jurgen Brauer/Hubert van Tuyll: Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History (2008, University of Chicago Press): Strikes me as a cheap argument, but the juxtaposition of economic and military logic, all those rational actors in pursuit of madness, is likely to offer some peculiar edification. But note that the economics of war has been drenched in even more red ink than blood for a long time now.

Gary Brecher: War Nerd (paperback, 2008, Soft Skull Press): Reportedly a data entry clerk in Fresno, CA, writing a column for the Moscow-based The Exile, Matt Taibbi's home for much of the 1990s. Scattered columns. Loves everything about the history of war. Doesn't think the US is very good at it.

Jerome R Corsi: Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (2008, Threshold Editions): Author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry cashes in on another election. Came out same day as David Freddoso's The Case Against Barack Obama: The Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate, with the same discounts and promo push. At this point Corsi is leading in sales, #7 on Amazon vs. #15 for Freddoso. Both books show extreme 5-star/1-star splits.

Meghnad Desai: Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (2002; paperback, 2004, Verso): Returns to Marx after the collapse of the Soviet Union to find a thinker who saw capitalism as a necessary stage to socialism, not something one can simply oppose but must move through and beyond -- actually, a position broadly understood before Lenin tried to fudge an exception. As far as I understand it, I think Desai is right. However, it's not clear to me what the value might be of trying to salvage Marx from the Marxists. More recently wrote: Rethinking Islam: The Ideology of the New Terror.

Michael Dobbs: One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (2008, Knopf): Looks like a major history on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. I just read Tony Judt's short book review on the subject, and found it gripping. Not that I'm up for 448 pages on the subject.

Richard Ellis: Tuna: A Love Story (2008, Knopf): More prosaically, the story of tuna: oversized, overfished, sooner or later due to be destroyed, either directly or through farming. Ellis previously wrote: The Empty Ocean, which seems to be the basic book on overfishing, although also cf. Charles Clover: The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat (new in paperback from University of California Press), and Paul Molyneaux: Swimming in Circles: Aquaculture and the End of Wild Oceans.

Rick Fantasia/Kim Voss: Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement (paperback, 2004, University of California Press): On the labor movement and its prospects, more basically on the political economics of work, the factors pushing wages down, not least the virtual disappearance of workers from the American social imagination.

Thomas Frank: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (2008, Metropolitan): I snapped this up and will get to it sooner or later. It's very much up the line of what I've been thinking about, and doubtless has a lot of useful details -- especially on the corruption that has become so rampant under the Republicans. Also picked up James Galbraith's The Predator State, which strikes me as more likely to teach me something I don't already know.

David Freddoso: The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate (2008, Regnery): The right's first big hatchet job on Obama, rushed into print after the expiry date on dozens of Hillary Clinton books lapsed. Bound for the bestseller lists: Borders introduced it with a 40% discount; Amazon with 45%. Same treatment for Swift Boater Jerome R Corsi: Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (2008, Threshold Editions).

Jeffrey A Frieden: Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2006; paperback, 2007, WW Norton): Global history of capitalism in the 20th century, with its obvious fall in the 1930s and a fairly long stretch of expansion after WWII. Seems like it might be a useful overview.

James K Galbraith: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008, Free Press): I'm not sure what it means, but the first assertion in the title may help to clear the air. What I suspect is: once they seize power (as they have done), conservatives see the state as a tool for advancing their (and to a lesser extent their sponsors') interests, regardless of whatever propaganda they spewed out on the way to the top. Of course, there are other ways of looking at what they've done, such as the promotion of crony capitalism monopolies, another way their practice runs counter to free markets. Galbraith is a sharp economist; this could be a very important book. (It's already on my shelf.)

Rob Gifford: China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power (paperback, 2008, Random House): Travel book, cuts through a cross section of China from Shanghai to Kazakhstan on China's Mother Road, Route 312.

Steven M Gillon: The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation (2008, Oxford University Press): Not sure what generation Gillon has in mind; mine was more disgusted than defined. As for the "pact": evidently Clinton and Gingrich were on the verge of making some bipartisan (or counterpartisan) deal on Social Security and Medicare in 1997, which got derailed by more pressing matters (Monica Lewinsky). Sounds like a few blow jobs and a splattered dress were all that saved us.

