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Friday, May 23, 2025

Last Book Roundup was back on April 5, 2025, nearly a full year after the previous one on April 25, 2024. So much had happened since then, and so much had changed, that I decided to limit myself to books published in calendar 2024, holding back some 2025 releases that already demanded attention. This is but a first installment on bringing the lists up to date.

As usual, the post has two sections: a main one, where I single out 20 (or so) books that strike me as especially worthy of comment; and a second one, where I briefly note the existence of other interesting books. As the number of "briefly noted" books has grown, I've taken to grouping them by subject, first under main section books (which they complement), and now also in the second section -- in effect, a supplementary list to a major book I haven't found yet.

Needless to say, I've actually read very few of these books. I'll include a cover scan for those I have read, or at least have bought and intend to read. What I know comes from reviews, blurbs, samples, and/or comments on sites like Amazon. I'm a very slow reader, but compensate with these wide-ranging surveys. While I read a fair amount of journalism most days, I take books to be the standard for what we actually know. They take more time and are more permanent, which both allows and insists on more work and reflection.

Note: I've also added the occasional red star () for bullet items which seem most promising.

Internal links to authors/subjects (+ extended lists; the numbering has no meaning other than it saves me from having to count):

1. Andrew Boyd: I Want a Better Catastrophe + climate/activism
2. John Cassidy: Capitalism and Its Critics
3. Robert Chapman: Empire of Normality + neurodiversity
4. Tom Cotton: Seven Things You Can't Say About China + more
5. James Davies: Sedated + psychology
6. Glenn Diesen: The Think Tank Racket + Ukraine/Russia
7. Phil Freeman: Ugly Beauty + jazz
8. Fawaz A Gerges: What Really Went Wrong
9. David A Graham: The Project: Project 2025
10. Greg Grandin: America, América
11. Chris Hayes: The Siren's Call
12. Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson: Abundance
13. Michael Lewis: Who Is Government
14. Carlos Lozada: The Washington Book
15. Sarah Maza: Thinking About History
16. Mike McCormick: An Almost Insurmountable Evil + Biden hate
17. Glenn McDonald: You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song + Spotify
18. Pankaj Mishra: The World After Gaza + Israel, genocide, antisemitism
19. Benny Morris/Dror Ze'evi: The Thirty-Year Genocide + Turkey
20. Premilla Nadasen: Care
21. Clay Risen: Red Scare
22. Enzo Traverso: Revolution
23. Michael Wolf: All or Nothing + 2024 election
24. A few more books briefly noted:

Andrew Boyd: I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor (paperback, 2023, New Society): Subtitle continues: "An existential manual for tragic optimists, can-do pessimists, and compassionate doomers." In other words, this is the current state of the climate change crisis, one where we no longer have the luxury of thinking that we're only talking about a distant, easily manageable future but have seen enough to start realizing how unprepared we are even for what's happening now. Boyd starts out with several charts that plot "progress" vs. time, and winds up with the one I grabbed and pasted stage right. I'm not much of a catastrophist here, so that view may seem excessive, even where his point is "gallows humor." But what does matter to me is whether we face the very real problems in ways that work collectively, or stick with the current favorite, which is for everyone to buy guns and fend for themselves.

Many more climate change and/or activism books (seems like every Roundup brings another boat load):

• Clayton Page Aldern: The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains (2024, Dutton): A "neuroscientist turned journalist."
• Sunil Amrith: The Burning Earth: A History (2024, WW Norton): This starts in 1200, with three sections divided by 1800 and 1945, the author from Singapore.
• Paul Bierman: When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth's Tumultuous History and Perilous Future (2024, WW Norton): "Not another global warming polemic, but rather a compelling introduction to Greenland, glaciers, and how scientists drill down through ice to reveal the past."
• Tad Delay: Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change (2024, Verso).
• Dana R Fisher: Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action (2024, Columbia University Press).
• Porter Fox: Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them (2024, Little Brown).
• Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (2024).
• Genevieve Guenther: The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It (2024, Oxford University Press).
• Malcolm Harris: What's Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis (2025, Little Brown): "Confirms [him] as a next-generation David Graeber or Mike Davis -- a historian-activist who shows us where we stand and how we got here." That involves combining his three ways into one "meta-strategy," which is probably right, but much easier said than done.
• Chelsea Henderson: Glacial: The Inside Story of Climate Politics (paperback, 2024, Turner): How slow can you go? Well, for one thing, the lead blurb here is from Joe Lieberman.
• Dougald Hine: At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies (2023; paperback, 2024, Chelsea Green): When he says we're "asking too much of science," I think he's confusing it with capitalism.
• Rob Jackson: Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere (2024, Scribner).
• Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: What if We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures (2024, One World).
• Ayana Elizabeth Johnson/Katherine K Wilkinson: All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis (paperback, 2021, One World).
• Abrahm Lustgarten: On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America (2024, Farrar Straus and Giroux).
• Vanessa Machado de Oliveira: Hospicing Moderntiy: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism (paperback, 2021, North Atlantic Books).
• Joanna Macy/Chris Johnstone: Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in with Unexpected Resilience & Creative Power (paperback, 2022, New World Library).
• Andreas Malm/Wim Carton: Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (2024, Verso): Malm previously wrote How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021).
• R Jisung Park: Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World (2024, Princeton University Press): Our focus on disasters helps mask many real and substantial other costs. There is so much that can be said about this that it's unlikely that anyone can say it all.
• Hannah Ritchie: Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet (2024, Little Brown Spark).
• Susan Solomon: Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do It Again (2024, University of Chicago Press): Refers to the ozone layer crisis, which was much easier, both technically and politically.
• Tom Steyer: Cheaper Faster Better: How We'll Win the Climate War (2024, Spiegel & Grau): The capitalist solution, from someone poised to make a lot of money off it. [PS: I had forgotten that he ran for president in 2020, and blew a lot of money in the process.]
• Leah Cardamore Stokes: Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States (paperback, 2020, Oxford University Press).
• John Vaillant: Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World (2023, Knopf): On the 2016 Fort McMurray, Canada fire.
• Jonathan Vigliotti: Before It's Gone: Stories From the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America (2024; paperback, 2025, Atria/One Signal).
• Adam Welz: The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown (2023, Bloomsbury): This one may be worth returning to, as it touches on an even more basic question than climate change, which is whether we want to allow some wild nature independent of human life, or intend to totally subvert it.
• Britt Wray: Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety (paperback, 2023, The Experiment).

John Cassidy: Capitalism and Its Critics: A history: From the Industrial Revolution to AI (2025, Farrar Straus and Giroux): New Yorker columnist, writes topically politician columns quite regularly, but his 2009 book How Markets Fail: The Rise and Fall of Free Market Economics was was one of the best books to come out of the 2008 financial crisis, and his earlier (2002) Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era looks solid enough. This looks to be very thorough, with The Communist Manifesto only appearing in Chapter Eight, a reminder that lots of people have had beefs with capitalism both before and independently after Marx. He notes that he started writing this book in 2016, in response to the Bernie Sanders campaign. Now you can read it as a historical supplement to Sanders' It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. Or perhaps as an "Amen."

• Jathan Sadowski: The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism (paperback, 2025, University of California Press): More on this, including a quote, toward the end.

