Books [Draft File]

This is a safe space for collecting items that may eventually go into a Book Roundup post.

Last Book Roundup was way back on May 23, 2025 and, well, much has happened since then. I promised then I'd drop the main section down to 20 books to try to get these out in a more timely manner, but if I do that now, it's going to take multiple posts just to deal with the leftovers from last year. But let's start with the obvious top priorities, and see where that gets us.

Keynote book on Trump:

Thom Hartmann: The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party,and a World on the Brink (paperback, 2025, Berrett-Koehler): "Progressive talk radio host."

• Jonathan Karl: Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America (2025, Dutton).

• Robin Wade Gonzalez: What if the President Is an Idiot?: Trump, Power, and the Death of Serious Politics: How a Reality Show Became a Presidency (paperback, 2025, independent).

Julie K Brown: Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story (paperback, 2020 [2021], Dey Street Books):

Cory Doctorow: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (2025, Verso Books): Sci-fi novelist, has written several books about the internet, increasingly on how tech businesses make everything they touch worse in their relentless effort to exploit users, extract and mine data, and lock in monopoly profits.

• Tim Wu: The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (2025, Knopf): Pretty much the same book, with less profanity.

• Tim Berners-Lee: This is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web (2025, Farrar Straus and Giroux): By the inventor of HTML, who had a different idea of how it should develop.

Kenneth Rogoff: Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider's View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead (2025, Yale University Press): On the history of the dollar, which through some combination of size and luck supplanted the British pound as the world's preferred reserve currency, an "exorbitant privilege" that comes with perks and burdens, and isn't bound to last, especially as greedy American politicians like Trump seek to abuse their powers.

Dahlia Scheindlin: The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel: Promise Unfulfilled (paperback, 2023, De Gruyter): A thorough history of what passes for democracy in Israel, dating back to and beyond 1948, including the pivotal initial decisions to exclude and/or control the Palestinians, and to grant the religious parties extensive control over Jewish civil life, up through the 2022 election which gave us Netanyahu's coalition with the extremist settler parties, the revolt in Gaza, and the subsequent genocide.

• Robbie Michaelson: The Broken Covenant: Netanyahu and Israel (paperback, 2025, Truth Dispatch).
• Neta Oren: Israel Under Netanyahu: Populism and Democratic Decline (2025, Lynne Rienner).

Paul Starr: American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge From the 1950s to Now (2025, Yale University Press): A broad politial history of my lifetime: it does seem like you have to go back to the 1950s to find solid ground, and portraying everything since as a dance between revolution and revenge helps explain a lot. I would add that ever since the late 1950s there has been a desire for revolution, but that it has been stymied, not so much by the repressive right as by the responsible center. The problem, of course, is that the center hasn't satisfied the desire for revolution, which keeps growing, and has eventually been exploited by the Trumpy right, not that what they're actually offering will work either.

A few more books briefly noted: