Andrew's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:40:01 -0800 60 Andrew's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Naked Lunch 563798 Naked Lunch is the unnerving tale of a monumental descent into the hellish world of a narcotics addict as he travels from New York to Tangiers, then into Interzone, a nightmarish modern urban wasteland in which the forces of good and evil vie for control of the individual and all of humanity. By mixing the fantastic and the realistic with his own unmistakable vision and voice, Burroughs has created a unique masterpiece that is a classic of twentieth-century fiction.]]> 232 William S. Burroughs Andrew 3 3.28 1959 Naked Lunch
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1959
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/01/31
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]]> Katie 3001708
Ever so nimble at bashing heads with her little hammer, Katie Slapes was her parents' joy and certain fortune. As the cellar filled with corpses, the family coffers filled with cash.

Pretty young Philo Drax didn't have a family anymore. Katie had finished off her grandfather and her mother, and promised to put Philo out of her misery very soon now.

It was a hard, cruel world for an innocent girl alone, but Philo was glad to be alive, and eager to continue so. She had prospeccts of a romantic marriage to sustain her through her trials. While Katie, poor creature, had only her cunning... and her hammer.

DON'T EVER TURN YOUR BACK ON KATIE!]]> 295 Michael McDowell 0380801841 Andrew 5 4.12 1982 Katie
author: Michael McDowell
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> Death of a City 58354705 208 Lionel White 0709123620 Andrew 0 to-read 1.00 Death of a City
author: Lionel White
name: Andrew
average rating: 1.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Tribe 2327295 Drawing on Jewish mythology and folklore, the novel also combines well-drawn characters and police procedural to create a memorable and humane horror novel.]]> 339 Bari Wood 0451111044 Andrew 5 3.71 1981 The Tribe
author: Bari Wood
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves:
review:

]]> The Secret Agent 86658
Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a full and up-to-date bibliography, a comprehensive chronology and a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a "monstrous town," a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and savage butchery. It also discusses contemporary anarchist activity in the UK, imperialism, and Conrad's narrative techniques.]]> 304 Joseph Conrad 0192801694 Andrew 0 to-read 3.60 1907 The Secret Agent
author: Joseph Conrad
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1907
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cobalt (Valentine & Lovelace Mystery #2)]]> 364741 256 Nathan Aldyne 1555834418 Andrew 0 to-read 3.96 1982 Cobalt (Valentine & Lovelace Mystery #2)
author: Nathan Aldyne
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Canary (Valentine & Lovelace Mystery #4)]]> 364740 282 Nathan Aldyne 1555834434 Andrew 0 to-read 3.89 1986 Canary (Valentine & Lovelace Mystery #4)
author: Nathan Aldyne
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Contract: White Lady (Black Berets #4)]]> 2633533 Book by McCray, Mike 176 Mike McCray 0440114268 Andrew 0 to-read 3.50 1984 Contract: White Lady (Black Berets #4)
author: Mike McCray
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Miss Mack 202907201 Michael McDowell 2381961313 Andrew 0 3.72 Miss Mack
author: Michael McDowell
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.72
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/21
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]]> The Amulet 446299 352 Michael McDowell 0380405849 Andrew 0 to-read 3.89 1979 The Amulet
author: Michael McDowell
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Cold Moon Over Babylon 571283
Margaret Larkin has been robbed of her innocence -- and her life. Her killer is rich and powerful, beyond the grasp of earthly law.

Now, in the murky depths of the local river, a shifting, almost human shape slowly takes form. Night after night it will pursue the murderer. It will watch him from the trees. And in the chill waters of the river, it will claim him in the ultimate embrace.

The cold moon rises, the awful squishing sounds begin...]]> 292 Michael McDowell 0380486601 Andrew 0 to-read 3.96 1980 Cold Moon Over Babylon
author: Michael McDowell
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> Gilded Needles 467107
Only a few blocks away, amidst the elegant mansions and lily-white reputations of Gramercy Park and Washington Square lived Judge James Stallworth. He was determined to crush Lena's evil crew, and with icy indifference he ordered three deaths in her family.

Then, one Sunday, all the Stallworths receive individual invitations - invitations to their own funerals. Black Lena has vowed a reign of revenge. Can even the Stallworth fortune and awesome power save them from her diabolical lust for revenge?]]> 342 Michael McDowell 0380763982 Andrew 0 to-read 3.93 1980 Gilded Needles
author: Michael McDowell
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (Blackwater, #1-6)]]> 23476097
Now, McDowell’s masterpiece—the serial novel, Blackwater—returns to thrill and terrify a new generation of readers, with all six volumes available for the first time as a single e-book.

Featuring an insightful new introduction by John Langan, Blackwater traces more than fifty years in the lives of the powerful Caskey family of Perdido, Alabama, under the influence of the mysterious and beautiful—but not quite human—Elinor Dammert.

The Flood heralds the arrival of a visitor who will change the Caskey family—and the town—forever�

When the town builds The Levee, it proves a vain attempt to control a horrific power that can never be contained�

The House hides terrible secrets that whisper in closed rooms and scrabble at locked doors�

The War reveals family secrets more deadly and devastating than anything Perdido has ever dreamed in its deepest nightmares�

The Fortune brings happiness and power—but even greater terror�

And finally, the mysterious saga of the Caskey family ends the only way it can—in terrible judgment and fury delivered under the cover of a relentless, earth-shattering Rain.

Will Errickson (Too Much Horror Fiction) writes, “Michael McDowell has written a rich, layered historical novel with many Southern Gothic touches, filled out with memorable characters and satisfying moments of death and shock.”]]> 895 Michael McDowell Andrew 0 to-read 4.37 1983 Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (Blackwater, #1-6)
author: Michael McDowell
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Elementals 301053
The McCrays and Savages, two fine Mobile families allied by marriage, have been coming to Beldame for years. This summer, with a terrible funeral behind them and a messy divorce coming up, even Luker McCray and little India down from New York are looking forward to being alone at Beldame.

But they won't be alone. For something there, something they don't like to think about, is thinking about them...and about all the ways to make them die.]]> 292 Michael McDowell 0380783606 Andrew 5 3.98 1981 The Elementals
author: Michael McDowell
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1981
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/11/21
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review:

]]> Drinking Coffee Elsewhere 6563987 The acclaimed debut short story collection that introduced the world to an arresting and unforgettable new voice in fiction, from multi-award winning author ZZ Packer

Her impressive range and talent are abundantly Packer dazzles with her command of language, surprising and delighting us with unexpected turns and indelible images, as she takes us into the lives of characters on the periphery, unsure of where they belong. We meet a Brownie troop of black girls who are confronted with a troop of white girls; a young man who goes with his father to the Million Man March and must decide where his allegiance lies; an international group of drifters in Japan, who are starving, unable to find work; a girl in a Baltimore ghetto who has dreams of the larger world she has seen only on the screens in the television store nearby, where the Lithuanian shopkeeper holds out hope for attaining his own American Dream.

With penetrating insight, ZZ Packer helps us see the world with a clearer vision. Fresh, versatile, and captivating, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a striking and unforgettable collection, sure to stand out among the contemporary canon of fiction.Ěý]]> 288 ZZ Packer 1101215658 Andrew 2 4.03 2004 Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
author: ZZ Packer
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2004
rating: 2
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date added: 2024/09/29
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh (Winnie-the-Pooh, #1-4)]]> 99110
Gorgeous watercolor illustrations from Ernest H. Shepard appear in all their glory. With beautiful colors and simple lines, these images hold their own as classics. The tales, filled with superb story lines and lessons, will continue to capture the hearts of new generations.]]> 557 A.A. Milne 0525467262 Andrew 5
The whole thing feels straight up existentialist and avant-garde compared with most other age-appropriate stuff before or since—I mean truly, if you are going to read something over and over and over (which duh, you will if you have a kiddo) this is the one desert island pick, the thing that can be read on a loop because it is so totemic, it contains multitudes and is profoundly so simple, you know, the kind of mantra you can’t forget, just all killer no filler.

]]> 4.48 1926 The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh (Winnie-the-Pooh, #1-4)
author: A.A. Milne
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.48
book published: 1926
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/09/16
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Like a less pathologically minded Peanuts, the Pooh tales are uniquely non-normative in fully embracing a misbegotten gang of fuck ups w/o any moralizing and barely any lessons learned (tbh Pooh and friends wouldn’t be out of place alongside McMurphy and the Cuckoos nest fam).

The whole thing feels straight up existentialist and avant-garde compared with most other age-appropriate stuff before or since—I mean truly, if you are going to read something over and over and over (which duh, you will if you have a kiddo) this is the one desert island pick, the thing that can be read on a loop because it is so totemic, it contains multitudes and is profoundly so simple, you know, the kind of mantra you can’t forget, just all killer no filler.


]]> Mansfield Park 45032 488 Jane Austen Andrew 4 3.86 1814 Mansfield Park
author: Jane Austen
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Lou Reed: The King of New York]]> 65215410 The most complete and penetrating biography of the rock master, whose stature grows every year.

Since his death ten years ago, Lou Reed’s living presence has only grown. The great rock-poet presided over the marriage of Brill Building pop and the European avant-garde, and left American culture transfigured. In Lou The King of New York , Will Hermes offers the definitive narrative of Reed’s life and legacy, dramatizing his long, brilliant, and contentious dialogue with fans, critics, fellow artists, and assorted habitués of the demimonde. We witness Reed’s complex partnerships with David Bowie, Andy Warhol, John Cale, and Laurie Anderson; track the deadpan wit, street-smart edge, and poetic flights that defined his craft as a singer and songwriter with the Velvet Underground and beyond; and explore the artistic ambition and gift for self-sabotage he took from his mentor Delmore Schwartz.

As Hermes follows Reed from Lower East Side cold-water flats to the landmark status he later achieved, he also tells the story of New York City as a cultural capital. The first biographer to draw on the New York Public Library’s much-publicized Reed archive, Hermes employs the library collections, the release of previously unheard recordings, and a wealth of recent interviews to give us a new Lou Reed―a pioneer in living and writing about nonbinary sexuality and gender identity, a committed artist who pursued beauty and noise with equal fervor, and a turbulent and sometimes truculent man whose emotional imprint endures.]]> 529 Will Hermes 0374193398 Andrew 3 4.21 2023 Lou Reed: The King of New York
author: Will Hermes
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/14
date added: 2023/10/14
shelves:
review:
some fun anecdotes and clever turns of phrase but short on insight. The twin theses of the book � that Lou is NYC incarnate, and that Lou’s story is incomplete without the stories of his collaborators � are super compelling, but Hermes doesn’t stick the landing on either one. Cale especially never really comes to life, at one point Hermes takes a half-hearted shot at him claiming he was likely envious of Lou, and then he makes the exact same point a half a page later, but in both cases never bothers to back it up. Breezy read but would have killed to see McDonough take a run at it
]]> <![CDATA[Your Favorite Band is Killing Me]]> 26245024
Beatles vs. Stones. Biggie vs. Tupac. Kanye vs. Taylor. Who do you choose? And what does that say about you? Actually -- what do these endlessly argued-about pop music rivalries say about us?

Music opinions bring out passionate debate in people, and Steven Hyden knows that firsthand. Each chapter in Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me focuses on a pop music rivalry, from the classic to the very recent, and draws connections to the larger forces surrounding the pairing.

Through Jimi Hendrix vs. Eric Clapton, Hyden explores burning out and fading away, while his take on Miley vs. Sinead gives readers a glimpse into the perennial battle between old and young. Funny and accessible, Hyden's writing combines cultural criticism, personal anecdotes, and music history -- and just may prompt you to give your least favorite band another chance.]]> 304 Steven Hyden 0316259152 Andrew 3 3.79 2016 Your Favorite Band is Killing Me
author: Steven Hyden
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2016
rating: 3
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date added: 2023/10/14
shelves:
review:
feel like the second I read that Corgan is self conscious about having his mothers hips, I realized I would always find a soft spot in my heart for him. can’t say that’ll ever fully send me overboard for his music, but whatever the case my heart goes out to the guy. Maybe a half dozen too many galaxy brain takes in these chapters but there’s some great stuff here, esp love the argument that Prince MJ Axl Rose Bob Dylan and Corgan only make sense in the context of being from the Midwest
]]> Another Country 38474
Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.]]> 448 James Baldwin 0141186372 Andrew 0 to-read 4.32 1962 Another Country
author: James Baldwin
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis]]> 48667449 218 Katherine Levine Einstein 1108769497 Andrew 4 trot-trot-to-boston
Incredible book, with next level of research. honestly the only ding is by the time it wraps, we’re just getting started. There’s not many books like this, but this is the kind of book that needs to be three times longer]]> 4.08 Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis
author: Katherine Levine Einstein
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.08
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/02
date added: 2023/07/03
shelves: trot-trot-to-boston
review:
if you ever in find yourself in the leafy affluent suburbs of Massachusetts and stumble across a yard that’s rocking a “in this house we believe� sign (speaking to a general sympathy for the marginalized) alongside another sign in that very same yard that’s super NIMBY, like pleading for you to vote against affordable housing or an up-zoning measure (something that could materially help those marginalized folks), you may ask yourself “what in the fuck.� Or if you’re a sicko white supremacist militia dude from the one of those less affluent parts of Mass, or rural NH, you might be like “wait, why didn’t we think of that?�

Incredible book, with next level of research. honestly the only ding is by the time it wraps, we’re just getting started. There’s not many books like this, but this is the kind of book that needs to be three times longer
]]> <![CDATA[Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol: The Explosive Story of M19, America's First Female Terrorist Group]]> 42201358
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced that it was “morning in America.� He declared that the American dream wasn’t over, but the United States needed to lower taxes, shrink government control, and flex its military muscles abroad to herald what some called “the Reagan Revolution.� At the same time, a tiny band of American-born, well-educated extremists were working for a very different kind of revolution.

By the end of the 1970s, many radicals had called it quits, but six veteran women extremists came together to finish the fight. These women had spent their entire adult lives embroiled in political protesting the Vietnam War, fighting for black and Native American liberation, and confronting US imperialism. They created a new organization to wage their The May 19th Communist Organization, or “M19,� a name derived from the birthday shared by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, two of their revolutionary idols. Together, these six women carried out some of the most daring operations in the history of domestic terrorism—from prison breakouts and murderous armed robberies, to a bombing campaign that wreaked havoc on the nation’s capital. Three decades later, M19’s actions and shocking tactics still reverberate for many reasons, but one truly sets them unlike any other American terrorist group before or since, M19 was created and led by women.

Tonight We Bombed the US Capitol tells the full story of M19 for the first time, alongside original photos and declassified FBI documents. Through the group’s history, intelligence and counterterrorism expert William Rosenau helps us understand how homegrown extremism—a threat that still looms over us today—is born.]]> 320 William Rosenau 1501170120 Andrew 4 3.33 2020 Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol: The Explosive Story of M19, America's First Female Terrorist Group
author: William Rosenau
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/19
date added: 2023/07/02
shelves:
review:
everyone makes fun of The Weather Underground for being naive and reckless and maybe even a CIA psyop to undermine the anti war movement, but I have a soft spot for lefty geezers like them and Fanon and the feminist radicals in this who, tactics aside, appear to be on the right side of history for literally almost everything. Sucks that the writer is such a conservative fuddy duddy who thinks his characters are twerps, but miraculously he makes this easy to ignore and instead his gallery of anti establishment beautiful losers get to let their freak flags fly
]]> <![CDATA[Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State]]> 61358585 A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America--from the acclaimed author of Thrown

Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections--a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs tells the true story of intelligence specialist Reality Winner, a lone young woman who stuffs a state secret under her skirt and trusts the wrong people to help. After printing five pages of dangerous information she was never supposed to see, Winner finds herself at the mercy of forces more invasive than she could have possibly imagined.

Following Winner's unlikely journey from rural Texas to a federal courtroom, Howley maps a hidden world, drawing in John Walker Lindh, Lady Gaga, Edward Snowden, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Howley's subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life.]]> 233 Kerry Howley 0525655492 Andrew 4 3.76 2023 Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State
author: Kerry Howley
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/14
date added: 2023/07/02
shelves:
review:
transcendent prose, with keenly observed heartbreaking details averaging at least once per paragraph. Yes sure she’s written for Reason mag but if you squint you can look past the libertarian leanings
]]> <![CDATA[Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan (American Music Series)]]> 61480549
Steely Dan’s songs are exercises in fictional world-building. No one else in the classic-rock canon has conjured a more vivid cast of rogues and heroes, creeps and schmucks, lovers and dreamers and cold-blooded operators—or imbued their characters with so much humanity. Pulling from history, lived experience, pulp fiction, the lore of the counterculture, and their own darkly comic imaginations, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker summoned protagonists who seemed like fully formed people with complicated pasts, scars they don’t talk about, delusions and desires and memories they can’t shake. From Rikki to Dr. Wu, Hoops McCann to Kid Charlemagne, Franny from NYU to the Woolly Man without a Face, every name is a locked-room mystery, beguiling listeners and earning the band an exceptionally passionate and ever-growing cult fandom. Quantum Criminals presents the world of Steely Dan as it has never been seen, much less heard. Artist Joan LeMay has crafted lively, color-saturated images of her favorite characters from the Daniverse to accompany writer Alex Pappademas’s explorations of the famous and obscure songs that inspired each painting, in short essays full of cultural context, wild speculation, inspired dot-connecting, and the occasional conspiracy theory. All of it is refracted through the perspectives of the characters themselves, making for a musical companion unlike any other. Funny, discerning, and visually stunning, Quantum Criminals is a singular celebration of Steely Dan’s musical cosmos.]]> 280 Alex Pappademas 1477324992 Andrew 5 4.43 Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan (American Music Series)
author: Alex Pappademas
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.43
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/08
date added: 2023/07/02
shelves:
review:
top tier anecdotes and some galaxy brain insights, interspersed with like 50 or so paintings of the beautiful losers and major dudes in the songs. even convinced me to revisit the stuff they put out since the 90s!
]]> Valparaiso 19022 107 Don DeLillo 033042694X Andrew 5 3.42 1999 Valparaiso
author: Don DeLillo
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/05/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again]]> 29434
A journalist's provocative, spellbinding account of her eighteen months spent undercover will transform the way we think about what it means to be a man

Following in the tradition of John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me) and Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed), Norah Vincent absorbed a cultural experience and reported back on what she observed incognito. For more than a year and a half she ventured into the world as Ned, with an ever-present five o'clock shadow, a crew cut, wire-rim glasses, and her own size 11 1/2 shoes—a perfect disguise that enabled her to observe the world of men as an insider. The result is a sympathetic, shrewd, and thrilling tour de force of immersion journalism that's destined to challenge preconceptions and attract enormous attention.

With her buddies on the bowling league she enjoyed the rough and rewarding embrace of male camaraderie undetectable to an outsider. A stint in a high-octane sales job taught her the gut-wrenching pressures endured by men who would do anything to succeed. She frequented sex clubs, dated women hungry for love but bitter about men, and infiltrated all-male communities as hermetically sealed as a men's therapy group, and even a monastery. Narrated in her utterly captivating prose style and with exquisite insight, humor, empathy, nuance, and at great personal cost, Norah uses her intimate firsthand experience to explore the many remarkable mysteries of gender identity as well as who men are apart from and in relation to women. Far from becoming bitter or outraged, Vincent ended her journey astounded—and exhausted—by the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity. Having gone where no woman (who wasn't an aspiring or actual transsexual) has gone for any significant length of time, let alone eighteen months, Norah Vincent's surprising account is an enthralling reading experience and a revelatory piece of anecdotally based gender analysis that is sure to spark fierce and fascinating conversation.]]> 290 Norah Vincent 0670034665 Andrew 3 3.39 2006 Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again
author: Norah Vincent
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2023/04/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration]]> 57506209
Deploying vivid cases and unflinching analysis, The Feminist War on Crime documents the failure of the state to combat sexual and domestic violence through law and punishment. Zero-tolerance anti-violence law and policy tendĚýto make women less safe and more fragile. Mandatory arrests, no-drop prosecutions, forced separation, and incarceration embroil poor women of color in a criminal justice system that is historically hostile to them. This carceral approach exacerbates social inequalities by diverting more power and resources toward a fundamentally flawed criminal justice system, further harming victims, perpetrators, and communities alike.

In order to reverse this troubling course, Gruber contends that we must abandon the conventional feminist wisdom, fight violence against women without reinforcing the American prison state, and use criminalization as a technique of last—not first—resort.Ěý]]> 304 Aya Gruber 0520385810 Andrew 5 fave-reads-2020
19th Century suffragettes' push for absolutist rape law reified racist assumptions of black male sexual savagery and patriarchal idealization of white womanhood.

Almost a century later, in the throes of civil rights era, the Anti-Poverty Feminists and Anti-Patriarchy coalitions faced off over the issues of domestic violence and gender equality. Backed by moneyed interests, the Anti-Patriarchy coalition won out, resulting in 1) the battered women’s movement transformed from radical antiauthoritarian movement into pro-policing/pro-prosecution lobby; and 2) for many women of color, gutting welfare rights in lieu of employment outside the home did not confer social status or political power.

In a way Gruber's argument is not so different from Toni Morrison's take on how libbys undermined BIPOC:
]]> 4.11 2019 The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration
author: Aya Gruber
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/02/21
shelves: fave-reads-2020
review:
From First to Second Wave Karens: how "Believe Women" sloganeering led to an epidemic of Black lynching and mass incarceration...

19th Century suffragettes' push for absolutist rape law reified racist assumptions of black male sexual savagery and patriarchal idealization of white womanhood.

Almost a century later, in the throes of civil rights era, the Anti-Poverty Feminists and Anti-Patriarchy coalitions faced off over the issues of domestic violence and gender equality. Backed by moneyed interests, the Anti-Patriarchy coalition won out, resulting in 1) the battered women’s movement transformed from radical antiauthoritarian movement into pro-policing/pro-prosecution lobby; and 2) for many women of color, gutting welfare rights in lieu of employment outside the home did not confer social status or political power.

In a way Gruber's argument is not so different from Toni Morrison's take on how libbys undermined BIPOC:

]]> <![CDATA[War with Russia? From Putin & Ukraine To Trump & Russiagate]]> 42429312
America is in a new Cold War with Russia even more dangerous than the one the world barely survived in the twentieth century. The Soviet Union is gone, but the two nuclear superpowers are again locked in political and military confrontations, now from Ukraine to Syria. All of this is exacerbated by Washington’s war-like demonizing of the Kremlin leadership and by Russiagate’s unprecedented allegations. US mainstream media accounts are highly selective and seriously misleading. American “disinformation,� not only Russian, is a growing peril.

In War With Russia? , Stephen F. Cohen—the widely acclaimed historian of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia—gives readers a very different, dissenting narrative of this more dangerous new Cold War from its origins in the 1990s, the actual role of Vladimir Putin, and the 2014 Ukrainian crisis to Donald Trump’s election and today’s unprecedented Russiagate allegations. Topics

Cohen’s views have made him, it is said, “America’s most controversial Russia expert.� Some say this to denounce him, others to laud him as a bold, highly informed critic of US policies and the dangers they have helped to create.

War With Russia? gives readers a chance to decide for themselves who is are we living, as Cohen argues, in a time of unprecedented perils at home and abroad?]]> 420 Stephen F. Cohen Andrew 4 2022
After the last few weeks it's easy to feel grim watching on as the US gov't and western media foam at the mouth when discussing the situation, but this book helps give a little context, if not a great deal of hope.

Honestly the one thing that Cohen likely would have brought up had he been able to see things reach such a fever pitch, is the result of all our saber-rattling is that Ukraine is going to get gutted and sold off for spare parts. First off, there's the fact that the level of hysteria we've engendered has led insurance companies now refusing to cover commercial flights into Ukrainian airspace, a pull out of all foreign citizens, and freight companies now refusing to service Ukraine due to that insurance issue. Combine this with Ukraine having received a massive IMF loan a month before this panic started and now Ukrainian currency has been inflated to the point they are screwed on those loans. The likely result of all this is that the IMF loan disaster with currency devaluation will mean full scale privatization of the Ukrainian power grid along with other state owned parts of their economy. Just more economic shock doctrine approaching the scale of what was done to the Russian economy in the 1990s I guess, though I'm worried we are going to see western investors making a killing buying up Ukrainian assets pennies on the dollar in the fallout of this.]]> 3.80 2018 War with Russia? From Putin & Ukraine To Trump & Russiagate
author: Stephen F. Cohen
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/14
date added: 2022/02/14
shelves: 2022
review:
Too bad folks don't have Stephen Cohen to kick around anymore, though would be nice to hear him go off on Max Boot at least one more time right about now. Whatever the case this book is relevant as ever, sad to say, seeing that the U.S. appears straight up addicted to feeding weapons into conflict zones. After the humiliation in Afghanistan too, there is almost certainly a desire by some in the Biden circle to run the same playbook from the 1980s -- giving the USSR its own Vietnam, this time giving Russia its own Afghanistan, which is some darkly ironic version of history. Reading Cohen it becomes crystal clear that our interventions have virtually nothing to do with human rights or protecting liberal democracy. The power struggle in Ukraine, in Russia, and the U.S./U.K. seems to be almost entirely an elite struggle without any real regard for the domestic population of any of these countries.

After the last few weeks it's easy to feel grim watching on as the US gov't and western media foam at the mouth when discussing the situation, but this book helps give a little context, if not a great deal of hope.

Honestly the one thing that Cohen likely would have brought up had he been able to see things reach such a fever pitch, is the result of all our saber-rattling is that Ukraine is going to get gutted and sold off for spare parts. First off, there's the fact that the level of hysteria we've engendered has led insurance companies now refusing to cover commercial flights into Ukrainian airspace, a pull out of all foreign citizens, and freight companies now refusing to service Ukraine due to that insurance issue. Combine this with Ukraine having received a massive IMF loan a month before this panic started and now Ukrainian currency has been inflated to the point they are screwed on those loans. The likely result of all this is that the IMF loan disaster with currency devaluation will mean full scale privatization of the Ukrainian power grid along with other state owned parts of their economy. Just more economic shock doctrine approaching the scale of what was done to the Russian economy in the 1990s I guess, though I'm worried we are going to see western investors making a killing buying up Ukrainian assets pennies on the dollar in the fallout of this.
]]> <![CDATA[Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor]]> 58438592 A 2022 Esquire Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
A 2022 BuzzFeed Book You’ll Love
A 2022 LitHub Favorite Book of the Year

“Kelly unearths the stories of the people-farm laborers, domestic workers, factory employees—behind some of the labor movement’s biggest successes.� � The New York Times

A revelatory, inclusive history of the American labor movement, from independent journalist and Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly.

Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the working-class heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.

The names and faces of countless silenced, misrepresented, or forgotten leaders have been erased by time as a privileged few decide which stories get cut from the final copy: those of women, people of color, LGBTQIA people, disabled people, sex workers, prisoners, and the poor. In this assiduously researched work of journalism, Teen Vogue columnist and independent labor reporter Kim Kelly excavates that history and shows how the rights the American worker has today—the forty-hour workweek, workplace-safety standards, restrictions on child labor, protection from harassment and discrimination on the job—were earned with literal blood, sweat, and tears.

Fight Like Hell comes at a time of economic reckoning in America. From Amazon’s warehouses to Starbucks cafes, Appalachian coal mines to the sex workers of Portland’s Stripper Strike, interest in organized labor is at a fever pitch not seen since the early 1960s.

Inspirational, intersectional, and full of crucial lessons from the past, Fight Like Hell shows what is possible when the working class demands the dignity it has always deserved.]]> 448 Kim Kelly 1982171057 Andrew 0 2022, to-read 4.19 2022 Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor
author: Kim Kelly
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/07
shelves: 2022, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone]]> 53241562 A deeply-reported examination of why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.

You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor treatment in the name of "being part of the family," all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love.

In Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this "labor of love" myth -- the idea that certain work is not really work, and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries -- from the unpaid intern, to the overworked nurse, to the nonprofit worker and even the professional athlete -- Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work.
As Jaffe argues, understanding the trap of the labor of love will empower us to work less and demand what our work is worth. And once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.]]> 432 Sarah Jaffe 1568589395 Andrew 0 2022, to-read 3.97 2021 Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
author: Sarah Jaffe
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/07
shelves: 2022, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age]]> 29639226
In No Shortcuts, Jane McAlevey argues that progressives can win, but lack the organized power to enact significant change, to outlast their bosses in labor fights, and to hold elected leaders accountable. Drawing upon her experience as a scholar and longtime organizer in the student, environmental, and labor movements, McAlevey examines cases from labor unions and social movements to pinpoint the factors that helped them succeed - or fail - to accomplish their intended goals. McAlevey makes a compelling case that the great social movements of previous eras gained their power from mass organizing, a strategy today's progressives have mostly abandoned in favor of shallow mobilization or advocacy. She ultimately concludes that, in order to win, progressive movements need strong unions built from bottom-up organizing strategies that place the power for change in the hands of workers and ordinary people at the community level.

Beyond the concrete examples in this book, McAlevey's arguments have direct implications for anyone involved in organizing for social change. Much more than cogent analysis, No Shortcuts explains exactly how progressives can go about rebuilding powerful movements at work, in our communities, and at the ballot box.
]]> 272 Jane F. McAlevey 019062471X Andrew 0 4.44 2016 No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age
author: Jane F. McAlevey
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/07
shelves: to-read, green-collar, trot-trot-to-boston, war-on-xmas, 2022
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A History of America in Ten Strikes]]> 34196060 Recommended by The Nation, the New Republic, Current Affairs, Bustle, In These Times

"Entertaining, tough-minded, strenuously argued."
--The Nation

A thrilling and timely account of ten moments in history when labor challenged the very nature of power in America, by the author called "a brilliant historian" by The Progressive magazine

Powerful and accessible, A History of America in Ten Strikes challenges all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. In this brilliant book, labor historian Erik Loomis recounts ten critical workers' strikes in American labor history that everyone needs to know about (and then provides an annotated list of the 150 most important moments in American labor history in the appendix). From the Lowell Mill Girls strike in the 1830s to Justice for Janitors in 1990, these labor uprisings do not just reflect the times in which they occurred, but speak directly to the present moment.

For example, we often think that Lincoln ended slavery by proclaiming the slaves emancipated, but Loomis shows that they freed themselves during the Civil War by simply withdrawing their labor. He shows how the hopes and aspirations of a generation were made into demands at a GM plant in Lordstown in 1972. And he takes us to the forests of the Pacific Northwest in the early nineteenth century where the radical organizers known as the Wobblies made their biggest inroads against the power of bosses. But there were also moments when the movement was crushed by corporations and the government; Loomis helps us understand the present perilous condition of American workers and draws lessons from both the victories and defeats of the past.

In crystalline narratives, labor historian Erik Loomis lifts the curtain on workers' struggles, giving us a fresh perspective on American history from the boots up.

Strikes include

Lowell Mill Girls Strike (Massachusetts, 1830-40)

Slaves on Strike (The Confederacy, 1861-65)

The Eight-Hour Day Strikes (Chicago, 1886)

The Anthracite Strike (Pennsylvania, 1902)

The Bread and Roses Strike (Massachusetts, 1912)

The Flint Sit-Down Strike (Michigan, 1937)

The Oakland General Strike (California, 1946)

Lordstown (Ohio, 1972)

Air Traffic Controllers (1981)

Justice for Janitors (Los Angeles, 1990)]]> 288 Erik Loomis 1620971615 Andrew 0 to-read, 2022 3.93 2018 A History of America in Ten Strikes
author: Erik Loomis
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/07
shelves: to-read, 2022
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Red State Revolt: The Teachers' Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics (Jacobin)]]> 43838867
Thirteen months after Trump allegedly captured the allegiance of “the white working class,� a strike wave—the first in over four decades—rocked the United States. Inspired by the wildcat victory in West Virginia, teachers in Oklahoma, Arizona, and across the country walked off their jobs and shut down their schools to demand better pay for educators, more funding for students, and an end to years of austerity.

Confounding all expectations, these working-class rebellions erupted in regions with Republican electorates, weak unions, and bans on public sector strikes. By mobilizing to take their destinies into their own hands, red state school workers posed a clear alternative to politics as usual. And with similar actions now gaining steam in Los Angeles, Oakland, Denver, and Virginia, there is no sign that this upsurge will be short-lived.