Robert Chapman: Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (paperback, 2023, Pluto Press): Alternative term for "autism," author is "a neurodivergent philosopher" and professor, referred to here as "they," who "exposes the very myth of the 'normal' brain as a product of intensified capitalism." While I've never (as far as I know) been diagnosed as autistic, or assigned some peg on the spectrum, and I certainly don't have the superpowers of the French police archivist in Astrid, I am aware of seeing things and recalling details and relationships that few others recognize, so perhaps there is something to this "neurodiversity" beyond its euphemistic usage. As for capitalism, the author may be engaging in the usual leftist blame game -- which I tired of 50 years ago, but I can't deny that doing so here offers both insights and an ethical framework. It occurs to me that one can recast capitalism not as economics or culture but as a species of game theory, which forces people to think and act in certain prescribed ways -- so routine as to seem natural to most people, but patently ridiculous to the few who can see through and beyond them.

This opens the door to an extensive literature I've rarely noticed before (although I read a lot of RD Laing and Thomas Szasz back in my day, so I'm familiar with the dialectics of psychology and politics). Also, note more books on psychology below, under Davies.

• Beatrice Adler-Bolton/Artie Vierkant: Health Communism (2022, Verso).
• Alicia A Broderick: The Autism Industrial Complex: How Branding, Marketing, and Capital Investment Turned Autism Into Big Business (paperback, 2022, 2022, Myers Education Press).
• Micha Frazer-Carroll: Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health (paperback, 2023, Pluto Press).
• Eric Garcia: We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation (paperback, 2022, Harvest).
• Steve Silberman: NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (paperback, 2016, Avery).
• Judy Singer: NeuroDiversity: The Birth of an Idea (paperback, 2017, self): Short (82 pp).
• Sonny Jane Wise: We're All Neurodiverse (paperback, 2023, Jessica Kingsley).
• M Remi Yergeau: Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (paperback, 2018, Duke University Press).
• Ashley Shew: Against Technolabelism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (paperback, 2024, WW Norton): Relevant here, to the extent that labels like "autism" denote disability and lead into a wide range of social reactions some are calling "ableism." I should return to that literature later, but will leave it for now.

Tom Cotton: Seven Things You Can't Say About China (2025, Broadside Books): And yet here he is, saying them. What a profile in "speaking truth to power"! Actually, he's a Senator (R-AR), building a reputation as the GOP's top warmonger, as if that's going to be his key to the White House. Actually, lots of think tankers are peddling the same wares, but he is exceptionally blunt about it. His seven chapter heads say more about his psyche than his book does about China:

1. China Is an Evil Empire
2. China Is Preparing for War
3. China Is Waging Economic World War
4. China Has Infiltrated Our Society
5. China Has Infiltrated Our Government
6. China Is Coming for Our Kids
7. China Could Win

In case you're wondering where the coronavirus pandemic fits in, he brings it up in the first line of the Prologue, adding "I've never taken the claims of Chinese Communists at face value." Nor is he fazed by independent observations, or any understanding of how the world actually works. I've cited a bunch of anti-China sabre rattling previously, to which we can add (including a few books that don't strictly follow the "coming war" formula):

• Dmitri Alperovitch/Garret M Graff: World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century (2024, PublicAffairs).
• Robert D Blackwill/Richard Fontaine: Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power (2024, Oxford University Press): Both have long lists of BLOB credentials.
• Hal Brands: The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World (2025, WW Norton): AEI fellow, he's never met a Cold War he didn't like, expanding here from his previous book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China (2022).
• Kerry Brown: Why Taiwan Matters: A Short History of a Small Island That Will Dictate Our Future (2025, St Martin's Press).
• Gordon G. Chang: Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America (2024, Humanix). Chang has previously written:
• Gordon G. Chang: China Is Going to War [Encounter Broadside No. 69] (paperback, 2023, Encounter Books).
• Gordon G. Chang: The Great U.S.-China Tech War [Encounter Broadside No. 61] (paperback, 2020, Encounter Books).
• Gordon G. Chang: The Coming Collapse of China (2001, Random House): This one is obviously a bit dated. Author has been plowing this field for a long time.
• Jonathan Clements: Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan (2024, Scribe US): Probably useful perspective, but within this debate reminds me of the sort of boosterism that Dan Senor and Saul Singer weaponized in Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle (2009).
• Fiona S Cunningham: Under the Nuclear Shadow: China's Information-Age Weapons in International Security (paperback, 2025, Princeton University Press).
• Eva Dou: House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company (2025, Portfolio): Big Chinese telecom company, often suspected of ulterior motives.
• James E Fanell/Bradley A Thayer: Embracing Communist China: America's Greatest Strategic Failure (2024, War Room Books).
• Emily Feng: Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China (2025, Crown).
• Keyu Jin: The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism (2023, Viking).
• Sulmaan Wasif Khan: The Struggle for Taiwan: A History of America, China, and the Island Caught Between (2024, Basic Books).
• David Daokui Li: China's World View: Demystifying China to Prevent Global Conflict (2024, WW Norton): A counterpoint from a Chinese economist who is tuned into that world view, with explanations very unlike the world domination ambitions US analysts are prone to.
• Driana Skylar Mastro: Upstart: How China Became a Great Power (2024, Oxford University Press).
• Patrick McGee: Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company (2025, Scribner): I'd edit the title, s/Greatest/Most Contemptible/, but that's an old grudge, and beside the point. If you view war as inevitable, as many think tankers do, you might view Apple as treasonous. On the other hand, Apple's links make war less likely, because they expose tangible risks, whereas deterrence theories are just hypothetical. Also note that Apple is just one of hundreds of big companies with political influence on both sides, but especially on the more corrupt American side.
• Grant Newshawm: When China Attacks: A Warning to America (2023, Regnery).
• Matt Pottinger: The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan (paperback, 2024, Hoover Institution Press): Argues for "a robust military policy," because nothing fights fire like more fire (and because that's who pays his way).
• Kevin Rudd: On Xi Jinping: How Xi's Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World (2024, Oxford University Press): Former Prime Minister of Australia.
• Michael Sheridan: The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China (2025, Headline).
• Michael Sobolik: Countering China's Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance (2024, Naval Institute Press).
• Anne Stevenson-Yang: Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy (paperback, 2024, Brixton Ink): Argues that under Xi, China has abandoned capitalism, and will suffer for it.
• Steve Tsang/Olivia Cheung: The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (2024, Oxford University Press).
• Chun Han Wong: Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China's Superpower Future (2024, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).
• Joel Wuthnow/Philip C Saunders: China's Quest for Military Supremacy (2025, Polity): Both work for US National Defense University.

James Davies: Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis (paperback, 2022, Atlantic Books). Notes that "In Britain alone, more than 20% of the adult population take a psychiatric drug in any one year" -- an increase of 500% since 1980, yet "levels of mental illness of all types have actually increased in number and severity." That may be because they're noticing things they had ignored before, or it may be a case of capitalist supply looking for demand -- a perennial in the advertising world. Or it may reflect the search for efficiency, combined with an indifference to care -- more capitalist traits. (One clue is the title: sedation may or may not be good for patients, but it can be a lot less trouble for "caregivers.")

The author has written about this before, and he's not alone.