Mike Gravel/Joe Lauria: A Political Odyssey: The Rise of American Militarism and a Man's Fight to Stop It (paperback, 2008, Seven Stories Press): I usually don't bother listing books by politicians, but this one's exceptional, and not just because he isn't much of a politician. Note ghostwriter gets same size type on front cover. Note forward by Daniel Ellsberg.

Chelsea Handler: Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea (2008, Simon Spotlight Entertainment): Noticed this earlier, but figured it was too far off-topic to mention here, until it somehow showed up in my Amazon Recommendations list. Read a few pages in the store, which were funnier than "Sex and the City" but not as funny as Cynthia Heimel. Haven't heard from Heimel in a while, so maybe this fills a void. Handler previously wrote My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands. Heimel, on the other hand, wrote: Sex Tips for Girls (reissued as Advanced Sex Tips for Girls: This Time It's Personal); When Your Phone Doesn't Ring, It'll Be Me; If You Can't Live Without Me, Why Aren't You Dead Yet; and the more poignant Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I'm Kissing You Goodbye!

David Harvey: A Short History of Neoliberalism (paperback, 2007, Oxford University Press): Goes back three decades or so, roughly since 1970, the economic doctrines pushed especially by the US through the IMF, the World Bank, and various trade regimes. Harvey has a lot of books, including Limits to Capital and Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development.

Carl Hiaasen: The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport (2008, Knopf): My first thought was that this would be another test for George Plimpton's ball-size theory of sports books. I've never read any of the golf books Plimpton so admires, and I doubt that I'll try this one. Grew up thinking that golf was the sport of another class, and I've never overcome that mental framework. A Kenneth Rexroth poem about sneaking into the country club at night and shitting in the golf holes didn't help.

David Lida: First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century (2008, Riverhead): Described as a "literary portrait," a panorama of Mexico City. Subtitle reminds me of Walter Benjamin, who wrote of Paris as the capital of the 19th century.

Craig Miner: Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854-2000 (paperback, 2005, University Press of Kansas): Wichita State history professor, taught there in my day and still around, has a pile of books on Kansas history, this the most general one. Should probably pick it up for reference some time. But I do recall that we had to spend Fifth Grade doing state history. Fifth grade sucked.

David Model: State of Darkness: US Complicity in Genocides Since 1945 (paperback, 2008, AuthorHouse): Author counts and documents eight genocides since 1945 that the US has been involved in, or perhaps largely responsible for. Less "a problem from hell" (as Samantha Power put it) than a policy for hell. Model has been down this road before; e.g., his previous book, Lying for Empire: How to Commit War Crimes With a Straight Face.

Richard A Muller: Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines (2008, WW Norton): Probably even more useful for citizens wanting to sanity check those future presidents. I think it's obvious that some basic understanding of science is essential for getting any sort of grasp on contemporary issues.

Dennis Perrin: Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War (paperback, 2008, Verso): Short (160 pages) book on trigger-happy Democrats, perhaps unfairly starting with Andrew Jackson and no doubt mentioning Henry Jackson with Iraq and Afghanistan of most recent interest. Don't know if this gets into Israel -- that would take a much larger book.

Jonas Pontusson: Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe Vs. Liberal America (paperback, 2005, Cornell University Press): The basic contrast could use more press. Don't know anything about the author, but he's obviously thinking like a European as regards Liberal. Wait till he gets the full measure of Conservative America.

Neil Postman/Steve Powers: How to Watch TV News: Revised Edition (paperback, 2008, Penguin): Postman was one of the most important education and culture critics of our time -- a book he co-wrote with Charles Weingartnet back around 1970, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, had a profound impact on me way back when. He died in 2003, having co-written this book with Powers 10 or so years earlier. Powers has some 45 years of broadcast news experience. He plugs in many recent examples, but I doubt that the critique has changed much.

TR Reid: The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy (2004; paperback, 2005, Penguin): Fairly extensive comparisons of US and Europe, favoring the latter. Tony Judt reviewed this in Reappraisals and it seems to have limits but useful info. (Also reviewed, along the same lines, Jeremy Rifkin: The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream; I've long found Rifkin to be extremely unreliable.)

Erik Reinert: How Rich Countries Got Rich . . . and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor (2007, Public Affairs): The history is pretty clear: rich countries today developed behind protectionist trade barriers, which they lowered only once they were positioned to compete in global free trade (and then grudgingly). Developing countries, at least some of them, have been able to accelerate this process through industrial policies. Countries that haven't done this have remained poor (although in many cases local elites have done well -- the OPEC countries are a case in point).