Red State Revolt is a compelling analysis of the emergence and development of this historic strike wave, with an eye to extracting its main strategic lessons for educators, labor organizer, and radicals across the country. A former high school teacher and longtime activist, Eric Blanc embedded himself into the rank-and-file leaderships of the walkouts, where he was given access to internal organizing meetings and secret Facebook groups inaccessible to most journalists. The result is one of the richest portraits of the labor movement to date, a story populated with the voices of school workers who are winning the fight for the soul of public education—and redrawing the political map of the country at large.]]> 224 Eric Blanc 1788735749 Andrew 0 2022, to-read 4.21 2019 Red State Revolt: The Teachers' Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics (Jacobin)
author: Eric Blanc
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/07
shelves: 2022, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation]]> 43371074 280 Éric Toussaint 1608463095 Andrew 0 2022, to-read 3.91 The Debt System: A History of Sovereign Debts and their Repudiation
author: Éric Toussaint
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.91
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/07
shelves: 2022, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers]]> 9307360 Ultimately, Toussaint and Millet advocate cancellation of all foreign debt for developing countries and provide arguments from a number of perspectives—legal, economic, moral. Presented in an accessible and easily-referenced question and answer format, Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank is an essential tool for the global justice movement.]]> 304 Éric Toussaint 1583672222 Andrew 0 currently-reading, 2022 4.23 2010 Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers
author: Éric Toussaint
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/07
shelves: currently-reading, 2022
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan]]> 426128 328 Robin Wood 0231057776 Andrew 0 2022, currently-reading 4.40 1986 Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan
author: Robin Wood
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/07
shelves: 2022, currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What Should Legal Analysis Become?]]> 452707 208 Roberto Mangabeira Unger 1859841007 Andrew 0 2022, to-read 4.00 1996 What Should Legal Analysis Become?
author: Roberto Mangabeira Unger
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/07
shelves: 2022, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Good War: An Oral History of World War II]]> 306399 589 Studs Terkel 1565843436 Andrew 0 to-read, 2022 4.29 1984 The Good War: An Oral History of World War II
author: Studs Terkel
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1984
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/07
shelves: to-read, 2022
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the World's Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything]]> 58725007 In his punchy follow-up to Moneyland, Oliver Bullough's Butler to the World unravels the dark secret of how Britain placed itself at the centre of the global offshore economy and at the service of the worst people in the world�

The Suez Crisis of 1956 was Britain’s twentieth century nadir, the moment when the once superpower was bullied into retreat. In the immortal words of former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, â€Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.â€� But the funny thing was, Britain had already found a role. It even had the costume. The leaders of the world just hadn’t noticed it yet.

Butler to the World reveals how the UK took up its position at the elbow of the worst people on Earth: the oligarchs, kleptocrats and gangsters. We pride ourselves on values of fair play and the rule of law, but few countries do more to frustrate global anti- corruption efforts. We are now a nation of Jeeveses, snobbish enablers for rich halfwits of considerably less charm than Bertie Wooster. It doesn’t have to be that way.]]> 288 Oliver Bullough 125028192X Andrew 0 to-read 3.96 2022 Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the World's Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything
author: Oliver Bullough
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama's Defining Decisions]]> 40593449
During these four months, Obama chose neoliberal policies for restoring the economy, reforming health care, addressing the housing market collapse, and moving to clean power.

This book describes how these decisions were made. Obama found himself trapped by the Bush administration’s prioritization of bolstering wall street. Then he made Hillary Clinton’s economic advisors his own and took their counsel. Although the Great Recession could have been much worse, the neoliberal policies led to a drawn out and uneven recovery, unpopular and limited health care reform, and failed energy reform.

Based on dozens of interviews with actors in the Obama transition, as well as the author’s personal observations, this book provides unique commentary on the fateful decisions of the winter of 2008-2009. Among those interviewed: David Axelrod, Tom Daschle, Austan Goolsbee, Peter Orszag, Christy Romer, and Larry Summers.

The ramifications of the Great Recession are not behind us. The 2016 election has not ended. The same battle between progressivism and neoliberalism still rages in the Democratic Party. As many seek the Presidency in the November 2020 election, all candidates and of course the eventual winner will continue to face decisions similar to those confronted by Barack Obama.

Everyone should learn from this critical and little-understood history.]]> 400 Reed Hundt 1948122316 Andrew 0 currently-reading 3.66 A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama's Defining Decisions
author: Reed Hundt
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.66
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality]]> 42585103 A compelling explanation of how the law shapes the distribution of wealth

Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else.

In this revealing book, Katharina Pistor argues that the law selectively "codes" certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. With the right legal coding, any object, claim, or idea can be turned into capital-and lawyers are the keepers of the code. Pistor describes how they pick and choose among different legal systems and legal devices for the ones that best serve their clients' needs, and how techniques that were first perfected centuries ago to code landholdings as capital are being used today to code stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations-assets that exist only in law.

A powerful new way of thinking about one of the most pernicious problems of our time, The Code of Capital explores the different ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are coded to give financial advantage to their holders. This provocative book paints a troubling portrait of the pervasive global nature of the code, the people who shape it, and the governments that enforce it.]]> 320 Katharina Pistor 0691178976 Andrew 5 fave-reads-2020 4.04 2019 The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
author: Katharina Pistor
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2021/01/02
date added: 2022/02/03
shelves: fave-reads-2020
review:
democratic self-governance RIP to a real one
]]> <![CDATA[Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Politics and Society in Modern America)]]> 21981630 392 Lily Geismer 0691157235 Andrew 4 4.19 2014 Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Politics and Society in Modern America)
author: Lily Geismer
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/03
date added: 2022/02/03
shelves:
review:
being a progressive is like being a fan of a sports team that always loses but also the game itself is not fun at all and also a lot of people will die because the team is either too apprehensive to play hardball or maybe just has no strategy to win. no idea who said this first, but this book basically proves the point: if it weren’t for fiscal conservatives, we wouldn’t need social liberals
]]> <![CDATA[Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness]]> 56269254 Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans--all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States' "exceptional" history and destiny.

Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation--attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II.

As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century's decades of devastating conflict.]]> 354 Elizabeth D. Samet 0374219923 Andrew 0 currently-reading 3.56 2021 Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness
author: Elizabeth D. Samet
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War]]> 56269282
In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed—and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences.

The ramifications of this shift became apparent in the post-9/11 era. By that time, the US military had embraced the agenda of humane war, driven both by the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle shifted from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated but its foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends only accelerated during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Even as the two administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the “forever� war.

Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all.]]> 416 Samuel Moyn 0374173702 Andrew 0 currently-reading 3.76 2021 Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War
author: Samuel Moyn
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire]]> 57693503
Smedley Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Bestselling books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Wherever the flag went, “The Fighting Quaker� went―serving in nearly every major overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898 until the eve of World War II. From his first days as a 16-year-old recruit at the newly seized Guantánamo Bay, he blazed a path for helping annex the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, leading troops in China (twice), and helping invade and occupy Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Mexico, and more. Yet in retirement, Butler turned into a warrior against war, imperialism, and big business, “I was a racketeer for capitalism."

Award-winning author Jonathan Myerson Katz traveled across the world―from China to Guantánamo, the mountains of Haiti to the Panama Canal―and pored over the personal letters of Butler, his fellow Marines, and his Quaker family on Philadelphia's Main Line. Along the way, Katz shows how the consequences of the Marines' actions are still very much talking politics with a Sandinista commander in Nicaragua, getting a martial arts lesson from a devotee of the Boxer Rebellion in China, and getting cast as a P.O.W. extra in a Filipino movie about their American War. Tracing a path from the first wave of U.S. overseas expansionism to the rise of fascism in the 1930s to the crises of democracy in our own time, Gangsters of Capitalism tells an urgent story about a formative era most Americans have never learned about, but that the rest of the world cannot forget.]]> 432 Jonathan M. Katz 1250135583 Andrew 0 currently-reading 4.20 2021 Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire
author: Jonathan M. Katz
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/02/03
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror]]> 40957627 442 Howard David Ingham Andrew 0 to-read 4.08 2018 We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror
author: Howard David Ingham
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/06/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World]]> 51720367 A sparklingly strange odyssey through the kaleidoscope of America's new spirituality: the cults, practices, high priests and prophets of our supposedly post-religion age.

In Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton takes a tour through contemporary American religiosity. As the once dominant totems of civic connection and civil discourse—traditional churches—continue to sink into obsolescence, people are looking elsewhere for the intensity and unity that religion once provided. We're making our own personal faiths - theistic or not - mixing and matching our spiritual, ritualistic, personal, and political practices in order to create our own bespoke religious selves. We're not just building new religions in 2019, we're buying them, from Gwyneth Paltrow's gospel of Goop, to the brilliantly cultish SoulCycle, to those who believe in their special destiny on Mars.

In so doing, we're carrying on a longstanding American tradition of religious eclecticism, DIY-innovation and "unchurched" piety (and highly effective capitalism). Our era is not the dawn of American secularism, but rather a brand-bolstered resurgence of American pluralism, revved into overdrive by commerce and personalized algorithms, all to the tune of "Hallellujah"--America's most popular and spectacularly misunderstood wedding song.]]> 301 Tara Isabella Burton 1541762533 Andrew 4 fave-reads-2020 3.88 2020 Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World
author: Tara Isabella Burton
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/06/12
shelves: fave-reads-2020
review:
super kooky insane hot takes in here, like how Harry Potter gave rise to both BLM and the incel community. in essence, lost in the desert of the ecumenical, evangelicals saw the light in some tired dorm room Thoreau and Emerson’s deity of man gospel (re-upped for the gilded/consumerist age by hypnotist charlatan Phineas Quimby). And as fast as you can say amen, we were reborn in the waters of self-care and cultural resistance
]]> <![CDATA[Outland (L'adaptation officielle)]]> 6834653 48 Jim Steranko 2731601388 Andrew 5 3.96 1982 Outland (L'adaptation officielle)
author: Jim Steranko
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/05/12
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa]]> 32735071 The first comprehensive biography of the director behind Godzilla and other Japanese sci-fi classics

Ishiro Honda was arguably the most internationally successful Japanese director of his generation, with an unmatched succession of science fiction films that were commercial hits worldwide. From the atomic allegory of Godzilla and the beguiling charms of Mothra to the tragic mystery of Matango and the disaster and spectacle of Rodan, The Mysterians, King Kong vs. Godzilla, and many others, Honda's films reflected postwar Japan's real-life anxieties and incorporated fantastical special effects, a formula that appealed to audiences around the globe and created a popular culture phenomenon that spans generations. Now, in the first full account of this long overlooked director's life and career, authors Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski shed new light on Honda's work and the experiences that shaped it--including his days as a reluctant Japanese soldier, witnessing the aftermath of Hiroshima, and his lifelong friendship with Akira Kurosawa. Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa features close analysis of Honda's films (including, for the first time, his rarely seen dramas, comedies, and war films) and draws on previously untapped documents and interviews to explore how creative, economic, and industrial factors impacted his career. Fans of Honda, Godzilla, and tokusatsu (special effects) film, and of Japanese film in general, will welcome this in-depth study of a highly influential director who occupies a uniquely important position in science fiction and fantasy cinema, as well as in world cinema.

Together, the authors have provided audio commentary tracks and produced supplemental material for numerous home video releases, including Ishiro Honda's Godzilla for the British Film Institute. They co-produced the documentary feature Bringing Godzilla Down to Size (2008).]]> Steve Ryfle Andrew 4 rubber soul of a nation 4.56 Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, from Godzilla to Kurosawa
author: Steve Ryfle
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.56
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/02/15
shelves:
review:
rubber soul of a nation
]]> A Promised Land 55361205
In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency—a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.

Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation’s highest office.

Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune’s Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden.

A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective—the story of one man’s bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of “hope and change,� and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible.

This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama’s conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.]]> 768 Barack Obama 1524763187 Andrew 2
(looking back to the 2008 primaries, it’s funny to see the extent to which mainstream pundits saw right through it, how he was destined to become a brand and a lifestyle guru...)

if you want to read something by a smooth Ivy League lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous politics, speaking the language of conservatism in the register of idealism and progress, you’d be better off hitting up some Scott Turow]]> 4.32 2020 A Promised Land
author: Barack Obama
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2021/02/14
shelves:
review:
if you come to this curious about why he wanted to hold elected office in the first place, you’ll be largely disappointed. Michelle tries to pin him down at one point, and after some hems and haws he says something to the effect that his presidency will help black faces get in high places. Not trivial but not much of a legislative agenda either.

(looking back to the 2008 primaries, it’s funny to see the extent to which mainstream pundits saw right through it, how he was destined to become a brand and a lifestyle guru...)

if you want to read something by a smooth Ivy League lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous politics, speaking the language of conservatism in the register of idealism and progress, you’d be better off hitting up some Scott Turow
]]> <![CDATA[The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins]]> 7781 Celebrate the 75th birthday of this classic treatise on bullying by Dr. Seuss with our new foil-covered, color-enhanced edition!

The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins is the story of a young peasant and his unjust treatment at the hands of King Derwin.

While The 500 Hats is one of Dr. Seuss's earliest and lesser known works, it is nevertheless totally Seussian and as topical today as when it was first published in 1938, addressing subjects that we know the good doctor was passionate about throughout his life: the abuse of power (as in Yertle the Turtle and Horton Hears a Who); rivalry (as in The Sneetches); and of course, zany good humor (as in The Cat in the Hat and the 43 other books he wrote and illustrated)! This is a perfect way to introduce new readers to an old classic or to reward existing fans.

Follow more of Bartholomew's adventures in Bartholomew and the Oobleck, a Caldecott Honor Award-winner.

With his unique combination of hilarious stories, zany pictures and riotous rhymes, Dr. Seuss has been delighting young children as well as helping them learn to read for over fifty years. Creator of the wonderfully anarchic 'Cat in the Hat', and ranked among the world's top children's authors, Dr. Seuss is a global best-seller, with nearly half a billion books sold worldwide.]]> 56 Dr. Seuss Andrew 3 4.02 1938 The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins
author: Dr. Seuss
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1938
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2021/02/07
shelves:
review:
decades before Seuss got woke about class with Yertle and eco justice with Lorax, he penned this anti-fascist parable about how even kings must bow before the market. An epic wind up with little pay off and zero rhymes! The takeaway makes for a weird curio, in that the moral is so open-ended that it could be either a neoliberal or socialist tract, but worth the read if only to think about how the two can co-exist, esp in this day and age when the two ideologies see the other as a threat worthy of mutually assured destruction
]]> Submission 25322084
Meanwhile, it’s election season. And although Francois feels “about as political as a bath towel,� things are getting pretty interesting. In an alliance with the Socialists, France’s new Islamic party sweeps to power. Islamic law comes into force. Women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged, and Francois is offered an irresistible academic advancement—on condition that he convert to Islam.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker has said of Submission that Michael Houellebecq is “not merely a satirist but—more unusually—a sincere satirist, genuinely saddened by the absurdities of history and the madnesses of mankind.� Houellebecq’s new book may be satirical and melancholic, but it is also hilarious, a comic masterpiece by one of France’s great novelists.]]> 246 Michel Houellebecq 0374271577 Andrew 0 3.68 2015 Submission
author: Michel Houellebecq
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/17
shelves:
review:

]]> War in the Age of Trump 51831854 The Rise of Islamic State, which was translated into 16 languages, and the widely-acclaimed The Age of Jihad, prize-winning foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn provides a clear-sighted and closely-observed account of the Middle East wars conducted by Donald Trump during the first term of his presidency.

From interviews via a weak cellphone link with soon-to-be killed Iraqis in Isis-besieged Mosul, to the gunshots heard in his Iraqi hotel room, not far from a Tahrir Square where protests were swelling into a brutally-repressed national uprising; from the destruction of Raqqa, Afrin, and Eastern Ghouta, to Turkey’s ethnic cleansing of Kurds in north-east Syria, Cockburn opens a vivid window onto the end of the Isis Caliphate, the successive defeats of the Kurds, and America’s escalating confrontation with Iran, culminating in the world-shaking assassination of General Qasem Soleimani.

Donald Trump claimed that his would be a presidency that brought to an end American engagement in “messy� foreign wars. In this vital and necessary book, Patrick Cockburn exposes how his on/off adventurism has not only continued widespread intervention, but added a dangerous layer of chaos and unpredictability.


“The greatest living foreign correspondent in English, a writer of understated integrity and compassion, with the necessary balance of indignation and detachment� —Richard Lloyd Parry, New York Times]]> 324 Patrick Cockburn 1682192393 Andrew 4 3.96 2020 War in the Age of Trump
author: Patrick Cockburn
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/08
shelves:
review:
oh man DT is such a loser first pres in over a century not to successfully overthrow another country and the first to try to overthrow his own and fail at that too
]]> Prometheus Unbound 80577
It depicts its philanthropist hero's ultimate triumph over the superstition and bigotry of the gods. As Shelley himself stated in his Defence of Poetry, Prometheus Unbound awakens and enlarges the mind.]]> 112 Percy Bysshe Shelley 1419143239 Andrew 4
While some lament that modern narratives offer little catharsis to break free of the cycles of abuse, Shelley half-seriously identifies liberation in the harm reduction model, although one that leans into both anarchism and (tweaked) sadomasochism. Prometheus the victim yearns to “trample� his oppressor in sadistic fantasies. His forgiveness of Jupiter leads to his liberation and an end of Jupiter’s rule.

But this act of mercy is not uncomplicated. We leave the play with the knowledge that the oppressor is within, that true freedom may in fact be illusory, as what makes us human is a yearning to subjugate and to be subjugated. Accordingly, both haves and have-nots seek empowerment in the cycles of abuse, with each taking turns at playing sadistic and masochistic roles.

Some might say this is because people are so disempowered that no model of justice will succeed to serve their interests. Shelley the Gothic would see this cycle of abuse not as a systemic issue unique to our era, but as a perfectly human compulsion, and that freedom (if it is even desired at all) will be denied until we submit to that reality.
]]> 3.78 1820 Prometheus Unbound
author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1820
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/06
shelves:
review:
in which Jupiter chains Prometheus to rocks, subjecting him to a daily ritual of a vulture devouring his liver.

While some lament that modern narratives offer little catharsis to break free of the cycles of abuse, Shelley half-seriously identifies liberation in the harm reduction model, although one that leans into both anarchism and (tweaked) sadomasochism. Prometheus the victim yearns to “trample� his oppressor in sadistic fantasies. His forgiveness of Jupiter leads to his liberation and an end of Jupiter’s rule.

But this act of mercy is not uncomplicated. We leave the play with the knowledge that the oppressor is within, that true freedom may in fact be illusory, as what makes us human is a yearning to subjugate and to be subjugated. Accordingly, both haves and have-nots seek empowerment in the cycles of abuse, with each taking turns at playing sadistic and masochistic roles.

Some might say this is because people are so disempowered that no model of justice will succeed to serve their interests. Shelley the Gothic would see this cycle of abuse not as a systemic issue unique to our era, but as a perfectly human compulsion, and that freedom (if it is even desired at all) will be denied until we submit to that reality.

]]> <![CDATA[Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film]]> 293192 260 Carol J. Clover 0691006202 Andrew 4 fave-reads-2020
However, Clover zeroes in on our economic realities in a different way, by unearthing cultural discourses buried inside the narrative’s tropes, including thorny concepts generally unarticulated in policy discussions around the issue of rape.

Clover provides critical insights into how rape trauma narratives are used to process our nation’s myriad economic anxieties, and (IMO) how economic guilt is intertwined within our models of justice and punishment.

The narrative’s trappings are as follows: a protagonist suffers sexual assault at the hands of a comparatively disenfranchised person/group. Resolving in the victim’s revenge, the narrative turns on retributive justice (though Clover employs the term “revenge�), often to a torturous and sadistic degree. But this trope reveals our justice and punishment models are not uncomplicated:

First, Clover shows retributive justice has its deficiencies. Once the victim (or victim’s ally)’s act of wrath shifts them into the role of an assailant, they’re casted into a “cycle of abuse,� denying them their catharsis.

Secondly, alternative justice models suffer limitations. Often in the films� characterization of restorative justice, a mediation-like scene occurs, where the victim is in a comparative position of power (perhaps wielding a phallus-like weapon), granting the assailant an opportunity to atone/process harm. But this mediation can be unsatisfying: maybe because the truth is slippery, the atonement feels insincere (motivated primarily by fear of punitive measures), or because the act was enabled by larger systemic forces (often embodied by a vile politico).

Lastly, the narrative often suggests that no justice model will suffice because the protagonist was embedded in the cycle of abuse before they were victimized. In the opening of Deliverance, an Atlanta businessman on a backwoods trip witnesses a dam under construction and concedes complicity in exploitation of the have-nots: “You push a little more power into Atlanta, a little more air conditioners for your smug little suburb, and we're gonna rape this whole goddamn landscape.� While other iterations of this narrative may not confront this so explicitly, the narrative by design posits that the inciting incident is not the assailant’s rape, as it was preceded by urbanities� collusion in a "rape" of the landscape.

Clover’s text does not address justice models explicitly, but her unpacking of America’s frontier myths/anxieties makes a case that while a victim/assailant binary can be dubious, the nation’s structural power imbalance indisputably functions as victimizer
]]> 4.03 1992 Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
author: Carol J. Clover
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/06
shelves: fave-reads-2020
review:
In “Getting Even,� a chapter of Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992) focused on rape-revenge narratives in cinema, a crucial stat goes ignored: in reality, the prevalence of sexual assault increases dramatically as household income decreases.

However, Clover zeroes in on our economic realities in a different way, by unearthing cultural discourses buried inside the narrative’s tropes, including thorny concepts generally unarticulated in policy discussions around the issue of rape.

Clover provides critical insights into how rape trauma narratives are used to process our nation’s myriad economic anxieties, and (IMO) how economic guilt is intertwined within our models of justice and punishment.

The narrative’s trappings are as follows: a protagonist suffers sexual assault at the hands of a comparatively disenfranchised person/group. Resolving in the victim’s revenge, the narrative turns on retributive justice (though Clover employs the term “revenge�), often to a torturous and sadistic degree. But this trope reveals our justice and punishment models are not uncomplicated:

First, Clover shows retributive justice has its deficiencies. Once the victim (or victim’s ally)’s act of wrath shifts them into the role of an assailant, they’re casted into a “cycle of abuse,� denying them their catharsis.

Secondly, alternative justice models suffer limitations. Often in the films� characterization of restorative justice, a mediation-like scene occurs, where the victim is in a comparative position of power (perhaps wielding a phallus-like weapon), granting the assailant an opportunity to atone/process harm. But this mediation can be unsatisfying: maybe because the truth is slippery, the atonement feels insincere (motivated primarily by fear of punitive measures), or because the act was enabled by larger systemic forces (often embodied by a vile politico).

Lastly, the narrative often suggests that no justice model will suffice because the protagonist was embedded in the cycle of abuse before they were victimized. In the opening of Deliverance, an Atlanta businessman on a backwoods trip witnesses a dam under construction and concedes complicity in exploitation of the have-nots: “You push a little more power into Atlanta, a little more air conditioners for your smug little suburb, and we're gonna rape this whole goddamn landscape.� While other iterations of this narrative may not confront this so explicitly, the narrative by design posits that the inciting incident is not the assailant’s rape, as it was preceded by urbanities� collusion in a "rape" of the landscape.

Clover’s text does not address justice models explicitly, but her unpacking of America’s frontier myths/anxieties makes a case that while a victim/assailant binary can be dubious, the nation’s structural power imbalance indisputably functions as victimizer

]]> <![CDATA[The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society]]> 50215280 An original history of ideas, and an unforgettable portrait of power, New York Times editorial writer Binyamin Appelbaum tells the story of the people who sparked four decades of economic revolution.

Before the 1960s, American politicians had never paid much attention to economists. But as the post-World War II boom began to sputter, economists gained influence and power.

In The Economists' Hour, Binyamin Appelbaum traces the rise of the economists, first in the United States and then around the globe, as their ideas reshaped the modern world, curbing government, unleashing corporations and hastening globalization.

Some leading figures are relatively well-known, such as Milton Friedman, the elfin libertarian who had a greater influence on American life than any other economist of his generation, and Arthur Laffer, who sketched a curve on a cocktail napkin that helped to make tax cuts a staple of conservative economic policy.