• James Davies: The Importance of Suffering: The Value and Meaning of Emotional Discontent (paperback, 2011, Routledge).
• James Davies: Cracked: Why Psychiatry Is Doing More Harm Than Good (paperback, 2014, Icon Books).
• James Davies: The Sedated Society: The Causes and Harms of Our Psychiatric Drug Epidemic (paperback, 2017, Palgrave Macmillan).
• Allen Frances: Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big-Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life (paperback, 2014, Mariner Books).
• Gary Greenberg: Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease (paperback, 2011, Simon & Schuster).
• Gary Greenberg: The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (paperback, 2014, Penguin).
• Ethan Watters: Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche (2010; paperback, 2011, Simon & Schuster): Argues that "the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: we are in the process of homongenizing the way the world goes mad." We're not just selling psychiatric drugs, we're marketing the "illnesses" that promote them. Which, come to think of it, is what we've done to ourselves since the invention of advertising.
• Robert Whitaker: Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (paperback, 2011, Crown).
• Robert Whitaker: Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill (paperback, 2019, Basic Books).
• Rob Wipond: Your Consent Is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships (2023, BenBella Books).

Glenn Diesen: The Think Tank Racket: Managing the Information War With Russia (paperback, 2023, Clarity Press): While this book is explicitly about how think tanks feed American militance against Russia, it's obviously relevant to the China sabre-rattling noted above (under Cotton). The bottom line: "The US adversarial relationship with Russia has sustained its exorbitant military spending over many decades." This opens with a section on "The Rise and Corruption of the Expert Class." No doubt they've created a lot of ideology on top of their graft, much of which is projection of America's own attempts to dominate an increasingly unconquerable world. Recent books on Russia follow the China pattern, except that it is easier to imagine future wars than it is to face current ones: before Putin's Ukraine invasion of 2022, efforts to rekindle the Cold War were common, but warnings of its consequences scarce; after Russia escalated, the first wave of American books were extremely anti-Russian, but now that the war has stalled, we're also seeing a few books that start to question American motives -- both leading up to the war, and in Biden's failure to attempt to stop it.

• Glenn Diesen: The Decay of Western Civilisation and Resurgence of Russia (paperback, 2020, Routledge).
• Glenn Diesen: The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order (paperback, 2024, Clarity Press).
• Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky: The Russian Way of Deterrence: Strategic Culture, Coercion, and War (paperback, 2023, Stanford University Press).
• Stephanie Baker: Punishing Putin: Inside the Global Economic War to Bring Down Russia (2024; paperback, 2025, Scribner): Hardcover noted previously; no indication of revisions here, although the policy has been notably unsuccessful.
• Jonathan Haslam: Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War Against Ukraine (2025, Belknap Press): While I have always blamed (and never excused) Putin for his reckless exploitation of the division within Ukraine in 2014 and even more so for his invasion of 2022, it is important to understand that his acts were done in a context largely set to US/NATO expansion, and in many ways should also be understood as grievous failures of American foreign policy. The early parts of this story are fairly well known, but the later parts need a fuller accounting, especially the period from when Biden took over to when Putin felt the need to invade. Not clear how far this goes, but it's a good start.
• Scott Horton: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War With Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine (paperback, 2024, The Libertarian Institute): Libertarian antiwar columnist, looks like he's collected his notes on US vs. Russia all the way back to "The Unipolar Moment" under George HW Bush, a total of 690 pp.
• Lucian Kim: Putin's Revenge: Why Russia Invaded Ukraine (2024, Columbia University Press): "He debunks the Kremlin narrative that the West instigated the conflict, and he instead identifies the root causes of the war in the legacy of Russian imperialism and Putin's dictatorial rule." Sounds like a caricature.
• Guy Mettan: Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria (paperback, 2017, Clarity Press): Swiss journalist, also has a more general book of interest: Europe's Existential Dilemma: To Be or Not to Be an American Vassal (2021).
• Leonid Nevzlin: Putin's Mafia State: A Story of Corruption, Control, and the Failure of Democracy in Russia (2024, self).
• Sergey Radchenko: To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power (2024, Cambridge University Press): Big book, 768 pp, more focused on Soviet era, but framed to feed those seeking to demonize Putin.
• Paul Robinson: Russia's World Order: How Civilizationism Explains the Conflict With the West (2025, Northern Illinois University Press): "Civilizationism" sounds like Samuel P Huntington, which these days should be a red flag.
• John J Sullivan: Midnight in Moscow: A Memoir From the Front Lines of Russia's War Against the West (2024, Little Brown): Was US ambassador to Russia under Trump and Biden (a little over a year each).
• Alexander Vindman: The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine (2025, PublicAffairs): Made his name testifying against Trump in the first impeachment.
• Andrew Wilson: Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship (paperback, 2021, Yale University Press).

There are also several books on Russia's use of mercenaries, which with Prigozhin dead may no longer be much of an issue:

• Anna Arutunyan/Mark Galeotti: Downfall: Prigozhin, Putin and the New Fight for the Future of Russia (2024, Ebury Press).
• Anna Arutunyan: Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow's Struggle for Ukraine (2022, Hurst; paperback, 2023, Neeti).
• John Lechner: Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare (2025, Bloomsbury).
• Jack Margolin: The Wagner Group: Inside Russia's Mercenary Army (2024, Reaktion Books).
• Candace Rondeaux: Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse Into Mercenary Chaos (2025, PublicAffairs).
• Owen Wilson: The Wagner Group: From Savage Global Mercenaries to Putin's Unlikely Nemesis (paperback, 2023, Gibson Square).

Phil Freeman: Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century (paperback, 2022, Zero Books): With two decades down, it's possible to start thinking of the 21st century as a distinctly different period of time from the decades that preceded it. While individual timelines align poorly with arbitrary decades or branded generations, statistics do add up. When I set up my record rating database, I divided jazz into 20-year chunks, based on when an artist or group name started recording. Counting names today, it looks like the expansion of jazz has been geometric: 1920s: 145; 1940s: 460; 1960s: 717; 1980s: 1649; 2000s: 3524. (I haven't started a 2020s yet, but there is no reason to think the expansion has slowed.) If I tried to characterized 20th century jazz in generations, I'd say: swing (1917-45), bebop (1946-65), avant and/or fusion (1966-1980), and postbop (1981-2000), although the edges are increasingly blurry, and nothing old ever really dies. After 2000, you get a massive expansion of all of the above, which lines up with the more general notion of postmodernism. Of course, few practical writers indulge in such inevitably faulty generalizations. It's easier, and more sensible, to come up with a list of musicians and profile them, as Freeman does here (42 names in 29 chapters): while he's somewhat broader than the similar Chinen and Mitchell books below, his map still leaves a lot of terra incognita.

• David R Adler, ed: The Jazz Omnibus: 21st Century Photos and Writings by Members of the Jazz Journalists Association (paperback, 2024, Cymbal Press).
• Bill Beuttler: Make It New: Reshaping Jazz in the 21st Century (paperback, 2019, Lever Press).
• Nate Chinen: Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (2018, Pantheon; paperback, 2019, Vintage).
• Rick Mitchell: Jazz in the New Millennium: Live & Well (2014; paperback, revised ed, 2024, Dharma Moon Press).

Book writers are always slow off the mark, so there's much more written recently about older jazz. For example (including a couple items that don't seem to be on Amazon):

• Paul Alexander: Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year (2024, Knopf).
• Clifford Allen: Singularity Codex: Matthew Shipp on RogueArt (2021, RogueArt).
• William G Carter: Thriving on a Riff: Jazz and the Spiritual Life (2024, Broadleaf Books): Jazz pianist and Presbyterian minister, leads Presbybop Quartet.
• Josephine Baker: Fearless and Free: A Memoir (2025, Tiny Reparations Books): First English translation of the singer's autobiography, originally published in France in 1949.
• Con Chapman: Sax Expat: Don Byas (paperback, 2025, University Press of Mississippi).
• TJ English: Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld (paperback, 2023, William Morrow): Author has more books on organized crime than on music.
• Philip Freeman: In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor (paperback, 2024, Wolke Verlag).
• Jonathon Grosse: Jazz Revolutionary: The Life & Music of Eric Dolphy (paperback, 2024, Jawbone Press).
• James Kaplan: 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool (2024, Penguin Press).
• Aidan Levy: Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins (paperback, 2023, Da Capo): 800 pp.
• Rick Lopez: The Sam Rivers Sessionography: A Work in Progress (paperback, 2022, self): Massive, beautiful work. Soon to be a major motion picture.
• Rick Lopez: The William Parker Sessionography: A Work in Progress (paperback, 2014, self): I should also mention this. Lead blurb by yours truly (probably the only time that ever happened).
• Allen Lowe: Letter to Esperanza: Or: The Goyim Will Not Replace Me - Looking for Tenure in All the Wrong Places (2023, Constant Sorrow).
• Allen Lowe: If I Don't Live Forever It's Your Fault (2021, Constant Sorrow).
• Allen Lowe: "Turn Me Loose White Man" Or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music 1900-1960 (2020-21, Constant Sorrow): Two volumes, comes with a 30-CD set.
• André Marmot: Unapologetic Expression: The Inside Story of the UK Jazz Explosion (2024, Faber & Faber).
• Daren Mueller: At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz (paperback, 2024, Duke University Press).
• Michael Pronko: A Guide to Jazz in Japan (paperback, 2025, Raked Gravel Press): Author born in Kansas City, but lived in Japan 20 years, before moving on to Beijing. He also writes Tokyo-based mystery novels.
• Sam VH Reese, ed: The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins (paperback, 2024, New York Review Books): 176 pp.
• Ricky Riccardi: Stomp Off, Let's Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong (2025, Oxford University Press): "Celebrates Lillian 'Lil' Armstrong as the architect of Louis Armstrong's career." Previously wrote:
• Ricky Riccardi: What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years (2011, Pantheon).
• Ricky Riccardi: Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong (2020, Oxford University Press).
• Matthew Shipp: Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings (2025, RogueArt): 94 pp.
• John Szwed: Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith (2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux; paperback, 2024, Picador).
• Henry Threadgill: Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music (2023, Knopf): Autobiography.
• Judith Tick: Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song (2023; paperback, 2025, WW Norton).
• Larry Tye: The Jazz Men: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America (2024, Mariner Books).
• Elijah Wald: Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories (2024, Da Capo).

Fawaz A Gerges: What Really Went Wrong: The West and the Failure of Democracy in the Middle East (2024, Yale University Press): Middle east expert based in London, was early on the scene in 1999 with America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests?, an insight that has served him well as an analyst -- especially in predicting the problems the Iraq War would exacerbate. The "Arab Spring" is widely regarded as a failure today, but did it have to be? What difference might it have made had the US generously supported efforts to support liberal democracy, peace, and prosperity for all, instead of its narrow economic interests and its ridiculous superpower conceits (including its willingness to sacrifice all other concerns to buttress Israel)? This primarily focuses on Iran and Egypt, on Mossadegh and Nasser, so doesn't get to my questions, but lays the groundwork.

David A Graham: The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America (paperback, 2025, Random House): Staff writer for The Atlantic, one of the few I'd read if I could, covers politics and national affairs, offers a short (160 pp) primer on the big plans the right-wing Heritage Foundation hopes to inflict on America through the clueless Trump administration. Although "think tanks" have long considered this sort of "thinking" their raison d'être, such plans rarely get taken seriously, as the actual "sausage-making" in Washington is done by the lobby groups that care for and feed our politicians, and they generally feel the less you know, the better. This one got some notoriety when a few journalists (like Graham) bothered to read it, provoking an embarrassed Trump to deny any involvement or interest -- an obvious lie, given that much of it was already tucked away in the wonkier corners of his campaign's website.

Greg Grandin: America, América: A New History of the New World (2025, Penguin Press): Big (768 pp) history of the entire Western Hemisphere, combining the United States and Latin America, showing how each affects and reflects the other. This is not the first time Grandin has looked south of the border for insights into American history: e.g., Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006); Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (2009); The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (2014); one might even note his Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman (2015).

Chris Hayes: The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource (2025, Penguin): I tend to automatically discount anything written by a "broadcast journalist," but Hayes' two previous books -- Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012) and A Colony in a Nation (2017) -- are both remarkably succinct and original attempts to deal with important and in some ways unexpected topics. Hard to say whether this makes three, but arguing against it is that attention is pretty close to his stock-in-trade -- he plies a trade where ratings are all-consuming -- and the concept is intrinsically hard to value. In particular, I wonder whether the point of many ploys isn't just to direct your attention away from elsewhere. For instance, while it may be horrifying to imagine what happens to the brains of people who follow Trump, the main point of much of what Trump does seems to be to keep you from thinking about Trump, and focus instead on the foibles of his opponents, or anyone who might just have an honest take on him. I'm reminded that the way airplanes escape anti-aircraft rockets is to flood the zone with false targets. If Trump isn't already doing that, I'd hate to imagine what he might do once he figures it out.

• Anna Kornbluh: Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism (paperback, 2024, Verso): This looks like an interesting, more Marx-aware take on the same problem.

Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson: Abundance (2025, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster): I've seen many references lately to "abundance liberalism," which this seems to be its bible. It comes at a time when Democrats are shell-shocked by the loss to Trump -- especially those who are congenitally prejudiced against the left, and still hope to double down on the neoliberal gospel of growth. I sympathize somewhat with their "build" mantra -- Democrats have a big problem convincing people they will actually deliver on their promises, perhaps because they have a really poor track record, and much of what they do deliver has been neutered by lobbyists and donor concerns -- but isn't the problem somewhat deeper than just providing cutting through the permit process paperwork? While it's true that if you built more housing, you could bring prices down, the neoliberal economy is driven by the search for higher profits, not lower prices. Democrats have been trained to think that the only way they can get things done is through private corporations (e.g., you want more school loans, so hire banks to administer them; you want better health care for more people, prop up and pay off the insurance companies); you want green energy, so offer patent monopolies and tax credits. This is not just wasteful, it invites further sabotage, and the result is you cannot deliver as promised. Similarly, Democrats have been trained to believe that growth is the magic elixir: make the rich richer, and everyone else will benefit. They're certainly good at the first part, but the second is harder to quantify. Perhaps there are some details here that are worth a read, but the opposite of austerity isn't abundance; it's enough, and that's not just a quantity but also a quality. Klein's a well read guy, and his Why We're Polarized (2020) covers useful ground. Thompson I'm not so sure about, so we'll note his books and some others in this general arena:

• Derek Thompson: The Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction (2017; paperback, 2018, Penguin Books): This looks like a possibly interesting book, but more likely to dazzle you with the breadth of his references -- sample chapter: Mona Lisa, "Rock Around the Clock," and Chaos Theory -- than with any depth of understanding. I suspect that what makes a hit has much less to do with design than with opportunity, which is notoriously hard to anticipate.
• Derek Thompson: On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity (paperback, 2023, Zando Atlantic Editions).
• Marc J Dunkelman: Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress -- and How to Bring It Back (2025, PublicAffairs): Sample blurbs: "Anyone who has been frustrated with the inefficiency of government must read this book" -- Lizabeth Cohen. "For progressive politics to work, the public must have an affirmative view of government and its effectiveness" -- Rahm Emmanuel.
• Yoni Appelbaum: Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity (2025, Random House): Lead blurbs here (not interesting enough to quote) from Heather Cox Richardson and Jill Lepore.
• David Suskind: Growth: A History and a Reckoning (2024, Belknap Press): This probably deserves its own entry, but for now it seems relevant here, as the main problem I've found with the "abundance agenda" is its uncritical faith in growth.

Michael Lewis, ed: Who Is Government: The Untold Story of Public Service (2025, Riverhead Books): Introduction and final chapter by the editor, who previously wrote a terrific book about public servants under threat from Trump, The Fifth Risk (2018). In between are six more profiles, by Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell, for a fairly broad cross-section. This seems to have started off as an op-ed series in late 2024, when we had a general sense of foreboding but hadn't yet reached the fever-pitched panic since inauguration day, when Trump revealed just how serious his revenge-seeking would be.

Carlos Lozada: The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians (2024; paperback, 2025, Simon & Schuster): Resident book critic at the Washington Post for much of this period, Lozada previously wrote What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era (2020, so it's tempting to insert "First" before "Trump Era"), where he surveyed "some 150 volumes claiming to diagnose why Trump was elected and what his presidency reveals about our nation." Few subjects have been written about as widely and as intensively as Trump. It's easy to claim "I read books so you don't have to," but Lozada actually turns out to be a pretty useful guide for sorting through this vast thicket. (I've read a couple dozen of these books, and it tracks well with what I know.) This one covers more ground and more time, and is mostly assembled from reviews published in the moment, so I expect it to be somewhat shakier, but it covers books about important people that I have little if any desire to read, so the helping hand may be even more useful here.

Sarah Maza: Thinking About History (paperback, 2017, University of Chicago Press). I've been thinking a lot about history lately, sometimes going so far as to question whether we are even capable of understanding the present except through analogy through the past. Of course, the flip side of that is that our understanding of the past is inevitably filtered through the present -- a line I noticed here is that history is what the present needs to know about the past.

Mike McCormick: An Almost Insurmountable Evil: How Obama's Deep State Defiled the Catholic Church and Executed the Wuham Plandemic (paperback, 2025, Bombardier Books): An early frontrunner for most insane right-wing hatchet job of the year, not least for his tangent on Pope Francis ("an illegitimate pope, an unclean cardinal, a compromised president, his criminal vice president, and their win-at-all-cost operatives"), as well as his revelations of "how the Obama-Biden White House networked the Catholic Church into human trafficking along the Southern Border; how it schemed Ukraine into becoming a biological warfare threat to Russia; and how it collaborated to release the Wuhan Plandemic [sic] to upend President Trump's 2020 campaign." McCormick claims to know all this because he worked as "White House stenographer" over 15 years (presumably before his 2019 memoir, so not actually in the Biden White House).

• Mike McCormick: Fifteen Years a Deplorable: A White House Memoir (2019, 15 Years a Deplorable).
• Mike McCormick: Joe Biden Unauthorized: And the 2020 Crackup of the Democratic Party (paperback, 2020, 15 Years a Deplorable).
• Mike McCormick: The Case to Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden (paperback, 2023, Bombardier Books).
• James Comer: All the President's Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes That Made the Biden Family Rich (2025, Broadside Books).
• Miranda Devine: The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America (2024, Broadside Books). The author also wrote:
• Miranda Devine: Laptop From Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide (2021, Post Hill Press).
• Rudy Giuliani: The Biden Crime Family: The Blueprint for Their Prosecution (2024, War Room Books).
• Joseph B Sweeney: Dangerous Injustice: How Democrats Weaponized DOJ to Protect Biden and Persecute Trump (2024, Real Clear Publishing).
• Kash Pramod Patel: Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy (paperback, 2024, Post Hill Press). Talk about politicizing DOJ, Trump picked Patel to run the FBI, to whit:
• Fred Chandler: Kash Patel: Kash Patel's Plan to Overhaul the FBI, Expose Corruption, and Restore Trust in Law Enforcement (paperback, 2025, independently published).

Glenn McDonald: You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music (paperback, 2024, Canbury Press): Rock credit, data nerd, someone I was acquainted with before he became Spotify's Data Alchemist, devising algorithms to guide users into finding their preferred music, or that seems to have been the theory. I had my own thoughts along those lines, and might have considered his my dream job, so I picked up this book -- (along with Stephen Witt: How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero or Piracy (2015) -- but I haven't had the time (or, I suppose, interest) to delve deeper.

• Sven Carlsson/Jonas Leijonhufvud: The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance (paperback, 2021, Diversion Books).
• Maria Eriksson/Rasmus Fleischer/Anna Johansson/Pelle Snickers/Patrick Vonderau: Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music (2019, The MIT Press).
• Liz Pelly: Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (2025, Atria/Signal One).

Pankaj Mishra: The World After Gaza: A History (2025, Penguin): Big-picture historian, tackled the entire modern world in Age of Anger: A History of the Present, seems to be jumping the gun a bit here, as the genocide is far from over. But the bulk of the book is about how we remember the Nazi Judeocide, with a major chapter on how "never forget" dominates and pervades everything in Israel, followed by "Germany from Antisemitism to Philosemitism" and "Americanising the Holocaust." And as one of the few writers working today who thinks in genuinely global terms, he also includes chapters on "The Clashing Narratives of the Shoah, Slavery and Colonialism" and "Atrocity Hucksterism and Identity Politics." In short, this looks like a very deep book, although not one where Palestinians have much volition or responsibility.

Also note these additional new books on Israel's war against Palestinians:

• Atef Abu Saif: Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide (paperback, 2024, Beacon Press): A Palestinian novelist, previously published The Drone Eats With Me: A Gaza Diary, about the siege of Gaza in 2014.
• Refaat Alareer: If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose (2024, OR Books): Renowned Palestinian poet and literature professor, killed by Israel shortly after writing the title poem.
• Peter Beinart: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (2025, Knopf).
• Khaled A Beydoun: Eyes on Gaza: Witnessing Annihilation (paperback, 2025, Street Noise Books): Graphics by Mohammad Sabaaneh.
• Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025, Knopf): Born in Egypt, lives in US, author of a novel (American War, which imagines a future civil war here), offers his "heartsick break letter with the West."
• Mohammed El-Kurd: Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal (paperback, 2025, Haymarket Books).
• Didier Fassin: Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza (paperback, 2025, Verso).
• Isabella Hammad: Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative (paperback, 2024, Grove Press): Short (96 pp), "shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing."
• Chris Hedges: A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine (paperback, 2025, Seven Stories Press). Famed war reporter, delivers "a scathing denunciation of the long violence of the Zionist project and its U.S. and European backers." Hedges has many books, from his early War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) to his prescient American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007) to The Greatest Evil Is War (2022).
• Munther Isaac: Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza (paperback, 2025, Eerdmans): Author is a Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem.
• Sim Kern: Genocide Bad.: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation (paperback, 2025, Interlink Books).
• Ibrahim Khalid: Israel's Genocide in Gaza: A Chronicle of Atrocities (paperback, 2024).
• Andreas Malm: The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth (paperback, 2025, Verso).
• James Robins: Blowing Up Everything Is Beautiful: Israel's Extermination of Gaza (2025, Arcade).
• Joe Sacco: War on Gaza (paperback, 2024, Fantagraphics): Short (32 pp) illustrated novella, returns to the scene of his previous books, Palestine (2001), and Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel (2009).
• Richard Seymour: Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization (2024, Verso): Mentioned this before, but note that the last chapter is obviously relevant here "Genocide: Shrouded in Darkness" (which follows "The Armed Shitstorm: Murderous Nationalisms," which is also relevant, itself following "War Machines: Cyberwar, Lone Wolves and Mass Shooters").
• Avi Shlaim: Genocide in Gaza: Israel, Hamas, and the Long War on Palestine (2025, Irish Pages Press): One of Israel's premier historians, author of one of the first comprehensive books I read on the subject, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2001).
• Dan Steinbock: The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel's Politics, Economy & Military (paperback, 2025, Clarity Press): This looks more at what Israel's policies of ethnic cleansing are doing to the politics and economy of Israel itself, which is fraught with its own perils.
• Enzo Traverso: Gaza Faces History (paperback, 2024, Other Press): From Italy, but has taught in France and at Cornell, specifically on Jewish history and on The New Faces of Fascism, so easily sees through "the dishonest weaponization of anti-Semitism (in some cases by true anti-Semites on the far right) to attack supporters of Palestinian rights."
• Maya Wind: Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (paperback, 2014, Verso).

Needless to say, the Hasbara folks have been working on this too (plus a couple older books along the same lines, just less desperate):

• Yair Agmon/Oriya Mevorach: One Day in October: Forty Heroes, Forty Stories (paperback, 2024, Maggid).
• David L Bernstein: Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews (paperback, 2022, Wicked Son).
• Elkana (Kuno) Cohen: OCT 7: The War Against Hamas Through the Eyes of an Israeli Command Officer (paperback, 2024, Viva Editions).
• Alan Dershowitz: Defending Israel: Against Hamas and Its Radical Left Enablers (paperback, 2023, Hot Books).
• Alan Dershowitz: The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies: And How to Refute Them With Truth (paperback, 2024, Skyhorse).
• Seth J Frantzman: The October 7 War: Israel's Battle for Security in Gaza (paperback, 2024, Wicked Son).
• David Friedman: One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2024, Humanix Books): Foreword by Mike Pompeo.
• Josh Hammer: Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West (2025, Radius Book Group): Blurbs from Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Ben Shapiro, David Friedman, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, and other exemplars of Western Civilization.
• Raphael Israeli: The Mind-Boggling October 7 Savagery: How Western Minds Were Boggled by Islamic Machinations (paperback, 2024, Strategic Book Publishing).
• Uri Kaufman: American Intifada: Israel, the Gaza War, and the New Antisemitism (paperback, 2025, Republic Book Publishers).
• Adam Kirsch: On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (2024, WW Norton).
• Richard Landes: Can "The Whole World" Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad (paperback, 2022, Academic Studies Press).
• Bernard-Henri Lévy: Israel Alone (paperback, 2024, Wicked Son).
• Douglas Murray: On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (2025, Broadside Books). My comment on the author's 2022 book, The War on the West: "Thin-skinned, xenophobic right-winger claiming victimhood 500+ years after Columbus." At least that's what I wrote when I found his previous book, The War on the West (2022). Before that he wrote The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017).
• Brendan O'Neil: After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation (paperback, 2024, Spiked).
• Alon Penzel: Testimonies Without Boundaries: Israel: October 7th, 2023 (paperback, 2024, Spines).
• Adi Schwartz/Einat Wilf: The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace (paperback, 2020, St Martin's Griffin).
• Rachel Shabi: Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism (2025, Oneworld): I suspect this book is nuanced enough it belongs in the previous section along with Beinart, but at this point I have little patience for bringing up antisemitism in any context. Author previuosly wrote We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel's Jews From Arab Lands (2009).
• Jake Wallis Simons: Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What to Do About It (paperback, 2025, Constable).
• Amir Tibon: The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel's Borderlands (2024, Little Brown).
• Gil Troy: To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream (paperback, 2024, Wicked Son): Troy has several previous books, including "the most comprehensive Zionist collection ever published, The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland -- Then, Now, Tomorrow (2018, 608 pp).
• Asa Winstanley: Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (paperback, 2023, OR Books): This predates 10/7, but shows the same tactics at work, here as a preëmptive strike against anyone critical of Israel.
• Lee Yaron: 10/7: 100 Human Stories (2024, St Martin's Press): Haaretz writer, not clear whether the stories are exclusively Israeli -- there is an acknowledgment of 30,000 Gazans killed between 10/7 and when the book was written -- but most seem to be. Kai Bird wrote a favorable blurb, so I wouldn't dismiss this one out of hand.
• Aeon History: A Concise History of the Jews: The People Who Wrestled With God, Ghettos, and Genocide to Achieve Modern Statehood (paperback, 2024, independent): 232 pp.

Some other recent (or not previously noted) books on Israel:

• Nasser Abourahme: The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony (paperback, 2025, Duke University Press): "That struggle is a form of anticolonial refusal that draws its power not from any decisive finality, but precisely from irresolution and keeping time open."
• Teresa Aranguren/Sandra Barrilaro: Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba (2024, Haymarket Books).
• Tony Greenstein: Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation (2022, Tony Greenstein): Shows how Zionism and antisemitism are symbiotic both in theory and practice, especially from the 1930s through the ingathering of Holocaust survivors. Written before the Gaza genocide, one could imagine a sequel where Netanyahu has metamorphosed into Hitler, and Biden and Trump have become alternative cheerleaders, like Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky.
• Yossi Klein Halevi: Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (paperback, 2019, Harper Perennial): I don't doubt that this is meant to convey the author's good intentions, but I doubt it will be taken as such, because it starts from such presumptions of a power imbalance.
• Ghassan Kanafani: On Zionist Literature (paperback, 2022, Ebb Books): First English translation of a 1967 book.
• Yardena Schwartz: Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2024, Union Square).
• Avi Shlaim: Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (2023; paperback, 2024, Oneworld).

Finally, some books on Jews in America with or without reference to Israel:

• Marjorie M Feld: The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism (2024, NYU Press).
• Joshua Leifer: Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life (2024, Dutton).

Benny Morris/Dror Ze'evi: The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924 (paperback, 2021, Harvard University Press): Israeli historian, did much to document the expulsion of Palestinians during Israel's "war of independence," later turned into a hard-right ideologue, so one suspects ulterior motives here, in attempting to reframe the more famous depredations against Armenians during the 1914-18 World War into a much broader framework of Turkish Muslims attacking Christian minorities. I read Taner Akcam: A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (2007) quite some time ago, as well as some more general books on the rise of the Young Turks, the Balkan Wars, the end of the Ottoman Empire, and the revival of Turkish nationalism, but it turns out there are more books I hadn't noted:

• Peter Balakian: The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (paperback, 2004, Harper Perennial).
• Grigoris Balakian: Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 (paperback, 2010, Vintage): Great-uncle of Peter Balakian, who translated.
• Giles Milton: Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (paperback, 2009, John Murray).
• Lou Ureneck: Smyrna September 1922: The American Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide (paperback, Ecco).

Premilla Nadasen: Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (paperback, 2023, Haymarket Books): Capitalism has laid the foundation for many higher stages: I don't know whether Lenin was the first to identify imperialism as a higher stage of capitalism, but he turned that insight into a theory. The pace seems to be quickening of late with coinages like Naomi Klein's "disaster capitalism" and Yanis Varoufakis' "techno-feudaliam." Meanwhile, the quainter industry of post-capitalism has mostly focused on using technology to open up leisure time (Sweezy and Gorz among Marxists, but also Keynes and Bookchin and Frase). I've long been a leisure partisan, not for want of a work ethic but I've never much cared for greed-headed bosses. But lately I've been thinking more about the sense of worth one gets from good work, and how that kind of work has increasingly shifted from production to services and finally to care. So when I saw this book, I flashed on the idea that the subtitle might harbor a bit of irony, that increasing focus on care might offer the path where capitalism fades back into history. Of course, much of the focus here is on the exploitation of care workers and the tarnished care they offer. Of course, even within those confines, she has much to write about. But when you start to think about care work, the contribution that capitalism adds is almost entirely negative. As more and more of our work becomes centered on care, it behooves us to cut out the profit-seeking predators and rentiers who devalue and degrade the such socially important work.
Some related books here:

• The Care Collective: The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (paperback, 2020, Verso).
• Leah Lakshmi Plepzna-Samarasinha: Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (paperback, 2018, Arsenal Pulp Press).
• Dean Spade: Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (paperback, 2020, Verso).
• Dean Spade: Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together (paperback, 2025, Algonquin Books).

Clay Risen: Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America (2025, Scribner): A timely revisit to the period where the powers that be panicked the American public into adopting anti-communism as secular religion, a cause for rearmament and global outreach as the champion of the capitalist "free world," and sworn enemy of labor unions, anticolonial movements, and working people all around the world. Sen. Joe McCarthy lent his name to the crusade, which started before he jumped on the bandagon, and continued even after he proved to be an embarrassment. Anyone who recalls the era will recognize echoes today in Trump's harangues against "radical leftists," by which he means not just us few harmless idealists but millions more who are neither radical nor leftists (although some will be as they find they have nothing more to lose).

Enzo Traverso: Revolution: An Intellectual History (paperback, 2024, Verso): Italian Marxist, has a new book on Gaza Faces History, cited among the Israel/Gaza books, but much more in his back catalog, of which this seems relatively major. I've soured on the idea of revolution, but clearly the idea captivated many on the left in the 19th and 20th centuries, with 1789 and 1917 looming large.

• Enzo Traverso: The Jews and Germany: From the "Judeo-German symbiosis" to the Memory of Auschwitz (1995, University of Nebraska Press).
• Enzo Traverso: Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism After Auschwitz (paperback, 1999, Pluto Press).
• Enzo Traverso: The Origins of Nazi Violence (2003, New Press).
• Enzo Traverso: The End of Jewish Modernity (paperback, 2016, Pluto Press).
• Enzo Traverso: Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945 (paperback, 2017, Verso).
• Enzo Traverso: The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate (revised ed, paperback, 2019, Haymarket Books): Previous version was The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate (2001).
• Enzo Traverso: The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (2019, Verso).
• Enzo Traverso: Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (paperback, 2021, Columbia University Press).
• Enzo Traverso: Singular Pasts: The "I" in Historiography (paperback, 2022, Columbia University Press).

Michael Wolff: All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America (2025, Crown): Here I am still trying to figure out the election, and Wolff already has a 400 page book of intense reporting: "Threading a needle between tragedy and farce, the fate of the nation, the liberal ideal, and democracy at all, [he] paints a gobsmacking portrait of a man whose behavior is so unimaginable, so uncontrolled, so unmindful of cause and effect, that it defeats all the structures and logic of civic life." And then he squanders what little insight he has and calls it "one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history." How could it be a "comeback" when Trump never left? Even when Biden was in the White House, Trump was in our minds, not least because he was all over the media -- even the ones who supposedly hated him never let him go.

More early takes on Trump, Biden, Harris, and the 2024 election:

• Alex Isenstadt: Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump's Return to Power (2025, Grand Central).
• Jonathan Allen/Amie Parnes: Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House (2025, William Morrow). Also wrote quickie books on 2016 (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign) and 2020 (Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency).
• Josh Dawsey/Tyler Pager/Isaac Arnsdorf: 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America (2025, Penguin). [07-08]
• Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson: Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again (2025, Penguin Press): This examines Biden's decision to run for a second term, which froze the field of potential challengers, most critically preventing anyone from "the democratic wing" -- assuming Sanders would also pass as being too old -- from rising and possibly reinvigorating the Democratic Party. I've seen it suggested that the "real original sin" was picking Harris for VP in 2020, but had they sensed her weakness, they should have gotten past Biden much earlier, to let the primaries weed her out. More likely they just didn't care.
• Chris Whipple: Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History (2025, Harper Influence).

This has been followed by a tsunami of Trump triumphalism:

• Joe Concha: The Greatest Comeback Ever: Inside Trump's Big Beautiful Campaign (2025, Broadside Books).
• Dinesh D'Souza: Vindicatinig Trump (2024, Regnery): Cover notes: "New York Times Bestselling Author"; "Now a Major Motion Picture"; "Includes an Inrterview with President Trump."
• Newt Gingrich: Trump's Triumph: America's Greatest Comeback (2025, Center Street).
• Annie Karni/Luke Broadwater: Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress (2025, Random House).
• Chris W Klevik: Donald J Trump 47th President: The Greatest Political Comeback in American History (paperback, 2025, independent).
• Larry O'Connor: Shameless Liars: How Trump Defeated the Legacy Media and Made Them Irrelevant (paperback, 2025, independent).
• Salena Zito: Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland (2025, Center Street). [07-08]

I've noted a huge number of books on Trump in the past, but I'm still finding pre-election books I missed, like:

• Jonathan Alter: American Reckoning: Inside Trump's Trial -- and My Own (2024, Ben Bella Books).
• Russ Buettner/Susanne Craig: Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success (2024, Penguin).
• Joel B Pollak: The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days (2024, War Room Books).
• Jack Posobiec/Joshua Lisec: Bulletproof: The Truth About the Assassination Attempts on Donald Trump (2024, Skyhorse).
• Barbara A Res: Tower of Lies: What My Eighteen Years of Working With Donald Trump Reveals About Him (2020, Graymalkin Media).
• Fred Trump: All in the Family: THe Trumps and How We Got This Way (2024, Gallery Books).
• Mary L Trump: Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir (2024, St Martin's Press).
• Mary L Trump: The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal (2021, St Martin's Press).
• Steve Turley: Fight! How Trump and the MAGA Movement Are Changing the World (paperback, 2024, Turley Publishing).

A few more books briefly noted:

Dana Bash/David Fisher: America's Deadliest Election: The Cautionary Tale of the Most Violenc Election in American History (2024, Hanover Square Press): Bash is "CNN's chief political correspondent," so of course she'd have nothing better to do during 2024 than reminisce about 1872. Fisher is "author of more than twenty New York Times bestsellers."

Ron Chernow: Mark Twain (2025, Penguin Press): Big time biographer, short titles, long books (1200 pp). Needless to say, Samuel Clemens (1835-1910) gave him a lot to write about.

Sue Coe/Stephen Eisenman: The Young Person's Illustrated Guide to American Fascism (paperback, 2005, OR Books): The latter's "crystalline text," followed by the former's drawings -- not clear how well integrated they are, or whether any effort is made to distinguish fascism from run-of-the-mill right-wing acts and thoughts.

Maureen Dowd: Notorious: Portraits of Stars From Hollywood, Culture, Fashion, and Tech (2025, Harper): Or, "forget everything I wrote about politics in the last decade, let's talk about stuff that doesn't matter."

Ross Gay: Inciting Joy: Essays (2022; paperback, 2024, Algonquin Books): Poet turned inspirational author, following up on The Book of Delights (2022) and The Book of (More) Delights (2023).

Frederic Jameson: The Years of Theory: Lectures on Modern French Thought (paperback, 2024, Verso).

Robert D Kaplan: Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis (2025, Random House): Used to be a travel writer with a fairly good grasp of history. But then he "started thinking" . . . and hanging out with folks like his blurbist David Petraeus.

Edward Luce: Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet (2025, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster): Major biography (560 pp) of Jimmy Carter's answer to Henry Kissinger, which is to say no answer at all.

Dan Nadel: Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life (2025, Scribner).

Steve Oney: On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR (2025, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).

David Petraeus/Andrew Roberts: Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 to Gaza (2023; paperback, 2024, Harper): Only interesting thing here is that the paperback reprint changes the subtitle from Ukraine to Gaza. I would ask what kind of general would even want to claim Gaza as a war when it is plain genocide, but the question answers itself.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Truths: The Future of America First (2024, Threshold Editions).

Kenneth Roth: Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments (2025, Knopf): Former executive director of Human Rights Watch. Israel gets chapter 9.

Chuck Schumer: Antisemitism in America: A Warning (2025, Grand Central Publishing): Democratic Party leader in the Senate evidently thinks he has nothing more pressing or important to write about. He made clear where his true loyalties lie when he joined Netanyahu's Republicans in voting against Obama's Iran Nuclear Deal.

Rebecca Solnit: No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain (paperback, 2025, Haymarket Books).

Jeffrey Toobin: The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy (2025, Simon & Schuster): Legal affairs journalist, has covered OJ Simpson, Timothy McVeigh, and the Supreme Court, timed this for general background as Biden and Trump were bound to issue a flurry of controversial pardons.

As I struggled to wrap this up, I kept poking around, looking for books related to the ones I already had written up, but inevitably found more items of interest I hadn't touched on at all, or that I simply wanted (assuming I'd have the time) to write more on. For one thing, we're due for an update on AI. Robert Wright has written a lot about AI in his newsletter, and has promised a book, but the publication date is still way out (November 18), and for me the title is even more disconcerting: The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. He's a smart guy who has a lot of useful insights into real world problems like how Americans think about foreign policy, but this is surely bullshit:

Wright provocatively suggests that to truly understand the significance of the AI revolution, we need to expand our perspective beyond the last century or even the whole history of technology and look back billions of years, across the entire history of life on Earth. All along, he says, evolution has been pushing life toward this technological threshold, which now confronts our species with a climactic challenge: Can we muster the political, moral, and spiritual resources needed to guide this technology wisely?

If we fail this challenge, the consequences for the whole planet could be grave. But if we meet the challenge—if we pass "the God test"—we can live in a world where humanity thrives, finding not just happiness but deeper meaning and purpose. We can be enriched and uplifted by, rather than imperiled by, awesomely intelligent machines.

I mean, I understand that all people -- and I certainly don't exempt myself from this, even if I'm more conscious of it than most -- when faced with the unknown, or just with new facts, translate them into their previously extant mental frameworks, no matter how poor the fit. So I'm not really surprised that a religion guy like Wright might come up with such an angle. (His books include: The Evolution of God, Three Scientists and Their Gods, The Moral Animal, and perhaps most pointedly, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.) Nor that an anti-religion guy like myself would recoil at such utter nonsense. I'm reminded here of Wolfgang Pauli's famous riposte: "That's not right. That's not even wrong."

But chances are, when we get down to details, I'm likely to find a lot to agree with Wright on. "Nonzero" may be bad teleology, but the concept has some real value in ethics, and that's something we need much more than God. When I think about AI, I'm reminded of what people thought about the internet back in the 1990s. They projected all sorts of scenarios, from techno-utopian to utterly dystopian, but for the last 25-30 years, we've just muddled through, adjusting when we can, sometimes giving up, but in the end (so far, anyhow) what we have is pretty much what we started with: a Reagan-Clinton neoliberal economy, where the internet is mostly advertising, not much more ubiquitous and obnoxious than it was with radio and TV. (Which, if memory serves, is a lot of both. Indeed, with my open source software, ad-blockers, and DVR, I'm probably assaulted by less advertising -- or less obvious advertising -- than I was in the 1980s.)

And while I'm not one to make light of advertising -- it may not be the root of all evil in capitalism, but it certainly turns the evil of capitalism into an art form -- I would still conclude that the internet is the best thing that has happened to at least my everyday life in my lifetime. But that doesn't mean that I'm happy it's turned out just as it has. As an engineer I see everything as opportunity for improvement. But I'm not much into "creative destruction" either. Sure, it works, but to say it's necessary require a pretty jaundiced view of humanity (which I rarely have, except when they do things as stupid as voting for Trump).

As I was cleaning up, I wrote a bit on John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics, and decided I had enough to include this time. I also added a sublist item for Jathan Sadowski: The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism, which is tied to Cassidy because both talk about Luddites, but also fit here because this strikes me as a smarter way of talking about AI and similar technologies. In particular, this quote from p. 12:

As capitalism develops -- and the easy, cheap ways of extracting value get more scarce -- the methods of accumulating capital and capturing profit have grown more complex and abstract. The relation is not always a direct connection between consumers, workers, bosses, and landlords who are making, buying, selling, and renting commodities in the great big Mall of Capitalism. Some of the biggest engines of capital to ever exist are based on financial instruments and digital platforms that pull profit out of pure speculation. These engines are collectively called "fictitious capital" because they are seemingly removed from the real economy of material things and physical processes. It is not always easy to discern how profit is made, who it is made for, and on what time horizons. We will get more into these dynamics and their consequences for technological capitalism in the chapter on innovation.

This isn't all that far from what Yanis Varoufakis has to say in Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, except without the confusing overkill metaphors. I should write more about this, and later, as this is one of the few books here that convinced me to order a copy. For now I'll note that the author's autobiographical sketch is not far removed from mine (although he was fortunate enough to have a science who wasn't a total asshole). And that I'm particularly looking forward to:

Chapter 5 uncovers the dynamics of labor in artificial intelligence, the Potemkin illusion of using hidden people to fake automation, and the capitalist dream of creating a perpetual value machine that will finally abolish the problem of human labor.

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