Gregory Rodriguez: Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America (2007, Pantheon): Looks like a substantial history not just of Mexican immigration into the US but of Mexico itself.

Robert J Samuelson: The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement (paperback, 1997, Vintage): Recommended by David Warsh as "the wisest treatment" of the economic, political, and social evolution of the US in the half-century after WWII. Samuelson has a new book scheduled for 11/2008: The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Transformation of America's Economy, Politics, and Society.

Bruce J Schulman/Julian E Zelizer, eds.: Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (paperback, 2008, Harvard University Press): Collection of history essays, edited by a couple of historians. Don't recognize any authors, but titles include "Inventing Family Values," "The White Ethnic Strategy," and "The Conservative Struggle and the Energy Crisis."

Peter Schweizer: Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less . . . and Even Hug Their Children More Than Liberals (2008, Doubleday): Wow. Makes me wonder whether conservatives are conservative because they're perfect, or conservatives are perfect because they're conservative. Sounds like a lot of self-flattery combined with a dose of how to lie with statistics. Still, why is it that most of the conservatives that we actually know about don't exactly fit this profile. Try fitting George Bush into that line. Or Rush Limbaugh (take fewer drugs? whine less?).

Natan Sharansky: Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy (2008, Public Affairs): Reports are that GW Bush's mind got blown by Sharansky's previous book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror -- that set him off on the tangent that led Billmon to dub him "Democracy Boy." But I have to wonder whether even Bush can stomach this one: Sharansky's "democracy" was pure sophistry, but "identity" is his real bread and butter, as it is and has been for fascists and nationalists throughout the ages.

Rob Sheffield: Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (paperback, 2007, Three Rivers Press): I went through a stage in the mid-'70s when I read nothing but rock crit, then a few years later got to where I could read virtually none of it. Sometimes I think I should at least try to keep up, and Sheffield is one of the guys I recognize as worth following. But I don't.

Guy Sorman: Empire of Lies: The Truth About China in the Twenty-First Century (2008, Encounter Books): Very negative account of everyday life in China -- you can guess the laundry list, but probably not all the details -- where Sorman lived 2005-06. May also argue that reporting about China is full of lies too. I'm sure there's something to it, but I always discount books with Truth in the title.

Deborah Stone: The Samaritan's Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor? (2008, Nation Books): The most impressive arguments conservatives have come up with in recent years are based on the cluster of ideas that self-interest produces best results, that people must enjoy full responsibility for their actions, and that therefore government help is harmful to individuals. This can all be true under certain best case scenarios, but for most people it winds up working very poorly. Stone tackles those ideas in what may be one of the more important books of the year.

Ron Suskind: The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism (2008, Harper): The author's third book on the Bush years, each with a fair amount of original reporting and a few headline-making surprises. Whereas the first two books were largely based on identifiable insiders -- Paul O'Neill and George Tenet -- this one looks to be more scattered, with various CIA threads and something about Benazir Bhutto.

Douglas Valentine: The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs (paperback, 2006, Verso): Not sure that the promised secrets will be all that interesting. The Drug War should be seen as a political issue, turning first on how one sees the role of government in regulating everyday life. The War has consistently failed because not even majority support is sufficient to control a relatively private and personal activity. Yet the War continues because its warriors have managed to keep the issue out of our political discourse.

David Foster Wallace: McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope (paperback, 2008, Back Bay Books): This is Wallace's reporting on McCain's 2000 campaign, reprinted from Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, with a new foreword by Jacob Weisberg, who evidently also covered McCain in 2000 and wrangled another interview in 2007. Pure opportunism, and a piece of false advertising, as whatever promise McCain seemed to have is ancient history now. Would have made more sense to reprint it as a second volume to Wallace's other 2000 work: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.

Sheldon S Wolin: Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008, Princeton University Press): Asks the question: "has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled?" Seems like a pretty deep question. I remember Wolin from way back as one of the sharper thinkers to emerge from the new left.

Ming Zeng/Peter J Williamson: Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation Is Disrupting Global Competition (2007, Harvard Business School Press): The obvious reason to move your manufacturing to China is cost, but it's still remarkable that China has such a substantial advantage on so many products. This digs into why that is, starting with cheap labor, of course, but there seems to be more to it.