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Book* [10 - 19]Friday, May 22, 2020 Book RoundupAside from last week's Trump Books, this is my first Book Roundup since October 31, 2019, so lots of ground to cover. As usual, 40 books in the main section (well, 45), some with lists of extras tacked on. Then a bunch of "briefly noted" -- most just noted. Not inconceivable I could return and write more about some of them later. I've even been known to read the occasional book that first appeared there. But at least this includes them in the big file for future reference. This time I have a third section, which includes leftovers from the Trump Books roundup. I didn't sort them out as I did before. Again, this section includes some forthcoming books -- some surprisingly close to the election, like they're deliberately planning on being irrelevant. [PS: On further reflection, I think I should move these new books back into the old post, but will hold off on doing that until later, so those reading in real time won't have to go back.] My usual methodology here is to start with Amazon's tracking of my tastes and interests, and see where their recommendations lead me -- especially given that their book pages contain blurbs and user reviews, often even a partial "look inside," usually sufficient information to base my notes on. However, Amazon has become much more frustrating and much less useful lately. Their "my recommendations" page is now about 80% non-book clutter, and their book subject lists have generally been slashed from 50 to 15 books (I've seen them with as few as 4), so not much to explore from there. Their book pages used to have long lists of related books (usually books that others have bought or looked at), but the only thing they offer regularly now is "books you may like" -- pretty much the same list on every page. Their subject browsing has never been useful (it's even hard to find it). Even searches are pot shots. For the Trump books, I scoured through 50-60 screens of titles before posting last week. Most of the books below showed up in the next 20-30 screens. I wound up going to Barnes and Noble for Trump books. Their subject browsing has been slightly better in the past, although it, too, seems worse than before. (Filters now seem to cancel each other out rather than further refine, and order by date is flat out broken.) Plus they don't have nearly as much aggregate information, so when I do find a book there, I wind up having to search it out on Amazon. I also looked at Indie Bound, but found no help at all. Looks like you can order there, but can't really shop. [PS: Finally, looked at Good Reads, which turns out to be more useful.] In the future, it looks like I'm going to have to return to doing things like thumbing through the New York Review of Books looking for advertisements. (In the past, I went to libraries and bookstores to jot down lists of titles. From age 16 on I prowled around bookstores several times a week, regarding it as essential to my mental health, but that practice declined and ended when Borders went bankrupt.) I even tried doing a Google search for "new political books," which referred me to BookAuthority's 63 Best New Politics Books to Read in 2020. Some real crap, but at least 25% of the books there didn't show up in my Amazon searches. (Thanks to that list, I added Lawrence Lessig's book to the list, and after looking up Lessig I wrote the two Ganesh Sitaraman entries, increasing the main list to 42 books.) Two of the longer sublists deserve special mention. I often list previous works by authors, but that went a little long with Joseph J Ellis. I look at the aforementioned "big file" often to see what other books someone has written, so it's always tempting to broaden that list -- currently, it's just everything mentioned in previous Book Roundups, but I can imagine stuffing it into a database. On the other hand, I didn't do that for the next author down, Eric Foner. That's partly because I've followed Foner more closely in the past, and indeed have read several of his books that predate the file (actually starting with Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970; paperback, 1995, Oxford University Press). Also did a long list under Nathan J Robinson, but the other list I wanted to mention was the one under Laurie Garrett. You hear people arguing that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but as the list shows, there's actually a pretty substantial literature on the subject, with Garrett's big 1994 book as a cornerstone. Admittedly, I padded the list with historical books on the 1918 influenza. That is the most similar historical event to the present one, so seems of special interest today. I wasn't finding much on older plagues, but given how much else I had I decided not to look harder. But I did think of a Robert Desowitz book I had read 20+ years ago, and thought it worth mentioning. Also stumbled across a new article by Garrett, which would have been good in a Weekend Roundup. Hard to predict when the next Book Roundup will appear, given what a mess my scratch file is currently in, plus the recent search troubles. I currently have 49 books left over, but most of them are mere stubs (some of those I might as well add as such below). On the other hand, at least a dozen are ready to go, and even as I write this I'm finding more books I want to comment on. Books (from the main section) I've read so far: Erwin Chemerinsky: We the People; Ani DiFranco: No Walls and the Recurring Dream; Matt Farwell/Michael Ames: American Cipher; Eric Foner: The Second Founding; Ezra Klein: Why We're Polarized; John McPhee: Draft No. 4; Suketu Mehta: This Land Is Our Land; Cailin O'Connor/James Owen Weatherall: The Misinformation Age; Charles Postel: Equality; Emmanuel Saez/Gabriel Zucman: The Triumph of Injustice; Joan C Williams: White Working Class. Most of these I picked up rather haphazardly from the library. I've also read all (or nearly) of Robert Christgau: Book Reports and Paul Krugman: Arguing With Zombies as pre-book essays. Wrote two of those up at the end, only after seeing them in my book feed. Posting this without yet doing the indexing. The "big file," see above for link, currently has 4,505 books (paragraphs, approximately the same thing), so it is already pretty unwieldy (although I can still load its 1.8 MB into an emacs buffer and search it almost instantly, so it still works for me). David A Ansell: The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills (paperback, 2019, University of Chicago Press): Doctor, has spent 40 years working in some of the poorest hospitals in Chicago, wrote a book about his experiences: County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital (2011, Academy Chicago Publishers). Problem here is not just that America's health care system fails poor Americans, inequality has stacked the deck against them even before illness or injury strikes. Related:
Andrew Bacevich: The Age of Illusions (2020, Metropolitan Books): Ex-soldier, professed conservative, Bacevich has written a long series of books about the revival of militarism in America after Vietnam and how that renascent military was wasted and ruined in a series of wars in the Middle East. He looks to be retracing his steps here, focusing especially on the decision to maintain "sole superpower" status after the Cold War's sudden end, a decision that encouraged new enemies to replace the old. While that has been profitable for an arms industry and a bureaucracy always in need of enemies, the forever wars have only left America poorer and shabbier than before. Christopher Caldwell: The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (2020, Simon & Schuster): This is regarded as a rare conservative attempt at serious cultural history, but as always the word "entitlement" gives the mythmaking impulse away. Caldwell takes "readers on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycontin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies" to illustrate his case that "the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled." Erwin Chemerinsky: We the People: A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the Twenty-First Century (paperback, 2018, Picador): Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law, previously wrote The Conservative Assault on the Constitution (2011), and The Case Against the Supreme Court (2014). His "progressive reading" emphasizes the preamble, which among other things permits the government to "promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" -- about as progressive a directive as one can imagine. Also see:
Robert Christgau: Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading (paperback, 2019, Duke University Press): Second collection of essays, following up Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism 1967-2017 (paperback, 2018, Duke University Press) with a selection of book reviews -- some on music history and criticism, some on fiction, some loosely grouped as "Bohemia Meets Hegemony" and "Culture Meets Capital." Adam Cohen: Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America (2020, Penguin Press): From 1936 to 1969 we were fortunate to have a Supreme Court that leaned left, for the only real period in American history when the Court worked to broaden and deepen the rights of all citizens, often in opposition to repressive and reactionary state and even federal laws. In 1969, Nixon started a campaign to pack the court with right-wingers (although his first two nominees were rejected by the Senate, his choice of William Rehnquist started to change the tide). Also see (plus the Robin Pogrebin/Kate Kelly book below, and the Erwin Chemerinsky book/list above):
John Corbett: Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music (2019, University of Chicago Press): Music writer and impressario (owns his own reissue label), reminiscences about 4-11 records from each year of the 1970s -- a pretty hip selection, many (even obscurities) I would have picked, probably more jazz than I knew at the time. Starts with the Kinks' "Lola," ends 1979 with the Raincoats' cover of same (plus one 1980 album, Grace Jones' Warm Leatherette). William Dalrymple: The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (2019, Bloomsbury): Major historian of British India, focuses here on the early period when English power was entrusted to private enterprise, the notorious East India Company -- a case example of what's likely to happen when the powers of state are directed exclusively for the profit of foreign shareholders. The progression is spelled out in chapter titles: "1599," "Sweeping With the Broom of Plunder," "Bloodshed and Confusion," "Racked by Famine," and "The Corpse of India." After the revolt of 1859, the British government had to step in and take over. They, too, did a lousy job. Ani DiFranco: No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir (2019, Viking; paperback, 2020, Penguin Press): DIY folksinger from Buffalo, released her own records and made a business out of that, which she still regards as a pretty weird thing to do. I have a cousin who moved to Buffalo and knows her -- my cousin's family shows up here and there in the book, and I figure I probably caught a glance of Ani as a girl, long before I started hearing about how amazing she was, which was long before you did, so I've always felt a bit of a personal connection. Also I figure it's good for me to read the occasional memoir, especially of people growing up political, as I may write one myself some day. I found the early family/city parts fascinating, the music/industry less so. I suspect she does too. EJ Dionne Jr: Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country (2020, St Martin's Press): The Washington Post columnist's second Trump book, perhaps a little more desperate than the first (One Nation Under Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported), but doubling down on his centrist pitch, that progressives have to give in and accept nothing for their votes, so the centrists can cut their own deals furthering oligopoly. Barbara Ehrenreich: Had I Known: Collected Essays (2020, Twelve): Starts with the Harper's piece that grew into her bestseller, Nickel-and-Dimed, with more on inequality, health, men, women, science, joy, God, and "bourgeois blunders" -- a rather vast category. A good selection, but after two dozen books, not remotely close to collected. Joseph J Ellis: American Dialogue: The Founders and Us (2018, Knopf): Historian, has written a number of books on the founding of the United States (partial list below). Notes the persistence of "what would the Founding Fathers think?" questions on current topics, tries to juxtapose several contemporary questions with thinking from those founders: Thomas Jefferson (racism), John Adams (inequality), George Washington (imperialism), and James Madison (the doctrine of original intent). I wouldn't put much stock in the answers (at least from the first two), but shows us again how the study of history is always (for better or worse) an interaction with the present. More Ellis books, and other recent period titles:
Matt Farwell/Michael Ames: American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the US Tragedy in Afghanistan (2019, Penguin Press): Bergdahl was a troubled teenager in Idaho, signed up and got thrown out of the US Coast Guard, joined the US Army as a private and got sent to Afghanistan. There, he wandered off his base, was captured by the Taliban and held for five years before being repatriated in a prisoner exchange. He was then reviled by the right-wing press, and as a result was court-martialed for desertion, convicted, and dishonorably discharged, without further incarceration. His story parallels America's futile and foolish war effort. Eric Foner: The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (2019, WW Norton): America's foremost historian of the period, his main book Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988; updated edition, paperback, 2014, Harper). This focuses most specifically on the three constitutional amendments of the period, including the one about "birthright citizenship" that Trump has most explicitly attacked. This details how and why they were passed, and how they've been reinterpreted by the courts ever since (e.g., how the 14th Amendment has been taken as carte blanche for corporate power). Laurie Garrett: The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1994; paperback, 1995, Farrar Straus & Giroux): This is an old book, massive (768 pp), nothing remotely specific on this year's pandemic, but a solid rejoinder to anyone's insinuation that "no one could have anticipated this." Garrett, by the way, is still around, most recently writing Trump Has Sabotaged America's Coronavirus Response. Here are some more books on pandemics and plagues, broadening the net both going back and forward.
Kim Ghattas: Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unravaled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020, Henry Holt). There's a natural dynamic to revolution to try to expand -- one thinks of the French wars against European monarchies, and Russia's appeal to proletarian revolution elsewhere. When Iran threw off the Shah, one of the first things the new Islamic Republic did was to mount a challenge for leadership of the Muslim World -- something Saudi Arabia had assumed since occupying the "holy cities" of Mecca and Medina. Hence the "forty-year rivalry" documented here. While revolutionary fervor in Iran has ebbed, isolation orchestrated by the Saudis, Israel, and the United States (as always, the sorest of sore losers) has kept a desperate edge on the conflict. Dan Kaufman: The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics (2018, WW Norton): The Kochs put a lot of money and organization into flipping Wisconsin, and had their most remarkable success these, with Scott Walker winning two terms as governor, Ron Johnson twice defeating Russell Feingold for the Senate, and a state legislature so gerrymandered Republicans still have a massive edge despite losing the popular vote -- Democrats did manage to rebound some in 2018. Moreover, Republicans won not by sugar-coating their ideology, but by taking advantage of their wins to implement some of the most radically right-wing policies in the nation. Marc Hetherington/Jonathan Weiler: Prius or Pickup? How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide (2018, Houghton Mifflin): Sure, badly. On the other hand, if you tell someone what your politics are, then ask them to answer the questions for you, the answers will probably correlate, at least in that people with different politics will probably put you into the authors pigeonholes. All that proves is that you can lie with statistics, as opposed to the usual process of just spouting nonsense. Authors also wrote:
AG Hopkins: American Empire: A Global History (2018, Princeton University Press). I thought I'd slip this in under Daniel Underwahr's How to Hide an Empire, but at 960 pp this is by far the more sweeping book, basically a recasting of the whole history of America as viewed through its imperialistic proclivities. Author is British, which no doubt helped set up the global imperial framework. Ezra Klein: Why We're Polarized (2020, Simon & Schuster): Polarization per se doesn't bother me. Indeed, given that Republicans have moved significantly to the right, it's good that Democrats have moved somewhat left, and would I'd be happier if they moved even further. Sure, this does cause problems, like when one party (almost always the Republican) tries to obstruct the other from doing it would do itself if under different circumstances (like pass stimulus bills). Klein cites a lot of political science research on how people identify themselves in groups, but he refuses to credit any kind of "identity politics" strawman (unlike, say, Mark Lilla, in The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics). He sees identity as inevitable but also flexible and multi-layered, which strikes me as right. Paul Krugman: Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future (2020, WW Norton): New York Times columnist and sometime economist recycles his columns, organized into thematic sections, like how Obamacare was supposed to work, why the Euro didn't, why tax cuts aren't always good, why deficits aren't always bad, and how politics affects (and infects) everything. Michael Lind: The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite (2020, Portfolio): Started out as a thinker with conservative impulses, gradually turned on the right without abandoning those instincts. Seems to be intent on defending working class Trump voters here from the charge of bigotry, arguing that they're caught in the grip of a class war against them, and for a "class compromise that provides the working class with real power." Andrew Marantz: Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation (2019, Viking). You know, there's a lot of incoherent shit on the internet. If you look for it, you'll find it, and if you take it seriously, you'll start to worry about, oh say, the future of civilization. As near as I can tell, that's what Marantz is doing here, plus a little legwork to meet up with some of the people who play assholes in virtual space. I'm not sure any of it matters, but he does spend enough time chatting up the alt-right to draw out their general maleficence, so that's something. Just not sure it's worth the trouble. Branko Marcetic: Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden (paperback, 2020, Verso): Intended as "a deep dive into Joe Biden's history and the origins of his political values," argues that "far from being a liberal stalwart, Biden often outdid even Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush, assisting the right-wing war against the working class, and ultimately paving the way for Trump." Even though Biden's been the Democratic frontrunner, we haven't seen many books reviewing his life and record. But I'm reminded here that the publisher has a history of dredging up dirt on Democratic candidates -- back in 2000, I read one of their more brutal hatchet jobs, Al Gore: A User's Manual (by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair). Biden is a much easier target -- Gore at least seemed to have the gravitas and smarts to make his frequent maneuvers to the right seem merely opportunistic, whereas Biden simply does whatever seems easiest. On the other hand, Biden's running less on his own record than on someone else's, and few have seen fit to call him on that. More on Biden:
Michael J Mazarr: Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy (2019, PublicAffairs): A RAND Corporation senior analyst, the sort of person who would have rubber-stamped the Bush administration's plot to invade Iraq, claims to have figured out how it all went so horribly wrong. He blames the decision on "a strain of missionary zeal that lives on" -- clearly, John Bolton is a particularly odious example. But while it's pretty easy these days to find politicians who admit that Iraq was a mistake, it's much harder to find ones who question the assumptions that went into that miscalculation. As such, even with books like this on the shelf, we have little reason to expect future war planners to have learned from past disasters. John McPhee: Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process (2017; paperback, 2018, Farrar Straus and Giroux): My favorite nonfiction writer constructs a memoir of his writing, stories of who and when and why, mixed with occasional grammar tips. I was hooked at the latter, although his thoughts on structure will challenge me more. Still, I'm reluctantly coming to suspect that at 89 his major works are behind him: The Founding Fish was 2002, Uncommon Carriers 2006, and since then just collections, most recently The Patch (2018), which I passed up at the library: essays on fishing, football, golf, lacrosse, bears, and something called "An Album Quilt." Suketu Mehta: This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto (2019, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Born in India, grew up in New York, wrote journalism all around the world, giving him the feel and perspective to write his major book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004). "Mehta juxtaposes the phony narratives of populist ideologues with the ordinary heroism of laborers, nannies, and others . . . also stresses the destructive legacies of colonialism and global inequality on large swaths of the world: When today's immigrants are asked, 'Why are you here?' they can justly respond, "We are here because you were there.'" Cailin O'Connor/James Owen Weatherall: The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread (2018; paperback, 2020, Yale University Press): Useful anecdotal history of many cases where blatant falsehoods were propagated far and wide, both recent and fairly deep into the past (e.g., the "health benefits" of bleeding). Also a series of approximate mathematical models of how such ideas are transmitted, ranging from gossip to propaganda. Kevin C O'Leary: Madison's Sorrow: Today's War on the Founders and America's Liberal Ideal (2020, Pegasus Books): A research fellow at the Center of the Study of Democracy at UC Irvine, previously wrote Saving Democracy: A Plan for Real Representation in America (paperback, 2006, Stanford University Press). Argues that Madisonian democracy was essentially liberal, and that the Republican Party has "unleashed an illiberal crusade against the ideals of the Founding Fathers." Both liberals and conservatives have tried to claim the Founders and their Constitution as their own. I've long thought that Scalia's "originalism" is a crock. On the other hand, the liberal case has mostly been aspirational, as they recall best sentiments and overlook how often those ideals have been failed. Still, I recall that my own politics started with a naive embrace of our noble past, leading me to turn against modern politicians of both parties for their many failures to live up to those ideals. But since then, one party has stood out in its desire to wreck the very foundations of democracy and equality: the Republicans, as O'Leary makes clear here. Thomas Philippon: The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets (2019, Belknap Press): By which he means: stopped worrying about monopoly power and shied away from antitrust enforcement. Economist, teaches finance at Stern School of Business. That's a reasonable position: capitalists wax eloquent about the efficiencies of the free market, but the first thing they learn to do in business school is to undermine and thwart competition. But I've seen this book picked apart by none other than James K Galbraith -- to some extent in defending his father (who was tolerant of well-regulated monopoly), but also for lionizing Wright Patman (D-TX), who had a reputation as a populist in the 1930s but didn't impress me much when he was chairing the House Banking Committee in the 1960s. Thomas Piketty: Capital and Ideology (2020, Belknap Press): Massive successor to the French economist's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, runs 1104 pages. Krugman panned this for wandering too far afield, but one suspects that a good part of the complaint has to do with Piketty's more radical political leanings. Goes deep in time, and all around the world, seeking to understand the roots of inequality and its extension today. Robin Pogrebin/Kate Kelly: The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation (2019, Portfolio): The authors dug up some of the background exposés that crowded out discussion of judicial philosophy -- reason enough to keep him far away from the Supreme Court. Book includes several revelations that resurfaced questions as to whether Kavanaugh lied to Congress during his confirmation hearings, and whether he should be impeached for it. Clearly, as a Supreme Court Justice, he's well positioned to do immense damage to our rights under the Constitution. Charles Postel: Equality: An American Dilemma 1866-1896 (2019, Farrar Straus and Giroux): A history of several political movements following the Civil War that took the notion of equality, given renewed emphasis following the end of slavery and the constitutional promise of equal rights, and tried to expand it to various groups -- farmers, women, labor. It's worth noting that several of those movements made alliances with the restoration of white power in the South, and as such compromised the equality they sought on the fractured ground of racism. Postel wrote a previous book, The Populist Vision. Jedediah Purdy: This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth (2019, Princeton University Press): Philosopher, I guess, although he makes his living teaching law. Hailing from West Virginia, he's haunted by the relationship between environmental destruction and poverty. A blurb touts this as a "Thoreauvian call to wake up," but surely he realizes that lifting a title from Woody Guthrie suggests a more straightforward revolution. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen: The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (2019, Oxford University Press): Intellectual history, "from the Puritans to Postmodernism, and everything in between." That's a tall, probably impossible order, especially given how much actual thinking in American history simply cancels one another out. To come up with something more usually requires an agenda. This one isn't clear, not least because what we might have recognized as a liberal/progressive consensus a generation or two ago has been widely trashed of late, mostly (but not only) by the right. Author previously wrote American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (2011; paperback, 2012, University of Chicago Press). Nathan J Robinson: Why You Should Be a Socialist (2019, All Points Press): Editor of Current Affairs, has a pile of books since 2013, including ones focused on Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, but more intent on explaining how much better life could be with democratic socialism. Other books by Robinson and other books on democratic socialism:
David Rohde: In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth About America's "Deep State" (2020, WW Norton). All bureaucracies have their own special interests, and those that act in secrecy are especially likely to hide their own agendas. The FBI, especially but not exclusively under J Edgar Hoover, often put its own agenda first, which led to numerous abuses, especially directed at what they dubbed "subversive" groups, like civil rights activists and labor unions. The CIA has been even more secretive, and their remit to run clandestine operations has been even more widespread. Moreover, they've enjoyed direct private access to the president -- at least since 9/11 on a daily basis, so their ability to shape US foreign policy, whatever their motives may be, is nonpareil but also obscure. Indeed, it's not uncommon for presidents-elect to reverse course following their first briefing, which only adds to the aura of mysterious power. So much as been obvious to everyone on the left since Harry Truman, but the last few years it's been Trump et al. who've been up in arms over the "deep state" -- an epithet they tend to apply indiscriminately to the whole civil service. This book provides some background, but mostly to help sort out the charges that the FBI and CIA, with their Obama-era leadership, were out to get Trump. I don't doubt there's something to those charges, but Trump's demands are such an overreach not just of decent policy but of law that it's hard to side with him, even against adversaries this bad. Heather Cox Richardson: How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020, Oxford University Press): Historian, argues not just that the defeated Confederacy was able to restore its old system of white supremacy for a century after the Civil War, but that a the American West provided a key vector for Southern political influence, notably through the "movement conservatives" like Barry Goldwater. Thus we see that their efforts to maintain supremacy did not end with the civil rights movement, but continue to influence the Republican Party today. Richardson previously wrote:
Emmanuel Saez/Gabriel Zucman: The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (2019, WW Norton): Saez is the world's foremost statistician of inequality, so expect a fair amount of number crunching here. Zucman, who I associate with French economist Thomas Piketty, has a previous book more specific to this concern: The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens (2015; paperback, 2016, University of Chicago Press). Makes a strong case for cracking down on tax havens, showing that the failure of the US and other countries to do so is a deliberate choice in favor of oligarchy. Also makes a case for a wealth tax. Gabriel Sherman: The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News -- and Divided a Country (2014; paperback, 2017, Random House). This is the basis for Showtime's TV series, with Russell Crowe playing Ailes. I had missed the book, which sounds like it's meant to blow smoke up Ailes' ass, and couldn't stand watching the show -- mostly because I didn't find Ailes' bloviating speeches credible (not so much that I couldn't believe he gave them but I couldn't stomach the notion that anyone bought them). Still, probably the single most important political story of the last quarter-century, so someone had to tell it. Ganesh Sitaraman/Anne L Alstott: The Public Option: How to Expand Freedom, Increase Opportunity, and Promote Equality (2019, Harvard University Press): The most often hear "public option" these days as Joe Biden's preferred way of patching up Obamacare's failure to assure competitive private health insurance. As such, it's seen as an alternative to Medicare for All, but the latter is a much better example of what the authors mean by "public option": a case where the government provides a public service, not bound by the private sector's need to maximize profit. The section on history offers examples like public libraries and Social Security, and admits "mixed results in education and housing." Part Three plots out where this could go, and probably shortchanges "And More" with just 12 pages. Ganesh Sitaraman: The Great Democracy: How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy, and Unite America (2019, Basic Books): Author of The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (2017, Knopf), which offered a pretty convincing account of the founding of the nation as an egalitarian ideal struggling to become real. Here he focuses on more recent history: the rise of the right from Reagan on (which he roots in and doesn't distinguish from neoliberalism, a term he uses a lot but I'd prefer to limit). Prescriptions follow. [PS: In his "Acknowledgments" I was surprised to find generous mention of Pete Buttigieg.] Gene Sperling: Economic Dignity (2020, Penguin Press): Cover adds: "Chief White House Economic Adviser to President Obama and President Clinton." Sperling advertised himself as The Pro-Growth Progressive in 2005, with his "economic strategy for shared prosperity." At that time, he was cooling his heels, working at the Brookings Institution, waiting to become Hillary Clinton's chief economic adviser for her ill-fated 2008 campaign (2008 was, however, very good to Sperling, as he received $2.2 million "from a variety of consulting jobs, board seats, speaking fees and fellowships" (that's prosperity, but not what I'd call shared). He easily made the transition from Clinton to Obama, and was a prominent player in Ron Suskind's 2011 book Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President. The new book leads off with a blurb from Hillary Clinton, who says "it should be our North Star for the recovery and beyond." There are people with worse resumes in Washington (e.g., those currently working for Trump), but few "progressives" have aimed so low and still failed to deliver. Even now, he's trying to buy us off with "dignity" (which, by the way, he defines as "you know it when you see it"). Good luck with that. Matt Stoller: Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy (2019, Simon & Schuster): Big book on the dangers of concentration of economic power as companies connive to prevent or limit competition: something antitrust law was meant to prevent, but has been hobbled by loose definitions and lax enforcement, not unrelated to the ever-greater role that lobbying and campaign "contributions" play in American politics. Joan C Williams: White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (paperback, 2019, Harvard Business Review Press): Sympathetic enough to her subjects, emphasizing how the desire for stability and belief in self-sufficiency offer the white working class a conservative ethos, a point which could be extended to the non-white working class if they only had a party option that wasn't as offensive as the Republicans. Contrasts this to the urban professionals who may be more liberal socially but also lack the grounding in community and its identities, and may wind up more alienated as a result. In passing, she mentions "class migrants," who typically come from the working class but are able to function in the professional world, appreciating bits of both. Other recent books noted with little or no comment: Alberto Alesina/Carlo O Favero/Francesco Glavazzi: Austerity: When It Works and When It Doesn't (2019, Princeton University Press). Charlotte Alter: The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America (2020, Viking). Profiles of young politicians, the eldest Pete Buttigieg (b. 1982), the only other one I recognize Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (b. 1989). Andrew J Bacevich, ed: American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition: A Century of Writings From Henry Adams to the Present (2020, Library of America). Molly Ball: Pelosi (2020, Henry Holt). Frida Berrigan: It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood (paperback, 2015, OR Books). Rutget Bregman: Humankind: A Hopeful History (2020, Little Brown): "A more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell." Vincent Brown: Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020, Belknap Press). Oren Cass: The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (2018, Encounter Books): Former "domestic policy director for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign." Panashe Chigumadzi: These Bones Will Rise Again (2020, The Indigo Press): On Zimbabwe and overthrowing Robert Mugabe. Michael D'Antonio: The Hunting of Hillary: The Forty-Year Campaign to Destroy Hillary Clinton (2020, Thomas Dunne Books). Alan Dershowitz: Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo (2019, Hot Books). Joan Marans Dim/Antonio Masi: Lady Liberty: An Illustrated History of America's Most Storied Woman (2019, Fordham University Press). Mike Duncan: The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (2017; paperback, 2018, PublicAffairs). Anna Fifield: The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jung Un (2019, PublicAffairs). Marc Fleurbaey, et al: A Manifesto for Social Progress: Ideas for a Better Society (paperback, 2018, Cambridge University Press). Kristen Ghodsee: The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe (paperback, 2015, Duke University Press). Ted Gioia: Music: A Subversive History (2019, Basic Books). Malcolm Gladwell: Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know (2019, Little Brown). Thom Hartmann: The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment (paperback, 2019, Berrett-Koehler). Thom Hartmann: The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America (paperback, 2019, Berrett-Koehler). Thom Hartmann: The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote -- and How to Get It Back (paperback, 2020, Berrett-Koehler). Nolan Higdon/Mickey Huff: United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (And What We Can Do About it) (paperback, 2019, City Lights). Jonathan Horn: Washington's End: The Final Years and Forgotten Struggle (2020, Scribner). Susan Jacoby: The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies (paperback, 2018, Vintage Books): Revised edition of her 2008 The Age of American Unreason, itself a return to Richard Hofstadter's famous Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Sean Kay: Rockin' the Free World! How the Rock & Roll Revolution Changed America and the World (2016, Rowman & Littlefield; paperback, 2018, RL). Stephen Kinzer: Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (2019, Henry Holt). Michael T Klare: All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change (2019, Metropolitan Books). Michael J Klarman: The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (2016, Oxford University Press). Mikael Klintman: Knowledge Resistance: How We Avoid Insight From Others (2019, Manchester University Press). Nicholas D Kristof/Sheryl WuDunn: Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope (2020, Knopf). Peter La Chapelle: I'd Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music (paperback, 2019, University of Chicago Press). Rob Larson: Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom (paperback, 2018, Zero Books). Erika Lee: America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (2019, Basic Books). Lawrence Lessig: They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy (2019, Dey Street Books). Steven Levingston: Barack and Joe: The Making of an Extraordinary Partnership (2019, Hachette Books). Matthew Lockwood: To Begin the World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe (2019, Harvard University Press). Agusto Lopez-Claros/Bahiyyih Nakhjavani: Equality for Women = Prosperity for All: The Disastrous Global Crisis of Gender Inequality (2019, St Martin's Press). Allen Lowe: God Didn't Like It: Electric Hillbillies, Singing Preachers, and the Beginning of Rock and Roll, 1950-1970 (paperback, 2013, Constant Sorrow Press). Annie Lowrey: Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World (2018, Crown). George Monbiot: Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (2017; paperback, 2018, Verso). Jenny Odell: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019, Melville House). Michael O'Sullivan: The Levelling: What's Next After Globalization (2019, PublicAffairs). Robert B Reich: The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It (2020, Knopf). Ruth Reichl: Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir (2019; paperback, 2020, Random House). Thomas E Sheridan/Randall H McGuire, eds: The Border and Its Bodies (2019, University of Arizona Press). Frank Smyth: The NRA: The Unauthorized History (2020, Flatiron Books). Rebecca Solnit: Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir (2020, Viking). Joseph E Stiglitz: Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti-Globalization in the Era of Trump (paperback, 2017, WW Norton). Cal Thomas: America's Expiration Date: The Fall of Empires and Superpowers . . . and the Futrure of the United States (2020, Zondervan). Jia Tolentino: Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019, Random House). Rick Van Noy: Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South (2019, University of Georgia Press). Michael Walzer: A Foreign Policy for the Left (2018, Yale University Press). Jesse Wegman: Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College (2020, St Martin's Press). Tara Westover: Educated: A Memoir (2018, Random House). Kevin D Williamson: The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics (2019, Gateway). Even after trying hard to round up all but the flimsiest and most ridiculous books on Trump, his administration, and the 2020 election, I find I still missed a few: Seth Abramson: Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump's International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy (2019, St Martin's Press): Previously wrote Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America (2018, Simon & Schuster), and has a third volume in the works, each over 400 pp range (this one 592). Seth Abramson: Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump (2020, St Martin's Press): A third volume, after Proof of Collusion (2018) and Proof of Conspiracy (2019). This seems to me like far and away the fattest subject, even before the author tacked on something about the pandemic, probably making it one of the first books to broach the subject. Still, seems too early to tell much. [September 8] Jeffrey F Addicott: Trump Judges: Protecting America's Establishment Pillars to "Make America Great Again" (paperback, 2020, Imprimatur Press). Dan Alexander: White House, Inc: How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency Into a Business (2020, Portfolio). Senior Editor at Forbes, so it's unclear whether this is muckraking or just their usual run of business puff pieces. But possibly useful to the extent he shows how it's done. [August 11]. Martin Amis: The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabakov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1986-2016 (2017, Joathan Cape). Sara Azari: Unprecedented: A Simple Guide to the Crimes of the Trump Campaign and Presidency (2020, Potomac Books): Author is "a practicing lawyer who specializes in white-collar crime," and at least starts with cases that led to prosecutions -- first chapter is on George Papadopoulos). Doesn't read "simple," but at 176 pp is short. Kobby Barda: The Key to Understanding Donald J Trump (2019, Simple Story). Edwin L Battistella: Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President, From Washington to Trump (2020, Oxford University Press). Joy Behar: The Great Gasbag: An A-Z Study Guide to Surviving Trump World (2017; paperback, 2018, Harper). Pablo J Boczkowski/Zizi Paracharissi, eds: Trump and the Media (paperback, 2018, MIT Press). Dan Bongino: Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J Trump (2018, Post Hill Press). Ben Bradlee Jr: The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America (2018, Little Brown). Donna Brazile: Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House (2017, Hachette Books). Laura Briggs: How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump (2017, University of California Press). Martha Brockenbrough: Unpresidented: A Biography of Donald Trump (2018, Feiwel Friends). FH Buckley: The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed (2018, Encounter Books). Leonard Cruz/Steven Buser, eds: A Clear and Present Danger: Narcissism in the Era of Donald Trump (paperback, 2016, Chiron Publications). Brian Francis Culkin: The Meaning of Trump (paperback, 2018, Zero Books). The Daily Show With Trevor Noah: The Donald J Trump Presidential Twitter Library (2018, Spiegel & Grau). Kim Darroch: Collateral Damage: Britain, America, and Europe in the Age of Trump (2020, PublicAffairs): Former British Ambassador to the US, resigned under fire "after a series of cables containing unflattering descriptions of President Trump." [September 15] Alan Dershowitz: Defending the Constitution: Alan Dershowitz's Senate Argument Against Impeachment (paperback, 2020, Hot Books). Ian Doescher/Jacopo della Quercia: MacTrump: A Shakespearean Tragicomedy of the Trump Administration, Part I (paperback, 2019, Quirk Books): An adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, or possibly Barbara Garson's Macbird (1967)? Lou Dobbs: The Trump Century (2020, Broadside Books): The Thousand Year Reich in an age of diminished expectations. [September 1] Jesse Duquette: The Daily Don: All the News That Fits Into Tiny, Tiny Hands (paperback, 2019, Arcade). David A Farenthold: Uncovering Trump: The Truth Behind Donald Trump's Charitable Giving (paperback, 2017, Diversion Books). John Bellamy Foster: Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce (paperback, 2017, Monthly Review Press): Marxist sociologist, editor of Monthly Review, has a number of books on ecological and financial crises. This is a short (144 pp), early take on Trump's election, by a guy who knows a "neo-fascist" when he sees (or smells) one. John Gartner/Steven Buser, eds: Rocket Man: Nuclear Madness and the Mind of Donald Trump (paperback, 2018, Chiron Publications): Some chapters: "If Trump Were a Policeman I Would Have to Take Away His Gun"; "Trump's Sick Psyche and Nuclear Weapons: A Deadly Mixture"; "Facing the Truth: The Power of a Predatory Narcissist"; "Trump's No Madman, He's Following the Strongman Playbook"; "Visions of Apocalypse and Salvation." John Glaser/Christopher A Preble/A Trevor Thrall: Fuel to the Fire: How Trump Made America's Broken Foreign Policy Even Worse (and How We Can Recover) (2019, Cato Institute). Mardy Grothe: Deconstructing Trump: The Trump Phenomenon Through the Lens of Quotation History (2019, Quoterie Press). Pete Hegseth: American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free (2020, Center Street): Flag-waving "old school patriot" with military background and tattoos, sees Trump as a "sign of a national rebirth," while decrying "Leftists who demand socialism, globalism, secularism, and politically-correct elitism." Parlayed his conceits into a job as co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend. Donald Heinz: After Trump: Achieving a New Social Gospel (paperback, 2020, Cascade Books). Rosanna Hildyard: Ubu Trump (paperback, 2017, Eyewear Publishing): Alfred Jarry's 1888 play Ubu Roi, "translated and entirely updated" by Hildyard. When I first saw MacTrump, I flashed on this as the more apt production . . . and here it is! Gene Ho: Trumpography: How Biblical Principles Paved the Way to the American Presidency (paperback, 2018, iUniverse). Adam Hodges: When Words Trump Politics: Resisting a Hostile Regime of Language (paperback, 2019, Stanford University Press): Analysis of Trump's words (you know, "the best words"), especially via Twitter. Carl Hoffman: Liar's Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump's MAGA Rallies (2020, Custom House). Katy Tur's Unbelievable (2017) provides a sense of what Trump's rallies are like, or at least were during the 2016 campaign, but this promises to be both more in-depth and more up-to-date. While the fans and the appeal are likely to be the same, I can't help but wonder if Trump being president doesn't intensify the sense of power. [September 22] Charles Hurt: Trump Saves America: Our Last Hope to Be Great Again (2019, Center Street). Aaron James: Assholes: A Theory of Donald Trump (2016, Doubleday). Brittany Kaiser: Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again (2019, Harper). David King: Why Trump Deserves Trust, Respect, and Admiration (paperback, 2016, CreateSpace): Blank pages -- not the first such Trump book I've seen. Edward Klein: All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump (2017, Regnery). Howard Kurtz: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War Over the Truth (2018, Regnery). Gary Lachman: Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump (paperback, 2018, TarcherPerigee). Martin E Latz: The Real Trump Deal: An Eye-Opening Look at How He Really Negotiates (2018, Brisance Books). David Limbaugh: Guilty by Reason of Insanity: Why the Democrats Must Not Win (2019, Regnery). Trevor Loudon: White House Reds: Communists, Socialists & Security Risks Running for US President, 2020 (paperback, 2020, independent): Quotes Trump saying the 2020 election would be about "Communism versus Freedom," then proceeds to red-bait "ten high profile contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination." Previously wrote Barack Obama and the Enemies Within (2011, 688 pp), and The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the US Congress (2013, 702 pp). Michael Maccoby, ed: Psychoanalytic and Historical Perspectives on the Leadership of Donald Trump (paperback, 2020, Routledge). Derek Mailhiot: Trump: America's First Zionist President (paperback, 2019, independent): Author means this as a compliment, but where exactly does that leave America First? Even if you see Trump's "deep relationship" is really with Christian Zionism, what does that mean but a yearning for Armageddon? And that's a longing Israeli Zionists want to encourage? Stephen Mansfield: Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him (2017, Baker Books). Gerardo Marti: American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion, and the Trump Presidency (paperback, 2020, Rowman & Littlefield). Mike McCormick: Fifteen Years a Deplorable: A White House Memoir (paperback, 2019, 15 Years a Deplorable). Rachel Montgomery: All I Ever Wanted to Know About Donald Trump I Learned From His Tweets: A Psychological Exploration of the President Via Twitter (paperback, 2017, Skyhorse). Samhita Mukhopadhyay/Kate Harding, eds: Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America (paperback, 2017, Picador). Stephanie Muravchik/Jon A Shields: Trump's Democrats (2020, Brookings Institution Press). [August 25] Jack Murphy: Democrat to Deplorable: Why Nine Million Obama Voters Ditched the Democrats and Embraced Donald Trump (paperback, 2018, independent). Caitríona Perry: In America: Tales From Trump Country (2018, Gill Books). Carol Pogash, ed: Quotations From Chairman Trump (2015, RosettaBooks). I'm surprise this hasn't been revised and reissued, given how much additional verbiage Trump has spewed in the meantime. Maybe the editor thinks it was already perfect? By the way, this wasn't the first attempt to parody Chairman Mao's "Little Red Book": I had a copy of Quotations From Chairman LBJ back in the day; and it was followed by a little blue book of Richard Nixon quotes, Poor Richard's Almanack. Joel Pollak/Larry Schweikart: How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution (paperback, 2017, Regnery). Kevin Powell: My Mother. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. And the Last Stand of the Angry White Man (2018, Atria Books). Jack Rasmus: The Sourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy From Reagan to Trump (paperback, 2020, Clarity Press). Ted Rall: Trump: A Graphic Biography (paperback, 2016, Seven Stories Press). Ian Reifowitz: The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (paperback, 2019, Ig Publishing). Sheldon Roth: Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J Trump (Bombardier Books). Against every other psychologist and psychiatrist who's weighed in on the subject, argues that Trump is "remarkably complicated, often brilliant, comfortingly human, and most importantly, of completely sound mind." David Rubin: Trump and the Jews (2018, Shiloh Israel Press): Note that Amazon's "frequently bought together" adds David Rubin: God, Israel, and Shiloh: Returning to the Land (paperback, 2011, Shiloh Israel Press), and Mark Blitz: Decoding the Antichrist and the End Times: What the Bible Says and What the Future Holds (paperback, 2019, Charisma House). John Bernard Ruane: The Real News! The Never-Before-Told Stories of Donald Trump & Fake News (paperback, 2018, Post Hill Press). Michael Savage: Stop Mass Hysteria: America's Insanity From the Salem Witch Trials to the Trump Witch Hunt (2018, Center Street). Steven E Schier/Todd E Eberly: The Trump Presidency: Outsider in the Oval Office (paperback, 2017, Rowman & Littlefield). Ben Shapiro: The Establishment Is Dead: The Rise and Election of Donald Trump (2017, Creators Publishing). Marsha Shearer: America in Crisis: Essays on the Failed Presidency of Donald Trump (paperback, 2019, GoMyStory). James B Stewart: Deep State: Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law (2019, Penguin Books). David A Stockman: Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin . . . And How to Bring It Back (2016, Laissez Faire Books): Ronald Reagan's Budget Director, turned libertarian iconoclast, fantasizes a bit about Trump making "ten great deals" -- which, of course, he never came close to considering, and not just because he doesn't really consider anything. Gene Stone: The Trump Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Living Through What You Hoped Would Never Happen (2017, Dey Street Books). Roger Stone: The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution (2017, Skyhorse). I missed this, but did list Stone's later book, The Myth of Russian Collusion: The Inside Story of How Donald Trump Really Won (paperback, 2019, Skyhorse). Stephen E Strang: God, Trump, and Covid-19: How the Pandemic Is Affecting Christians, the World, and America's 2020 Election (paperback, 2020, Frontline): Short (128 pp) follow up to the author's God, Trump, and the 2020 Election: Why He Must Win and What's at Stake for Christians if He Loses (2020, Frontline), and for that matter his 2017 book, God and Donald Trump. Joe Walsh: F*ck Silence: Calling Trump Out for the Cultish, Moronic Authoritarian Con Man He Is (2020, Broadside Books): Author is a "rock-ribbed conservative," a former Republican congressman from Illinois who briefly challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican presidential primary. Jonathan Weisman: (((Semitism))) Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump (2018, St Martin's Press). Shannon Wheeler: Sh*t My President Says: The Illustrated Tweets of Donald J Trump (2017, Top Shelf Productions). John K Wilson: President Trump Unveiled: Exposing the Bigoted Billionaire (paperback, 2017, OR Books). Byron York: Obsession: Inside the Democrats' War on Trump (2020, Regnery). Chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner, and Fox News hack. Previously wrote: The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President -- and Why They'll Try Even Harder Next Time (2005, Crown Forum). [September 8] Also: books that I've written about (or noted) before, that I missed when looking for old Trump books: Tucker Carlson: Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018, Free Press). Andrew C McCarthy: Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency (2019, Encounter Books). Ask a question, or send a comment. Saturday, May 16, 2020 Trump BooksMy last Book Roundup was back on October 31, 2019, so I'm overdue for another. I quickly came up with more than one column's worth, and noticed that an awful lot of those books -- including several cascaded lists -- dealt with Donald Trump, his corrupt administration, and the political dynamics that got him elected, and that continues to support him. Obviously, a big part of the timing has to do with the 2020 election. We have, by comparison, few books on Democrats, aside from political strategy books aimed at defeating Trump. So I thought I'd group these Trump books into a single post. This does not include more general political and economic books, or books on specific issues that aren't explicitly tied to Trump -- although Trump looms large over them as well. I'm including a number of forthcoming books. I usually wait for them in my periodic reports, as I always have enough old stuff to fill the column, but if they fit the theme, I might as well include them here. Some extend as far out as October 27. The future dates are noted. Some books in the main section include lists of additional books on same or similar subject. Anonymous: A Warning (2019, Twelve): Allegedly by "a senior Trump administration official," a book-length expansion of a New York Times op-ed called "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration." As far as I know, the author hasn't been exposed yet. His/her bona fides are established by insisting that he/she is a conservative activist, dedicated to advancing movement goals with or without Trump's blessing. I don't doubt that policy subversion like this happens in all White Houses, but it's usually not something to brag about. Krystal Ball/Saagar Enjeti: The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising (paperback, 2020, Strong Arm Press): Authors are co-hosts of "Rising at the Hill TV," where they seem to take opposing left-right positions, agreeing only on the establishment figures at the root of the problems. Each signs their own pieces, with the combined book gaining accolades from both Tucker Carlson and Nina Turner (co-chair of Bernie 2020). Wayne Barrett: Without Compromise: The Brave Journalism That First Exposed Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the American Epidemic of Corruption (paperback, 2020, Bold Type Books): Edited by Eileen Markey, this collects the late Village Voice reporter's early reporting on Trump -- it's pretty safe to say that Trump first came to my attention thanks to Barrett's reports, and I learned all I ever really needed to know about Trump there. Barrett later wrote a book on Trump (1992's Trump: The Deals and the Downfall), revised in 2016 (Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention). Not sure why the publication date here is so far out, or whether the book includes much on Barrett's other prime subject, Ed Koch -- his book, written with Jack Newfield, was City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York). [September 22] Andrea Bernstein: American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power (2020, WW Norton): Co-host of a podcast called "Trump Inc.," offers a deep dive into where the family fortunes came from, how they "encouraged and profited from a system of corruption, dark money, and influence trading." David Bromwich: American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us (2019, Verso Books): A short (192 pp) chronicle of "the degradation of US democracy," mostly through the expansion of presidential war-making powers and the double-speak that was first enshrined in law by the 1947 National Defense Act. Has a second new book out this month: How Words Make Things Happen (2019, Oxford University Press). Some previous books: Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking (1994); The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (2014); Moral Imagination: Essays (2014). Roderick P Hart: Trump and Us: What He Says and Why People Listen (paperback, 2020, Cambridge University Press): While probably not a pro-Trump book, Hart is generous enough to take Trump at his word. In fact, he counts Trump's words, sorts them out, and establishes why Trump voters respond to various words and themes, and therefore promises to answer questions about who and why where most writers rely on their prejudices. Susan Hennessy/Benjamin Wittes: Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office (2020, Farrar Straus and Giroux). The authors are editors of the website Lawfare and senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, and Hennessy previously worked as an attorney in the NSA, so it's not surprising they view the presidency as a legal and institutional totem rather than as the simple reflection of any actual President, or that they should want to defend it against an occupant as ill suited as Trump. On the other hand, the phrase "the world's most powerful office" gives me the creeps. Ever since WWII, Congress has increased the power of the presidency, especially through the vast array of warmaking forces at the president's disposal. One could write a book showing how dangerous that is given a president as unstable and deranged as Trump, and that's the likely value of this book. But the list of favorable blurb authors -- Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Michael Hayden, Preet Bharara -- for this book suggest that the author's agenda is something else. Charles J Holden/Zach Messitte/Jerald Podair: Republican Populist: Spiro Agnew and the Origins of Donald Trump's America (2019, University of Virginia Press). This is a stretch, a case of scouring history for precedents and settling for trivial likeness. Agnew was a relatively liberal Maryland governor, but Nixon wanted a hatchet man for his campaign, especially someone who could exploit the prejudices of the white ethnics Nixon's strategists hoped to pry away from the Democratic Party. Agnew stepped up, and became a culture war lightning rod, but Nixon made sure to get rid of him before his own resignation. No subsequent politician sought to emulate Agnew, and there is no reason to think that Agnew could have run on his own. As for being a "populist," the authors mean bigot and prig, which is all that reminds them of Trump. Ben Howe: The Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values (2019, Broadside Books). White evangelical Christians vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. This confuses liberals who are inclined to give evangelicals the benefit of their doubts, and saddens evangelicals who have liberal instincts. But it doesn't surprise ex-believers like myself much, as we've long noted the deep well of hatred their "faith" justifies and reinforces.
Sarah Kendzior: Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America (2020, Flatiron Books): Journalist from Missouri, previously wrote The View From Flyover Country, claims she predicted Trump's win in 2015, then launches into a comparison of Trump to Uzbek strongman Islam Karimov, who also made aspirations to greatness part of his political vocabulary. The book broader and deeper than Trump, with chapters of "a buried American history" from at least the 1980s, although tying that decade to Roy Cohn keeps the focus close enough to Trump. John Marini: Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century (2019, Encounter Books): One of Trump's most resonant campaign lines in 2016 was his pledge to "drain the swamp." I didn't believe him, but more importantly I didn't understand him. By "swamp" I assumed he meant the pervasive influence of money in Washington, flowing from thousands of lobbyists and the interest groups they represented. What else could he possibly have meant? So when he took office, I took it as plain hypocrisy when he hired dozens of lobbyists to hand control of regulation over to the businesses affected. But here Marini argues that "the swamp" has nothing to do with money. Rather, "the swamp" is the domain of government workers: people hired by the government to serve the public interest by limiting private greed and ensuring that government services are run for the public's benefit. He dubs these public servants "the swamp creatures," and applauds Trump's efforts to purge them and/or to subjugate them to Trump's partisan patronage machine. Michael Lewis covers some of this in The Fifth Risk, showing how Trump's efforts to politicize administration undermines our collective well-being. How much so is all but unfathomable, but the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed one sector's failings most dramatically. Dan P McAdams: The Strange Case of Donald J Trump: A Psychological Reckoning (2020, Oxford University Press): It's tempting to think one can psychoanalize Trump, given that even before he ran for president he was such a public figure, projecting virtually no sense of personal depth. After various other attempts, this one is widely praised for its balance and for insights into why Trump still appeals to many people, even while many more regard him as puerile, narcissist, sociopathic, and/or moronic. Jennifer Mercieca: Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump (2020, Texas A&M University Press): A "political communication expert," a professor in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M, co-editor of a previous book on another president's somewhat different rhetorical conception. After immersing herself in Trump-speak, she found that Trump and his campaign "expertly used the common rhetorical techniques of a demagogue." She backs that up with technical analysis (citing various fallacious arguments, "reification, paralipsis, and more"). Turns out that those of us who jumped to the conclusion that he's just another fascist were on the right track. [July 9]
Malcolm Nance: The Plot to Betray America: How Team Trump Embraced Our Enemies, Compromised Our Security, and How We Can Fix It (2019, Hachette Books). Author "spent 35 years participating in field and combat intelligence activity including both covert and clandestine anti & counter-terrorism support to national intelligence agencies, and has written a series of books, first celebrating the US War on Terror (e.g., An End to Al Qaeda: Destroying Bin Laden's Jihad and Restoring America's Honor), and trying to relaunch the Cold War with Russia (e.g., The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election, and The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin's Spies Are Winning Control of America and Dismantling the West). I find this line of argument against Trump to be both useless and obscene: useless because Trump isn't either a principled or effective critic of the security hawks, and obscene because what the critics advocate for is even worse than what Trump does (or sometimes talks about doing). And I'm especially uncomfortable with talk about "betraying America" (or, worse still, "treason"). The purpose of such talk is invariably to shut down discussion of political choices in foreign policy -- something that is sorely needed. Richard W Painter/Peter Golenbock: American Nero: The History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst Offender (2020, BenBella Books): Painter "served as White House chief ethics counsel under President George W Bush," which doesn't sound like much in the way of credentials -- if you ask me, Bush's administration was as corrupt at any in American history (at least, pre-Trump), and his staff lawyers were remarkably practiced at rationalizing torture and other war crimes. On the other hand, he doesn't simply draw the line at Trump. He's written a long book that goes deep into American history, exposing dozens of examples where "the rule of law" was violated by American politicians. But first he starts with sketches of Nero and George III, emphasizing their similarities to Trump (starting with narcissism). Joe Palazzolo/Michael Rothfeld: The Fixers: The Bottom-Feeders, Crooked Lawyers, Gossipmongers, and Porn Stars Who Created the 45th President (2020, Random House). Cover looks like it fell out of a tabloid, which seems peculiarly appropriate for this president. Makes you wonder whether Trump's relative immunity to scandal isn't the result of such prolonged exposure it's not only lost its power to shock, it's become part of his aura. Of course, the big draw here is the bit about porn stars, not least because they are more honest and less unsavory than fixers like Roy Cohn and Michael Cohen. Dan Pfeiffer: Un-Trumping America: A Plan to Make America a Democracy Again (2020, Twelve): "Pod Save America" co-host, worked (as did the other three) in Obama administration, feels that entitles him to give practical advice on how to defeat Trump in 2020. There are a number of books like that out recently, including:
Jerrold M Post/Stephanie R Doucette: Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers (2019, Pegasus Books): Post is "the long-time head of psychological profiling at the CIA," where he prepared numerous profiles of world leaders -- "he may be the only psychiatrist who has specialized in the self-esteem problems of both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein." That sounds pretty dubious to me: I have serious doubts about shrinks who have direct access to patients, and understand how easy it is to project one's prejudices, especially across vast distances. One possible value-added here is the probe into the psyches of Trump's supporters. Post previously wrote:
Philip Rucker/Carol Leonnig: A Very Stable Genius: Donald J Trump's Testing of America (2020, Penguin Press): Another detailed chronicle of madness and mayhem in the Trump White House, as leaked to two senior Washington Post writers (Pulitzer Prize winners). They seem to be especially chummy with the unelected foreign policy intelligentsia alarmed by Trump's occasional lapses from the usual American clichés, which can get annoying. The title is Trump's self-description, which has been widely lampooned (see parody books below). Robert P Saldin/Steven M Teles: Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites (2020, Oxford University Press): Sure, various Republican "elites" had reservations about Trump in early 2016, but they turned out to be purely tactical: once Trump won, all was forgiven, with GOP officials as well as rank-and-file lining up dutifully, eventually learning not to even flinch when he does something obviously uncouth. That left a few incalcitrants to oppose Trump in the sanctified name of conservatism. This book divides them up into four parts: national security professionals; political operatives; public intellectuals; lawyers and economists. The best known are in the third group, but many of them work for mainstream media outlets where their views are esteemed. Jim Sciutto: The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World (2020, HarperCollins): CNN's chief national security correspondent, his standing within America's imperial security establishment amply demonstrated by his 2019 book, The Shadow War: Inside Russia's and China's Secret Operations to Defeat America. Title refers to Nixon's "madman theory," which at least had a cunning rationale behind it. That Trump's madcap approach to foreign policy differs first in that it isn't remotely a theory, as is clear when Sciutto admits that Trump's employs his version "sometimes intentionally and sometimes not." I'm fairly sure that someone could write a book that reduces Trump's foreign policy to a handful of simple rules, like: Trump is always looking for short-term business propositions; Trump has no concerns about liberal ideals like human rights and democracy, but he does loathe any hint of socialism, and he defaults to being a race and religious bigot; Trump likes foreign leaders who flatter him, even if they're the wrong race and/or religion; Trump bears grudges against countries that fail to show him sufficient obeissance, and is obsessed with the idea that supposed allies are cheating him (or America); Trump has no real interest in results, so he's happy doing nothing as long as people are saying the right things. Needless to say, he is frustrating and annoying to anyone who actually has an ideological stake in foreign policy, like the neoliberal and neoconservative mandarins who dominate the business, but he hasn't changed much of what they do. [August 18] Stuart Stevens: It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump (2020, Knopf): Author "spent decades electing Republicans at every level" and "knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America," but evidently has changed his mind root and branch -- as opposed to the "Never Trumpers" who claim to remain true to principles that Trump personally betrayed. I've been saying all along that Trump is the expected outcome of decades of right-wing political machinations, so I'm gratified to see Stevens making just that case. I doubt he's exactly right, but his complaint about "five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion" is spot on. [August 4]. Jeffrey Toobin: True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump (2020, Doubleday): First significant history of the Mueller Invesgitation and the Impeachment of Donald Trump, by the legal analyst for CNN and The New Yorker, who has written weighty books on the Clinton impeachment (A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President), Bush v. Gore (Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six Day Battle to Decide the a2000 Election), the Supreme Court (The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court and The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme court), as well as some famous criminal cases (OJ Simpson, Patty Hearst, Oliver North). Not sure I give a shit, but this is a book he was destined to write. [August 4]. Other new books on Mueller and/or impeachment:
Dannagal Goldthwaite Young: Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States (2019, Oxford University Press). I haven't yet found a book that explores the thesis that Donald Trump is basically a stand-up comic, but that's one way of viewing his rallies -- at least if you can manage not to gag, which is the most common reaction among people who are perceptive. One big problem is that Trump isn't very funny, but he does some things that comics do: he distorts the truth in unexpected ways, in the hopes of getting an instant emotional response instead of a reasoned one. Young explores a number of politically-focused cultural figures, finding that those on the right aim mostly at provoking rage, whereas many of those on the left would rather evoke laughter. (Of course, not everyone left of center aims at comedy; most pundits are sober analysts, and there are another few who simply rail at the right -- although they usually still do have more facts at their disposal than is customary on the right -- well, Russia-phobes excepted). Indeed, for me the most remarkable cultural change I've seen since Trump became president has been the politicization of late-night talk shows, where Trump is lambasted and ridiculed in ways that were unimaginable for Reagan and the Bushes, or for that matter Obama and the Clintons. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but I have taken considerable comfort in knowing that my own revulsion over Trump is so widely shared. James D Zirin: Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits (2019, All Points Books): Not sure anyone ever tried to count before, but Trump clearly holds the record for most lawsuits (either filed or defended against), probably by an order of magnitude, maybe two or three. Trump has a couple of lawsuits being argued this week before the Supreme Court, where he's attempting to suppress subpoenas for his financial records -- something all other recent presidential candidates have volunteered. I can think of other lawsuits where presidents attempted to elevate their office beyond the normal reach of law (Nixon, Clinton), as well as cases like Bush v. Gore, and Trump has political cases like those, but most of his relate to his business practices, which doesn't make them any less tawdry. And these are recent Trump-themed books I'm only briefly noting, as I don't have much more to say about them. Most memoirs by Trump staff and appointees wind up here -- presumably they have some historical value, even if they wind up being pure propaganda. I have, however, separated out the purer pro-Trump propaganda books, as well as trivia and attempts at humor (see the following sections). Eric Alterman: Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie -- and Why Trump Is Worse (2020, Basic Books). [August 11] Alain Badiou: Trump (paperback, 2019, Wiley). Kate Bennett: Free, Melania: The Unauthorized Biography (2019, Flatiron Books). Peter Bergen: Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos (2019, Penguin Press). Sarah Blaskey/Nicholas Nehamas/Caitlin Ostruff/Jay Weaver: The Grifter's Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency (2020, PublicAffairs). [August 4] John Bolton: The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (2020, Simon & Schuster). Kate Andersen Brower: Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump (2020, Harper). [May 19] Nina Burleigh: Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump's Women (2018, Gallery Books): Four women on cover: Ivanka and the three wives. Ian Buruma: The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, From Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit (2020, Penguin Press). [September 1] Josh Campbell: Crossfire Hurricane: Inside Donald Trump's War on the FBI (2019, Algonquin Books). Patrick Cockburn: War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict With Iran (2020, Verso Books). [July 7] Robert Dallek: How Did We Get Here? From Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump (2020, HarperCollins). Bob Davis/Lingling Wei: Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War (2020, HarperCollins): Wall Street Journal reporters. [June 9] Lawrence Douglas: Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020 (2020, Grand Central). Daniel W Drezner: The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency (paperback, 2020, University of Chicago Press). Jonathan Engel: Unaffordable: American Healthcare From Johnson to Trump (2018, University of Wisconsin Press). David Enrich: Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction (2020, Custom House). Guy Fawkes: 101 Indisputable Facts Proving Donald Trump Is an Idiot: A Brief Background to the Most Spectacularly Unqualified Person to Ever Occupy the White House (2018, Guy Fawkes). Emily Jane Fox: Born Trump: Inside America's First Family (paperback, 2019, HarperCollins). David Frum: Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020, Harper). [May 26] Mark Green/Ralph Nader: Fake President: Decoding Trump's Gaslighting, Corruption, and General Bullsh*t (paperback, 2019, Skyhorse). Jean Guerrero: Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda (2020, HarperCollins). [August 11] Nikki R Haley: With All Due Respect: Defending America With Grit and Grace (2019, St Martin's). Steve Harris: America's Secret History: How the Deep State, the Fed, the JFK, MLK, and RFK Assassinations, and Much More Led to Donald Trump's Presidency (2020, Skyhorse). Richard L Hasen: Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy (2020, Yale University Press). Steven Hassan: The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control (2019, Free Press). Julie Hirschfeld Davis/Michael D Shear: Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration (2019, Simon & Schuster). Charles E Hurlburt: The Enemy Within: A Chronicle of the Trump Administration: Book One (11/2016-08/2018) (paperback, 2019, independent). Mary Jordan: The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump (2020, Simon & Schuster). [June 16]. David A Kaplan: The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court in the Age of Trump (paperback, 2019, Broadway Books). Jonathan Karl: Front Row at the Trump Show (2020, Dutton). Jasmine Kerrissey/Eve Weinbaum/Claire Hammonds/Tom Juravich/Dan Clawson, eds: Labor in the Time of Trump (paperback, 2020, ILR Press). Glenn Kessler/Salvador Rizzo/Meg Kelly [The Fact Checker Staff of The Washington Post]: Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth (paperback, 2020, Scribner): Only 384 pp? [June 2] Harold Hongju Koh: The Trump Administration and International Law (2018, Oxford University Press). Daniel S Lucks: Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump (2020, Beacon Press). [August 4] Lachlan Markay/Asawin Suebsaeng: Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington (2020, Viking): Two investigative reporters for The Daily Beast explain how Trump has remade the DC "swamp" in his own image. Jim Mattis/Bing West: Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead (2019, Random House): Trumps' first Secretary of Defense, but evasive on all that. HR McMaster: Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (2020, Harper): Trump's second National Security Advisor. [September 15] Rory McVeigh/Kevin Estep: The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the Mainstreaming of Resentment (2019, Columbia University Press). Pippa Norris/Ronald Inglehart: Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (paperback, 2019, Cambridge University Press). Joseph S Nye Jr: Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy From FDR to Trump (2020, Oxford University Press). Greg Palast: How Trump Stole 2020: The Hunt for America's Vanished Voters (paperback, 2020, Seven Stories Press). [July 14] William J Perry/Tom Z Collina: The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power From Truman to Trump (2020, BenBella Books): Former Secretary of Defense. [June 30] John J Pitney Jr: Un-American: The Fake Patriotism of Donald J Trump (2020, Rowman & Littlefield). Patrick Porter: The False Promise of Liberal Order: Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump (2020, Polity). [July 7] Eric A Posner: The Demagogue's Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy From the Founders to Trump (2020, St Martin's). [June 30] Scott Ritter: Scorpion King: America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons From FDR to Trump (2nd ed, paperback, 2020, Clarity Press). [June 1] Amy Roost/Alissa Hirshfeld: Fury: Women's Lived Experiences During the Trump Era (paperback, 2020, Regal House). David Rothkopf: Traitor: A History of American Betrayal From Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump (2020, St Martin's). [October 27] Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Speaking for Myself: Faith, Freedom, and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House (2020, St Martin's). [September 8] Steven E Schier/Todd E Eberly: How Trump Happened: A System Shock Decades in the Making (2020, Rowman & Littlefield). Gerald F Seib: We Should Have Seen It Coming: From Reagan to Trump -- A Front-Row Seat to a Political Revolution (2020, Random House). [August 25] Glenn Simpson/Peter Fritsch: Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump (2019, Random House): Authors are co-founders of Fusion GPS. Ryan Skinnell, ed: Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J Trump (paperback, 2018, Societas). Guy M Snodgrass: Holding the Line: Inside Trump's Pengaton With Secretary Mattis (2019, Penguin). Brian Stelter: Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth (2020, Atria/One Signal). [August 25] Benjamin R Teitelbaum: War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers (2020, Dey Street Books). Ivana Trump: Raising Trump (2017, Gallery Books). Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia: Banned: Immigration Enforcement in the Time of Trump (2019, NYU Press). Ken Wilber: Trump and a Post-Truth World (paperback, 2017, Shambhala). Jeffrey R Wilson: Shakespeare and Trump (paperback, 2020, Temple University Press). For context, these are Trump-themed books I've written about or merely noted in previous Book Report posts. In some cases I've reproduced (or more often edited down my) original comments. Books from this section that I have read: Tim Alberta: American Carnage; David Daley: Ratf**ked; Ben Fountain: Beautiful Country Burn Again; Allen Frances: Twilight of American Sanity; David Frum: Trumpocracy; Stanley B Greenberg: RIP GOP; Michael Lewis: The Fifth Risk; Alexander Nazaryan: The Best People; James Poniewozik: Audience of One; Matt Taibbi: Insane Clown President; Katy Tur: Unbelievable. Alan I Abramowitz: The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump (2018, Yale University Press): Looks at shifting party alignments, especially racial/ethnic, religiosu, ideological, and geographic. Seth Abramson: Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America (2018, Simon & Schuster). Tim Alberta: American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (2019, Harper): Politico reporter, tight with Republican House leaders like Boehner and Ryan, covers changing forces since 2008, especially Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, and the ultimately decisive arrival of Trump. Dale Beran: It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office (2019, All Points Books). Max Blumenthal: The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (2019, Verso): Basic primer on how the US fed and nurtured its eventual enemies in the Middle East -- a fundamental incoherence that Trump has done nothing to resolve. Frank O Bowman III: High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump (2019, Cambridge University Press). Amanda Carpenter: Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us (2018, Broadside Books). Chris Christie: Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics (2019, Hachette). Stephen F Cohen: War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate (paperback, 2019, Hot Books). James Comey: A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership (2018, Flatiron). David Daley: Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy (2016; paperback, 2017, Liveright): Nuts-and-bolts on how the right-wing has plotted its takeover of American democracy, especially by gerrymandering. Stormy Daniels: Full Disclosure (2018, St Martin's Press). Michael D'Antonio: The Truth About Trump (paperback, 2016, St Martin's Griffin): Reissue of 2015 book, Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success. Michael D'Antonio/Peter Eisner: The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence (2018, Thomas Dunne Books). First book I'm aware of to take stock of Trump's Vice President, who seems to have parlayed his obsequious devotion to Trump and his extensive networking with far-right Republicans into a position of exceptional behind-the-scenes power. EJ Dionne Jr/Norman J Ornstein/Thomas E Mann: One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported (2017, St Martin's Press): Quickie from veteran Washington reporters. Maureen Dowd: The Year of Voting Dangeously: The Derangement of American Politics (2016, Twelve). Ben Fountain: Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution (2018, Ecco Books): Novelist, shocked by the 2016 election, posits an 80-year cycle of crises, lining Trump up with the comings of the Civil War and the Great Depression. Allen Frances: Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump (2017, William Morrow). Argues that Trump is not technically insane, but raises many pertinent questions about whether America as a whole. Justin A Frank: Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (2018, Avery). David Frum: Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (2018, Harper): Former Bush speechwriter turned Never Trumper, faults Republicans for failing to satisfy the needs of their base voters, has a good nose for Trump's corruption. Stanley B Greenberg: RIP GOP: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans (2019, Thomas Dunne Books). Democratic pollster, sees Republicans boxing themselves into a corner due to declining demographics and a dysfunctional platform. Joshua Green: Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (2017, Penguin). Asad Haider: Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (paperback, 2018, Verso). Luke Harding: Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win (paperback, 2017, Vintage Books). Seth Hettena: Trump/Russia: A Definitive History (2018, Melville House). Elizabeth Holtzman: The Case for Impeaching Trump (2019, Hot Books). Michael Isikoff/David Corn: Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump (2018, Twelve). David Cay Johnston: The Making of Donald Trump (2016, Melville House). David Cay Johnston: It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America (2018, Simon & Schuster). Michiko Kakutani: The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump (2018, Tim Duggan Books). Marvin Kalb: Enemy of the People: Trump's War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy (2018, Brookings Institution Press). Brian Klaas: The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack on Democracy (2017, Hot Books). Naomi Klein: No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (paperback, 2017, Haymarket Books): Prominent critic, especially of what she calls "disaster capitalism." Tied this title to Trump, but later books also deal with Trump, just in broader contexts. Naomi Klein: The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists (paperback, 2018, Haymarket Books). Naomi Klein: On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019, Simon & Schuster). Michael Kranish/Marc Fisher: Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power (2016, Scribner). Laurence Leamer: Mar-A-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump's Presidential Palace (2019, Flatiron). Brandy Lee: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (2017, Thomas Dunne Books). Barry Levine/Monique El-Faizy: All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator (2019, Hachette Books). Michael Lewis: The Fifth Risk (2018, WW Norton). Mostly writes on financial debacles, but is more interested in following the stories of interesting people. For this book, he goes into the federal bureaucracy, providing an eye-opening view of the valuable services of three government departments, and how Trump's politicization of those departments is undermining their jobs. And since much of what they do aims to limit risks, you rarely notice them until something bad happens. Jeffrey Lord: Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and the New American Populism vs. the Old Order (2019, Bombardier Books). Amanda Marcotte: Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself (2018, Hot Books). Andrew G McCabe: The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump (2019, St Martin's Press). Jeff Merkley: America Is Better Than This: Trump's War Against Immigrant Families (2019, Twelve). Greg Miller: The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy (2018, Custom House). Angela Nagle: Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump the Alt-Right (paperback, 2017, Zero Books). Alexander Nazaryan: The Best People: Trump's Cabinet and the Siege on Washington (2019, Hachette Books): Offers us a rogues gallery of Trump's cabinet-level deputies, who more often than not turn out to reflect the vanity and avarice of their leader. David Neiwert: Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (2017; paperback, 2018, Verso): Wrote a pair of books on how the right responded to the Obama election in 2008; e.g., with John Amato: Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane. Omarosa Manigault Newman: Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House (2018, Gallery Books). John Nichols: Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America (paperback, 2017, Nation Books): Quickie, offering brief biographies of Trump's early cabinet and staff, many of whom didn't last long (although they were usually replaced by others even more sycophantic and/or corrupt. Pippa Norris/Ronald Ingelhart: Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (paperback, 2019, Cambridge University Press). Keith Olbermann: Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) (2017, Blue Rider Press). Greg Olear: Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia (paperback, 2018, Four Sticks Press). James Poniewozik: Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America (2019, Liveright). TV critic, provides a detailed account of Trump's media exposure, his constant search for the limelight, how his fame and wealth are linked, and where his politics comes from. The single most insightful book I've found on Trump. Bill Press: Trump Must Go: The Top 100 Reasons to Dump Donald Trump (and One to Keep Him) (2018, Thomas Dunne Books). Joy-Ann Reid: The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story (2019, William Morrow). Rick Reilly: Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump (2019, Hachette Books). Corey Robin: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (2011; paperback, 2017, Oxford University Press): Original subtitle ended at Sarah Palin. Nathan J Robinson: Trump: Anatomy of a Monster (paperback, 2017, Demilune Press). April Ryan: Under Fire: Reporting From the Front Lines of the Trump White House (2018, Rowman & Littlefield). Greg Sargent: An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics (2018, Custom House). Marc Shapiro: Trump This! The Life and Times of Donald Trump: An Unauthorized Biography (paperback, 2016, Riverdale Avenue Books). Cliff Sims: Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House (2019, Thomas Dunne Books). Mark Singer: Trump and Me (2016, Mark Duggan Books). Amy Siskind: The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump's First Year (2018, Bloomsbury): Extensive index of every time she noticed Trump doing something well outside the norms of his office, accumulating 528 pp in little more than one year. Ryan Skinnell, ed: Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J Trump (paperback, 2018, Societas). Sean Spicer: The Briefing: Politics, the Press, and the President (2018, Regnery): Trump's first press secretary. Charles J Sykes: How the Right Lost Its Mind (2017, St Martin's Press). Matt Taibbi: Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus (2017, Spiegel & Grau): Quickie compilation of 2016 campaign reports. Lawrence Tribe/Joshua Matz: To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment (2018, Basic Books). Katy Tur: Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History (2017, Dey Street Books): TV reporter assigned to Trump for the 2016 campaign. Craig Unger: House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia (2018, Dutton): Previously wrote House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties (2004). Vicky Ward: Kushner, Inc. Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump (2019, St Martin's Press). Rick Wilson: Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever (2018, Free Press). Michael Wolff: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018, Henry Holt). Michael Wolff: Siege: Trump Under Fire (2019, Henry Holt). Bob Woodward: Fear: Trump in the White House (2018, Simon & Schuster). One thing that the Trump years have given us is a shitload of parody, satire, and trivia: some insightful in ways that more sober assessments miss the impact of, some comforting, some outrageous, some scabrous, some totally missing the point. Here are some (not all by any means). Some may even be pro-Trump. (* indicates books I haven't listed before.) Alec Baldwin/Kurt Andersen: You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump (A So-Called Parody) (2017, Penguin Press). John Barron: A Is for "Asshole": A Children's "ABC" Guide to Donald Trump & the Trump Administration (paperback, 2018, CreateSpace).* William H Clark/John M Werthen Jr: Tweeter of the Free World: A Covfefe Table Book: A Collection of Donald Trump's Funniest Tweets (2018, Politically Correct Publishing).* The Editors of the Onion: The Trump Leaks: The Onion Exposes the Top Secret Memos, Emails, and Doodles That Could Take Down a President (2017, Harper Design).* Faye Kanouse/Amy Zhing: If You Give a Pig the White House: A Parody for Adults (2019, Castle Point).* Holan Publishing Inc: Sh*t Trump Says: The Most Terrific, Very Beautiful and Tremendous Tweets and Quotes From Our 45th President (2017, Hollan Publishing).* Holan Publishing Inc: Sh*t Trump Says: Flips, Flops, Flattery, and Falsehoods From Our 45th President (2019, Hollan Publishing).* John Klotsche: Donald John Trump: MEMEoir of a Stable Genius (paperback, 2019, Gatekeeper Press).* John Lithgow: Dumpty: The Age of Trump in Verse (2019, Chronicle Prism).* Mike Luckovich: A Very Stable Genius (paperback, 2018, ECW Press): editorial cartoons.* Michael S Luzzi: Trumpty Dumpty: A Parody Is on the Loose, Trump's Invaded Mother Goose, a Chronicle of Trumpty Times, Reimagind in Classic Rhymes (paperback, Boggs Hill Boys Press).* MAD: MAD About Trump: A Brilliant Look at Our Brainless President (paperback, 2017, MAD).* MAD: MAD About the Trump Era (paperback, 2019, MAD).* Brennan Matthews/Michelle Kerr: Tragic Trump: A Series of Comical Explanations for President Donald Trump (paperback, 2020, independent).* Media Lab Books: My Amazing Book About Tremendous Me: Donald J Trump -- Very Stable Genius (2018, Media Lab Books).* Leroy Mould II/Karin Carlson, eds: Very Stable Genius: The Best Words and Quotations of Donald J Trump, Individual One, the Chosen One. Volume II (paperback, 2019, independent).* A Nasty Woman: F*ck Trump: An Adult Coloring Book (paperback, 2017, Toppings Publishing).* Rob Sears: The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump (2020, Canongate Books).* GB Trudeau: Yuge! 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump (paperback, 2016, Andrews McNeel). GB Trudeau: #SAD!: Doonesbury in the Time of Trump (paperback, 2018, Andrews McMeel). GB Trudeau: Lewser! More Doonesbury in the Time of Trump (paperback, 2020, Andrews McMeel). [July 7]* Finally, I want to group together a long list of pro-Trump books. In most cases, the titles alone suffice to give you an idea of how deranged the books are. (* indicates books I haven't listed before; I'm grouping both old and new books together for cumulative effect.) It's possible that a small number of these exhibit more honesty and discretion than is immediately apparent, but most are pure propaganda, straight from the right-wing disinformation machine. There is a real sickness out there. Nick Adams: Trump and Churchill: Defenders of Western Civilization (2020, Post Hill Press): Foreword by Newt Gingrich.* Mykel Barthelemy: Trump Is a Racist! Here's Why (paperback, 2019, independent).* James A Beverley: God's Man in the White House: Donald Trump in Modern Christian Prophecy (paperback, 2020, Castle Quay).* Conrad Black: Donald J Trump: A President Like No Other (2018, Regnery): Reissue [August 18] with new title: A President Like No Other: Donald J Trump and the Restoring of America (paperback, 2020, Encounter Books). Dan Bongino: Exonerated: The Failed Takedown of President Donald Trump by the Swamp (2019, Post Hill Press). Eric Bolling: The Swamp: Washington's Murky Pool of Corruption and Cronyism and How Trump Can Drain It (2017, St Martin's). L Brent Bozell III/Tim Graham: Unmasked: Big Media's War Against Trump (2019, Humanix Books). Jason Chaffetz: The Deep State: How an Army of Bureaucrats Protected Barack Obama and Is Working to Destroy the Trump Agenda (2018, HarperCollins).* Jason Chaffetz: Power Grab: The Liberal Scheme to Undermine Trump, the GOP, and Our Republic (2019, Broadside Books). John Michael Chambers: Trump and the Resurrection of America: Leading America's Second Revolution (2019, Defiance Press). Steve Cioccolanti: Trump's Unfinished Business: 10 Prophecies to Save America (paperback, 2020, Discover Media). Horace Cooper: How Trump Is Making Black America Great Again: The Untold Story of Black Advancement in the Era of Trump (2020, Bombardier Books).* Jerome R Corsi: Killing the Deep State: The Fight to Save President Trump (2018, Humanix Books). Ann Coulter: In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! (2016, Penguin).* Ann Coulter: Resistance Is Futile! How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind (2018, Penguin).* Charles Davies: Getting Trump: How the Media Is Hurting Itself Chasing the Donald (2019, Defiance Press). Alan Dershowitz: Trumped Up: How Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy (paperback, 2017, CreateSpace). Alan Dershowitz: The Case Against Impeaching Trump (2018, Hot Books): Later reissued as The Case Against the Democratic House Impeaching Trump (2019, Hot Books). JM Eckert: And In Walked Trump: For Such a Time as This (paperback, 2018, Xulon Press). John L Fraser: The Truth Behind Trump Derangement Syndrome: There is More Than Meets the Eye (paperback, 2018, JF Publications). Major Garrett: Mr. Trump's Wild Ride: The Thrills, Chills, Screams, and Occasional Blackouts of an Extraordinary Presidency (2018, All Points Books). Newt Gingrich: Understanding Trump (2017, Center Street). Newt Gingrich: Trump's America: The Truth About Our Nation's Great Comeback (2018, Center Street). Newt Gingrich: Trump vs China: Facing America's Greatest Threat (2019, Center Street). Sebastian Gorka: The War for America's Soul: Donald Trump, the Left's Assault on America, and How We Take Back Our Country (2019, Regnery). Victor Davis Hanson: The Case for Trump (2019, Basic Books): Historian of ancient Greece, turned right-wing hack. Robert Henderson: Praying for the Prophetic Destiny of the United States and the Presidency of Donald J Trump From the Courts of Heaven (paperback, 2020, Destiny Image).* Thomas R Horn: The Rabbis, Donald Trump, and the Top-Secret Plan to Build the Third Temple: Unveiling the Incendiary Scheme by Religious Authorities, Government Agents, and Jewish Rabbis to Invoke Messiah (paperback, 2019, Defender).* Thomas R Horn: Shadowland: From Jeffrey Epstein to the Clintons, From Obama and Biden to the Occult Elite: Exposing the Deep-State Actors at War With Christianity, Donald Trump, and America's Destiny (paperback, 2020, Defender).* David Horowitz: Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America (2017, Humanix Books). David Horowitz: Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win (2020, Humanix Books). [June 2]* Charles Hurt: Still Winning: Why America Went All In on Donald Trump -- And Why We Must Do It Again (2019, Center Street). Gregg Jarrett: The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump (2018; paperback, 2019, Broadside Books). Gregg Jarrett: Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History (2019, Broadside Books). Ronald Kessler: The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game (2018, Crown Forum).* Charlie Kirk: The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future (2020, Broadside Books).* Corey R Lewandowski/David N Bossie: Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency (2017, Center Street). Corey R Lewandowski/David N Bossie: Trump's Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency (2018, Center Street). Corey R Lewandowski/David N Bossie: Trump: America First (2020, Cener Street). [September 29]* Theodore Roosevelt Malloch: The Plot to Destroy Trump: The Deep State Conspiracy to Overthrow the President (paperback, 2019, Skyhorse). Lily Manchubel: Too Far Left: An Eroding United States Democratic Republic: Anecdotal Observations of President Obama's Administration Left Leaning Cultural Shift, Poor Foreign and Domestic Government Policies; Versus That of Trump's More Right of Center Programs (paperback, 2019, Lulu Publishing Services): Deserves some sort of award for cutest fascist title. Matt Margolis: Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama's Legacy (paperback, 2019, Bombardier Books). KT McFarland: Revolution: Trump, Washington and "We the People" (2020, Post Hill Press).* Paul McGuire/Troy Anderson: Trumpocalypse: The End-Times President, a Battle Against the Globalist Elite, and the Countdown to Armageddon (paperback, 2019, FaithWords).* Stephen Moore/Arthur Laffer: Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy (2018, All Points Books): Possibly the two worst "economists" in America.* Hal Moroz: The Book of Tweets: President Trump's Social Media Revolution & America's New Birth of Freedom (paperback, 2018, CreateSpace).* Bill O'Reilly: The United States of Trump: How the President Really Sees America (2019, Henry Holt). George Papadopoulos: Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump (2019, Diversion Books). Star Parker With Richard Manning: Necessary Noise: How Donald Trump Inflames the Culture War and Why This Is Good News for America (2019, Center Street). Jeanine Pirro: Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (2018, Center Street). Jeanine Pirro: Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge: The Left's Plot to Remake America (2019, Center Street). Andrew F Puzder: The Capitalist Comeback: The Trump Boom and the Left's Plot to Stop It (2018, Center Street): Trump's first pick to be Secretary of Labor.* Ralph Reed: For God and Country: The Christian Case for Trump (2020, Regnery).* Vernon Robinson III/Bruce Eberle: Coming HOme: How Black Americans Will Re-Elect Trump (2020, Humanix Books).* Jesse Romero: A Catholic Vote for Trump: The Only Choice in 2020 for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents Alike (paperback, 2020, TAN Books).* Austin Ruse: The Catholic Case for Trump (2020, Regnery). [August 11]* Anthony Scaramucci: Trump: The Blue-Collar President (paperback, 2019, Center Street). Allen Salkin/Aaron Short: The Method to the Madness: Donald Trump's Ascent as Told by Those Who Were Hired, Fired, Inspired -- and Inaugurated (2019, All Points). Michael Savage: Trump's War: His Battle for America (2017, Center Street). Michael Savage: Trump's Fight for America: The Battle Continues (2020, Center Street). [September 15]* Kurt Schlichter: The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (And You!) (2020, Regnery). [July 7]* Peter Schweizer: Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America's Progressive Elite (2020, Harper).* Lee Smith: The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in US History (2019, Center Street).* George A Sorial/Damian Bates: The Real Deal: My Decade Fighting Battles and Winning Wars With Trump (2019, HarperCollins): Sorial is a "longtime Trump Organization executive and attorney." Sean Spicer: Leading America: President Trump's Commitment to People, Patriotism, and Capitalism (2020, Center Street). [October 13] Roger Stone: The Myth of Russian Collusion: The Inside Story of How Donald Trump Really Won (paperback, 2019, Skyhorse). Stephen E Strang: Trump Aftershock: The President's Seismic Impact on Culture and Faith in America (2018, Frontline).* Stephen E Strang: God and Donald Trump (2017, Frontline).* Stephen E Strang: God, Trump, and the 2020 Election: Why He Must Win and What's at Stake for Christians if He Loses (2020, Frontline).* Kimberley Strassel: Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America (2019, Twelve). Mark Taylor: The Trump Prophecies: The Astonishing True Story of the Man Who Saw Tomorrow . . . and What He Says Is Coming Next (2nd ed, paperback, 2019, Defender).* Donald Trump Jr: Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us (2019, Center Street). Lance Wallnau: God's Chaos Candidate: Donald J Trump and the American Unraveling (2016, Killer Sheep Media): Written after Jeb Bush referred to Trump as "the chaos candidate."* Doug Wead: Game of Thorns: The Inside Story of Hillary Clinton's Failed Campaign and Donald Trump's Winning Strategy (paperback, 2018, Center Street).* Doug Wead: Inside Trump's White House: The Real Story of His Presidency (2019, Center Street).* Diana West: The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (paperback, 2019, independent).* Matthew Whitaker: Above the Law: The Inside Story of How the Justice Department Tried to Subvert President Trump (2020, aRegnery): Whitaker was Trump's Acting Attorney General after Trump fired Jeff Sessions.* John Yoo: Defender in Chief: Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power (2020, St Martin's): GW Bush's "torture memo" lawyer. [July 28]* Ask a question, or send a comment. Thursday, October 31, 2019 Book Reports
Another batch of 40 brief notes on recently published books -- the third I've published this year, after March 15 and June 1. Actually, a good deal more than 40 books mentioned below, as I've tacked on lists of related books where it seemed appropriate and useful -- in some cases, the list is probably the point. Inclusion in a list doesn't guarantee that I'll never write a book up separately, but usually satisfies my sense of duty. While the dates above seem to suggest a regular, orderly process, I only managed to do this once in 2018, and twice in 2017 (here and here), so I feel like I'm working my way out of a deep hole. Indeed, I have 55 more-or-less written entries in my scratch file for later, so I could do a fourth one next week, or at least by the end of the year. Oh, and that doesn't count the merely noted titles that follow the top 40 -- 46 more of them in the file, but I'll list some of them to end this post. Worth noting that I have read (or am working on) the books I have cover art for on the right. Kate Brown's book on Chernobyl is probably the "best read" of the bunch. Just started Poniewozik's Audience of One, and he's scoring points from the very start (unlike, say, Tim Alberta, who wants you to regard John Boehner and Paul Ryan as normal, decent human beings). I checked out Astra Taylor's Democracy May Not Exist but We'll Miss It When It's Gone, but ran out of time before I got deep enough into it to count. I bought a copy of Stanley Greenberg's RIP GOP, but haven't gotten to it yet -- I figure it's next in queue after Poniewozik, but a lot of what I've read recently has been plucked opportunistically from the city library. It occurs to me that I should probably do a whole piece on music, but these days I never find the time to read up on what's supposed to be my specialty. Still, I have a handful of music books in the draft file, starting with Robert Christgau's Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading, and John Corbett's Pick Up the Pieces: Excursions in Seventies Music. I also started a list entry on cookbooks, which could grow into a specialized post -- not least because I do regularly buy and use cookbooks. Tim Alberta: American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (2019, Harper). It's pretty easy now to see how everything Republicans did from 1968 to 2016 paved the way for electing this crass, bigoted grifter and sham. Nixon laid the foundation with his crass appeals to racists and reactionaries, his Orwellian "peace with honor" (a tactical retreat covered by real and feigned escalation), above all his conviction that winning is the only thing that matters, and that excuses all manner of criminality. Reagan put a sunnier face on an even darker heart. Ditto the Bushes, less artfully. Alberta only picks up this digression in 2008, with the Sarah Palin boomlet, and 2009, with the Tea Party eruption, then goes on to show how Trump won the party over, delivering the one thing they craved most of all: winning. Of course, you know all of that, but Alberta puts you in the rooms as the party brass figures it out and comes to terms with their debasement. Some other recent books on how we got to Trump:
Binyamin Appelbaum: The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (2019, Little Brown): A history of the growing influence and power of economists from 1969, when economists were kept to the basement of the Federal Reserve, to 2008, when the world transformed by their fundamentalist faith in markets crashed and nearly burned. In between, business and political interests looked to economists for help, and many economists strove to service their masters. One line I noted: "Conservatism was a coalition of the powerful, defending the status quo against threats real and imagined." More recent books on economics:
Kathleen Belew: Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018; paperback, 2019, Harvard University Press): Locates the roots of the alt-right/white power movement less in opposition to the civil rights movement than in reaction against the loss of the Vietnam War -- though either way you can see how Richard Nixon's "silent majority"/"Southern strategy" conjured up the seething hatred of this movement, which Trump has only stoked further. More recent books on the racist right-wing fringe:
Marcia Bjornerud: Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (2018, Princeton University Press): After my first wife died, I went through a period of several years where most of what I read was on geology, ranging from semi-popular books like John McPhee's I-70 quartet (later collected as Annals of the Former World) through some very technical texts on plate tectonics, plus a lot of paleontology and contemporary earth science. I suppose a big part of the attraction came from the vast time frameworks geologists routinely deal with, but I was also much impressed by the logic behind the science: how geologists work and think. Since 9/11, I've denied myself the indulgence of pursuing such pleasant interests. Otherwise this book would jump to the top of my reading list. Some other geology books that caught my eye:
Kate Brown: Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019, WW Norton): History of the 1986 nuclear plant explosion at Chernobyl, Ukraine, Soviet Union, but less on the explosion than on the disaster it spread, especially the faulty, fitful efforts to understand (or in some case not) the widespread effects of the radiation it left. Author has written a couple of books leading up to this one, and there's been a spate of recent books on Chernobyl and so forth:
Elizabeth C Economy: The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (2018, Oxford University Press): A history of China since Xi Jinping came to power, bringing a series of reforms distinct enough from Deng Xioping's "second revolution" reforms to merit the title. I'm not really up enough on the subject to judge, but it seems that China has found a very different path to development -- one that Americans are especially ill-prepared to understand. Other recent books on contemporary China:
Richard J Evans: Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (2019, Oxford University Press): A big (800 pp) biography of a great historian, born in Egypt of 2nd generation British parents, orphaned at 14 in 1931, living in Berlin at the time, fleeing to England when the Nazis came to power, joined the Communist Party, went on to write major histories of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. The author is a notable historian in his own right, his writings including three major books on Nazi Germany (The Third Reich Trilogy). Adam Gopnik: A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019, Basic Books): A staff writer for The New Yorker, seems like he's mostly written about innocuous topics, like art, travel, food, and (mostly) himself, so this foray into political philosophy ("a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition") comes as a bit of a surprise. Or maybe just to me, as his bibliographic note opens with a fairly long list of essays he has published on political figures. The central section of the book consists of three parts: a "manifesto," followed by chapters on "Why the Right Hates Liberalism" and "Why the Left Hates Liberalism" (the longest). If he's honest, the reasons are very different: the right fears any challenge to hierarchical order, while the left sees liberals as too willing to compromise their principles, because in a world of individualism self-interest is ultimately decisive. I recall being very critical of liberalism back in the late 1960s, when it seemed to be hegemonic. I've softened my stance since then: as the right has emerged as the greater threat, liberals offer a respectable stance and critique. Related:
Stanley B Greenberg: RIP GOP: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans (2019, Thomas Dunne Books): Pollster, worked for Clinton and Obama, seems like he's been peddling rosy futures to mainstream liberals for more than two decades now: Middle Class Dreams: Building the New Majority (1995, Crown); The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics (ed. with Theda Skocpol, 1997, Yale University Press); The Two Americas: Our Current Political Deadlock and How to Break It (2004, Thomas Dunne Books); It's the Middle Class Stupid! (with James Carville, listed first, and probably to blame for the title, not least the missing comma; 2012, Blue Rider Press); America Ascendant: A Revolutionary Nation's Path to Addressing Its Deepest Problems and Leading the 21st Century (2015, Thomas Dunne Books). This one seems more plausible, as it shifts the focus to Republicans with their failing programs and declining demographics. Victor Davis Hanson: The Case for Trump (2019, Basic Books): The author is supposedly expert on ancient Greek military history, but he's been such a shameless right-wing hack for so long his credentials don't carry much weight any more -- other than perhaps to make him the natural leader of the parade of hacks and hysterics with recent books defending their Fearless Leader, campaigning for him, and (most often) slandering his "enemies":
Reed Hundt: A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama's Defining Decisions (2019, Rosetta Books): Inside adviser to Clinton (via Gore) in the 1990s, and to Obama from campaign to transition, recounts the personnel and policy decisions made by Obama during his transition and first few months which sharply limited the set of options that could be entertained to halt the collapse of the financial sector and to rebuild an economy that had been decimated by banking risks. One thing that was especially shocking was how little consideration was given to anyone other than Tim Geithner and Larry Summers for roles which ultimately prevented Obama from doing anything but protect the bankers who caused the recession. Hundt's own pet project during this period was setting up a program for infrastructure development, but it was killed by Summers on the assumption that the recession would be so short-lived that only short-term spending was needed. Other memoirs and assessments of the Obama years (skipping the most obvious right-wing rants):
Nancy Isenberg/Andrew Burstein: The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality (2019, Viking): A dual biography of father and son, the second and sixth presidents of the US, each limited to a single, controversial term as they were the exceptions to the Virginia planters who dominated the early democracy, a forum they worked in if never totally approved of. Not sure what the "cult of personality" was -- Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson are mentioned, and they no doubt qualify. Isenberg previuosly wrote White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Burstein has written books on Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, and Washington Irving. His most intriguing title was Democracy's Muse: How Thomas Jefferson Became an FDR Liberal, a Reagan Republican, and a Tea Party Fanatic, All the While Being Dead (2015; paperback, 2017, University of Virginia Press). Stuart Jeffries: Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (2016, Verso): A group biography of the Frankfurt School, an important intersection of German Marxist thinkers who came together around 1923, and remained outside of (and often opposed to) the Soviet circle, ultimately having great influence in the development of the New Left in 1960s Europe and America. The standard book on the subject is Martin Jay: The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research 1923-1950 (1973), which appeared when I was deeply immersed in these thinkers. Related:
Eric Kaufmann: Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities (2019, Harry N Abrams): Tempted to file this in the long list of books about how threatened white identity is shaping American and European politics, but this is a much bigger (624 pp), broader, deeper, and presumably more nuanced undertaking. Still, the very subject lies somewhere between unsavory and offensive. The basic truth is that when Europe started its project to conquer and colonize the world, it became inevitable that the conquered peoples would seep back into Europe and eventually change it: domination never lasts. Naomi Klein: On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019, Simon & Schuster): Bestselling Canadian whose critique of capitalism started with globalization -- No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000) -- and evolved as the neoliberal market engulfed politics -- The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) -- and the environment -- This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014). Her vision of the Green New Deal is way to fight back, but beneath it all is an ever-sharpening critique of capitalism.
Nicholas Lemann: Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (2019, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Profiles of "three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras": Adolf Berle (of FDR's "brain trust"), Michael Jensen (of Harvard Business School), and Reid Hoffman (a Silicon Valley venture capitalist). Presumably the first two correspond to the Roosevelt and Reagan eras. Harder to figure where that third avatar is dragging us, but as the title suggests, the author is looking not at where we want to go, but where how the era's great profiteers intend to con us. Christopher Leonard: Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America (2019, Simon & Schuster): Focuses more on the business behind the political forces that Jane Mayer wrote about in Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016). Jill Lepore: This America: The Case for the Nation (2019, Liveright): A short (160 pp) postscript, I would guess, to last year's massive These Truths: A History of the United States, described as an "urgent manifesto on the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century." Sees American history as a struggle between liberal and illiberal nationalism, and tries to buck up the former at a time when many liberal-minded folks see nationalism as an atavistic regression. Lepore's earlier The Story of America: Essays on Origins (paperback, 2013, Princeton University Press) started with the same problems, exploring them in scattered essays, as historians are prone to do. Rachel Maddow: Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth (2019, Crown): The MSNBC pundit's obsession with Russia has been aired so thoroughly since the 2016 debacle that this book is likely to rise to the level of self-parody, but somewhere along the line Maddow discovered that Russia is a petro-state, and broadened her aim to include the international oil industry, finding particularly juicy stories in Oklahoma earthquakes. Daniel Markovits: The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (2019, Penguin Press): I thought the best previous book on "meritocracy" was Chris Hayes' Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, which made it clear that "meritocracy" was little more than a deceptive argument for maintaining the class dominance of established elites. Markovits takes the further step of arguing that "meritocracy now ensnares event hose who manage to claw their way to the top, requiring rich adults to work with crushing intensity, exploiting their expensive educations in order to extract a return." Related:
Branko Milanovic: Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World (2019, Belknap Press): Economist, wrote Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Aims at a big picture, noting capitalism's considerable material benefits as well as its moral failings, trying to weigh such factors. Someone more optimistic might frame this as "post-capitalism," but he sees nothing beyond -- just a long struggle to keep from devouring ourselves. Alexander Nazaryan: The Best People: Trump's Cabinet and the Siege on Washington (2019, Hachette Books): Attempts to look past Trump's personality and showmanship, but doesn't get deep enough to see the real effects of his administration. Rather, he offers us a rogues gallery of Trump's cabinet-level deputies, who more often than not turn out to reflect the vanity and avarice of their leader. Curiously, doesn't cover the whole cabinet, with scarcely any mentions at all of State, Defense, Justice, or Homeland Security. It might be interesting to contrast this with John Nichols' Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Giude to the Most Dangerous People in America, written and rushed into print almost as soon as the initial cabinet picks were announced. Martha C Nussbaum: The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (2018, Simon & Schuster): Teaches philosophy in a law school, author of twenty-somebooks, won the 2016 Kyoto Prize ("the most presigious award available in fields not eligible for a Nobel" -- she accepted this the day after the Trump election, so it's a starting point), knows her Greeks and checks back with them regularly, also knows some psych and is not above folding in a little empirical research from the social sciences. Key concerns here are fear, disgust, and envy -- feelings which contribute to and exacerbate our struggles with everyday life, not least in politics. Robert L O'Connell: Revolutionary: George Washington at War (2019, Random House): Looking for something to round out my evaluation of the USA's first president -- my gut tells me he presents a stark and illustrative counterpoint to the latest (or maybe last?) president -- I picked this up and found it fascinating. Far from hagiography, it presents us with a flesh-and-blood figure, molded by the events of war but always with a fine sense of political mission. Daniel Okrent: The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America (2019, Scribner): Probably spent more time as an editor than anything else, first attracting notice for his baseball fandom, but lately has been writing substantial, sweeping books on history: Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center (2003), Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2010), and now this book on the racist and xenophobic movement to pass the 1923 law that radically restricted immigration to the United States. As timely now as those working to resurrect that movement. George Packer: Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (2019, Knopf): Major (608 pp) biography of the late diplomat, whose career started with the American War in Vietnam, and ended with his failure to make any headway as Obama's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Along the way, he gained a modicum of fame for brokering the Dayton Accords which ended the war between Serbia and Bosnia. Reviewers have focused on how both author and subject supported the Bush War in Iraq despite knowing better -- for Holbrooke it was a calculated cost of his ambitions to become Secretary of State (had Hillary Clinton won in 2008; with Obama winning, she settled for that position, and wrangled Holbrooke the Afghanistan/Pakistan portfolio). I suppose it's naïveté that lets Packer think Holbrooke's a worthy subject for such a massive effort. In the end, though, Holbrooke is a prime example of the moral and political bankruptcy of "the American era." And Packer's too competent a journalist not to expose that, even if he doesn't want to admit it. Raj Patel/Jason W Moore: A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017; paperback, 2018, University of California Press): A sweeping critique of capitalism, the force that cheapens things, in this case: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. This may slight what strikes me as the main effect of cheapening, which is that it makes things more plentiful. Moore previously wrote Capitalism in the Web of Life (paperback, 2015, Verso), which treats capitalism as a "world-ecology," Patel previously wrote Stuffed and Sarved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System (2008), and The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (2010). James Poniewozik: Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America (2019, Liveright). TV critic for the New York Times, traces Trump's long history of promotion and exposure on the tube, alongside the evolution of television from three major networks to "today's zillion-channel, internet-atomized universe, which sliced and diced them into fractious, alienated subcultures." I've long suspected that too much TV isn't a good thing -- the classic treatment is Neal Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I've seen this likened to -- but fragmentation would seem to limit the appeal of someone like Trump. Indeed, it took no effort to ignore him until he ran for president, and the news masters found their love/hate obsession with him. So I suspect there are more levels to this than a mere TV critic can develop, although that may be a good place to start. Corey Robin: The Enigma of Clarence Thomas (2019, Metropolitan Books): Author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (or, as recently reprinted, to Donald Trump), takes a shot at reconciling contradictions in the far right Supreme Court Justice, from his early embrace of black nationalism to the extreme conservatism he is known for -- another species of "reactionary mind," determined more by what he reacts so virulently to more than anything he believes in. Brian Rosenwald: Talk Radio's America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States (2019, Harvard University Press): This goes back to 1988, when "desperate for content to save AM radio, top media executives stumbled on a new format that would turn the political world upside down." They may have only been seeking profits, but rage and reaction was quickly recognized as effective conservative propaganda, an easy way to move a mass of voters to support the right-wing agenda. After the Republican debacle in 2008, the dynamic changed, as mass rage wound up leading the politicians, and in Donald Trump ("the kind of pugnacious candidate they had been demanding for decades") they put their own chump in charge. Bernie Sanders: Where We Go From Here: Two Years in the Resistance (2018, Thomas Dunne Books): These days most major election campaigns kick off with a book to introduce the candidate and set the tone for the campaign. But in 2016, Sanders waited until his campaign was over before releasing his, allowing him to open with a memoir, then tack a manifesto on at the end. He called it Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, and it was pretty credible for the genre. This one is reportedly sketchier, but even if he's just recounting his reaction to events, he's likely to give you insights you won't pick up from the usual sources. Elsewhere in the 2020 campaign wave (some are a bit old, more are on the way; some are by non-candidates, but fit the mold; I've written about Elizabeth Warren's book previously):
Isabel Sawhill: The Forgotten Americans: An Economic Agenda for a Divided Nation (2018, Yale University Press); Economist at the "centrist" Brookings Institute, stresses the importance of "mainstream values, such as family, education, and work." Detractors decry her as left wing nut job . . . the logic of know it all 5th grader and the mind set of a soviet thug." Chapters include "Why Economic Growth Is Not Enough," "The Limits of Redistribution," "A GI Bill for America's Workers," "A Bigger Role for the Private Sector" and "Updating Social Insurance." That all seems pretty modest to me, but "conservatives" can't so much as acknowledge the problem without flying off half-cocked. Makes one wonder why bother to appeal to them anyway. Tom Segev: A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion (2019, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Big (816pp) biography of Israel's first Prime Minister, by one of Israel's most important historians. Few national leaders in our time have more completely defined their nations -- Attaturk comes to mind as the closest comparable figure, although Mao and Castro ruled longer and more forcefully. Even today, it's possible to map most currents in Israeli political life to one facet or another of Ben Gurion complex view of his mission. Other recent books relating to Israel:
JC Sharman: Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order (2019, Princeton University Press): They say "history is written by the victors," and for 500 years we've been reading about how Europe's maritime conquest of the world reflected superior technology (and, less fashionably these days, genes and religion). This thin (216 pp) book tries to flip that argument on its head, asserting that the conquest "is better explained by deference to strong Asian and African polities, disease in the Americas, and maritime supremacy earned by default because local land-oriented polities were largely indifferent to war and trade at sea." Some of these ideas resemble the ones Jared Diamond put forth in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), but both underestimate the amount of greed, bad faith, and knavery involved. The pattern I see most clearly is that European contact always started a corrosion of traditional social, economic, and political ties well before Europeans were able to seize control. Jake Sherman/Anna Palmer: The Hill to Die On: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump's America (2019, Crown): Congress beat reporters for Politico report on the two year stretch when Republicans controlled both the White House and both houses of Congress, rehashing the jockeying behind the "repeal and replace" of Obamacare, the massive corporate tax giveaway, the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, and the partial government shutdown. Matt Taibbi: Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another (2019, OR Books): Journalist, covers elections and other scandals for Rolling Stone, a path paved by Hunter Thompson, so he's all but expected to get a little gonzo. Outside the mainstream hive, he's written some of the sharpest analysis of the media's coverage of elections, starting with Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches From the Dumb Season (2005), but I thought his quickie book on 2016, Insane Clown Posse: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus failed to rise to the absurdity of events he was forced to cover. In some ways, this book looks like a do-over, but rather than stare straight into the sun, he's focusing on the mediaa, and how they got blinded not just by events but by their devil's bargain with the mega-corporations that employ them. Two appendices: "Why Rachel Maddow is on the Cover of This Book," and "An Interview with Noam Chomsky." I guess Sean Hannity's appearance on the cover (on the red side vs. Maddow on the blue) requires no further explanation. Taibbi has long had a habit of burnishing his independence by attacking both parties, or both right and left, even when there's no equivalence. Astra Taylor: Democracy May Not Exist: But We'll Miss It When It's Gone (2019, Metropolitan Books): Ruminations on a much declaimed and frequently confused political principle, something we're taught to believe in, to pride ourselves in, yet not take too seriously, as it's been much abused by self-interested elites. That those abuses seem to increased, both in frequency and in crassness, in recent years is probably due to increasing inequality. Author also has a documentary film, What Is Democracy?, and another film on Marxian philosophe Slavoj Zizek. Adam Tooze: Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018, Viking): Economic historian, has a couple of major works: Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2007), and The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (2014). This sums up the decade following the 2008 crash. There have been a lot of books about the immediate causes of the crash. David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019, Tim Duggan Books): A general primer on global warming, albeit one that goes beyond presenting what we know to look at, and take seriously, the worst case scenarios scientists imagine -- hence the title -- without blunting the impact by parading the usual list of "what we can do about it" palliatives. Reviews tend toward hyperbole: "the most terrifying book I have ever read," and "the most important book I have ever read." May be a good lead in for yet another list of recent climate books (I started one earlier under Jeff Goodell but they do keep coming):
Brenda Wineapple: The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (2019, Random House): This is probably number one on the short list of events that could have changed American history had it gone slightly differently. As it was, Andrew Johnson did much to weaken and undo plans to empower freed slaves and reconstruct the south more equitably. Those years he held power made it easier for white southerners to reclaim power and create a racist order that prevailed into the 1960s, with remnants still evident today. Wineapple previously wrote the broader period history, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877 (2013; paperback, 2014, Harper Perennial). More on impeachment history (expect more on impeachment news soon):
Other recent books noted with little or no comment: HW Brands: Heirs of the Founders: Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants (2018, Doubleday; paperback, 2019, Anchor Books). Bill Bryson: The Body: A Guide for Occupants (2019, Doubleday). Gail Collins: No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History (2019, Little Brown). Jay Cost: The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy (2018, Basic Books). Kathleen Day: Broken Bargain: Bankers, Bailouts, and the Struggle to Tame Wall Street (2019, Yale University Press). Larry Diamond: Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (2019, Penguin Press). Robin DiAngelo: White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (paperback, 2018, Beacon Press). Ronan Farrow: Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (2019, Little Brown). Silvia Federici: Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (paperback, 2018, PM Press). Aaron Glantz: Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream (2019, Custom House). Garrett M Graff: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 (2019, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster). Gerald Horne: The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean (paperback, 2018, Monthly Review Press). Tom LoBianco: Piety & Power: Mike Pence and the Taking of the White House (2019, Dey Street Books). George Monbiot: Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (paperback, 2018, Verso Books). Philip Mudd: Black Site: The CIA in the Post-9/11 World (2019, Liveright). Margaret O'Mara: The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2019, Penguin Press). Samantha Power: The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (2019, Dey Street Books). Susan Rice: Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For (2019, Simon & Schuster). Christopher Ryan: Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress (2019, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster). Tatiana Schlossberg: Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have (2019, Grand Central Publishing). Rebecca Solnit: Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters (paperback, 2019, Haymarket Books). The Washington Post: The Mueller Report (paperback, 2019, Scribner). Gary Younge: Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (2016; paperback, 2018, Bold Type Books). Ask a question, or send a comment. Saturday, June 1, 2019 Book RoundupWhen I posted my latest Book Roundup on March 15 -- eleven months after my only 2018 compilation, after two in 2017, four in 2016, and five in 2015 -- I figured another one would be eminent. I got distracted, but here's a second batch of 40+ books, and I'm pretty certain that a third will be ready in a few weeks. These surveys are useful to me as a means of keeping track of what the world knows and is thinking about. I've been trying to track "the coming dark age" for some time now, but while lots of people seem to be getting dumber (or at least more certain of their ignorance), a lot of smart thinking is still being developed and preserved in books. As I've started doing recently, I'm including various related books in bullet lists following a leading one. There's also a supplemental list at the end, of books worth noting but not (as far as I'm concerned) at much length. Jill Abramson: Merchants of Truth: The Business and the Fight for Facts (2019, Simon & Schuster): Tries to update David Halberstam's The Powers That Be (1979) by profiling four major media corporation (The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE) as they make business out of the public's appetite for news. That, of course, raises the question of how the selection and reporting of news is filtered and often distorted by each of their business and cultural models. That's an intrinsically interesting question, but not necessarily one that can be answered -- for one thing the author adds her own limited vantage point. I can't say anything about charges that sections of the book were plagiarized. Related:
Carol Anderson: One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018, Bloomsbury USA): At some point in recent history, Republicans came to realize that it was easier to win by suppressing the vote among Democratic constituencies than it was to convince those voters of a political program which actually promises little more than to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. Of course, this isn't new: all republics have struggled over who counts and who doesn't, but the core idea of democracy -- each and every person is entitled to the same vote -- has been hard to argue with, until very recently. Even now, even among Republicans, the arguments tend to be disguised, and much of the mischief avoids the spotlight. Also wrote, with Tonya Bolden, We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide (2018, Bloomsbury). Previously wrote: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016). Also on voting rights:
Max Blumenthal: The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (2019, Verso): For the most part, a basic primer on how the US fed and nurtured its eventual enemies in the Middle East, in a long series of events that ultimately show how arrogant and self-centered the architects of American policy have been. That general book has been written a half-dozen times already, with dozens of other tomes treating one aspect or another of the big picture. However, by dropping Trump into the title, he's adding another dimension: not just what American plots and wars have done to the Middle East, but what such persistent warmaking has done to the psyches of ignorant and oblivious Americans-- Trump being an example. Steven Brill: Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall -- and Those Fighting to Reverse It (2018, Knopf): Journalist, wrote a book on Obamacare called America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healtcare System (2015), looks for a bigger picture and finds it in "an erosion of responsibility and accountability, an epidemic of shortsightedness, an increasingly hollow economic and political center, and millions of Americans gripped by apathy and hopelessness." That sounds a bit like a backgrounder for Trump's "Make American Great Again" campaign slogan, but it appears that the culprit Brill identifies is Trump's own billionaire class. Arthur C Brooks: Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt (2019, Broadside Books): Someone might be able to write a decent book on this theme, but I doubt that the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative propagandist who revels in his sense of moral superiority, is up to the task. Previous feel-good books include: Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (2006); Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America -- and How We Can Get More of It (2008); The Battle: How the Fight Between Big Government and Free Enterprise Will Shape America's Future (2010); The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise (2012), and The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America (2015). Turns out that it's easy to "love your enemies" once you've ground them under heel, which is the author's real mission. More recent efforts to make the conservatives seem like they think and care:
Contrast these with the right's more pedestrian hackwork, designed to rile up hatred (and otherwise confuse you):
Paul Buhle/Steve Max: Eugene V Debs: A Graphic Biography (paperback, 2019, Verso): Buhle was editor of Radical America, a major historian of American radical movements (co-editor of Encyclopedia of the American Let), and a long-time of the graphic book form, so the only thing surprising here is that it took so long to come together. Art by Noah Van Sciver, with additional help by Dave Nance. Actually, I've noted several of Buhle's graphic histories in the past. Here's a longer list (credits aren't always clear):
Chapo Trap House: The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason (2018, Atria Books): I went through a kneejerk period in the 1960s when I rebelled so hard against the liberal warmongers of the Democratic Party that I was willing to throw away all appeals to "logic, facts, and reason," and embrace its opposite (arts, irrationality, mysticism). I changed my tune when I found that one could arrive at right conclusions through reason, and I wound up more dedicated to rationality than ever before. So at first glance I took this book to be complete, reactionary bullshit. But it turns out this is meant to be funny, and it's aimed at young people today who feel the same incoherent rage and disgust over the powers that be as I felt back in the 1960s. The authors are comedians who run some kind of podcast. And while there are some lame jokes and outright bullshit here, their core claim harbors a kernel of truth: "Capitalism, and the politics it spawns, is not working for anyone under thirty who is not a sociopath." Once you understand that, you can look elsewhere for better-reasoned explanations and proposals, but that insight is a good place to start. Sarah Churchwell: Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream" (2018, Basic Books): Two iconic notions, offered as sweeping generalizations about America's role in the world, adopted by various political movements for varying ends depending on the time and place. The contemporary interest angle is that both played large roles in the 2016 election, perhaps even more so than in their long and storied past. On the other hand, they're basically bullshit, at once able to flatter and mislead their political targets, and there's something rather hollow about stretching a book around them. Kimberly Clausing: Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital (2019, Harvard University Press): Theory tells us that free trade and unrestricted mobility of capital and labor increases wealth all around. The reality is something else, as global capital has exploited economic theory to effectively escape nation-state regulation, leading to ever more extreme inequality, stripping most people of most nations of their political standing. That has in turn produced a backlash, both on the reactionary right and on the left, which sees things like "free trade agreements" as little more than a power- and wealth-grab. Causing attempts to save theory from practice, by advancing political schemes to make open borders work for everyone. Anna Clark: The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy (2018, Metropolitan Books): We routinely receive warnings about America's crumbling infrastructure, but usually assume those threats are things that could happen in the future, not things already happening today. But the water system in Flint, Michigan has already turned toxic, killing and irreparably harming people who merely happened to live in the wrong place. Michael D'Antonio/Peter Eisner: The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence (2018, Thomas Dunne Books): Two key questions here: How bad is Pence? And how powerful is he? Trump had promised to give his vice president unprecedented day-to-day power -- the first evidence of that was that Pence had the leading role in staffing the administration, which is how Trump got surrounded by so many orthodox extreme conservatives. But beyond his immediate influence, I can't recall a moment of disharmony between Trump and Pence -- indeed, hard to think of anyone else in the administration one can say that about. Part of this is that Pence has been eager and willing to support Trump's Kulturkampf fetishes, no matter how loony (e.g., his stunt leaving a NFL game after players took the knee during the national anthem, or his ridiculous task of holding the official press conference announcing the Space Force). The import of this is how Pence has set an example for even the most hopelessly ideological Republicans to line up behind and join forces with Trump. Jared Diamond: Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (2019, Little Brown): An anthropologist who since his famous Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) has used his license to practice macrohistory, taking a view that straddles vast stretches of time and space to wrap big questions up into tidy boxes. He picks on six countries for his turning points this time: Japan (forced opening by US in 1860s), Finland (attacked by Soviet Union in 1939 following their "non-aggression" pact with Nazi Germany), Germany and Austria (post-WWII), Indonesia and Chile (victims of US-backed coups in 1965 and 1973). He draws lessons for Americans today. I doubt he has much to say about karma. William Egginton: The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today's College Campuses (2018, Bloomsbury): "Egginton argues that our colleges and universities have become exclusive, expensive clubs for the cultural and economic elite instead of a national, publicly funded project for the betterment of the country. Only a return to the goals of community, and the egalitarian values underlying a liberal arts education, can head off the further fracturing of the body politic and the splintering of the American mind." Lots of gripes about higher education these days, many from the right. Hard for me to sort these book out, probably because my own stake in academia is so tenuous:
David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018, Simon & Schuster): It's long been obvious -- I first picked up this insight from a book by Paul Sweezy written in the 1950s -- that we have a lot of jobs that don't really produce anything of value, that are effectively pointless and parasitical, what Graeber has finally called bullshit. He's an anthropologist and anarchist, the writer of a major tome Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and a book of his experience and theory of Occupy Wall Street, The Democracy Project:A History, a Crisis, a Movement. Greg Grandin: The End of Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (2019, Metropolitan Books): Author of a number of first-rate books on America's impact on Latin America -- e.g., Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2006) -- easily sees the links between two centuries of US aggression and the militarization of the US-Mexico border. Timely enough to include Trump's border wall fixation, though not the latest blow up in Venezuela. Bradley W Hart: Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States (2018, Thomas Dunne Books): Some were well known, like Charles Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh, the Bund and the America First Committee. I wouldn't be surprised to hear names like Koch and Trump pop up, although neither appear in what I've read. Still, I'd guess that actual supporters were fewer in number than sympathizers and apologists, especially those with home-grown racist and/or anti-labor agendas. On the other hand I really doubt that every isolationist was anti-semitic. Before WWII, Americans had a long history of believing that we should stay away from foreign entanglements, and the war schemes they lead to. Daniel Immerwahr: How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2019, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Beyond the 48 continental states, the US managed to pick up various far-flung lands, and has actually managed to keep more of them than any European rival: Alaska and Hawaii have become full-fledged states, Puerto Rico and various smaller islands are in limbo, the Philippines were let go but only losing them to Japan, the Panama Canal Zone was returned to Panama (which was itself a US creation), Cuba was never officially on the books but treated like a colony until its revolution. This surveys most of that list, stopping short of the coups and incursions and a globe-straddling archipelago of bases and even more pervasive property claims by private Americans and friendly investors. Stephen Kinzer: The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (2017; paperback, 2018, St Martin's Griffin): To be clear, Roosevelt was for and Twain was against in this particular political debate (c. 1898, what we've dubbed the Spanish-American War) over whether America should impose itself on others as an empire -- arguably not the first such debate, and most certainly not the last. Evan Thomas covered the pro-empire side (mostly) in The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire (2010); also Kinzer has previously written about the 1898 annexation of Hawaii in Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq (2006). Still, would be good to pay more attention to the anti-war/empire arguments. Eric Klinenberg: Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (2018, Crown): Sociologist, writes about the value of shared spaces -- examples given include libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, churches, synagogues, and parks -- for building social bonds and a sense of common interests, as opposed to the fragmentation and isolation that has lately taken hold almost everywhere. Kevin M Kruse/Julian E Zelizer: Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (2019, WW Norton): A broad history of what I've started calling the Reagan-to-Trump era, backing up a couple years (the falls of Nixon and Saigon, OPEC embargoes, desegregation riots in Boston) to get a running start. Jill Lepore says this details how "Americans abandoned a search for common ground in favor of a political culture of endless, vicious, and -- very often -- mindless division." Kruse previously wrote White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), and One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (2015). Zelizer has written The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (2015, Penguin Press), and a few more, including books on the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Milton Lodge/Charles S Taber: The Rationalizing Voter (paperback, 2013, Cambridge University Press): Argues that "political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts," testing five basic hypotheses: "hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion, and motivated reasoning." Yglesias used this book to explain Kanye West's embrace of Trump. Michael Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (2019, Oxford University Press): Argues that "in the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history." Further asserts that this blissful state ended "because three major countries -- Vladimir Putin's Russia in Europe, Xi Jinping's China in East Asia, and the Shia clerics' Iran in the Middle East -- put an end to end to it With aggressive nationalist policies aimed at overturning the prevailing political arrangements in their respective regions." Pretty amazing that anyone can look at the last 25-30 years and fail to identify the one nation that has been almost constantly at war, attacking "enemies" in more than a dozen countries scattered all around the world. Also that the author overlooked a number of other wars that broke out during the period, including the period's most deadly wars (in and around Congo). Bill McKibben: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (2019, Henry Holt): Wrote one of the early books on global warming, The End of Nature (1989). I read it during a mid-summer trip to Florida, where my initial skepticism was overcome by seeing and feeling how much heat could be absorbed into the atmosphere. Still, I hated his metaphor, and he has a knack for coming up with new irritating ways to say the same thing ever since. (Eaarth was the worst.) This is his latest, probably even more impassioned as he's made his career move from critic to activist. I'd probably find his 2013 memoir, Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, more to my taste than this doomsday screed. But despite the hyperbole, he's been basically right all along. You have to respect that. John J Mearsheimer: The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (2018, Yale University Press): Foreign policy mandarin, subscribes to the realist wing like his sometime co-author Stephen M Walt, has developed a healthy skepticism about how American foreign policy is practiced. Problem here is likely to be his choice of "Liberal Dreams" as his evil strawman. Although political liberals, especially in the anti-communist 1950s, readily supported America's originally bipartisan, military-first foreign policy, this policy has never advanced "liberal dreams." For the last 30-40 years, "liberal hegemony" has never been more than a neocon ruse, an attempt to dress up old-fashioned imperial power projection with a patina of nice words. Meanwhile, Walt has his own new book:
Steve Pearlstein: Can American Capitalism Survive? Why Greed Is Not Good, Opportunity Is Not Equal, and Fairness Won't Make Us Poor (2018, St Martin's Press): Reminded me first of Robert Kuttner's 2018 book Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism (still unread on my shelf), but the questions are slightly different. Pearlstein seems to assume democracy will have the final say, and asks instead whether capitalism can be reformed in ways that will make it palatable to most people. Clearly, its current practices like "squeezing workers, cheating customers, avoiding taxes, and leaving communities in the lurch" tend to undermine public trust and confidence. Nomi Prins: Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World (2018, Nation Books): Former bond trader, found her calling writing about the banking racket in the Bush years -- Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America (2004), Jacked: How "Conservatives" Are Picking Your Pocket (Whether You Voted for Them or Not) (2006), It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals From Washington to Wall Street (2009) -- looks at how "the open door between private and central banking has ensured endless opportunities for market manipulation and asset bubbles." I'm not a big fan of the titles per sé, but few people have written more lucidly about how theirs racket works. John Quiggin: Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly (2019, Princeton University Press): Author of Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, an important effort to clear out much of the dead wood, takes up Henry Hazlitt's 1946 classic, Economics in One Lesson, which he summarizes as "leave markets alone, and all will be well." But all isn't well, as there are many cases of market failures, so Quiggin adds "Lesson Two: Market prices don't reflect all the opportunity costs we face as a society." He gives 400 pages of examples and explanations, in what may be one of the essential texts of modern economics. Eric Rauchway: Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal (2018, Basic Books): After an overwhelming majority of Americans voted to free themselves from President Herbert Hoover, they faced a four-month delay until the new president could be sworn in -- a period so grueling that the US Constitution was changed to move future inaugurations up from March to January. This book covers those four months, a kind of pre-history to the famous "100 days" that followed Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration. In terms of anticipatory obstructionism, Hoover probably holds the record -- although John Adams in 1800-01 raised the bar, and Donald Trump will no doubt try to top them all in the shorter 2020-21 transition period. Richard Rhodes: Energy: A Human History (2018, Simon & Schuster): Recaps the history of mankind as the story of claiming and taming sources of energy, possibly starting with human and domesticated animal muscle, but wood, coal, oil, and nuclear play larger roles in this story -- Rhodes seems to be especially fond of nuclear, although the four major books he's written on nuclear bombs can be read as cautionary tales. I've read those four books, plus a couple more, and don't doubt that he is capable of synthesizing such a large and important story. Nathaniel Rich: Losing Earth: A Recent History (2019, MCD): A history, pointing out that by 1979 "we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change -- including how to stop it," which goes on to show how supposedly responsible people failed to act on that knowledge, letting us slide into the ever-increasing crisis we face today. The Reagan administration's determination to promote coal and cripple the EPA and drive science from the policy process -- I'd say "echoes of Trump" but it's the other way around -- were key, but the thing you keep running into is human reluctance to deal with a catastrophe that seems to merely loom in the future, because the worst hasn't struck yet. Sam Rosenfeld: The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (2017, University of Chicago Press): Assumes that the problem with politics today is partisan polarization, and seeks to find where that came from by examining the political period from 1945 through 1980, moving from "The Idea of Responsible Partisanship" to "The Making of a Vanguard Party" and "Liberal Alliance-Building for Lean Times." Winds up with a chapter on 1980-2000 and a "Conclusion: Polarization without Responsibility, 2000-2016." Rosenfeld attributes the idea that the two parties should be realigned on a liberal-conservative axis to Franklin Roosevelt. What actually forced the realignment was a single issue -- civil rights -- which straddled the 1980 divide (what we might call the tipping point). Whether this was a good or bad thing depends a lot on how important you think that issue is. But more generally, polarization always occurs when issues become more serious and less amenable to compromise -- and we see that happening now, on race (of course) but also on the more general principles of equality, fairness, justice, and whether government will serve or oppress the vast majority of the people. I don't mean to argue that polarization has no down side. The main one is that it's led one party in particular to view politics as a zero-sum game, even worse as it's blinded that party to recognizing common problems (most obviously, climate change, which Republicans furiously deny because it's inconvenient for some of their major donors). Joseph E Stiglitz: People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (2019, WW Norton): Major liberal economist, advised Clinton in the 1990s and bragged about it in The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade (2003), warned about Bush in the 2000s and reminded us in Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (2010), wrote an important book on The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future (2012), and several books on trade, starting with Globalization and Its Discontents (2002). I've read (and admired) most of his books, but overlooked an earlier book, Whither Socialism?, which claimed that "market socialism" couldn't work. His analysis back then probably has much to do with his decision now to push for what he calls "progressive capitalism" as the alternative to the burgeoning movement for socialism. I'm sure he's very smart about it, but I always find it a bit sad that the only occasions when the left gains enough power to do something, they first have to spend all their energy saving capitalism's sorry ass. Bhaskar Sunkara: The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (2019, Basic Books). Editor of Jacobin offers a primer on the history of socialism since the mid-1800s and "a realistic vision for its future" -- well short of the Soviet-era ideals, but carefully, cautiously tailored to provide universal, fair and equitable solutions to economic problems. Related:
Michael W Twitty: The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (2017, Amistad): A family history back to its roots, focusing on the food that made each generation, and crossed in various ways from black to white and back. Also on food and the South: John T Edge: The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South (2017, Penguin). Craig Unger: House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia (2018, Dutton): A journalist with a nose for corrupt relationships, previously wrote House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties (2004), seems to have a ripe subject digging into Trump's various deals with Russian mobsters and oligarchs. Jose Antonio Vargas: Dear America, Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (2018, Dey Street Books): Author spent 25 years as an "undocumented" American, "living illegally in a country that does not consider me one of its own," before outing himself to write about the experience in the New York Times -- becoming a spokesman for the millions of "undocumented" Americans. Less about immigration either as policy or practice than about what it feels like to live in a country you have to hide from. Other recent books on immigration:
William T Vollmann: Carbon Ideologies: Volume One: No Immediate Danger/Volume Two: No Good Alternative (2018, Viking): Mostly a novelist, occasionally writes non-fiction and has been known to get carried away, like his Imperial (1306 pp). This "almanac of global energy use" is similar-sized, but published in two volumes. Jon Ward: Camelot's End: Kennedy vs. Carter and the Fight That Broke the Democratic Party (2019, Twelve): This suggests that Reagan's triumph in 1980 had more to do with a breakdown caused by Ted Kenndy's almost unprecedented primary challenge against a president of his own party. The closest analogy I can think of was Teddy Roosevelt's rebuke of William Howard Taft in 1912, which wound up with his Bull Moose third party and both losing to Woodrow Wilson. Lots of parallels there, not least the challengers' sense of entitlement. Looking back now it's clear that Carter was a forerunner of many of Reagan's issues, and as such helped to legitimize someone who had previously been viewed as a far-right fringe candidate. One wonders whether the clearer choice that Kennedy might have presented would have faired better. Alan Wolfe: The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity (2018, University of Chicago Press). More like senescence, which has less to do with age than the popular choice 38 years ago to turn away from facing reality and pretend we're fine in Ronald Reagan's fantasy world. Wolfe is a political science prof (emeritus) with a long list of books, including The Seamy Side of Democracy: Repression in America (1973), Marginalized in the Middle (1996), Does American Democracy Still Work? (2006), and At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews (2014). I last noticed him when he published The Future of Liberalism (2009), a spirited defense that this must contrast with. Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019 PublicAffairs): Seems to focus on the new information businesses, specifically the ones that track your every step in navigating the Internet, and analyze and market that information to others hoping to manipulate you. I'm not sure how far you can push this model: is it really that important? I suspect it may even be self-limiting. Other recent books also noted without comment: Ben S Bernanke/Timothy F Geithner/Henry M Paulson Jr: Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons (paperback, 2019, Penguin Books). William J Burns: The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal (2019, Random House). Tucker Carlson: Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (2018, Free Press). Robert A Caro: Working (2019, Knopf). Susan Faludi: In the Darkroom (2016, Metropolitan Books; paperback, 2017, Picador). Henry Louis Gates Jr: Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019, Penguin Press). Gary Giddins: Bing Crosby: Swinging on a Star: The War Years 1940-1946 (2018, Little Brown). Jonah Goldberg: Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (2018, Crown Forum). Max Hastings: Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018, Harper). Steven Johnson: Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most (2018, Riverhead Books). Dan Kaufman: The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics (2018, WW Norton). Yasmin Khan: India at War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War (2015, Oxford University Press). Lawrence Lessig: America, Compromised (2018, University of Chicago Press). Steve Luxenberg: Separate: The Story of Plessy V. Ferguson, and America's Journey From Slavery to Segregation (2019, WW Norton). Anna Merlan: Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (2019, Metropolitan Books). Ashoka Mody: Euro Tragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts (2018, Oxford University Press). Raghuram Rajan: The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind (2019, Penguin Press). Jeffrey D Sachs: A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2018, Columbia University Press). Darrel M West: Divided Politics, Divided Nation: Hyperconflict in the Trump Era (2019, Brookings Institution Press). Joan C Williams: White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (2017, Harvard Business Review Press). Ask a question, or send a comment. Friday, March 15, 2019 Book RoundupI've fallen way behind here. The last Book Roundup appeared way back on April 21, 2018, eight months after the previous one on August 18, 2017 (full list and archive is here, but it's one long file). The way this works is I pick 40 books per post, and write a few words on each, mostly based on descriptions and comments at Amazon, plus whatever else I happen to know or find. (Given the long delays, I've actually read thirteen books from this batch,[1] and bought several more.) I've been known to do multiple posts in quick succession when I catch up from far behind, and will likely follow this one up with another (or two or maybe three) in pretty quick order. In addition to the chosen 40, I list many more books in uncommented lists, either under selected books where they seem to be related, or at the end. I've included related book lists all along, especially when I would find a cluster of related titles and didn't find reason to comment on them individually. More recently I started appending a generic list of books without comment, and since they're easy, I've turned them into a time-saving measure (which also makes the list more comprehensive). Again, due to the long lead time here, you'll find more below than ever before. In the past, I've added extra lists of paperback reissues of books I've previously noted -- especially books I had since read and wanted to write more about. None of them this time, but perhaps in the future. As far as domain, the chose books are primarily on politics, history, and the social sciences (especially economics), although I'll make an exception here and there, whatever strikes my fancy. My main reason for doing this is to familiarize myself with what people are writing about issues I care about. [1]: Read: Gregg Carlstrom: How Long Will Israel Survive?; John Dower: The Violent American Century; Ben Fountain: Beautiful Country Burn Again; Thomas Frank: Rendezvous With Oblivion; Robert Gerwarth: The Vanquished; Masha Gessen: The Future Is History; David Satter: The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep; Jill Lepore: These Truths; Kevin Peraino: A Force So Swift; Michael Ruhlman: Grocery; Quinn Slobodan: Globalists; Sarah Smarsh: Heartland; Timothy Snyder: The Road to Unfreedom. Waiting on the shelf: Tom Engelhardt: A Nation Unmade by War; Steve Fraser: Class Matters; Michael Tomasky: If We Can Keep It. Alan I Abramowitz: The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump (2018, Yale University Press): One of several recent books that try to make sense of recent changes in partisan alignment, especially as right and left have become more stuck with their limited party options. This one focuses on "an unprecedented alignment of many different divides: racial and ethnic, religious, ideological, and geographic." OK, with Trump, mostly racial. Other recent books:
Andrew J Bacevich: Twilight of the American Century (2018, University of Notre Dame Press): A collection of essays since 9/11/2001, 480 pages. He's a conservative anti-war, anti-intervention, soldier-turned-scholar, has written a bunch of books in the meantime, including: The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005); The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008); Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (2010); Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (2013); and America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (2016). Entitled to a lot of "I told you so's." Becky Bond/Zack Exley: Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything (paperback, 2016, Chelsea Green): A primer for grass roots political change, written by two "digital iconoclasts" who have worked for the Bernie Sanders campaign. Title probably a nod to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. There are actually quite a few activist primers out recently, such as:
Bryan Caplan: The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (2018, Princeton University Press): As a high school dropout, I should sympathize with the argument that our education system is inefficient and ineffective, that much of what is taught there is of little value, and that people can learn essential life skills otherwise. And that should be even more true now than it was when I was in school, as the system since then has evolved into more of a credentials mill than a source for widespread knowledge development. Elements of Caplan's critique are certainly correct, but his proposal -- spend less on general education and more on vocational training -- misses some key points. In particular, in an increasingly complex technological civilization people need more knowledge just to function as responsible citizens. Just as important, they need to be able to reason independently, and to continue to learn for the rest of their lives. I managed to do that, for the most part in spite of my formal education, but rather than throwing everyone else into the deep end to see who swims, wouldn't more people be better off if we changed the educational system to help people learn and develop -- rather than just train people for the jobs we think we need now? Gregg Carlstrom: How Long Will Israel Survive? The Threat From Within (2017, Oxford University Press): A decade ago, Richard Ben Cramer wrote what I thought the best single book on the intractable problem of the Zionist State's continuing domination over the Palestinian people in Greater Israel. His simple thesis was that Jewish Israel was divided into a half-dozen very distinct tribes that were being held together by their common enemy: the people they displaced in settling Israel. Thus, they had to keep feeding the conflict, lest they lose themselves as a people. That's what they've done since then, ever more intransigently, to the point where it's rotting the nation from within. We got our first really good picture of how pervasive this is in Max Blumenthal's 2013 book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (not that close readers couldn't recognize the problem much earlier, even before the 1948 War of Independence). Carlstrom adds a few more years onto Blumenthal's story. Not pretty, although I suspect that had he waited a year or two into the Trump era, where the US has totally given up any pretense of independence, the story would be even grimmer. Elizabeth Catte: What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (paperback, 2018, Belt Publishing): Examines the history of Appalachia (especially West Virginia) and various stereotypes that have been popularized, especially by J.D. Vance: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis (2016), a book that journalists discovered looking for explanations of why Trump was so successful there. Amy Chua: Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018, Penguin Press): Stresses the role of group identity in elections both in the US and abroad. Chua has in the past been especially sensitive (maybe a bit chauvinistic too) to how the Chinese diaspora rose to economic prominence and political antipathy all around southeast Asia -- cf. World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability -- so I imagine she builds on that here, a much broader (though not necessarily deeper) foundation than our recent carping about identity politics. Tom Engelhardt: A Nation Unmade by War (paperback, 2018, Haymarket): Another collection of essays from the author's TomDispatch website, where he and a few dozen regular contributors have meticulously chronicled the frustrations and failures of the post-9/11 "global war on terror" -- a vain and desperate defense of the worldwide empire American neocons claimed as its triumph over communism. Actually, that empire had always been based on more than a little self-delusion, and its costs and contradictions had already become evident when one of Engelhardt's writers, Chalmers Johnson, wrote The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2004). Engelhardt follows up, recounting the attendant chaos and confusion. Also, by other Engelhardt writers:
Ronan Farrow: War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence (2018, WW Norton): Based on interviews with Secretaries of State from Henry Kissinger to Rex Tillerson, this reports on the decline of the US State Department. There is certainly an interesting book to be written on this, but it needs to be paired with the increasing power of military and intelligence sectors, and how both reflect a shift as Washington politicians have lost faith in international institutions and law, preferring to act unilaterally (at most giving lip service to an ad hoc "coalition of the willing"). In the "sole superpower" view of neocons like John Bolton, diplomacy is disparaged not just as ineffective but as an admission of weakness. The curious thing is that there is absolutely no evidence that the US acting on its own is anyway near as effective as diplomacy. Such a book would also note that the shift to the now dominant neocon view has mostly been driven by a blind, unthinking "alliance" with Israel, such that the more Israel defies international law and censure, the more isolated, bitter, and ineffective the US becomes. Ben Fountain: Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution (2018, Ecco Books): Author of a well-regarded novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, sees America has stuck in some sort of eighty-year cycle, leading to crises -- the first two were the Civil War and the Great Depression -- requiring major upheavals to put the nation back on track. Much of the book is election reporting, which sounds like old (and much too rehashed) news, but none of the books I've seen so far really makes sense of 2016's nonsense, so maybe we should give continuously referring back to history a chance. One thing that's a pretty safe bet is that Fountain's not going to argue that Trump is the answer to the present crisis, unlike Lincoln and Roosevelt. Still, even as Fountain writes about 2016 and the bad feelings evident there from all sides, his real subject is the coming crisis -- 2020, maybe even 2024, surely not much further out. But even there, don't expect history to repeat itself. Buchanan and Hoover were procrastinators, not least because they didn't see any way out of their dilemmas, but Trump is a man of action, corroding and breaking everything he touches. It's only a matter of time before his damage can no longer be shrugged away as fake news. Thomas Frank: Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society (2018, Metropolitan Books): Collection of scattered essays, which makes this seem less coherent than Frank's recent string of books -- Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016), Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (2012), The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation (2008) -- although the net effect does much to prove how prescient The Wrecking Crew's analysis was. Steve Fraser: Class Matters: The Strange Career of an American Delusion (2018, Yale University Press): The story of how the subject of class has repeatedly been expunged from American history and consciousness, taking a half-dozen case moments from the Mayflower to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech as examples. Fraser wrote about this same subject more broadly in The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (2015), noting that with Occupy Wall Street the pendulum was suddenly flipping back. Robert Gerwarth: The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (2016; paperback, 2017, Farrar Straus and Giroux): On November 11, 1918, Germany surrendered, signing an armistice ending the war they launched in 1914 by invading Belgium and France. For Western Europe (and America), that ended what was then called the Great War, but by then the Russian Tsar had been overthrown, replaced by a revolutionary Soviet, and multi-ethnic empires in Austria-Hungary and Turkey (the Ottoman Empire) had also collapsed. For several years after, war, revolution, and reaction continued in Eastern Europe, at least up to 1923 when the Communists consolidated power in Russia and a nationalist government in Turkey had driven both foreign and native Greeks from Asia Minor. In the longer term, the Treaty of Versailles, dictated by the victorious imperialist powers of Britain and France, was widely viewed as unjust, an insult that festered and grew into a second, even more deadly World War. Another recent book that covers this territory is Prit Buttar: The Splintered Empires: The Eastern Front 1917-21 (2017; paperback, 2018, Osprey), the fourth volume in Buttar's history of the Eastern front, following: Collision of Empires: The War on the Eastern Front in 1914 (2014; paperback, 2016, Osprey); Germany Ascendant: The Eastern Front 1915 (2015; paperback, 2017, Osprey); and Russia's Last Gasp: The Eastern Front 1916-17 (2016; paperback, 2017, Osprey). Masha Gessen: The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017; paperback, 2018, Riverhead): Chronicles the failure of Russia to develop a liberal democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of Soviet Communism, by tracking a small number of individuals -- mostly intellectuals, descendents of Soviet-era elite families who tended to become liberal opponents of Yeltsin and Putin. Tends to view the willingness to submit to an authoritarian state as rooted in psychology rather than as the sort of ideological belief system Timothy Snyder claims. Other books by Gessen and/or on Putin and Russia:
Steven M Gillon: Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism (2018, Basic Books): Officially, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by governor Otto Kerner (D-IL), a group appointed by President Lyndon Johnson following riots in Newark and Detroit. They took a fairly hard look at racism and poverty, and recommended bold new programs to end both. You'd think that was the right in line with Johnson's "Great Society" agenda, but Johnson rejected the report, and Nixon built his campaign -- especially in his 1972 bid to pick up Wallace voters -- on race baiting. Gillon regards the failure to follow up on the report as a failing of liberalism, but what really damaged Johnson and Humphrey was their leading role in the Vietnam War, followed by the crippling loss to Nixon, and later to Reagan. Anand Giridharadas: Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018, Knopf): As more and more of the world's wealth sinks into the clutches of the very rich, a few of them are stepping up with offers of philanthropic aid, offering to somehow turn the world they're sucking dry into a better place -- without, of course, undermining their exalted place in it. Related:
Jeff Goodell: The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World (2017; paperback, 2018, Back Bay Books): Makes sense: Earth climate warms, ice melts, flows into sea, which rises, flooding coastlines, where many of the world's largest cities are. Goodell has written several books related to climate change, like Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future (2007), and How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate (2010). Every Roundup the shelves of climate change books grows ever more imposing:
Chris Hedges: America: The Farewell Tour (2018, Simon & Schuster): Author has become increasingly gloomy about the state of the nation -- one might trace this through such books as American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007), Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of the Spectacle (2009), The Death of the Liberal Class (2010), The World as It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress, and Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt (2015), winding up with this combination of high moral outrage and down-and-out journalism. Seems to mostly be reissued columns, which makes for a relatively scattershot book. Michael Isikoff/David Corn: Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump (2018, Twelve): With the Mueller investigation not even done rounding up even the usual suspects, this is probably just a quickie trying to sum up what little is known about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. What is pretty clear is that Russia-backed hackers weighed in forcefully for Donald Trump, although it seems like sheer scapegoatism to credit the Russians with more influence than the Kochs and Mercers and other quasi-independent Trump backers. I'd be especially surprised if they have any "inside story" on why Putin would wager such a risky bet. Most of the speculation I've seen seems to be little more than projection. Isikoff and Corn wrote a decent book on the Iraq War (Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War), which recommends this over most competing books, like:
Kathleen Hall Jamieson: Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President: What We Don't, Can't, and Do Know (2018, Oxford University Press): A subject sure to be much written about, especially as the Mueller investigation sorts through and eventually discloses (or leaks) its evidence, but for now this is probably the most comprehensive, detailed analysis we have of what Russian hackers did in 2016 and what the effect was (see Jane Mayer's article in The New Yorker). Jamieson has written/contributed to a bunch of books analyzing elections, going back to Everything You Think You Know About Politics . . . and Why You're Wrong (2000, Basic Books). Jill Lepore: These Truths: A History of the United States (2018, WW Norton): House historian for The New Yorker, her less popular early work includes The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (1998), and New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005), which prepared her well to write a book about the use and abuse of history by the Tea Party Movement (The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History). This is, as advertised, a single-volume history of American political life and ideals, at once huge (960 pp) and schematic, with an eye for telling details (many I never knew). Daniel J Levitin: Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era (paperback, 2017, Dutton): Interesting case example of what happens when Donald Trump gets elected president. Levitin is a neuroscientist who's written books like The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, and A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics: A Neuroscientist on How to Make Sense of a Complex World (which in a saner world would just be a basic update of Darrell Huff's 1954 classic How to Lie With Statistics). So he started with a recognition that human brains are fighting a losing battle against complexity, "information overload," and the flood of calculated misinformation, then panics when he sees where the nonsense he had tried to reason with has gotten us. This new title is actually just a revision of his Field Guide, where circumstances actually seem to call for a fresh review. I expect more books along these lines will appear. For now, I also note:
Michael Lewis: The Fifth Risk (2018, WW Norton): Journalist, has written a stack of very readable books, nominally on finance and business but mostly about interesting people. This one goes into three government bureaucracies -- the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Commerce -- and finds people who for years now have been doing useful, important work there, and takes a look at what Trump and his minions are doing to those people and all that work. Mostly they are shredding data, and purging the departments of the workers with the expertise to collect and analyze that data. It seems that facts and data have become troublesome for profit seekers in industries that have Trump's ear. This is refreshing compared to the reporters who get all the muck they can rake from twitter feeds, the Washington gossip mill, and playing "gotcha" watching talk shows. Sure, those things are symptomatic of the rot in Washington, but the real stink you're going to have a hard time escaping will be coming from out-of-the-way places, like Lewis' chosen departments. John Meacham: The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels (2018, Random House): Biographer, has written books on Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and GHW Bush, takes a sweeping look at American history, specifically the struggles for expanding rights and greater economic opportunity -- a legacy that we (as opposed to certain conservatives) take pride in when we think of American history (as opposed to numerous other threads that we increasingly find shameful). Yascha Mounk: The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It (2018, Harvard University Press): The election of Donald Trump has produced a tidal wave of books on how the ignorant masses are rising up to turn to fascism against liberal democracy, as if the effete corruption of the Clintons actually represented the latter. To the extent that Trump gives off the stink of authoritarianism, such books may be warranted, but the bigger problem is how the center-left parties have turned their backs on their natural supporters. Not sure what Mounk's proposal is, but the way to save democracy is to make it pay off. More books along these lines:
Lawrence O'Donnell: Playing With Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics (2017, Penguin Press): Broadcast journalist, something I assume moves him to the shallow end of the pool, but this is not a bad time to take another look at the 1968 election: like 2016, a time when a very unpopular and untrustworthy Republican managed to eke out a victory because many people trusted the establishment Democrat even less, most of all because the latter was associated with the longest and bleakest war(s) in American history. Kevin Peraino: A Force So Swift: Mao, Truman, and the Birth of Modern China, 1949 (2017, Crown; paperback, 2018, Broadway Books): Chronicles a single turning-point year as Mao's revolutionary forces swept through the major cities of eastern China, while Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalists retreated to Taiwan, and Madame Chiang -- a major figure in her own right -- was frustrated in her lobbying efforts in New York and Washington. Some more context would have been useful -- fortunately I had previously read James Bradley's The China Mirage: The hidden History of American Disaster in Asia, which laid out the romantic relationship between missionary-minded Americans and the Soong family (most notably Mme. Chiang). Still, I don't know much about Mao's gains up to 1949, or American thinking on China until the blame game of "who lost China?" took over, after the fact. Some more recent historical books on China:
Michael Ruhlman: Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America (2017, Henry N Abrams): Food writer, first noticed (by me at least) for his memoirs on studying to become a chef -- The Making of a Chef (1997) and The Soul of a Chef (2000) although I also have his tip books The Elements of Cooking (2007) and Ratio (2009) but only one of his cookbooks -- Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing (2005) -- rarely if ever used (although it sure seems like a good idea). This is a history of grocery stores, bound to be interesting -- as one reviewer put it, "a lot of memoir, a smattering of rants, endless lists." Quinn Slobodan: Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018, Harvard University Press): A history of neoliberal thinkers starting with Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, their roots in the old Hapsburg Empire, their Geneva School in the 1920s-30s, moving in to the Mount Pelerin Society up to the World Trade Organization. Focus is mostly on Europeans, with some political support from the US right but neither author nor subject seems to have much respect for American economists like Milton Friedman. One thing that is striking is that while the degree of overt racism varied, all were concerned with replacing crumbling colonial regimes with private ownership, in effect ensuring that imperialism would survive by privatizing it. Sarah Smarsh: Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018, Scribner): Author "was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side." Grew up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita (also in Wichita), and seems to have kicked the fates of her mother and grandmother, while still remembering enough to write movingly about people like herself. Timothy Snyder: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018, Tim Duggan Books): Historian, has written a couple of major books on the especially bloody and cruel war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for eastern Europe. I've long been bothered by his tendency to treat Hitler and Stalin as political equivalents, a sloppiness broad enough to let him slip Putin into the same mold. His key here is the obscure Vladimir Ilyin, offered here as the architect of a "politics of eternity" which binds Putin to the totalitarians of yore. Snyder does his best to chronicle Putin's offenses against liberal democracy, up to and including his shadow war with Ukraine, but his focus on ideology (and demonizing Putin) slights other possible factors, like the economy. Despite the subtitle, Europe and America are scarcely mentioned. Jason Stanley: How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018, Random House): Philosophy professor at Yale, previously wrote How Propaganda Works (2015). Focuses on actual politics in the US here, which means you can count him among the minority who believe that certain common political ideas and strategies fit the F-word framework. One obvious point makes it into his subtitle: the rallying of a self-considered nationalist core into a political movement defined in opposition to all sorts of others that diverge from the model. Republican propaganda has increasingly been build around that focus from Nixon to Reagan to Bush to Trump. The second obvious point is the willingness of the fascist leaders to run roughshod over democratic processes, to reduce law to a tool of power, and to use violence as a means for asserting their power. The Republicans aren't yet as vicious and brutal as fascists under Musolini and Hitler, but they lean that way, and their followers respond emotionally (if rarely phsyically) to their taunts. Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2018, Random House): Fourth in a series of books that seek to approximate a logic of how the world works -- Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan started off by looking at statistics and its exceptions. One point here is that the world is run by determined minorities imposing their will. Other points: "For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing"; "Ethical rules aren't universal"; "Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find)." The title -- a phrase I've always found suspicious -- is also given unconventional examination: "Never trust anyone who doesn't have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them." Maybe, but I also don't trust people who want you to put more of your skin in their game. They're looking to make you pay for their mistakes. Sandy Tolan: Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land (2015, Bloomsbury USA): Author of one of the best books ever on the Israel/Palestine conflict -- The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (2007) -- returns with another very specific, concrete story of Palestinian and Israeli musicians transcending the conflict through "the power of music," but also "determination and vision." Michael Tomasky: If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saed (2019, Liveright): Political analyst, writes for Daily Beat and New York Review of Books, a resolute centrist adrift in a world where the center hasn't held. Starts with a "chronology of polarization" that almost exactly matches the four era division I've been threatening to write about. His command of history is strong, even if I'd nitpick a bit. Ends with a "fourteen-point agenda to reduce polarization" that strikes me as mostly crap, some specific ("reduce college to three years and make year four a service year"), some vague ("vastly expand civics education"). And like most centrists, he's much more bothered by the left than the right ("insist on a left that doesn't contribute to the fracture"). I probably need to read this, but I'm not likely to be happy with it. Lawrence Tribe/Joshua Matz: To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment (2018, Basic Books): For some people, it's impossible to think of the colossal mistake American voters made in November 2016 without thinking of rectifying it through given constitutional means: impeachment -- a feeling which goes deeper with each scandal or other embarrassment (i.e., almost daily). The rest of us don't deny the requisite "high crimes and misdemeanors" the constitution calls for, but recognize that impeachment has been a purely political matter since it was first contemplated as a way to get rid of the almost universally loathed John Tyler. Tyler dodged impeachment; Andrew Johnson was impeached but not removed from office; Richard Nixon wound up resigning before the House voted. Bill Clinton was impeached in the most cynical of all such affairs, but Republicans in the Senate never had a prayer of mustering the two-thirds majority. As long as Republicans hold power in Congress Trump is safe, not least because Trump has done very little that offends them. Still, if you want to read about impeachment (or the 25th amendment, which allows the cabinet to stage a political coup with mere consent of Congress), there are plenty of books to choose from. Tribe is probably first choice because of his long practice writing about the Supreme Court -- most recently Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution (paperback, 2015, Picador). Also recent:
Siva Vaidhyanathan: Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (2018, Oxford University Press): Author of an eye-opening book on Google -- The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) (2011), with previous books on Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Proprety and How It Threatens Creativity (2003), and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004). Not a technophobe or luddite, but casts a wary on the business manipulations of your formerly private life. Some other recent books on web society:
Sean Wilentz: No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding (2018, Harvard University Press): Wide-ranging American historian -- his masterpiece is The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, but he's also written (much less reliably) The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008 (2008). Here he expands on a theme that Jill Lepore emphasizes in These Truths: A History of the United States: that many of the founders of the American Republic were conscious of the problem of slavery, especially as it contradicted their revolutionary appeals to liberty and equality. Bob Woodward: Fear: Trump in the White House (2018, Simon & Schuster): I suppose every time I do one of these I should pick out a recent Trump book and hang a list under it. This one is probably the best-selling, with its usual load of insider dirt. Some others:
Robert Wuthnow: The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America (2018, Princeton University Press): I get why farmers and small town dwellers find the federal government distant and aloof, but what makes them think they're so different from other people in America? Part of this is that they're more invested in a cult of self-sufficiency: they feed themselves, fend for themselves, and don't see why others shouldn't do so as well. Such views have made them easy pickings for the cynical political manipulators on the right, but they are probably justified in their suspicion that the changes in what Hillary Clinton calls "the more dynamic parts of the nation" is at the root of their relative decline. Wuthnow previously wrote Small Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future (paperback, 2016, Princeton University Press). Also noted: Anne Applebaum: Red Famin: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2018, Doubleday). Michael Beschloss: Presidents of War: The Epic Story, From 1807 to Modern Times (2018, Crown). Max Boot: The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right (2018, Liveright). Preet Bharara: Doing Justice: A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law (2019, Alfred A Knopf). Timothy Caulfield: Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: How the Famous Sell Us Elixirs of Health, Beauty & Happiness (2015; paperback, 2016, Beacon Press). Amy Chozick: Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling (2018, Harper). Chris Christie: Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics (2019, Hachette). James R Clapper: Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence (2018, Viking). Mike Davis: Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory (2018, Verso). Michael Eric Dyson: What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America (2018, St Martin's Press). Daniel Ellsberg: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017, Bloomsbury). Norman G Finkelstein: Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom (2018, University of California Press). Doris Kearns Goodwin: Leadership: In Turbulent Times (2018, Simon & Schuster). Alan Greenspan/Adrian Wooldridge: Capitalism in America: A History (2018, Penguin Press). David Harvey: Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (2017, Oxford University Press). Seymour M Hersh: Reporter: A Memoir (2018, Knopf). Eric Holt-Giménez: A Foodie's Gide to Capitalism (paperback, 2017, Monthly Review Press). Robert Kagan: The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World (2018, Knopf). Robert D Kaplan: Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World (2018, Random House). Naomi Klein: The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists (paperback, 2018, Haymarket Books). Stephen Kotkin: Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (2017; paperback, 2018, Penguin Press). Andrew G McCabe: The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump (2019, St Martin's Press). Ralph Nader: To the Ramparts: How Bush and Obama Paved the Way for the Trump Presidency, and Why It Isn't Too Late to Reverse Course (2018, Seven Stories Press). Catherine Nixey: The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (2018, Houghton Mifflin). Michelle Obama: Becoming (2018, Crown). David Quammen: The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (2018, self-published). Alissa Quart: Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America (2018, Ecco). Ben Rhodes: The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (2018, Random House). Dani Rodrik: Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy (2017, Princeton University Press). Helena Rosenblatt: The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (2018, Princeton University Press). Arundhati Roy/John Cusack: Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations (paperback, 2016, Haymarket Books). Bernie Sanders: Where We Go From Here (2018, Thomas Dunne Books). Neil Sheehan/Hedrick Smith/EW Kenworthy/Fox Butterfield/James L Greenfield: The Pentagon Papers: The Secret History of the Vietnam War (paperback, 2017, Racehorse Publishing). Robert Skidelsky: Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics (2018, Yale University Press). Neil deGrasse Tyson/Avis Lang: Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military (2018, WW Norton). Yanis Varoufakis: Adults in the Room: My Battle With the European and American Deep Establishment (2017, Farrar Straus and Giroux). Alex Von Tunzelmann: Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower's Campaign for Peace (2016; paperback, 2017, Harper). Vicky Ward: Kushner, Inc. Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump (2019, St Martin's Press). Thomas Weber: Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017, Basic Books). Gordon S Wood: Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (2017; paperback, 2018, Penguin Books). Lawrence Wright: God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State (2018, Knopf). Ask a question, or send a comment. Saturday, April 21, 2018 Book RoundupIt's been eight months since my last Book Roundup -- a major lapse on my part. I started working on this a few months back, then lost track again. At this point I suspect I'm far enough behind that I'll need two more columns just to catch up, but at this point I'm only 15 books into the next one, so don't expect them to come out bang-bang-bang like previous catch-ups. One thing that will slow down the pace a bit is that I've started to simply note the existence of additional books following the forty I've written something on. Usually this is because I don't have anything non-obvious to say. Often, it's just that the book is worth knowing about, but unlikely to be worth reading. Some I may return to eventually, should I change my mind. Given my delays, I've actually managed to read several of these books: Allen Frances: Twilight of American Sanity, David Frum: Trumpocracy, Mark Lilla: The Once and Future Liberal, and Sean Wilentz: The Politicians & the Egalitarians. I'm also about 400 pages into Steve Coll: Directorate S, and I've bought copies but haven't yet gotten to Jennifer M Silva: Coming Up Short, Amy Siskind: The List. I can't really say that any of these books are "must read," but I have learned things from each. My main complaint about the Coll book is that by focusing on the CIA, ISI, and NDS (the Afghan counterpart) he's very rapidly skipped over the most ill-fated US decisions, like the conviction that the US can simply dictate Pakistan's behavior, and the blanket rejection of any possible Taliban role. But he also only barely touches on the CIA's continued support of their Afghan warlord clients even after the Karzai government was formed. I'm currently up to 2009, with McChrystal still in charge of the surging military, and Holbrooke still among the living (if not among the functional) -- two things I know will change soon. Kurt Andersen: Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire (2017, Random House): Big picture history of America, strikes me as like one of those creative writing assignments meant to let your imagination run wild -- probably helps that the author has a couple of novels to his credit. Still, shouldn't be hard to fill up 480 pp. with stories of America's tenuous love/hate relationship to reality. Nor has the election and regime of Donald Trump given us reason to doubt that we're living in a Fantasyland. And clearly Trump was on the author's mind -- probably the reason Alec Baldwin hired him as co-author of their cash-in book, You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump (A So-Called Parody). Benjamin R Barber: Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming (2017, Yale University Press): Political and cultural theorist, wrote a book I was impressed by back in 1971, Superman and Common Men: Freedom, Anarchy and the Revolution, and a couple dozen books since then: two that intrigued me but always seemed a bit too flip were Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World (1996) and Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (2007). Turned his eye toward cities with his 2013 book, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities, to which this is a sequel, focusing on the relative energy efficiency of cities. Sad to read that he died, about a month after this book came out. Ronen Bergman: Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (2018, Random House): Big (756 pp) book by the Yedioth Ahronoth military analyst. I doubt there are many secrets here -- Israel has a long history of bragging about its secret agency exploits -- but the scale of the killings may come as a surprise. Some time ago, I spent time looking at a database of prominent Palestinians, and the sheer number of them killed by Israel was pretty eye-opening. Max Boot: The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (2018, Liveright): Another attempt to find a scapegoat for the American failure in Vietnam, in this case arguing that if only American leaders had followed the advice of CIA operative Lansdale everything would have worked out for the better. This is an appalling argument in lots of ways. For one thing, Lansdale did have an outsized influence on the decision to cancel elections and stick by Diem's corrupt and vicious regime. Beyond that, Lansdale's successors were always going to view the war as a test of American resolve and power, and they were always going to be contemptuous of the Vietnamese and profoundly uninterested in their welfare. The real tragedy of the war in Vietnam was the failure of America's class of strategic thinkers to learn some humility and restraint following their imperial overreach, as is evidenced by repeated failures in numerous more recent wars. Paul Butler: Chokehold: Policing Black Men (2017, New Press). One of several recent books on how the criminal justice system is stacked against black men, written by a former federal prosecutor who's been there and done that. Previously wrote Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice (2009). Also see: Angela J Davis, ed: Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment (2017, Random House); Jordan T Camp/Christina Heatherton, eds: Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (paperback, 2016, Verso Books). Ta-Nehisi Coates: We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017, One World): A collection of essays, some new, including "Fear of a Black President," "The Case for Reparations," and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" -- important work. Still, I never quite got the feeling that "we were in power" during Obama's two terms, even the first two years when Democrats had large majorities in Congress but let Max Baucus decide life and death issues; meanwhile Robert Gates was Secretary of Defense and Ben Bernanke chaired the Fed. Steve Coll: Directorate S: The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2018, Penguin Press): Coll's second book about America's misadventure in Afghanistan (and schizophrenic alliance with Pakistan), bringing the story started in Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004) up to date. Of course, the post-9/11 US invasion and still ongoing occupation of Afghanistan hasn't exactly been a secret, but presumably this focuses more on the CIA role there rather than chronicling the ham-fisted DOD and their NATO proxies. No doubt an important book, but I expect it leaves much uncovered. Peter Cozzens: The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West (2016, Knopf; paperback, 2017, Vintage Books): Covers every front over a 30 year stretch, 1861-1891, during which white Americans fought numerous wars, brokered treaties (and often broke them), ultimately herding Native Americans into a few barren reservations and closing the frontier. Author worked for the State Department, and has written a number of military histories of the Civil War. Larry Derfner: No Country for Jewish Liberals (2017, Just World Books): A Jewish journalist from Los Angeles, typically liberal, moved to Israel and surveys the intolerant, closed, often vicious society he encounters. I've maintained for some time now that constant war even more than greed and corruption (both plenty in evidence) has been responsible for so many Americans abandoning their liberal traditions. Same thing applies to Israel, even more so given the relative intensity of their militarism (a universal draft, for Jews anyway) and their incessant cult of victimhood. EJ Dionne Jr/Norman J Ornstein/Thomas E Mann: One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported (2017, St Martin's Press): Quickie from three authors who've made careers explaining, as Dionne put it in his 1992 book, Why Americans Hate Politics -- the others are best known for their 2012 dissection of Congress, It's Even Worse Than It Looks. Dionne seems to be the unshakable optimist -- another of his titles is They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era -- but these days I find the assumption that there will still be "one nation after Trump" to be ungrounded. Barbara Ehrenreich: Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer (2018, Twelve): Seems to be a sequel to her 2009 book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, her critical instincts sharpened by another decade of getting older (78) and more acquainted with mortality. I've been expecting her to write a major book on the high cost of being poor in America -- a subject she's written several essays about recently. Hope she gets to that. I might also wish she'd explore the inner madness of the Trump voter, but she anticipated all that in her 1989 book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. Jesse Eisinger: The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives (2017, Simon & Schuster): Investigates the fact that none of the bank executives responsible for the 2008 meltdown and ensuing recession were ever charged with crimes (although eventually a number of substantial fines were paid by newly profitable companies the public had bailed out, most often leaving their management in place). Nor is it just bankers who seem to be able to get away with whatever. Blames timid prosecutors, but to make sense of it all you'd have to work through the lax regulation companies are subjected to, and the widespread respect civil servants seem to have for money and well-heeled executives. Neil Faulkner: A People's History of the Russian Revolution (paperback, 2017, Pluto Press): One-hundred years later, emphasizes the revolutionary parts of the Russian Revolution, the parts that tore down one of the most corrupt and decadent aristocracies in Europe and tried to build a broad-based alternative -- before violence and paranoia took its toll. In today's post-Soviet era we're inclined to see the revolution and its aftermath as continuous tragedy, which is only true if you forget the injustices of the world it swept away. Allen Frances: Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump (2017, William Morrow): Argues that Trump is not technically insane, but raises many pertinent questions about whether America as a whole. The opening section on truths Americans reject and myths they embrace is a garden variety liberal list, but this gets more interesting when he goes on to root our understanding of psychology in Darwin rather than Freud. Tricky terrain: I think easy psychological labels are misleading, yet don't doubt that deeply seated mental processes are serving us poorly when we think about politics these days. David Frum: Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (2018, Harper): Former Bush speechwriter, has of late argued that Republicans should pay more heed to the needs of their base voters and less to their moneyed elites, which makes him sympathetic with the popular impulse of Trump's campaign and critical of the reality of his administration. Useful mostly for detailing the myriad ways Trump is bound up in corruption, and unflinching in its criticism of other Republicans for condoning and enabling his treachery. Would be more trenchant if only he realized that corruption is the coin of the Republican realm -- not just a side-effect of a political philosophy dedicated to making the rich richer but a way of keeping score. David Goodhart: The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (2017, Hurst): British editor of Prospect magazine, wrote a previous book The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration, takes the Brexit vote and Trump's win as signposts for a right-wing revolt he deems to be populist. I regard those wins as flukes: possible only because serious economic interests were lucky enough to find themselves with enemies that could be blamed for all the evils of neoliberalism. Most elections don't break quite like that -- e.g., the post-Brexit UK elections. Linda Gordon: The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (2017, Liveright): The original KKK was formed in the 1970s to restore white supremacy in the South through the use of terror. Its work was largely done by the 1890s with the adoption of Jim Crow laws across the South and into parts of the North. In the 1910s Woodrow Wilson extended Jim Crow to the federal government, and the movie Birth of a Nation romanticized the old KKK, leading to a resurgence that grew beyond the South. This is the history of the latter movement, how it grew and why it crumbled (not that remnants haven't survived to the present day). David Cay Johnston: It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America (2018, Simon & Schuster): Journalist, has written several books on how the economic system is rigged for the rich, and has also written a couple of books about one such rich person in particular: Donald Trump. Therefore, he started well ahead of the learning curve when Trump became president. Hopefully he goes deeper as a result. Probably a good companion to Amy Siskind: The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump's First Year. Gilles Kepel: Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West (2017, Princeton University Press): French political scientist and Arab expert, wrote Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (2000 in French where the subtitle was Expansion et Déclin de l"Islamisme; 2002 in English with an afterward on how 9/11 seemed like a desperate ploy to reverse the decline -- thanks mostly to GW Bush it worked), with a steady stream of books since then. This covers recent terror attacks in France and their socioeconomic context. Also new is a thin book by the other famous French jihad expert, Olivier Roy: Jihad and Death: The Global Appeal of Islamic State (2017, Oxford University Press). Sheelah Kolhatkar: Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street (2017, Random House): About Stephen A Cohen and SAC Capital, although the former was never indicted for his hedge fund's insider dealing. Robert Kuttner: Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? (2018, WW Norton): Could have filed this with the warnings against right-wing populism, but this goes deeper, seeing the global expansion of capitalism since the 1970s, and especially the tendency of those same capitalists to game supposedly democratic systems, at the root of the crisis. The problem has less to do with authoritarian wannabes and their fans than with corporate managers and financiers seeking to exempt business from any form of public restraint. The results may still bear some formal resemblance to democracy, but not the kind where most people can force the system to treat them fairly. When you think of it that way, the question becomes "has democracy survived global capitalism"? One could answer "no." Brandy Lee: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (2017, Thomas Dunne Books): The "consensus view of two dozen psychiatrists and psychologists [is] that Trump is dangerously mentally ill and that he presents a clear and present danger to the nation and our own mental health." Sounds about right, but then I recall having long ago become a fan of Thomas Szasz's work, particularly his The Myth of Mental Illness, and I myself have been diagnosed as mentally ill by various shrinks, both credentialed and not. Indeed, I doubt it would be hard to sketch out unflattering psychological portraits of anyone who's become president since 1900 (I'm hedging a bit on McKinley but Teddy Roosevelt was mad as a hatter, and half of his successors are comparably easy pickings). Indeed, there's little reason to expect that people we elect to the nation's highest (and presumably most coveted) office should be even close to "normal." On the other hand, Trump is certainly an outlier, especially in his lack of understanding how government works, perhaps even more importantly in his lack of concern for how his acts affect people. Psychologists have compiled a thick book of diagnoses for traits like that (e.g., see "sociopath"), but much of that behavior can also be explained by looking at his class background -- how he inherited and then played with his wealth, parlaying it for fame in his peculiarly own ego-gratifying terms. Moreover, psychoanalyzing him misses the fact that he rules through other people, who while having their own fair share of foibles have aligned thermselves with Trump more for political and/or ideological reasons -- and that, I think, is where we should focus our critiques. (Not, mind you, that I doubt Trump's stark-raving bonkers.) Mark Lilla: The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (2017, Harper Collins). Short essay rushed out following the Trump election. Argues that liberals need to seek the moral high ground by focusing on universal rights and values instead of what he sees as their recent indulgence in cultivating "identity groups." "Identity politics" is a term much bandied about, near-meaningless with ominous overtones, probably because the right has been rather successful at fragmenting people into tribes and motivating them to vote to thwart the plans of rival tribes. On the other hand, literally everyone votes because of some identity they've developed -- which need not be ethnic or racial or religious, but could just as well be class or even a sense of the positive value of diversity. Liberalism would be an identity too, except that liberals have been running away from the label for 30-40 years now, which has only encouraged conservatives to pile on. Lilla at least is trying to reassert some universal values. Angela Nagle: Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump the Alt-Right (paperback, 2017, Zero Books): Short (156 pp) survey of "culture war" rants on the internet, mostly from the "alt-right" but takes a few jabs at supposed lefties for balance. Argues that there's way too much of this stuff, and (I think) that we'd be better off with more taste and mutual respect (as long as that doesn't seem like some sort of radical leftist stance). Rachel Pearson: No Apparent Distress: A Doctor's Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine (2017, WW Norton): By "front lines" she means the leaky bottom of the safety net, where patients can get diagnosed but are left untreated because they too indigent or not indigent enough. Kim Phillips-Fein: Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (2017, Metropolitan Books): In 1975 New York City risked bankruptcy, and one famous newspaper headline read: "Ford to City: Drop Dead." Banker Felix Rohatyn intervened, staving off the crisis but forcing the city to adopt various changes, including ending its practice of free college. Phillips-Fein previously wrote an important book on the rise of the right in America: Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan (2009), and sees this as yet another chapter in that rise -- all the more notable today as austerity is the right's standard answer to public debt. Steven Pinker: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018, Viking): Author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, continues expanding his case for optimism at a time when contrary evidence is so overwhelming it threatens to bury us. I think he has a point -- indeed, a number of them -- but one shouldn't fail to notice that anti-Enlightenment, anti-Progressive thinking has grabbed considerable political power (at least in the US), so much so that most Americans regard war as a permanent condition, and many see no problem with inequality hardening into oligarchy. Robert B Reich: The Common Good (2018, Knopf): For better or worse, a true liberal. His most famous book, The Work of Nations (1991), was built around one of the worst ideas of our time -- one which, I might add, was the reason Bill Clinton hired him as Secretary of Labor -- and also offered one of the sharpest observations of how life was changing due to increasing inequality. The latter: how the rich were separating and isolating themselves from everyone else, most obviously by moving into gated communities and even more rarefied spaces (like Trump Tower and Mar-A-Lago). The former: his idea how Americans could survive the ongoing process of financial globalization, including the decline of manufacturing industries, by retraining workers to become what he called "symbolic manipulators." In point of fact, it was never possible for more than a tiny sliver of American workers to become "symbol manipulators," it was a convenient rationalization for neoliberals like Clinton to embrace globalization and growing inequality. One might argue that ever since Reich left Clinton's cabinet, he has been trying to do penance for his role there. He's written another dozen books, trying to defend key liberal ideas and save capitalism in the process. This at least is on a key idea that has taken a beating from conservatives: the idea that there is "a common good" as opposed to numerous individual goods that markets allow competition for. He also notes that the common good is built from "virtuous cycles that reinforce and build" as opposed to "vicious cycles that undermine it." We have been stuck in the latter for decades now, and it's cumulatively taking a huge toll. So this is an important concept, even if I don't particularly trust the messenger. Richard Rothstein: The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (2017, Liveright): Going back as far as the 1920s, argues that what we think of as de facto segregation has been significantly shaped by law and public policy, even after the Fair Housing Act of 1968 supposedly put an end to all that. Jennifer M Silva: Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (paperback, 2015, Oxford University Press): Short book based on one-hundred interviews with young working class adults in Massachusetts and Virginia, finding their opportunities limited and fleeting as the right-wing attack on unions and the welfare state has focused more on kicking the ladder out for future generations than on wrecking the lives of their elders. Silva also did interviews for Robert D Putnam's Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Amy Siskind: The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump's First Year (2018, Bloomsbury): "A national spokesperson, writer and expert on helping women and girls advance and succeed" -- a noble career, no doubt, derailed by her decision to compile weekly blog posts on all the unprecedentedly strange things Trump and his minions have done as they were reported. Early on she came up with 6-9 items per week, but over time that list grew to as many as 150, a quantity that not only means much is slipping through the cracks even in our 24/7 news obsession, but which has overloaded and numbed our sense of outrage and even our ability to analyze. This compiles a year of those reports, a mere 528 pages. Good chance this will endure as an essential sourcebook for the year. Ali Soufan: Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State (2017, WW Norton): Former FBI agent, famed for his expert interrogation of terror suspects -- he's the subject of a chapter in Lawrence Wright's The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State, and author of the book, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda (2011). Cass R Sunstein: #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (2017, Princeton University Press): Occasionally interesting MOR Democratic theorist, takes his shot here at trashing the internet for propagating self-selected, self-confirming nonsense that divides people into hostile camps incapable of empathy with or understanding of anyone but themselves. This, of course, has been pretty much the high-brow critique of media since Gutenberg, the main point that it detracts from people blindly following whatever experts are sanctified by whoever has the power to do that sort of thing. I suppose there's some truth this time around, but I'd look at the vested interests using social media for their propaganda (ok, they call it advertising) before concluding that "the media is the message." Charles J Sykes: How the Right Lost Its Mind (2017, St Martin's Press): Former "longtime host of the #1 conservative talk-radio show in Wisconsin," now "a regular contributor to MSNBC," features a Trump-like hat on the cover and evidently focuses on how conservatives wound up flocking to Trump. Sounds like he's failed to make the necessary distinction between why the Right lost its mind and things the Right did after having lost its mind. The former would be an interesting book, although it actually isn't so mysterious: the only real political principle behind conservatism is the defense of wealth and privilege, and that's intrinsically a hard sell in a real democracy, so the Right has to hide their soul behind a lot of incidental sales pitches. The latter is just sad and pathetic, like so much recent American history. Heather Ann Thompson: Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (2016, Pantheon; paperback, 2017, Vintage Books): A major history of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, its brutal suppression, and the decades-long legal fight that followed. When this happened my philosophy 101 professor at Wichita State was so disturbed he ditched his lesson plan to talk about what happened. Later I became friends with a lawyer who put most of her career into this case, the extraordinary Elizabeth Fink, so it feels like I've tracked this story all my life. The enduring lesson is how much contempt and disdain people in power have for the people they condemn as criminals, and how that hatred and fear can lead them to do things as bad or worse. Katy Tur: Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History (2017, Dey Street Books): NBC News correspondent assigned to cover Trump's campaign, where she evidently fact-checked, challenged, and generally made herself a nuissance, while visiting 40 states and filing 3800 live television reports. Sounds like it must have been much worse than "craziest" implies. Richard White: The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (2017, Oxford University Press): A new volume in The Oxford History of the United States, originally planned by C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter back in the 1950s, with the first volumes appearing in 1982 (Robert Middlekauff on 1763-1789) and 1988 (James M. McPherson on the Civil War), and David M. Kennedy (whose 1929-1945 volume came out in 1999) taking over after Woodward's death. Each of the eleven period volumes (plus a 12th on US foreign relations) is close to 1000 pages, and the few I've looked at (3 remain unpublished) are remarkably imposing tomes. Sean Wilentz: The Politicians & the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics (paperback, 2017, WW Norton): A major historian, though much more reliable on The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln than on The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2000, offers a book of scattered essays, mostly book reviews. Useful for reminding ourselves how prevalent the egalitarian impulse is in American history, and how often pragmatic politicians fall short of even their own professed ideals. Lawrence Wright: The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State (2016; paperback, 2017, Vintage Books): Author of one of the best general histories of Al-Qaeda and 9/11, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), updates the story with scattered pieces -- mostly profiles of more or less related individuals although nothing like a comprehensive update of the ensuing history. Other recent books also noted without comment: Alec Baldwin/Kurt Andersen: You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump (A So-Called Parody) (2017, Penguin Press). Krystal Ball: Reversing the Apocalypse: Hijacking the Democratic Party to Save the World (2017, Pelican Media). Hillary Rodham Clinton: What Happened (2017, Simon & Schuster). James Comey: A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership (2018, Flatiron). Melinda Cooper: Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (2017, Zone Books). Corey R Lewandowski/David N Bossie: Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency (2017, Center Street). Keith Olbermann: Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) (2017, Blue Rider Press). Leo Panitch/Sam Gindin: The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (paperback, 2013, Verso Books). Yanis Varoufakis: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism (paperback, 2017, The Bodley Head). Michael Wolff: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018, Henry Holt). John Ziegelman/Andrew Coe: A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression (2016; paperback, 2017, Harper). Ask a question, or send a comment. Thursday, August 10, 2017 Book Roundup
This is only the second Book Roundup I've done this year -- the last one was back on April 26, with the second most recent, on August 21, 2016, dating from almost a year ago. Limiting myself to 40 blurbs per post, I should be able to do one of these every other month (six times a year), but it's hard to get into the right research mode. Still, when I do, I tend to overshoot, coming up with two or more posts in rapid succession (five is my current record). Right now I only have 18 leftover blurbs in the scratch file, but I expect it won't be hard to round them up to a second post. I suppose one thing that helps thin them out is that I recently started adding a section listing books without blurbs -- gives me a way I can note the existence of something without having to take the time to write much. I don't count those books under my 40 limit. On occasion I've also noted paperback reprints of previously noted books, and there are some of those below. The Thomas Frank and Jane Mayer books were written before the 2016 election, but they turned out to be the year's most prophetic books (note that both paperbacks have post-election I-told-you-so afterwords). Most recently I've been reading Hacker and Pierson, a book that's been sitting on my shelves a fair while. Its paean to "the mixed economy" could be sharper, but its review of the political forces that stripped us of past keys to prosperity is reasonably thorough. I would add that the more you forget about how things work, and the more you adopt ideas that are just plain wrong, the deeper you enter into what the late Jane Jacobs recognized as "the coming dark age." Going through this list, some books that I either already have or am particularly likely to pick up are Andrew Bacevich: America's War for the Greater Middle East, Michael Chabon/Ayelet Waldman: Kingdom of Olives and Ash, Michael J Hudson: J Is for Junk Economics, Ibram X Kendi: Stamped From the Beginning, Nancy McLean: Democracy in Chains, Nathan Thrall: The Only Language They Understand. I'll also note that my wife is currently listening to China Miéville: October. One thing I've learned from this book so far is that the Bolsheviks came out on top because they were the only party willing to walk away from the disastrous World War. Tariq Ali: The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism War Empire Love Revolution (2017, Verso Books): One expects that the centenary of the Russian Revolution will produce the usual spate of new books, so this is nominally one of them. But for a good while now we've known that in his last couple years Lenin was unhappy about the drift of his revolution, so it's never been quite fair to blame him for the whole dead weight of the Stalinist system. Not sure whether Ali can freshen him up in any useful way, but it's worth noting that the hopes that many people held for the workers' paradise weren't wrong, even if they were somewhat misplaced. Forthcoming [Sept. 19]: Slavoj Zizek: Lenin 2017: Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through (2017, Verso Books). Jon Bakija/Lane Kenworthy/Peter Lindert/Jeff Madrick: How Big Should Our Government Be? (paperback, 2016, University of California Press): Looks like each author gets separate chapters around the question. The only one I'm familiar with is Madrick, who wrote The Case for Big Government (2008), so you know where he's going. Right-wingers have argued for shrinking federal government back to an arbitrarily small percent of GDP, a level not seen since Calvin Coolidge, although few of them are on record in favor of shrinking the federal government's most cancerous tumor, the Department of Defense, proportionately. Even so, they've shown no allowance for the ways the world has changed since the 1920s, such as the much greater complexity of the marketplace, the need for a much more skilled and knowledgeable workforce, the need for modern transportation and communication networks, the impacts of larger population and production on the environment, and many other things -- even if (like me) you think the growth of the "defense" and "security" sectors (i.e., war and repression) is largely bogus. I would go further and argue that public takeover of dysfunctional markets like health care would be a good idea, as well as some way to subsidize creative development of products that can be freely mass-produced (like software and many forms of art). I don't see how you can map any of these needs to a fixed size, so size itself isn't a very good measure. John Berger: Portraits: John Berger on Artists (2015, Verso Books): Art critic and novelist, died earlier this year at 90, his early books Art and Revolution (1969), The Moment of Cubism (1969), Ways of Seeing (1972), and About Looking (1980) had a huge effect of me personally. This is a collection of 74 pieces on more/less famous artists, starting with the Chauvet Cave Painters but quickly jumping to Bosch (6) and Michelangelo (11), and ending with ten names born post-1950 (most, sad to say, unknown to me). The sort of book you're bound to learn a lot from. Tom Overton edited this, and also: Landscapes: John Berger on Art (2016, Verso Books). Also recent: John Berger: Confabulations (paperback, 2016, Penguin Books); Lapwing & Fox: Conversations Between John Berger and John Christine (2016, Objectif). Heather Boushey/J Bradford DeLong/Marshall Steinbaum, eds: After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality (2017, Harvard University Press): Large (688 pp) collection of essays on Thomas Piketty's pathbreaking book Capital in the Twenty-First Century and the myriad problems associated with increasing inequality. Michael Chabon/Ayelet Waldman, eds: Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation (paperback, 2017, Harper Perennial): Connecting with Breaking the Silence, a number of well known writers (mostly novelists) took a tour of Israel and its Occupied Territories, and chronicled what they found as they bear "witness to the human cost of the occupation." Frans de Waal: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016, WW Norton): Interesting question, most likely one the biologist/primatologist has much fun poking holes in. More or less related: Jennifer Ackerman: The Genius of Birds (2016, Penguin); Jonathan Balcombe: What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (2016, Farrar Straus and Giroux); Charles Foster: Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide (2016, Metropolitan Books); Sy Montgomery: The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness (paperback, 2016, Avila); Virginia Morell: Animal Wise: How We Know Animals Think and Feel (paperback, 2014, Broadway Books); Carl Salina: Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (paperback, 2015, Picador). Bill Emmott: The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World's Most Successful Political Idea (2017, Economist Books): British, editor of The Economist, same basic shtick as Edward Luce: The Retreat of Western Liberalism. Blames Moscow, Beijing, but also Washington, and locates "the west" as much in Tokyo and Seoul as in Europe, the idea being the promise of neoliberalism (if not necessarily the reality): "It relies on the operation and staunch defense of several principles, first among them relative equality of income and opportunity as well as openness . . . An open society is thus one of porous borders rather than of walls, friendly to free trade agreements as opposed to protectionist tariffs, outward-looking rather than nationalist." Perhaps the idea wouldn't be fairing so poorly if the practice did a better job of delivering the promised broad-based wealth. The recent Brexit vote provides a detailed map of who wins and loses from open borders. Niall Ferguson: Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist (2015, Penguin Press): Hagiography, based on access to private papers, the first installment of a "magisterial two-volume biography," written by a pseudo-scholar with politics and morals flexible enough for the task. Anyone else would subtitle the second volume War Criminal, even if the time frame had to extend beyond 1976. But my guess is that Ferguson is thinking of The Realist, a suitable philosophical refuge for idealists once their hands get bloody. Myself, I'm more inclined to call this period The Bullshit Artist, then look for something even more scatological to follow. Peter Fleming: The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself (paperback, 2015, Pluto Press): Argues that "neoliberal society uses the ritual of work (and the threat of its denial) to maintain the late capitalist class order," despite all sorts of technological and cultural changes that could reduce the class-definitional role of work toward the sidelines. In the US you might want to substitute "jobs" for "work," and I-don't-know for "neoliberal society" -- the corporate-political system? Also wrote Resisting Work: The Corporatization of Life and Its Discontents (paperback, 2015, Temple University Press). James Forman Jr: Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017, Farrar Straus and Giroux): How many black politicians got wrapped up in the post-1970 "war on crime" and its attendant mass incarceration. Forman worked six years as a public defender, a stark contrast to other jobs on his resume, like Supreme Court clerk and Yale Law School professor. Thomas L Friedman: Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations (2016, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Anyone who can get away with as many clichés and as much cant as Friedman must truly feel blessed. However, the very facts and trends that makes him so optimistic signify little more than mental rot to me. For more, see Matt Taibbi's review. Kelly Fritsch/Clare O'Connor/AK Thompson, eds: Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle (paperback, 2015, AK Press): Recalling Raymond Williams' Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), the activist-editors and forty-some contributors attempt to map contemporary movements by their jargon, terminology, language. Probably a worthy undertaking, interesting to me because I opened a file recently under the same rubric, but not to explore language so much as to offer a framework for hanging short topical essays on. Williams' book goes deeper into history and etymology -- he was, after all, primarily a literary critic. Best case this one does too. Worst case it tries to codify some form of "political correctness" -- to pick a term that postdates Williams' work. Bruce Cannon Gibney: A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America (2017, Hachette): Author is a venture capitalist, a guy who made a fortune mostly betting on high-tech start ups, so it's rather ripe for him to blame a whole generation for the short-sighted squandering of the unprecedented wealth many Americans enjoyed after the Great Depression and WWII. He berates "a generation whose reckless self-indulgence degraded the foundations of American prosperity . . . [who] ruthlessly enriched themselves as the expense of future generations . . . turned American dynamism into stagnation, inequality, and bipartisan fiasco." That all happened, and I think it is fair to say that the Boomer generation, which grew up with postwar prosperity and its focus on individual freedom was further removed from the previous generation than is generally the case, but those effects the author describes as sociopathic were just one political strain in a broad spectrum, that of the resurgent right-wing and its promotion of often predatory greed. Perhaps the author has some other political agenda, but offhand this looks like he's representative of the rarefied class that captured the nation's wealth then blamed the less fortunate for their "entitlements." Just who are the real sociopaths here? Joshua Green: Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (2017, Penguin): Campaign reporting, focusing on Bannon -- presumably the Devil in the title, although it's since become clear that he picked a very leaky and unstable vessel for his machinations. I have no idea what Bannon's been able to accomplish since moving into the White House. During the campaign he provided Trump with a gloss of fascist aesthetics and a whiff of ideological coherence distinct from the usual run of conservative nostrums -- that probably contributed to Trump's win, but was far less significant than Hillary's failures, the lock-step support of the Koch/Republican machines, and the amazing gullibility of so much media and so many people. On the other hand, one might cast Trump as the Devil, and explore why Bannon would invest all his hare-brained ideological fantasies in such a shoddy salesman. I suppose because doing so made him famous, and in America fame is merchantable (and money is everything). Chris Hedges: Unspeakable: Talks With David Talbot About the Most Forbidden Topics in America (2016, Hot Books): Conversations, evidently the publisher has a series of these. Hedges was a divinity student who left the church and became a prize-winning war journalist, then the more he saw the more he moved to the left. Among his books: American Fascists, written back in 2007. Michael Hudson: J Is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception (paperback, 2017, Islet): Presented as a "companion" to his 2015 book, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy. Starts with an "A-to-Z" of key economic terms, nothing that "economic vocabulary is defined by today's victors -- the rentier financial class," and working to unmask their spin. Follows up with several scattered essays, like "The 22 Most Pervasive Economic Myths of Our Time," "Economics as Fraud," and "Methodology Is Ideology, and Dictates Policy." He was one of the first to recognize the real estate bubble of the 2000's and predict its bust -- a now obvious point that all but a few conventional economists missed. Frederic Jameson: An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (paperback, 2016, Verso): Marxist literary critic and political theorist -- I must have a copy of his 1971 Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories in Literature somewhere upstairs -- takes a shot at sketching out his utopia in the lead essay here, followed by nine responses edited by Slavoj Zizek (only other author I recognize is novelist Kim Stanley Robinson). I haven't read any of his later books, most recently (all Verso): Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality (2016); The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (2015); The Antinomies of Realism (2013, Verso); Representing 'Capital': A Reading of Volume One (2011); The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit (2010); Valences of the Dialectic (2009). Matthew Karp: This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (2016, Harvard University Press): When I think of southerners running US foreign policy, I think of James Byrne's decisive role in launching the Cold War, and later Lyndon Johnson plotting a coup in Brazil as well as "Americanizing" the civil war in Vietnam. But this goes back to the first half of the nineteenth century, before the South tried to secede from the union, a period when prominent southerners agitated to expand American power south and west, and thereby to buttress and advance their system of slavery. I suppose you can start with the Louisiana Purchase and the Monroe Doctrine, as well as the Mexican War and the annexation of Texas, but there were other schemes that didn't come to fruition, notably the desire to annex Cuba as a "slave state." Ibram X Kendi: Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016; paperback, 2017, Nation Books): I've long thought that the "definitive" history was Winthrop Jordan's monumental White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, which won the National Book Award for 1968, but that book was focused more on the early development of Anglo-American racism. Those ideas have since been recapitulated (sometimes with mutations) in many ways up to the present day -- the key to Kendi's own National Book Award winning tome. Many reviewers describe this book as "painful" -- often citing the skewering of otherwise admirable abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison for adopting racial stereotypes (the book consists of five parts built around individuals: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, Garrison, WEB DuBois, and Angela Davis). I don't know whether the author adopts a fatalist position on the racist ideas, but I believe that their persistence has everything to do with increasing inequality, much as the origins of those ideas had everything to do with exploiting negro labor. As Kendi argues: "Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America." Naomi Klein: No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (paperback, 2017, Haymarket Books): Describes Trump as "a logical extension of the worst and most dangerous trends of the past half-century" -- trends Klein has made a career of writing about; e.g., No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014). James Kwak: Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality (2017, Pantheon): A primer on how "Economics 101" is wrapped up in political biases which promote inequality, passing it off as the genius of markets. Another book along the same lines: Joe Earle/Cahal Moran/Zach Ward-Perkins: The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts (paperback, 2016, Machester University Press); also Michael Hudson: J Is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception (paperback, 2017, Islet). Guy Laron: The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (2017, Yale University Press): Fifty years later, has the advantage of recently declassified documents. "The Six-Day War effectively sowed the seeds for the downfall of Arab nationalism, the growth of Islamic extremism, and the animosity between Jews and Palestinians." The latter started much earlier, but the war led to a massive increase in the number of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation, and started the great land grab known as the Settler Movement -- so, yes, it did much to poison relations. I don't know if Laron discloses anything new about the run up to the war -- 90% of the book is on the events before the war itself -- but it seems pretty clear to me that Ben-Gurion regarded the 1950 armistices as temporary stays while Israel gathered strength to launch new offensives to grab the various territories they've long coveted. Their military success changed the nation's psychology, as they stopped paying heed to world law and opinion, and set out on their own arrogant path, trusting only in their own brute force and cunning. Chris Lehmann: The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (2016, Melville House): A book on how often throughout America's history Christianity has upheld and celebrated economic iniquity -- "the pursuit of profit, as well as the inescapability of economic inequality." Edward Luce: The Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017, Atlantic Monthly Press): British political writer, has covered both Washington and New Delhi for Financial Times. No relation to Henry Luce, but you get the feeling he'd like to occupy a similar perch, but where Henry proclaimed "the American century," Edward bemoans its eclipse, lamenting both the decline of western power in the world and the erosion of Democratic norms in the west. At first blush, this all has a whiff of "white man's burden" to it. Not sure if that's fair, but one should note that the assault on liberal democracy in America and elsewhere comes almost exclusively from entrenched elites whose "populist" pitch is purely cynical. Nancy McLean: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America (2017, Viking): This traces the Koch political machine back to the ideas of an Nobel prize-winning economist, James McGill Buchanan (1919-2013), a president of the Mont Pelerin Society, distinguished senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and professor at George Mason U. -- although the reality has more to do with the Kochs' money than with Buchanan's ideas (which included the book Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism). Should be an interesting book (in my queue, anyway). Viet Tranh Nguyen: Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016, Harvard University Press): Vietnamese novelist, moved to US at age 4, won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Sympathizer, writes about how most or all sides remember the war and aftermath he grew up in. Thomas M Nichols: The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (2017, Oxford University Press): My own impression is that we don't lack for expertise, but as inequality increases so does the temptation for experts to hire themselves out to private interests, which in turn makes people more suspicious of experts. The author seems more inclined to blame the internet for 'foster[ing] a cult of ignorance" -- but that strikes me as a secondary effect. PJ O'Rourke: How the Hell Did This Happen? The Election of 2016 (2017, Atlantic Monthly Press): Famed right-wing humorist, not that he was ever very funny -- if you ever bother to scan through conservative editorial cartoons you'll get a sense of how low the bar is -- but do you really want to bother with lines like this: "America is experiencing the most severe outbreak of mass psychosis since the Salem witch trials of 1692. So why not put Hillary on the dunking stool?" Ilan Pappé: Ten Myths About Israel (paperback, 2017, Verso Books): Only ten? Some are big ones, long since debunked, like that Palestine was "a land without people" (therefore perfect for "a people without land"), that Palestinians who fled their homes in 1947-49 did so voluntarily, and that Israel had no choice but to start the 1967 war. I don't have the full list, but they evidently extend to Israel's rationalizations for its periodic assaults on Gaza and the question of why people who have repeatedly sabotaged the "two state solution" still insist it's the only one possible. Pappé has written many important books on Israel and the Palestinians, especially The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007), and more recently The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge (2014). Keith Payne: The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die (2017, Viking): Textbooks on inequality invariably start with lists or charts of numbers -- after all, the most straightforward thing you can do with money is count it. However, the problem with inequality has never just been who gets (deservedly or not) what. Every bit as important is how it makes us think and behave toward each other. Several books have explored these ways -- e.g., how inequality worsens health care outcomes, even beyond the correlation between inequal societies and crappy health care systems -- although this promises to delve deeper into experimental psychology. Charles Peters: We Do Our Part: Toward a Fairer and More Equal America (2017, Random House): Founder and long-time editor of The Washington Monthly, a journal I've long admired both for its heart-felt liberal bearings and its shrewd analysis of what government can and cannot do. And while he would like to point us toward "fairer and more equal," the trajectory he's recognized since 1970 has been pointed the other way. (Although I've lately discovered that he coined the term "neo-liberal" and seems to have a dark side -- especially an antipathy to unions, which for many years were the most effective and practical advocates for "a fairer and more equal America.") Kate Raworth: Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (2017, Chelsea Green): The doughnut image depicts "a sweet spot of human prosperity" -- where economics should aim for widespread human satisfaction, as opposed to the 20th-century (and earlier) obsession with scarcity and growth. The seven ways are better captured by their subtitles: from GDP to the Doughnut; from self-contained market to embedded economy; from rational economic man to social adaptable humans; from mechanical equilibrium to dynamic complexity; from 'growth will even it up again' to distributive by design; from 'growth will clean it up again' to regenerative by design; from growth addicted to growth agnostic. The last few years have seen a rash of books complaining about how economic theory is shot through with false and damaging assumptions, so it was only a matter of time before someone tried to build a new understanding around more contemporary goals. TR Reid: A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System (2017, Penguin Press): Author of a very good international survey of health care systems, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care (2009), tries to work the same magic by comparing tax codes around the world. While he's probably correct that the US tax code (plus the huge state-by-state variations and wrinkles for other taxing authorities) is "a fine mess," and that other nations have come up with "tax regimes that are equitable, effective, and easy on the taxpayer," the whole issue seems much less important. It is, however, something that Republicans obsess on, as with most things usually with an eye toward making it much worse. Walter Scheidel: The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (2017, Princeton University Press): A rather depressing argument: he argues that inequality has been the default state of civilization ever since agriculture started producing surpluses that predatory elites could seize. The exceptional periods of leveling only seem to occur due to wars and other disasters. One might still hope that reason might come to our rescue, but empiricists are unconvinced. Gershon Shafir: A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World's Most Intractable Conflict (2017, University of California Press): Fiftieth anniversary of 1967, when Israel dismantled its internal military occupation and seized new territory from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, allowing them to bring back military occupation on an even larger scale. Author has written a number of books on the conflict, going back as far as Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflit 1882-1914. Thomas M Shapiro: Toxic Inequality: How America's Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, and Threatens Our Future (2017, Basic Books): We certainly need more books that come up with vivid examples of how inequality poisons social and political and economic relationships, which is what this title promises. Focuses on race, which follows up from the author's previous The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality. One thing that should be obvious is that you can't achieve racial equality in an era of increasing wealth/income inequality. Steven Slowan/Philip Fernbach: The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone (2017, Riverhead): "Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don't even know how a pen or a toilet works." (For the record, I can answer both of those, although never having read about pens -- unless Henry Petroski's book on pencils ventured there -- I'd have to offer a guess there, based on other principles I understand.) But the basic idea is sound. I'm not sure what the authors draw from this, but I'd say that one important thing is that as we become ever more dependent on advanced technology, it becomes ever more important that we develop social relations that increase trust. This in turn implies several changes: we need to cultivate more widespread expertise; we need to make that information more open; and we need to shift incentives for experts toward openness and generosity and away from selfishness and exploitation. I should also add that this has generally been the direction over the last couple centuries, hand in hand with technological advancement. But all this is increasingly at risk because various business and political interests find it more profitable to appropriate and monetize "knowledge" -- for a sketch of the possible outcomes here, see Peter Frase's Four Futures. Wolfgang Streeck: How Will Capitalism End? (2016, Verso): Depicts a world of "declining growth, oligarchic rule, a shrinking public sphere, institutional corruption, and international anarchy," adding up to instability, probably collapse, certainly a need for profound change. Contradictions of capitalism has been a staple of Marxist thought for 150 years now, so even if the author doesn't come up with an answer to his question, he has plenty of theory to build on. Streeck also wrote Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2nd edition, paperback, 2017, Verso). Nathan Thrall: The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (2017, Metropolitan Books): Hard to think about the conflict without considering how to end it, especially if you're an American, since we've long assumed that our mission on Earth is to oversee some sort of agreement. Thrall has been following the conflict closely for some time now, and writes up what he's figured out: that the only way it ends is if some greater power wills it. The title has a certain irony in that the Israelis, following the British before them, have often said that violence is the only language the Palestinians understand. But as students of the conflict should know by now, the only times Israel has compromised or backed down have been when they been confronted with substantial force: as when Eisenhower prodded them to leave Sinai in 1956, when Carter brokered their 1979 peace with Egypt, when Rabin ended the Intifada by recognizing the PLO, or when Barak withdrew Israeli forces from Lebanon in 2000. Since then no progress towards resolution has been made because no one with the power to influence Israel has had the will to do so -- although Israel's frantic reactions against BDS campaigns shows their fear of such pressure. On the other hand, one should note that force itself has its limits: Palestinians have compromised on many things, but some Israeli demands -- ones that violate norms for equal human rights -- are always bound to generate resistance. What makes the conflict so intractable now is that Israel has so much relative power that they're making impossible demands. So while Thrall would like to be even-handed and apply external force to both sides, it's Israel that needs to move its stance to something mutually tolerable. The other big questions are who would or could apply this force, and why. Up to 2000, the US occasionally acted, realizing that its regional and world interests transcended its affection for Israel, but those days have passed, replaced by token, toothless gestures, if any at all. It's hard to see that changing -- not just because Israel has so much practice manipulating US politics but because America has largely adopted Israeli norms of inequality and faith in brute power. Bassem Youssef: Revolution for Dummies: Laughing Through the Arab Spring (2017, Dey Street Books): Egyptian, dubbed "the Jon Stewart of the Arabic World," had a popular television show during the brief period when that was possible -- the brief, unpopular period of democracy sandwiched between the even less popular (but who's counting?) Mubarak and Sisi dictatorships. Other recent books also noted: Gilad Atzmon: Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto (paperback, 2017, Interlink) Nir Baram: A Land Without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank (paperback, 2017, Text) Mark Bowden: Hue 1968: A Turning Point in the American War in Vietnam (2017, Atlantic Monthly Press) Noam Chomsky: Optimism Over Despair: On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (paperback, 2017, Haymarket Books): interviews by CJ Polychroniou. Joan Didion: South and West: From a Notebook (2017, Knopf) Richard Falk: Palestine's Horizon: Toward a Just Peace (paperback, 2017, Pluto Press) Al Franken: Giant of the Senate (2017, Twelve) Henry A Giroux: America at War With Itself (paperback, 2016, City Lights Press) Al Gore: An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (paperback, 2017, Rodale Books) Jeremy R Hammond: Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (paperback, 2016, Worldview) Yaakov Katz/Amir Bohbot: The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower (2017, St Martin's Press) China Miéville: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (2017, Verso) Vijay Prashad: The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (paperback, 2016, University of California Press) David Roediger: Class, Race, and Marxism (2017, Verso Books) Alice Rothchild: Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine (paperback, 2017, Just World Books) Raja Shehadeh: Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine (2017, New Press) Peter Temin: The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy (2017, MIT Press) Also, some previously mentioned books new in paperback: Andrew J Bacevich: America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (2016; paperback, 2017, Random House): A self-styled conservative, but a useful critic of militarism in post-Vietnam America (see 2005's The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War). As the Cold War wound down, the military pivoted to focus on the Middle East, most dramatically with the 1990-91 Gulf War, which turned into a 12-year containment project aimed at Iraq, and boosted by 9/11 backlash into a massive war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and more clandestine operations from Libya to Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan. David Daley: Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy (2016; paperback, 2017, Liveright): More nuts-and-bolts on how the right-wing -- the financiers of the Koch Bros. dark money networks -- has plotted its takeover of American democracy, especially by targeting and capturing state legislatures. Thomas Frank: Listen, Liberal: Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016; paperback, 2017, Picador): Shows how the Democratic Party, especially since the arrival of Bill Clinton in 1992, has triangulated its way into the good graces of bicoastal urban elites more often than not at the expense of the party's old base -- people they could continue to take advantage of because the Republicans have left them nowhere else to go. This was damning and embarrassing when it came out last summer, and after white working class voters flocked to elect Trump over Hillary people started pointing to this book as prescient. Paperback includes an afterword where the author gets to "I told you so." Real question is whether the Democratic Party moving forward can learn from its mistakes. A good place to start is here. Jacob S Hacker/Paul Pierson: American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (2016; paperback, 2017, Simon & Schuster): Argues that ever since Madison and Hamilton crafted a strong federalist constitution, America has benefited from a strong activist government, one that regulated commerce to limit market failures, that made major investments in infrastructure, and eventually built a modern safety net -- lessons that too many Americans have forgotten as narrow-minded business interests have sought to capture government for their own greedy ends. Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionairse Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016; paperback, 2017, Anchor): To assess the disaster of the 2016 elections, it is not only important to look at the shortcomings of the Democrats -- start with Thomas Frank: Listen, Liberal before you move on to Jonathan Allen/Arnie Parnes: Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign -- but also at what made the Republicans so effective, mostly a huge clandestine political machine only marginally connected to the RNC and/or the Trump Campaign, largely funded by the Koch Bros. and their fellow travelers. This is the best book on the latter, and the paperback as an "I told you so" afterword. Still, Mayer's excavation of these misanthropes has only barely begun. Ask a question, or send a comment. Thursday, April 27, 2017 Book RoundupI haven't done a Book Roundup since August 21, 2017, so I should have about six months worth of books saved up. I don't, but managed to quickly bag my limit (40 per post), and I'm far from done, so will likely follow this up with a second (and probably third) part before long. I posted four of these in 2016, five in 2015, three in 2014, five in 2013, four in 2012, six in 2011. The main purpose is to keep myself abreast of what's being published, at least in my main areas of interest -- politics, economics, and history -- although I sometimes stray (albeit almost never to literature, a luxury indulgence I haven't had time for in many years). This whole series has been plagued by long breaks then sudden flurries of research, usually resulting in clusters of 2-3-4 closely spaced posts. At this point I have about thirty more notes written up, and I'm nowhere near caught up. But perhaps my methodology isn't up to snuff. I usually start with my Amazon recommendations then click on various "related" books, but that approach has lately been yielding diminishing returns. (I wonder if their algorithm's slipped or maybe it's becoming more corrupt -- it is, after all, a form of advertising -- or my own data has gotten confused by buying way too many cookbooks.) In the past I've supplemented this by collecting lists at bookstores and libraries, but I hardly ever frequent them anymore. The other thing that's undercutting my ability to pull forty notes together is that a while back I started adding uncommented notes at the end of posts. At first I was thinking of books that might be worth knowing about but which I didn't have anything non-obvious to add to. One source of these are public figures like Mikhail Gorbachev, Olivier Blanchard, and Sheldon Whitehouse -- I almost includes Elizabeth Warren but decided instead to make a point on Middle Class. Then there are books that don't seem that promising, and books that would just elicit comments similar to past books (the latest Robert D Kaplan has moved into that category. But almost instantly that gave me an out for books I might have written about but don't feel like digging into at the moment. And, as usual, I've grouped some related books under one I wrote about -- not necessarily the best (how would I know?) but the one that got me going. I have thirty more books in my scratch file, and will continue to collect them for a few more days, so expect a follow up post sooner rather than later (hopefully with more paperbacks; for some reason they're exceptionally hard to find just using Amazon). Given how long it's been, I'll note that I've read (or at least started) five of these books (Peter Frase, James Galbraith on Greece, Wenonah Hauter, Gail Pellett, and Matt Taibbi), have a couple more on the shelf (Dean Baker, the other Galbraith, Bernie Sanders), and plan on ordering a couple more (JVP, John W Dower, maybe Pankaj Mishra). Also, Laura's played the audio of Shattered, so I've picked up some of that, too. (Should be required reading for anyone who thought the Clinton machine had any credibility left 24 years after the populist promises of 1992 -- or for that matter any mechanical skills. I'm not sure whether I can exempt myself, inasmuch as, despite quite a bit of awareness to the contrary, I never doubted that Hillary could have been elected in 2016, nor that she would helm a much less obnoxious administration than the one we got with Trump.)
Jonathan Allen/Arnie Parnes: Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign (2017, Crown): Purports to offer inside dirt on Clinton's failed presidential campaign. Of course, had she won we'd read this differently: perhaps as a triumph over adversity, or maybe just as a vindication for democracy, showing that the people could still see past the shortcomings of the candidate. On the other hand, the fact that she lost, and lost to so unpopular and despicable a candidate as Donald Trump, turns this into a scab you want to pick at -- in the end she lost because too many people hated her more than they feared him, and while that wasn't wholly her fault, she was far from faultless. Carol Anderson: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (2016, Bloomsbury USA): Flips the tables on complaints of "black rage" in response to recent police shootings of unarmed blacks to point out the long history of intemperate rage and resistance of whites at every advance of civil rights since the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. Dean Baker: Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (paperback, 2016, Center for Economic and Policy Research): How various rules and policies increase inequality, and how different rules could reduce the concentration of wealth. Book available free online as a PDF or ebook. James Brennan: Against Democracy (2016, Princeton University Press): Philosopher, argues that democracy is inefficient and often misguided, mostly because it pretends that people who don't know shit are entitled to make decisions about how everything is run. Brennan argues for a "epistocracy" -- rule by a small number of people who have qualified by taking rigorous tests (developed no doubt by the epistocracy). Sure, maybe those properly qualified could settle their differences by voting, but the process could just as well be narrowed to ever smaller (more qualified) elites until it achieves the ultimate efficiency of dictatorship. Lots of problems with this: one is that rulers quickly develop interests that run counter to public interests, like self-perpetuation. For all its flaws and corruptions, democracy at least gives lip service to the notion that government serves all (or at least most) of the people, and provides remedies when leaders get out of hand. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy was the worst possible form of government, except for the rest. I suspect what he really appreciated about democracy was that it allowed the voters to periodically take leave of him without having to sever his head. Brennan is reportedly writing books Against Politics and cowriting one called Global Justice as Global Freedom: Why Global Libertarianism Is the Humane Solution to World Poverty. Now if only he can come up with a definition of libertarianism that doesn't suspiciously resemble feudalism. Noam Chomsky: Requiem for the American Dream: 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power (paperback, 2017, Seven Stories Press): Derived from a documentary film made mostly of interviews with Chomsky. Principles (from chapter titles): 1. reduce democracy; 2. shape ideology; 3. redesign the economy; 4. shift the burden; 5. attack solidarity; 6. run the regulators; 7. engineer elections; 8. keep the rabble in line; 9. manufacture consent; 10. marginalize the population. That needs some fleshing out, but this is probably a fairly succinct primer on an important issue. Tyler Cowen: The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream (2017, St Martin's Press): How much more proof do you need that "the dream is dead" than that this right-wing hack should come along, lecturing how stupid you were to have ever fallen for the idea in the first place? It may help to point out here that what American Dream always meant was the notion that prosperity should be widely shared -- within the grasp of practically everyone (aka the Middle Class, which is to say the condition of sufficient equality where virtually no one is so poor they cannot share in the nation's increasing prosperity). On the other hand, Cowen's resignation to the oligarchy has less to do with insight and vision than with who signs his checks. Books like this must make the rich feel inevitable and invincible. Katherine J Cramer: The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (paperback, 2016, University of Chicago Press): After 2016, when Wisconsin voted down Russ Feingold's Senate run and went with Trump for president, after three statewide wins for weaselly governor Walker, you have to admit that Republicans have had remarkable success at capturing Wisconsin -- the subject here. Christopher de Bellaigue: The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times (2017, Liveright): The start date was when Napoleon invaded Egypt, an event more often remembered as the first salvo of European dominance of the Middle East). This deals with the spread of (and reaction to) cultural and intellectual ideas -- what others have called modernism -- from Europe to the intellectual centers of Islam (Cairo, Istanbul, and Tehran). John W Dower: The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II (paperback, 2017, Haymarket Books): Perhaps our most important historian of Japanese-American relations both during and after WWII, Dower took an interest in Bush's Iraq War schemes when warmongers cited the US occupation of Japan and Germany as successful models for what the Bush administration could do in Iraq. He pointed out many ways in which Iraq was different, but also stressed how the US had changed in ways that made us less fit. I expect a big part of this book to expand on those insights (although possibly not as much as his 2010 book, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq.) Peter Frase: Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (paperback, 2016, Verso): Speculative post-capitalist futurology plotting out broad options based on two axes based on distribution of wealth in a world of plenty or scarcity. Frase calls these options communism, rentism, socialism, and exterminism. Written before last year's election, which suddenly tilted the odds toward the later. James K Galbraith: Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know (paperback, 2016, Oxford University Press): Galbraith's Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis (2012, Oxford University Press), turned out to be a dry compendium of research, meant for specialists, but this primer should be clear and compelling. He did, after all, write two of the most important (and quite accessible) political-economic books of the last decade: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008), and The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth (2014). James K Galbraith: Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe (2016, Yale University Press): America's best economist offers a view of the Euro crisis, informed by having worked as an advisor to the Syriza government in Greece. No nation suffered (or continues to suffer) more than Greece for the inflexibility of the Euro system and its rigid control by German bankers. Anne Garrels: Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia (2016, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Before jumping to conclusions about Russia's president, perhaps a good idea to look at Russia itself. This focuses on Chelyabinsk, a city deep in Siberia best known as one of the centers of the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons program. Garrels is an NPR correspondent who spent several years in occupied Baghdad -- see Naked in Baghdad: The Iraq War and the Aftermath as Seen by NPR's Correspondent Ann Garrels (2003; paperback, 2004, Picador). Other recent books on Russia and/or Putin (aside from Satter, which I treat separately): Charles Clover: Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism (2016, Yale University Press); Karen Dawiska: Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (2014; paperback, 2015, Simon & Schuster); Steven Lee Myers: The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (2015, Knopf; paperback, 2016, Vintage Books); Mikhail Zygar: All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin (2016, Public Affairs). Mark Hannah: The Best "Worst President": What the Right Gets Wrong About Barack Obama (2016, Dey Street Books): As Obama's second term comes to a close, it's tempting to start looking at his legacy, which Hannah views through the peculiar prism of the most ungrounded, counterfactual attacks any president has had to suffer. Still, vilification of political opponents is old hat in America, even if now it seems more unhinged than ever. The other part of the problem with Obama is that he hasn't clearly changed much, but he also has this idea that small incremental changes will have larger long-term consequences, and those are hard, perhaps impossible, to accurately gauge now. I suspect that Hannah is trying to claim those changes now, and I don't know that he's not right to do so. On the other hand, Trump is frantically trying to reverse as much of Obama's legacy as possible -- something Obama's focus on small changes makes all the easier. Wenonah Hauter: Frackopoly: The Battle for the Future of Energy and the Environment (2016, New Press): US petroleum production had been declining ever since Hubbert's Peak was hit in 1969, but at least in the short term new technologies like hydraulic fracturing has made it possible to recover more oil and to open up substantial amounts of natural gas trapped in shale deposits. On the other hand, all this new production adds to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and fracking introduces new environmental problems -- so much so that opposition to it has become a potent political movement. Hauter herself heads an organization called Food & Water Watch, and previously wrote Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America (paperback, 2014, New Press). Chris Hayes: A Colony in a Nation (2017, WW Norton): A look at race relations, keyed off the shooting in Ferguson, MO, expanding on the theme that there remain a managed colony of black people in America, separate and very different from the concept of an egalitarian nation commonly experienced (at least the lip-service) by whites. Hayes previous book, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, was one of the most insightful, accessible, and powerful books on increasing inequality. Richard Heinberg/David Fridley: Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy (paperback, 2016, Island Press): Heinberg has written a number of books on the limits of basing our energy needs on oil, starting with The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2003) up to Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future (2013), and he's generally been a pretty pessimistic sort, one book even titled The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (2011). On the other hand, the cost of renewable energy sources has been plumeting (especially solar cells), opening up the possibility of transitioning to renewables with relatively little disruption (except, of course, to fossil fuel companies). Related: Lester R Brown: The Great Transition: Shifting From Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy (paperback, 2015, WW Norton); Gretchen Bakke: The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future (2016, Bloomsbury USA). Arlie Russell Hochschild: Strangers in Their Own Land (2016, New Press): Sociologist sets out to explore "a stronghold of the conservative right" in Louisiana, finding "lives ripped apart by stagnant wages, a loss of home, an elusive American dream," a context for trying to understand their self-defeating political choices. Made a list of "6 books to understand Trump's win," compiled by people who probably don't understand it themselves. Also on that list: J.D. Vance: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis (2016, Harper). Jewish Voice for Peace: On Anti-semitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice in Palestine (paperback, 2017, Haymarket Books): Essay collection probing various aspects of the frequent charge that advocating peace and justice in Israel/Palestine is anti-semitic. JVP has been an important group in America in the campaign to end the Occupation precisely because their activism is rooted in common Jewish values, which has put them in a uniquely authoritative position to dispute this canard. Robert P Jones: The End of White Christian America (2016, Simon & Schuster): Head of something called the Public Religion Research Institute argues that since the 1990s White Christians have both demographically and culturally become a minority in America. Not sure what he does with this insight, but but it does correspond to many Republicans losing grip not just on power but on reality -- as you'd expect, it's a question that only matters to people wrapped up in White Christian identity, especially those nostalgic for an America that honored and privileged their prejudices. John B Judis: The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (paperback, 2016, Columbia Global Reports): Short (184 pp) and topical overview of what passes for populism both on the right and the left, both in Europe and America. It takes a peculiar perspective to see all those stances as related. Even shorter: Jan-Werner Müller: What Is Populism? (2016, University of Pennsylvania Press); also: Benjamin Moffitt: The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (2016, Stanford University Press). Sarah Leonard/Bhaskar Sunkara, eds: The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century (paperback, 2016, Metropolitan Books): Editors associated with The Nation and Jacobin collect some essays to sketch out "a stirring blueprint for American equality," starting with the recognition that the present system is an oligarchy. They imagine finance without Wall Street, full employment achieved by limiting work hours, and many other things. Pankaj Mishra: Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Mishra has written several books on how various Asian intellectuals reacted to modernism, especially given how Europeans presented it wrapped up in self-serving imperialism -- a much trickier subject than figuring out why so many westerners are so full of rage as their world of myth slips out of any illusion of their control. Nor would he ever stop at the West, unlike chroniclers of "populism," because he knows anger circles the world, taking all sorts of form. Cathy O'Neil: Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2016, Crown): Former Wall Street quant, defected to the Occupy Movement and now writes a blog as mathbabe. The "big data" she writes about is mostly used by businesses to target sales pitches, to qualify mortgages and loans, and other things that effectively discriminate against the poor or statistical analogs, not least by warping their experiences in self-perpetuating ways (she talks about "siloing" people which strikes me as an apt metaphor, especially since in my part of the country silos are often death traps). Of course, government also uses "big data" and while I wouldn't say they're up to no good, they too often aren't doing you any favors with their own siloing. I'm not so sure the math itself is at fault, but we'd have to turn the power relationships around to give it a chance -- e.g., collect data about everything public on the market and give consumers tools to access it in a consistent and even-handed manner. As it is, "big data" is becoming an increasingly effective tool for managing and manipulating people, one that helps those in power exercise more power than ever. Iain Overton: The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms (2016, Harper): Mostly on the US but Overton journeys through twenty-five countries looking into many aspects of gun proliferation -- "meets with ER doctors dealing with gun trauma, SWAT team leaders, gang members, and weapons smugglers." No idea how deep this goes, but it reflects critically enough that Amazon's gun nuts have buried it in negative ratings -- they seem to be even more vigilant than Israel's hasbaraists. Gail Pellett: Forbidden Fruit: 1980 Beijing, a Memoir (paperback, 2015, VanDam): A new left feminist I knew in St. Louis before she moved on to Boston and New York, working in radio and video (including NPR and Bill Moyers). Along the way she spent a year at Radio Beijing as a "foreign language expert," "polishing" news propaganda. That was 1980, post-Mao, a transitional period as the party regime was starting to stabilize after the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four -- interesting times, as the old Chinese curse put it. Elizabeth Rosenthal: An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back (2017, Penguin Books): With the health care industry sucking up close to 20% of America's GDP these days -- double from a couple decades ago when the gold rush really accelerated with vulture capitalists snapping up previously non-profit hospitals. This promises a big picture look at how business is organized, how they subvert markets, how they game both supply and demand sides, and how they grapple with public policy which hopes to contain costs but is influenced largely by lobbyist money. Zachary Roth: The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy (2016, Crown): The 2010 sweep reinforced for Republicans the idea that all they have to do to win is keep undesirable people from voting. Since then, they've passed dozens of state laws to make it harder for people to vote: this recounts those efforts, looks at the right-wing money behind those campaigns. This is not just an assault on democracy, it's an attempt at negation: it starts with the Republians' assumption that their group is more worthy than others, and follows that anything they can do to increase their power is justified. Bernie Sanders: Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In (2016, Thomas Dunne): Came out post-election, recognizing that the same platform would be relevant regardless of who won. And while we all supported Hillary figuring she'd be slightly more aware of the problems and slightly more amenable to real solutions, with Trump in the White House and the Republicans controlling Congress (and oh so much more), this looms as the only real way forward for anyone who wants a fairer and less conflict-ridden society (even mainstream Democrats should be supportive of that, given the alternative). David Satter: The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin (2016, Yale University Press): Fourth book on Russia, all harshly critical, so much so that the Russian government expelled him in 2013 as a general nuisance. This new book seems to recapitulate and update his previous ones: Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (1996), Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (2003), and It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past (2007). A quote from the second book: "Influenced by decades of mendacious Soviet propaganda, [Russia's reformers] assumed that the initial accumulation of capital in a market economy is almost always criminal, and, as they were resolutely procapitalist, they found it difficult to be strongly anticrime. . . . The combination of social darwinism, economic determinism, and a tolerant attitude toward crime prepared the young reformers to carry out a frontal attack on the structures of the Soviet system without public support or a framework of law." It's hard to overstate how much social and economic damage their "reforms" did, nor to appreciate how popular Putin became as the strong man who ushered in a new era, both by winning back Chechnya and covering up Yeltsin's corruption. Satter returns to the 1999 apartment bombings that gave Putin his excuse for attacking Chechnya -- if true (and I find them credible) a remarkably cruel and cynical turn. While I worry that most anti-Putin fulminations are themselves cynical efforts to relaunch the Cold War -- the lost love of the neocons, Satter has a knack for making them make sense. Ganesh Sitaraman: The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (2017, Knopf): Argues first that the US constitution was designed to counteract class inequality -- in no small part because "compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America's republic." Every expansion of democracy since has been linked to putting the nation on a more equal footing, so it's no surprise that the rise of oligarchy today is so eager to limit the franchise, not to mention burying it under mountains of money. Timothy Snyder: On Tyrrany: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century (paperback, 2017, Tim Duggan): Historian, I know him mostly from his late collaborations with Tony Judt, but he has two major books on the Nazis and Eastern Europe, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History Warning (2015). His "warning" from the latter: "our world is closer to Hitler's than we like to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was." This short (128 pp) post-Trump book draws further ties between the genocidal "tyranny" of the WWI era and our own times: another warning. Andy Stern: Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream (2016, PublicAffairs): Former president of the SEIU, one of the few unions which has grown in size since 2000, bucking trends that have been driven by technology and politics. He recognizes that technology has entered a phase where it's more likely to destroy jobs than to create new ones (the main theme of James K Galbraith's The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth), and he recognizes that this has been a major source of the growth of inequality, and consequently an increasingly inequitable society. His basic income scheme counters inequality while making technological trends less disruptive. When I think along these lines, I tend to think of not just recirculating cash into the hands of workers but also of giving workers equity in the companies they work for, ultimately democratizing the workplace. But for as far as it goes, a basic income is a good idea. Other recent books along these lines: Rutger Bregman: Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek (paperback, 2016, The Correspondent); Philippe Van Parijs/Yannick Vanderborght: Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (2017, Harvard University Press); and Nick Srnicek/Alex Williams: Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (paperback, 2015, Verso). Joseph E Stiglitz: The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe (2016, WW Norton): Probably the definitive book on why the Euro has straitjacketed Europe's economy following the 2008 financial meltdown. The idea behind the Euro was to extend and simplify the Common Market with a common currency, but that market was never integrated politically (like, say, the United States) so the central bank, and effectively the single monetary policy, could be effectively captured by German national interests. In pre-recession years this helped fuel housing bubbles in southern Europe and Ireland, which burst in 2008, but left those nations with particularly severe debt overhangs, denominated in Euros so they couldn't compensate by inflating their own currencies. Greece was hit hardest of all, partly its own government's fault, and when the Greek people resisted by electing a left-wing government, the Germans came down even harder, dictating a crippling austerity regime. Stiglitz reviews all this and offers several sensible ways out. If there's a fault it may be that focuses on what is technocratically possible as opposed to the politics that got us here and keep us from fixing it. Matt Taibbi: Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus (2017, Spiegel & Grau): Quickly patched together from reports covering the election -- you know, the one where it was absurd that Trump would win until the day he did, giving the whole affair a certain whiplash. Still, Taibbi was more sensitive to Trump's supporters and conscious of Hillary's faults than most, so he helps even when he's not totally right. But then he's always been sharp, which he proves here by quoting 20+ pages from his book on 2008 and making it seem as timely as ever. By contrast, Maureen Dowd called her campaign journal The Year of Voting Dangeously: The Derangement of American Politics (2016, Twelve) -- borrowing her subtitle from Taibbi, whose 2008 book was The Great Derangement. Michael Waldman: The Second Amendment: A Biography (2014; paperback, 2015, Simon & Schuster): Two parts: the first a history of the original debate surrounding the framing and adoption of the second amendment ("the right to bear arms"); the second covers the various Supreme Court rulings on the amendment, most recently ones broadening the right of individuals to own firearms. Needless to say, those were different debates and sets of issues. The original, I've long felt, was a way of reserving to the states the option of starting the Civil War, so became obsolete once that happened. Today the key issue has more to do with the acceptability of violence for resolving public disputes. Unfortunately, the federal government's practice of imposing its will abroad through force of arms sets a bad example for everyone under it, leading to all sorts of futile arms races, even much legal ambiguity over when lethal force may or may not be used. Elizabeth Warren: This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class (2017, Metropolitan Books): Originally from Oklahoma, one of the few to clearly recognize what was happening during the 2008 banking meltdown, the principle architect of a major tool for ending the consumer abuses which contributed so much to that debacle, acts which gave her a measure of fame from which she won a US Senate seat from Massachusetts. All that plus her aggressive tone against Trump in 2016 positions her to be a credible presidential candidate in 2020, so figure this to be a position stake-out. That's good enough for me, but I want to quibble about her Middle Class usage. The Middle Class is not an entity that one can care for to the exclusion of rich and poor. Rather, it is the effect you get when the economic system is relatively equal -- when differences between most people (blue collar and white collar, manual laborers and professionals) are inconsequential, when all those people have similar opportunities and intergenerational hopes. To get a Middle Class you need institutions, both public and private (like unions), and policies that equalize differences, primarily by leveling up (you move poor people into the Middle Class by supporting them, and you fold the relatively well-to-do back into the Middle Class by reducing their intrinsic advantages). And that's basically what progressive politicians like Warren mean when they say "Middle Class." But the reason they say "Middle Class" instead of "equal" is that they (and/or their target audience) have bought the right-wing's propaganda that the poor are responsible for their own destitution, usually because lack some essential character trait that the "Middle Class" prides itself on. Secondly, "Middle Class" gives the Upper Class a pass, a green light to keep on doing what they're doing -- such as using government as a tool to keep pulling away from the rabble -- but at least "Middle Class" doesn't challenge them the way old-fashioned Populism did. That comes in handy for politicians who are still dependent on the rich for most of their funding. J Kael Weston: The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan (2016, Knopf): Former US State Department officer, spent seven years in these wars, writes at great length (606 pp) on the human cost of those wars, though possibly only to the Americans who fought them -- a lot of looking in the mirror here. That may be sufficiently damning, but is far from the whole story. And I have to wonder how critical he can be about American intentions given how long he kept trying to serve them. James Q Whitman: Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017, Princeton University Press): Well before Hitler came to power, the US codified the set of racial discrimination laws known as Jim Crow. It's pretty well known that South Africa's Apartheid system was based on the American model, but what about Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Laws? Yes and no: "the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh." Even so, the slope from discrimination to genocide turned out to be much steeper in Germany, probably due to the extraordinary pressures of fighting a loosing war. While interesting in itself, a more interesting book would examine Nazi views of America's own Lebensraum campaign -- the series of wars that drove Native Americans off the land, making room for white settlers. Indeed, the US was the pioneer for white settler colonies all around the world (most recently Israel). Other recent books merely noted: Ryan Avent: The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century (2016, St Martin's Press) Olivier Blanchard/Raghuram G Rajan/Kenneth S Rogoff/Laurence H Summers, eds: Progress and Confusion: The State of Macroeconomic Policy (2016, MIT Press) Derek Chollet: The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America's Role in the World (2016, Public Affairs) Angela Y Davis: Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (paperback, 2016, Haymarket Books) Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (paperback, 2015, Beacon Press) Michael Eric Dyson: Tears We Cannot Stop: A Serman to White America (2017, St Martin's Press) Mikhail Gorbachev: The New Russia (2016, Polity) Pamela Haag: The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (2016, Basic Books) Jerry Kaplan: Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2015, Yale University Press) Robert D Kaplan: Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World (2017, Random House) Walter Laqueur: Putinism: Russia and Its Future With the West (2015, Thomas Dunne) Giles Merritt: Slippery Slope: Europe's Troubled Future (2016, Oxford University Press) Trevor Noah: Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood (2016, Spiegel & Grau) Arkady Ostrovsky: The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War (2016, Viking) George Papaconstantinou: Game Over: The Inside Story of the Greek Crisis (paperback, 2016, Create Space) William J Perry: My Journey at the Nuclear Brink (paperback, 2015, Stanford Security Studies) Kenneth S Rogoff: The Curse of Cash (2016, Princeton University Press) Jeffrey D Sachs: The Age of Sustainable Development (paperback, 2015, Columbia University Press) Chris Smith: The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests (2016, Grand Central Publishing) Rebecca Solnit: The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports From the Feminist Revolutions (paperback, 2017, Haymarket Books) Sheldon Whitehouse: Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy (2017, New Press) Jason Zinoman: Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night (2017, Harper) Selected paperback reprints of books previously noted: Mark Blyth: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2013; paperback, 2015, Oxford University Press) Steven Brill: America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System (2015; paperback, 2015, Random House) Noam Chomsky: Who Rules the World? (2016; paperback, 2017, Metropolitan Books): Essay collection. Martin Ford: Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (2015; paperback, 2016, Basic Books) Theda Skocpol/Vanessa Williamson: The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (2012; updated ed, paperback, 2016, Oxford University Press) Ask a question, or send a comment. Sunday, August 21, 2016 Book RoundupTime for another collection of 40 short notes on recent books -- my modest attempt to keep track of what's being published primarily in the fields of politics, history, economics, and social science (not that other personal interests don't slip in occasionally). These are mostly gathered by trolling around Amazon, checking my "recommended" lists, following up on cross-references, reading (and occasionally quoting) the hype, blurbs, sometimes even reviews. Few of these books I have any in-depth knowledge of, so they hardly constitute reviews. Last batch of these came out on July 7, before that April 26. Christopher H Achen/Larry M Bartels: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (2016, Princeton University Press): Political scientists argue against the conventional view that voters make rational political choices by pointing out how their views at least as much shaped by primordial identities, a hint of what's become obvious as the red-blue divide has gone beyond analysis and prescription to selective embrace of facts. Still, title suggests something more, like pointing out how these distortions have opened up opportunities for politicians to do things contrary to the positions they adopt when campaigning. Those things are mostly favors for special interests -- favors that wouldn't stand a chance if "representatives" were actually responsive to voter views. Mehrsa Baradaran: How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy (2015, Harvard University Press): "The United States has two separate banking systems today -- one serving the well-to-do and another exploiting everyone else." Actually, I doubt the "well-to-do" are served all that well either, but the "payday lenders" and "check cashing services" that people frozen out of the legit banking system deserve a harsher word than "exploiting." Baradaran advocates a "postal banking" system that would provide minimal cost banking services to everyone. Samuel Bowles: The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens (2016, Yale University Press): Lectures -- I imagine this poised against the Thaler/Sunstein notion of nudges which assumes that wise managers can concoct incentives that lead seemingly free economic actors to do good deeds, although he could be countering the older laissez-faire conceit that markets miraculously do good on their own. It was, after all, no coincidence that the new vogue for Friedman, etc., in the 1980s was accompanied by rejection of public interest and a coarsening of civil concern. Rosa Brooks: How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon (2016, Simon & Schuster): Law professor, New America Foundation fellow, married a Green Beret, was a "senior advisor at the U.S. State Department" and "a counselor to the US defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011," but also daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich, one of America's finest lefty journalists: I'm not sure how all that adds up (blurb suggests: "by turns a memoir, a work of journalism, a scholarly exploration into history, anthropology and law, and a rallying cry"), or whether. An excerpt I read pushes a Walmart analogy way beyond ridiculousness, especially in assuming that the military, like Walmart, produces tangible and desirable (albeit shoddy and ethically dubious) goods. The military has, for instance, become the only big government institution beloved by conservatives out to discredit all other big government. Part of this is that, as Brooks points out, it crowds out saner alternatives, yet that's not just successful lobbying from organized interest groups -- an important group of Pentagon boosters simply don't want sane. Noam Chomsky: Who Rules the World? (2016, Metropolitan Books): Another essay collection, so not wholly devoted to the title question -- probably just as well, as there's no good answer. Still likely to include his usual rigorous accounting of US misbehavior in the world (one chapter is "The US Is a Leading Terrorist State"). Other recent Chomsky titles I haven't noted before: How the World Works (paperback, 2011, Soft Skull Press); On Anarchism (paperback, 2013, New Press); Masters of Mankind: Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013 (paperback, 2014, Haymarket Books); What d Kind of Creatures Are We? (2015, Columbia University Press); On Palestine (with Ilan Pappé, paperback, 2015, Haymarket Books); Because We Say So (paperback, 2015, City Lights); also several reprints of older books (mostly from Haymarket Books), and the DVD Requiem for the American Dream. Stephen S Cohen/J Bradford DeLong: Concrete Economics: The Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth and Policy (2016, Harvard Business Review Press): An argument that history is key to understanding how the American economy grew, and a compact history of government intervention in the American economy going all the way back to Alexander Hamilton. David Cole: Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law (2016, Basic Books): Points out a number of cases where Supreme Court rulings merely formalized changes in public opinion brought about by political activism -- sample cases include marriage equality and the individual right to bear arms, but it isn't hard to think of more cases, including the 1930s reversal on New Deal programs. David Daley: Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy (2016, Liveright): Title evidently a technical term coined by a Nixon operative to boast about some of the "dirty tricks" used to tilt the 1972 presidential election his boss's way, but is generalized here to cover the story of how the recent deluge of GOP-leaning money has helped that party to gain political power way beyond what you'd expect in a representative democracy. Gerrymandering is one not-so-secret aspect of this. Lesser known is the REDMAP project -- especially how the Republicans targeted state legislatures -- that opened up so many opportunities to stack the deck. Charles Derber/Yale R Magrass: Bully Nation: How the American Establishment Creates a Bullying Society (2016, University Press of Kansas): Not just schoolyard bullying, but we live in a society that increasingly lets the rich and powerful bully the poor and weak, that prizes wealth and power, treats their lack as a personal disgrace. These are all consequences of inequality, but they also correlate with the US stance as the world's superpower, the one nation that is free to tower over and bully all others. This is one book that seems to get all that: "The larger the inequalities of power in society, or among nations, or even across species, the more likely it is that both institutional and personal bullying can become commonplace." Dan DiMicco: American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness (2015, St. Martin's Press): Former CEO of Nucor, "the largest and most profitable U.S. steel company" although as far as I an tell they mostly melt down and recycle in non-unionized plants far from America's old Rust Belt. Recently DiMicco was named to Trump's economic advisory board, with the strategic word "Greatness" hinting this book might be a blueprint for Trump's agenda. Still, I doubt there's anything new here: there's still a good deal of manufacturing in America, and such companies can be profitable if you can keep the vulture capitalists who dominate Trump's board from bleeding them dry. The bigger problem is how to get more of the profits of business back into the paychecks of workers, and there DiMicco is more problem than solution. Tamara Draut: Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America (2016, Doubleday): Cover features the banner "FIGHT FOR $15 AND A UNION." The new working class isn't the old blue collar one, but "more female and racially diverse" employed in bottom end service jobs that don't pay enough to live on much less secure the old notion of middle class equality. A decade ago Draut wrote Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Something Can't Get Ahead, and they've only fallen further behind, which is why they're (finally) fighting back. Ben Ehrenreich: The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (2016, Penguin Press): American journalist, son of Barbara Ehrenreich, has also written a pair of novels, details considerable time spent in Israel/Palestine observing the military occupation, and perhaps more importantly the people subject to that occupation. Rana Foroohar: Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business (2016, Crown Business): If I recall correctly, the title comes from Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign speech where he derided the 47% of Americans who owe no federal income tax as "takers" -- as parasites living off the better off classes (i.e., those without effective tax dodge scams). Still, another reading is possible: some businesses still make things, but others (notably Romney's Bain Capital) just take profits out of the economy through various financial shenanigans. Everyone knows that the latter have grown enormously over recent decades. What this book does is explore the effect of all this financial "taking" on the older practice of making things, which as everyone also knows has declined severely in America. Pretty sure the two are linked. Hope this book helps explain why. Robert H Frank: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy (2016, Princeton University): Short book, argues that the rich tend to underestimate the role of luck in their success, or overestimate the role of merit -- flip sides of the same coin. Steve Fraser: The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America (2016, Basic Books): The term dates from the 1969 New York mayoralty election, about the same time the "hard hat" riots against antiwar protesters reinforced Nixon's idea that a conservative "silent majority" had been victimized by "liberal elites" -- a term that ultimately had more traction than "limousine liberal." Fraser recently wrote about how Americans lost their sense of class struggle in The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of Organized Wealth and Power, to which this adds a significant case study. Chas W Freeman Jr: America's Continuing Misadventures in the Middle East (paperback, 2016, Just World Books): Former US diplomat, was denied a job in the Obama administration because he was considered unacceptably equivocal about Israel. Shortly after that, he wrote America's Misadventures in the Middle East (paperback, 2010, Just World Books). Presumably this is all new material, succinct even, as it only runs 256 pages. Michael J Graetz/Linda Greenhouse: The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right (2016, Simon & Schuster): Of course, the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts moved even further to the right, but Nixon's appointment of Warren Burger to replace Earl Warren started the rightward shift. This book explains how and why. I'll add that this represented a reversion to form for the Supreme Court up to the New Deal. Maybe now we should recognize how fortunate we were to have grown up in an era when the Supreme Court took an active interest in expanding individual and civil rights. Karen J Greenberg: Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (2016, Crown): Having written a book on Guantanamo and edited one called Torture Papers, the author is in a position to sum up the marginal rationalizations used to trample two centuries of legal principle just to facilitate the security state's defense of its own power and secrets. While many of these examples were started by the Bush administration in its initial panic over 9/11, most have been continued under Obama, with some policies -- like extrajudicial killings -- greatly extended. Seymour M Hersh: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden (2016, Verso): Short book on how the US sent a team of Navy SEALs deep into Pakistan to assassinate the nominal leader of Al-Qaida. Hersh casts doubt on many of the stories the Obama administration spread about its exploit. Elizabeth Hinton: From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2016, Harvard University Press): Author starts with Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, which includes a simultaneous "war on crime," a set of policing policies that Republicans (and Bill Clinton) kept building up while at the same time tearing down the welfare programs. It is probably no accident that Johnson's programs were launched while America was increasingly mired in war in Vietnam, and even less so that police became more militarized during the so-called War on Terror. In between you get the War on Drugs. The idea there was probably that in post-WWII America "war" is the magic word for unity and determination, but after Vietnam most Americans were tired of war, and anti-drug laws criminalized a wide swath of society, which gave increasingly well-financed police a wide license to pick and choose. The result is that "the land of the free" became the world's most pervasive prison state. David Cay Johnston: The Making of Donald Trump (2016, Melville House): Journalist, previously wrote a couple books on how the political system is rigged to favor the rich -- Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else and Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill). Not an in-depth biography (288 pp), but probably as good as any quick primer on the Republican nominee. Other new books on Trump (aside from the jokes I mention under Trump's own book): Michael D'Antonio: The Truth About Trump (paperback, 2016, St Martin's Griffin -- reissue of 2015 book Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success; Michael Kranish/Marc Fisher: Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power (2016, Scribner); Marc Shapiro: Trump This! The Life and Times of Donald Trump, an Unauthorized Biography (paperback, 2016, Riverdale Avenue Books); Mark Singer: Trump and Me (2016, Mark Duggan Books); and, of course, GB Trudeau: Yuge! 30 Years of Doonsebury on Trump (paperback, 2016, Andrews McNeel). Mark Landler: Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power (2016, Random House): Journalist, interviewed over 100 "inside sources" to discover that Clinton was invariably hawkish as Secretary of State, while Obama usually started skeptical but often gave in to the hawks he surrounded himself with -- far be it from to seriously reject any orthodoxy. I doubt Landler further explores how often Obama's policies backfired, as he seems more entranced with his "team of rivals" collaboration story -- the common ground of those alter egos. Marc Lynch: The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East (2016, PublicAffairs): Wrote The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East (2012), a more hopeful title but in case after case popular uprisings have given way to civil war, as the ancien regimes have violently clung to power, as jihadists have come to the fore, and as foreign governments (notably the US) have interfered to advance poorly understood interests. Benjamin Madley: An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (2016, Yale University Press): There is evidence that the population of Native Americans was reduced by as much as 90% from pre-Columbian levels to the end of the 19th century, and it's not much of a stretch to call that genocide. This book deals with just one narrow front, in California where the native population dropped from about 150,000 to 30,000 in the years covered -- roughly the period of California's Gold Rush. On the same subject: Brendan C Lindsay: Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873 (paperback, 2015, University of Nebraska Press). Related: John Mack Faragher: Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles (2016, WW Norton). George Monbiot: How Did We Get Into This Mess? Politics, Equality, Nature (2016, Verso): British journalist, has written about science (degree in Zoology), climate change, and all sorts of political matters, which gives him a broad view of the "mess" of our times. This one's an essay collection, columns written 2007-15, that illustrate his title rather than exploring it systematically. Still, I did track down the title piece, which indicts neoliberalism traced back to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. Peter Navarro: Crouching Tiger: What China's Militarism Means for the World (2015, Prometheus Books): Another Trump "economic adviser," the only one with any academic credentials, which as this book shows means zilch. Trump has a whole range of complaints about China ranging from currency manipulation to short-changing on patent rents. But Navarro sees something different: a mirror image of the US expanding its economic grasp into Asia under a cloak of the threat/promise of military power. The implication is that if the US ever backs down, China will pounce -- certainly not that China's military was built as a defense against intimidation from the world's sole superpower." Navarro previously co-wrote (with Greg Autry): Death by China: Confronting the Dragon -- A Global Call to Action (2011, Pearson Press). Chinese-American conflict has become a staple, both for business writers and empire strategists; e.g.: Thomas J Christensen: The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power (2015, WW Norton); Thomas Finger: The New Great Game: China and South and Central Asia in the Era of Reform (paperback, 2016, Stanford University Press); Aaron L Friedberg: A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (paperback, 2012, WW Norton); Lyle J Goldstein: Meeting China Halfway: How to Diffuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry (2015, Georgetown University Press); Robert Haddick: Fire on the Water: China, America, and the Future of the Pacific (2014, Naval Institue Press); Bill Hayton: The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia (paperback, 2015, Yale University Press); Anja Manuel: This Brave New World: India, China and the United States (2016, Simon & Schuster); Liu Minglu: The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era (2015, CN Times Books); Henry M Paulson Jr: Dealing With China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower (2015, Twelve); Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (paperback, 2016, St Martin's Griffin); also, one I've mentioned before: Robert D Kaplan: Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (2014; paperback, 2015, Random House); and one I somehow didn't mention, Henry Kissinger: On China (2011; paperback, 2012, Penguin Books). Daniel Oppenheimer: Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century (2016, Simon & Schuster): Profiles that go "deep into the minds of six apostates -- Whitaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens." Reagan seems an odd choice for any book concerned with the mind, but the rest are far from original thinkers, more like notorious cranks, and can only be counted as reshaping the century in the sense that they allowed themselves be used as tools for the right-wing. Some blurb writers I respect liked this book, but it's hard to see why it should matter. Thomas Piketty: Why Save the Bankers?: And Other Essays on Our Economic and Political Crisis (2016, Houghton Mifflin): Author of the major work on economic inequality Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), picks these scattered essays from a monthly column published in France (2008-15). Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters: Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics (paperback, 2016, Anchor): Author previously co-wrote (with David Brock) The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network Into a Propaganda Machine and The Benghazi Hoax: The Truth Behind the Right's Campaign to Politicize an American Tragedy. The PR outfits may have started out just trying to spin the truth, but they quickly found themselves creating whole untruths from scratch, and what worked for tobacco and climate denial was seized upon by the right-wing for their own political machinations. Yakov M Rabkin: What Is Modern Israel? (paperback, 2016, Pluto Press): Argues that Zionism is rooted not in anything Jewish but in Protestant Christianity's reading of Biblical prophecy, compounded by "Europeean ethnic nationalism, colonial expansion, and geopolitical interests." That doesn't quite explain why the idea came to be embraced by many Jews, both among those who settled in Israel and among those scattered elsewhere. Andrés Reséndez: The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Slavery in America (2016, Houghton Mifflin): Before Columbus imported slaves from Africa, he tried enslaving the natives he "discovered." The Spanish crown supposedly ended this practice in 1542, but by then slavery had already had a calamatous effect on decimating native populations, and the story didn't end there. Most likely an eye-opening, pathbreaking book. Jeremy Scahill: The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program (2016, Simon & Schuster): Previously wrote about early US use of drones for extrajudicial assassinations in 2013's Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. Since then drones have become ever more central to Obama's continuation of Bush's Global War on Terror, which makes this an important book. Jean Edward Smith: Bush (2016, Simon & Schuster): Big (832 pp) history of the eight years when GW Bush was pretty clearly the worst president the United States has ever had to suffer through, written to remind us of just that fact, all the more urgent since so many media hacks and even President Obama -- originally elected when the memory was clear in the minds of the electorate -- have let so much of his record slip from their minds. Jason Stahl: Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture Since 1945 (2016, University of North Carolina Press): Surveys the history of right-wing financiers' efforts to stand up a faux academia to propagate their pet theories, and increasingly to fabricate their own facts, in hopes of dressing up their self-interested politics. But academia turned out to be too grand a vision, as they descended ever more into cranking out made-to-order political propaganda. And they've increasingly turned into a jobs program for conservative politicians, a security net for out-of-work ideologues. Robert Teitelman: Bloodsport: When Ruthless Dealmakers, Shrewd Ideologues, and Brawling Lawyers Toppled the Corporate Establishment (2016, PublicAffairs): During the 1970s there arose a mania for building companies by mergers and acquisitions, a practice which led to the growth of diversified conglomerates as well as big companies snuffing out their competitors. Not clear to me whether Wall Street led the way or jumped on the bandwagon, but this went hand-in-hand with the financialization of the American economy, a process which increased inequality in lots of ways. The ideologues come into play with their justification of the supreme importance of shareholder value, regardless of who gets hurt. Donald J Trump: Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America (paperback, 2016, Threshold Editions): Cover an orange smudge on an American flag against a not quite uncloudy blue sky, a vast improvement over Trump's scowl on the hardcover that came out last November as Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again. Like the title swap, the juxtaposition between crippled and great is so confusing it's hard to tell which is the past and which is the future. Meanwhile, the short (170 pages gets you to "Acknowledgments") campaign prop is full of such simplistic pablum you could use it for a second grade reader -- if, that is, you don't mind turning our children into sociopaths. By the way, if you want more Trumped-up propaganda, check the usual suspects: Ann Coulter: In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! (2016, Sentinel); Dick Morris/Eileen McGann: Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary (2016, Humanix Books); Wayne Allyn Root: Angry White Male: How the Donald Trump Phenomenon Is Changing America -- and What We Can All Do to Save the Middle Class (2016, Skyhorse Publishing). Yanis Varoufakis: And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future (2016, Nation Books): Economist, became Finance Minister when the leftist Syriza party won in Greece, precipitating a crisis within the Eurozone resulting in Greece being forced to suffer punitive austerity and Varoufakis leaving the government in disgust. This appears to aim at something more general, but the author's unique experience offers a distinct starting point. Varoufakis has a similar previous book, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy (3rd ed, paperback, 2015, Zed Books). Dov Waxman: Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel (2016, Princeton University Press): There have always been segments of the Jewish population in the US that have been critical of Israel, but especially after the 1948 and 1967 wars Israel enjoyed deep support among American Jews. That has begun to shift, mostly along generational lines, as Israel has moved hard to the right politically, as its militarism and human rights abuses have proven ever more difficult to justify on security grounds. This book looks at that, and to do so fairly you have to look at the issues that underly these divisions. Edward O Wilson: Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life (2016, Liveright): Legendary biologist/entomologist (the study of bugs), has increasingly turned to writing about how much damage people have done to the natural world, and at 86 isn't done yet. He has a case, and his anger is justified. Still, the notion that the earth cares, much less is fighting back, is a fanciful conceit, flattering to the same people who scarcely comprehend what they are doing -- not so much to the earth as to ourselves. Richard D Wolff: Capitalism's Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown (paperback, 2016, Haymarket): Lefty economist, has been tracking economic crisis since 2009's Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It, and for that matter did something about it, being closely associated with the Occupy Movement. Short, topical pieces written over several years. Other recent books also noted:
Previously mentioned books (book pages noted where available), new in paperback:
Ask a question, or send a comment. Thursday, July 7, 2016 Book RoundupHere's another batch of forty book blurbs as I try to keep up with what's being published in my main areas of concern: politics, history, economics, occasionally something else. This batch isn't especially up to date: I went to work on this tonight for the first time in several weeks and found that I had already picked out 38 books, so I added two more from my scratch file. Real catch-up research begins after this post, but at this point the scratch file is pretty close to bare, so it may take some time to fill it out. "Also noted" books are just that. They are more/less relevant and as such notable but for one reason or another I didn't feel like taking the time to write more. No "second notice" paperback reprints this time, mostly because the list is rather short. Maybe next time. Peter Bergen: United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists (2016, Crown): Interviewed Osama bin Laden beck before he became infamous, turning that into a career as a terrorism expert (i.e., Islamic terrorism -- he doesn't seem to recognize any other kind. His books range from Holy War, Inc to The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader to Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad.) He notes that some 300 Americans "have been indicted or convicted of terrorism charges" since 9/11, so he thought he'd look into their backgrounds and how they became such fearsome terrorists. Don't know whether he also looks into tactics used by law enforcement to identify these terrorists, since getting indicted by the US government is a pretty low bar. Howard Brick/Christopher Phelps: Radicals in America: The US Left Since the Second World War (paperback, 2015, Cambridge University Press): Part of a series of history books, so the subject and scope were assigned (and thankfully not by David Horowitz). What follows is organized chronologically, moving from old left to new left to the broad smorgasbord of quasi-left protest and advocacy efforts that followed -- last two chapters are "Over the Rainbow" and "What Democracy Looks Like." Douglas Brinkley: Rightful Heritage: Franklin D Roosevelt and the Land of America (2016, Harper): Brinkley has written several books about America's national parks and wilderness areas, including an obvious predecessor to this one, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2009). TR was better known as an outdoorsman, but FDR greatly expanded the national park system, and his public works projects made those parks accessible to millions of Americans. Gail Lumet Buckley: The Black Calhouns: From Civil War to Civil Rights With One African American Family (2016, Atlantic Monthly Press): A family history going back six generations, starting with Moses Calhoun, a "house slave" who became a successful businessman in post-Civil War Atlanta, following two branches of the family -- one that stayed in the South, the other migrating to Brooklyn. The author is the daughter of Lena Horne, and previously wrote The Hornes: An American Family, and American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military From the Revolution to Desert Storm. Peter Catapano/Simon Critchley: The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments (2015, Liveright): A broad overview of what academic philosophers are thinking about these days, a big book (816 pp) of essays originally published as "The Stone" by the New York Times. Wide range of pieces, many touching on politics (or at least ethics, not unrelated), only a few going back to the canon (one title I like: "Of Hume and Bondage"). As a former philosophy major I'm intrigued, but maybe not enough. I will say that virtually none of the author names are familiar to me. Jefferson Cowie: The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (2016, Princeton University Press): As I understand it, Cowie is arguing that it's impossible to construct a leftward shift like the New Deal in current or future America because the actual New Deal appeared in circumstances that cannot be reproduced today. Cowie's argument is that the 1930s were a unique, "a temporary cessation of enduring tensions involving race, immigration, culture, class, and individualism" that occurred in the 1930s. Immigration was curtailed significantly in 1923, while race iniquities were locked in the deep freeze of segregation -- a non-issue only in the sense that the New Deal could largely ignore it (often by not challenging racial discrimination). Arguably, this meant a more homogeneous society, one where people could care more for others because the others weren't that different. Then WWII came along and bound together everyone -- an effect today's wars don't have because they involve so few people. I think it's more likely that the class consciousness that had been brewing since the robber baron era threatened to boil over during the Depression, but faded in the postwar affluence, especially when Cold War ideology took hold and made capitalism seem more like freedom than wage slavery. And as manufacturing gave way to service jobs, it became harder to regain that class consciousness, even as economic situations worsened. In today's environment it's easy to blame the lack of class consciousness on racial and ethnic and cultural divisions, but those differences have always existed. While major obstacles to a new New Deal persist, I think we're growing closer to seeing through the petty differences and distractions of the past. Lee Drutman: The Business of America Is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate (2015, Oxford University Press): As late as the 1970s most corporations didn't have their own lobbying offices, whereas now many have 100 or more lobbyists on staff. This looks to be a pretty thorough analysis of what happened, why, and how all that lobbying distorts politics and policy. Richard Engel: And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (2016, Simon & Schuster): NBC's "chief foreign correspondent," a post which has put him in front of cameras in various Middle Eastern hot spots, including a brief period when he was abducted in Syria. I've never found his reporting especially astute but perhaps this is a better forum for reflection. Has two previous books: A Fist in the Hornet's Nest: On the Ground in Baghdad Before, During, and After the War (2004, which makes the word "after" stand out, as if he bought "Mission Accomplished" hook, line and sinker), and War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq (2008). Tim Flannery: Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis (2015, Atlantic Monthly Press): Australian paleontologist, I first ran into him with his broad sweep The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples (2001) although he had previously written a similar book about his homeland: The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People (1994). His interests then moved to climate change, writing The Weather Makers: The History & Future Impact of Climate Change (2007) and Now or Never: Why We Must Act Now to End Climate Change and Create a Sustainable Future (2009), and this follows in that vein, trying to find some hope in geoengineering -- which even if it can compensate for too long denial, is hardly a solution to too much denialism. Lily Geismer: Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (2015, Princeton University Press): Focuses on the high-tech corridor of Route 128 around Boston, but that's just part of a more general movement, as the Democrats have embraced socially liberal professionals, especially in high-tech, to make up for their losses of unionized workers -- indeed, they've aided and abetted the destruction of unions in part because there's more money in professionals and similarly-minded businesses. Gary Gerstle: Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government From the Founding to the Present (2015, Princeton University Press): A history of America refracted through a pair of concepts about governmental power. Funny thing is that the people who talk the most about liberty are often the same ones most eager to use the power of the state to impose their will on a reluctant citizenry. Gerstle previously wrote the similarly sweeping American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Rebecca Gordon: American Nuremberg: The US Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes (2016, Hot Books): Previously wrote Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States (2014, Oxford University Press) and Cruel and Unusual: How Welfare "Reform" Punishes Poor People (2001), drawing on her Ph.D. in Ethics and Social Theory. This one, too, seems to focus more on torture than the grosser war crimes that seem so obvious to me. Jacob Darwin Hamblin: Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (2013, Oxford University Press): The story here is about how the US military has been working ever since the start of the Cold War to figure out how the US can create environmental disasters and use them as strategic weapons: inducing droughts in the Soviet Union is just one example. Not sure if this is covered, but the US military continues to war game global warming -- the idea may be taboo among right-wing politicos, but the realities impinge on global military strategy (ranging from African droughts to submarine cover in the Arctic). Richard L Hasen: Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections (2016, Yale University Press): The title a play on the Citizens United ruling, where the right-wing Supreme Court concocted a scheme to eliminate limits on campaign spending and in principle turn elections into auctions among the superrich. Hasen, a professor of law and political science, has covered this beat before, notably in The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown (2012). Joan Hoff: A Faustian Foreign Policy From Woodrow Wilson to George W Bush: Dreams of Perfectability (paperback, 2007, Cambridge University Press): I don't normally list books this old, but when I see a blurb line like this I have to make a note: "Like no book since William Appleman Williams' The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Hoff's study powerfully demonstrates that a better future for America (and the world) lies in coming to terms with the corrupt bargains of the past." Of course, she could have started with William McKinley but that was plain greed -- no one tops the sanctimonious arrogance of Wilson and Bush, plus you get the Dulles Brothers, Henry Kissinger, and Oliver North sandwiched in the middle. Harold Holzer/Norton Garfinkle: A Just and Generous Nation: Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity (2015, Basic Books): "Rather than a commitment to eradicating slavery or a defense of the Union, [the authors] argue, Lincoln's guiding principle was the defense of equal economic opportunity." They do figure that the emancipation of slaves was a step toward such opportunity, but also bring up other efforts, casting the first Republican president as "the protector not just of personal freedom but of the American dream itself." In other words, the opposite of the party which seeks to crush that dream today. Nancy Isenberg: White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016, Vintage): A history of the white underclass in America going back to colonial immigrants, many of whom sold themselves as indentured servants, continuing through generation after generation of impoverishment and the various forms of approbation heaped on them by the more affluent -- I rather wish she had used the term "waste people" for the title. Author previously wrote Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr and co-authored (with Andrew Burstein) Madison and Jefferson. Susan Jacoby: Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion (2016, Pantheon): Looks into the history of various people converting to one religion of another, with Saul/Paul a prominent early example, and Muhammad Ali and George W Bush among the more recent. Secularism has been a repeated theme in Jacoby's writing, especially Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004). Greg Jobin-Leeds/AgitArte: When We Fight, We Win: Twenty-First Century Social Movements and the Activits That Are Transforming Our World (paperback, 2016, New Press): I can't say as I consider all of the author's examples as victories, but it is clear that they all resonate with substantial numbers of (mostly) young people, to such point that they've become reference posts for more conventional political campaigns. I suspect a more accurate title might be If We Don't Fight, We Won't Win -- and by "fight" I mean a quaint term from an earlier era: organize. Fred Kaplan: Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (2016, Simon & Schuster): A lot of grey lines here, especially ethically where propaganda and censorship blend into espionage and subversion, where the lack of blood may make transgressions seem more acceptable, where state and non-state actors cloak themselves in similar obscurity, where one's dirty tricks may be another's terrorism. I can't help but feel disgust over virtually every aspect of the subject. More or less related: Richard A Clarke/Robert Knake: Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It (paperback, 2011, Ecco); PW Singer/Allan Friedman: Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know (paperback, 2014, Oxford University Press); Shane Harris: @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex (paperback, 2015, Mariner Books); Marc Goodman: Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It (2015, Doubleday); Richard Stiennon: There Will Be Cyberwar: How the Move to Network-Centric War Fighting Has Set the Stage for Cyberwar (paperback, 2015, IT-Harvest); Adam Segal: The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age (2016, PublicAffairs). Robert D Kaplan: In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond (2016, Random House): Travel journalist and imperialist pundit/apologist (or in his own mind strategist), started out writing propagandistic books on Ethiopia (Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind the Famine) and Afghanistan (Soldiers of God: With the Mujahidin in Afghanistan, followed by his more substantial Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (1993), remembered today for its background on Yugoslavia just before it was dismembered, but actually the longest section of the book his caustic portrait of Romania. Here he returns in 2013-14 and evidently finds the same hellhole he knew before. Kevin M Kruse: One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (2015, Basic Books): Argues that the idea that the United States "is, was, and always has been a Christian nation" originated in the 1930s when opponents of FDR, including corporations like General Motors and Hilton Hotels, recruited conservative clergymen to attack the "pagan statism" of the New Deal. That line of attack gained more traction after WWII when "godless communism" became a more plausible enemy, and Dwight Eisenhower proved a particularly useful idiot for the meme. This complements the similarly themed Steve K Green: Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding (2015). Charles R Lister: The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency (2016, Oxford University Press); Middle East/terrorism wonk, has been involved with "a two-year process of face-to-face engagement with the leaderships of over 100 Syrian armed opposition groups," a background which has resulted in a substantial (540 pp) book with a reputable publisher. That certainly doesn't give him equal access to all sides, nor the sort of distance academics will eventually require to chart the history of this tragic war. But he is likely to shed light on the granularity of the opposition groups, and the extent to which they have gravitated towards Jihadism as the war evolved and the situation on the ground deteriorated. Erik Loomis: Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe (2015, New Press): With the ability to move workplaces to anywhere in the world, you get a "race to the bottom" where economic incentives tend to favor the lowest standards of regulation, including pollution controls and health and safety standards for workers. The result, predictably, is a rash of disasters (the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2013 is one example cited). Of course, this only gets worse as unions and their political allies are weakened. Robert W McChesney/John Nichols: People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy (2016, Nation Books): A major thrust of business in recent years has been to eliminate the cost of jobs by employing new technology, which (along with shipping jobs overseas) has allowed profits to soar while weakening workers. The authors have separately and together written many books on media control and workers' political struggles, and every year gives them more fodder to write about. Joy Newton-Small: Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works (2016, Time: 1): Don't know whether this book is serious or not, but either way I couldn't resist noting the title. Blurb says the author is "one of the nation's most deeply respected and sourced journalists" and adds that she gathered "deep, exclusive and behind-closed-doors" interviews with dozens of notable women in politics, including Sarah Palin and Valerie Jarrett. Broad, indeed. Henry Petroski: The Road Taken: The History and Future of America's Infrastructure (2016, Bloomsbury USA): Author of numerous books on engineering looks primarily at America's highway system, how it was built, how it is falling apart, and how (when and if) we try to repair it. I doubt he gets very deep into the politics and economics of it all, which is the main reason infrastructure is deteriorating so, but the technical understanding is bound to be interesting. Related: Earl Swift: The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways (2011; paperback, 2012, Mariner Books) Wendell Potter/Nick Penniman: Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It (2016, Bloomsbury): Few things are more obvious than the insidious effect money has on American politics: even when it doesn't decide who wins, it determines who runs, on what issues, and after election day it becomes even more influential. No doubt the vast majority of Americans would love to see something done about this corruption, but the issue is promptly forgotten after each election, perhaps because the winners are by definition those most skilled at playing the game. Every books post I do has something on this, and no reason to think this book is exceptional, but it's as good as any to hang the issue on this time. Some others I haven't mentioned yet: Robert E Mutch: Buying the Vote: A History of Campaign Finance Reform (2014, Oxford University Press); Derek Cressman: When Money Talks: The High Price of "Free" Speech and the Selling of Democracy (paperback, 2016, Berrett-Koehler). Stephen Prothero: Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose Elections): The Battles That Define America From Jefferson's Heresies to Gay Marriage (2016, Harper One): Seems intuitively right, although the extreme vitriol of anti-abortion activists and their hegemonic sway over a party that is only really seriously dedicated to making the rich ever richer seems like some kind of counter-example. Prothero's 19th century examples are bound to seem quaint, but I've long been struck by how much Mormons and Muslims have in common, and today's anti-Muslim backlash is actually rather tame compared to 19th-century anti-Mormonism. More narrowly cultural issues are probably even clearer: I can, for instance, remember how nuts certain Christian clergy went over rock and roll, but odds are you can't. Jedediah Purdy: After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015, Simon & Schuster): A philosophical digression on life in the era of humans, moving as we have ever further from the systems of nature which preceded us. Author was regarded as some kind of prodigy when he first appeared in 1999; has since become a professor of law and moved from cultural issues to more weighty, which doesn't necessarily mean better, thoughts. Steven Radelet: The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World (2015, Simon & Schuster): The 2000s, in particular, saw the US ruled by the most slovenly pro-business regime in history, yet they only achieved anemic growth by inflating a bubble of fraud and debt (all wiped out when the bubble burst). On the other hand, during the same decade much of the "developing world" accelerated its development (especially China, India, and Brazil), and virtually everywhere saw remarkable progress against poverty, disease, and so forth. This is their story. I wonder whether the book notes that peace and relatively progressive governments were critical factors. Lisa Randall: Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe (2015, Ecco): Physicist, teaches particle physics and cosmology at Harvard, writes popular science books on the side, previously: Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions (2005), Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World (2011), and Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space (2013). This one develops a theory that dark matter had something to do with a comet which hit earth 65 million years ago wiping out the dinosaurs, but that's just one of many fascinating interconnections. Simon Reid-Henry: The Political Origins of Inequality: Why a More Equal World Is Better for Us All (2015, University of Chicago Press): Considers inequality "the defining issue of our time," but takes a longer view historically, going back to the 18th century, and a broader one geographically, spanning the former colonial world. The common denominator is evidently politics: above all else, inequality is the result of rigging the game. Somehow manages to cover this with remarkable brevity (all in 208 pp). Dani Rodrik: Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science (2015, WW Norton): Economist, specialty is globalization and development -- most important insight I've gained from him is that any nation that adopts more liberal trade policies also needs to expand its safety net to compensate for the victims (something the US did the opposite of). This seems to be a general purpose economics primer, going back to Adam Smith and working up basic models and their math. Kenneth Scheve/David Stasavage: Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe (2016, Princeton University Press): After studying the ebb and flow of progressive income taxation in twenty countries over two centuries, the authors conclude that "governments don't tax the rich just because inequality is high or rising -- they do it when people believe that such taxes compensate for the state unfairly privileging the wealthy," mostly citing wars requiring mass mobilization as the prime example. No doubt marginal tax rates in the US rose during WWII and further in the early years of the Cold War, but they had previously risen when the Great Depression highlighted the unfairness of a system that had greatly favored the rich and caused great harm to everyone else when it failed. David Sehat: The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible (2015, Simon & Schuster): Sure, politicians of every conceivable stripe have looked to the nation's Founders when they could find (or plausibly invent) a congruence of interests -- a stance where infallibility begats inflexibility. Of course, those Founders were hardly of one mind. Sehal focuses on Thomas Jefferson, who strikes me as the one least likely to regard his own position as eternal, but evidently provides a focal point for a history of constitutional politicizing. Sehat previously wrote The Myth of American Religious Freedom (2011). Rick Shenkman: Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics (2016, Basic Books): More of a journalist than anything else, has long been interested in the murky margins of dis-knowledge -- an early book was Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History, but more to the point is Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter (2008). Not sure about the stone age, but one mistake many of us make today is to flock behind the loudest, most self-confident alpha male we can find (the GOP does its best to breed them). Another is that many of us readily buy into easily manipulated identities. I imagine that most of this you could easily figure out on your own, much as it pains us to think about it. Wen Stephenson: What We're Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches From the Front Lines of Climate Justice (2015, Beacon Press): A survey of the "new American radicals" who focus on climate and environmental issues, their focus having more to do with their understanding of human rights -- how environmental degradation hurts people -- than conservative (and hubristic) notions of "saving the earth." David Talbot: The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government (2015, Harper): Big (715 pp) biography of Eisenhower's CIA Director, the brother of Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a pair responsible for some of the most egregious acts of Cold War America, ones that continue to reverberate down to the present day. A more succinct version of this story is Stephen Kinzer: The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War (2013). Oddly enough, Talbot previously wrote a book with pretty much the same title: Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (2007; paperback, 2008, Free Press). L Randall Wray: Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist (2015, Princeton University Press): Hyman P Minsky (1919-96) matters because of his unique insights into the instability of modern finance, a point he made well before it became obvious in the 2008 financial meltdown. Until that happened, you might recall, much of the economic profession was dedicated to assuring us that such a breakdown couldn't possibly happen -- that we had entered an "age of moderation" where Milton Friedman's minor corrections to the money supply was all the world needed. Keynes, who had much to say about how to fix depressions, has made a similar comeback, but Minsky was always an outlier. Other recent books also noted:
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