Others stayed out of the limelight, but left a lasting impact on modern life: Walter Oi, a blind economist who dictated to his wife and assistants some of the calculations that persuaded President Nixon to end military conscription; Alfred Kahn, who deregulated air travel and rejoiced in the crowded cabins on commercial flights as the proof of his success; and Thomas Schelling, who put a dollar value on human life.

Their fundamental belief? That government should stop trying to manage the economy.

Their guiding principle? That markets would deliver steady growth, and ensure that all Americans shared in the benefits.

But the Economists' Hour failed to deliver on its promise of broad prosperity. And the single-minded embrace of markets has come at the expense of economic equality, the health of liberal democracy, and future generations.

Timely, engaging and expertly researched, The Economists' Hour is a reckoning-and a call for people to rewrite the rules of the market.]]> 336 Binyamin Appelbaum 0316512273 Andrew 4 4.21 2019 The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society
author: Binyamin Appelbaum
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/06
shelves: econ-classes, fave-reads-2020, green-collar
review:
$2000 checks are good and all, obviously super stoked, but if it’s checks and then foreclosure/eviction wave and then some bs on cutting the deficit, it’ll mean jack shit in face of a rising tide of deaths of despair. Assuming the new gov’t goes down this path of austerity (in a recession!) cannot imagine a better political branding exercise beginning its tenure by signaling violent opposition to it
]]> The Railway Children 164531
The youngsters' days are filled with adventure and excitement, including their successful attempt to avert a horrible train disaster; but the mysterious disappearance of their father continues to haunt them.

The solution to that painful puzzle and many other details and events of the children's lives come to vivid life in this perennial favorite, a story that has captivated generations of readers and, more recently, delighted television and movie audiences. In this inexpensive, unabridged edition, it will charm a whole new audience of young readers with its warmth and appeal.]]> 188 E. Nesbit 0486410226 Andrew 4
Whenever you think about diving back into “Little House on the Prairie� to see if it holds up � yearning for a simpler time of sock darning and Xmas on a shoestring and just non-stop pastoral beauty � this thing is probably closer to what you have in mind]]> 4.01 1906 The Railway Children
author: E. Nesbit
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1906
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/06
shelves:
review:
until they make a kids edition of Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, you could do worse than this super low key fable/paean to the kindness of strangers. It has just enough Santa and actual train content to keep any 4 year olds in the house from wandering away for too long. For the rest of us, the book's tankie take on poverty (collectivize!) serves as a 101 of sorts on the subject of making friends under austerity while we all bug out for the next stimulus check.

Whenever you think about diving back into “Little House on the Prairie� to see if it holds up � yearning for a simpler time of sock darning and Xmas on a shoestring and just non-stop pastoral beauty � this thing is probably closer to what you have in mind
]]> <![CDATA[Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity]]> 8480795 314 Douglas Kysar 030012001X Andrew 0 to-read, green-collar 4.00 2010 Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity
author: Douglas Kysar
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/06
shelves: to-read, green-collar
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wall Street's Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014]]> 26143687 Traces the expansive influence of The Council of Foreign Relations in advancing Wall Street's foreign policy agendas and U.S. influence abroadThe Council on Foreign Relations is the most influential foreign-policy think tank in the United States, claiming among its members a high percentage of government officials, media figures, and establishment elite. For decades it kept a low profile even while it shaped policy, advised presidents, and helped shore up U.S. hegemony following the Second World War. In 1977, Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter published the first in-depth study of the CFR, Imperial Brain Trust, an explosive work that traced the activities and influence of the CFR from its origins in the 1920s through the Cold War.Now, Laurence H. Shoup returns with this long-awaited sequel, which brings the story up to date. Wall Street’s Think Tank follows the CFR from the 1970s through the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present. It explains how members responded to rapid changes in the world globalization, the rise of China, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the launch of a “War on Terror,� among other major developments. Shoup argues that the CFR now operates in an era of “Neoliberal Geopolitics,� a worldwide paradigm that its members helped to establish and that reflects the interests of the U.S. ruling class, but is not without challengers. Wall Street’s Think Tank is an essential guide to understanding the Council on Foreign Relations and the shadow it casts over recent history and current events.]]> 366 Laurence H. Shoup 1583675523 Andrew 0 to-read, green-collar 4.23 2015 Wall Street's Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014
author: Laurence H. Shoup
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/06
shelves: to-read, green-collar
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back]]> 39979237 From ruined towns on the edge of Siberia, to Bond-villain lairs in Knightsbridge and Manhattan, something has gone wrong with the workings of the world.

Once upon a time, if an official stole money, there wasn't much he could do with it. He could buy himself a new car or build himself a nice house or give it to his friends and family, but that was about it. If he kept stealing, the money would just pile up in his house until he had no rooms left to put it in, or it was eaten by mice.

And then some bankers in London had a bright idea.

Join the investigative journalist Oliver Bullough on a journey into Moneyland - the secret country of the lawless, stateless superrich.

Learn how the institutions of Europe and the United States have become money-laundering operations, undermining the foundations of Western stability. Discover the true cost of being open for business no matter how corrupt and dangerous the customer. Meet the kleptocrats. Meet their awful children. And find out how heroic activists around the world are fighting back.

This is the story of wealth and power in the 21st century. It isn't too late to change it.

]]> 305 Oliver Bullough 1782833331 Andrew 0 to-read, green-collar 4.21 2018 Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back
author: Oliver Bullough
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/06
shelves: to-read, green-collar
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence]]> 10799632 Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency.

Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism"--a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.]]> 304 Christian Parenti 1568586000 Andrew 0 to-read, green-collar 3.86 2011 Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence
author: Christian Parenti
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/06
shelves: to-read, green-collar
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics]]> 2743290
Exploring the major political and intellectual currents from the Black Power era to the present, Cedric Johnson reveals how black political life gradually conformed to liberal democratic capitalism and how the movement’s most radical aims—the rejection of white aesthetic standards, redefinition of black identity, solidarity with the Third World, and anticapitalist revolution—were gradually eclipsed by more moderate aspirations. Although Black Power activists transformed the face of American government, Johnson contends that the evolution of the movement as a form of ethnic politics restricted the struggle for social justice to the world of formal politics.

Johnson offers a compelling and theoretically sophisticated critique of the rhetoric and strategies that emerged in this period. Drawing on extensive archival research, he reinterprets the place of key intellectual figures, such as Harold Cruse and Amiri Baraka, and influential organizations, including the African Liberation Support Committee, the National Black Political Assembly, and the National Black Independent Political Party in postsegregation black politics, while at the same time identifying the contradictions of Black Power radicalism itself.

Documenting the historical retreat from radical, democratic struggle, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders ultimately calls for the renewal of popular struggle and class-conscious politics.

Cedric Johnson is assistant professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.]]> 320 Cedric G. Johnson 0816644780 Andrew 5 fave-reads-2020
]]> 3.76 2007 Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics
author: Cedric G. Johnson
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/06
shelves: fave-reads-2020
review:
or as Florence once said to George Jefferson, "How come we overcame and no one told me?"


]]> <![CDATA[Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars]]> 43335190 96 Jessica Trisko Darden 1626166668 Andrew 5 counterinsurgencies 3.91 Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars
author: Jessica Trisko Darden
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.91
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: counterinsurgencies
review:

]]> Somebody's Done For 3249030 176 David Goodis 0671652672 Andrew 0 to-read 4.03 1967 Somebody's Done For
author: David Goodis
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Parenting Beyond Pink & Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes]]> 18112197
Reliance on Gendered Stereotypes Negatively Impacts Kids

Studies on gender and child development show that, on average, parents talk less to baby boys and are less likely to use numbers when speaking to little girls. Without meaning to, we constantly color-code children, segregating them by gender based on their presumed interests. Our social dependence on these norms has far-reaching effects, such as leading girls to dislike math or increasing aggression in boys.

In this practical guide, developmental psychologist (and mother of two) Christia Spears Brown uses science-based research to show how over-dependence on gender can limit kids, making it harder for them to develop into unique individuals. With a humorous, fresh, and accessible perspective, Parenting Beyond Pink & Blue addresses all the issues that contemporary parents should consider—from gender-segregated birthday parties and schools to sports, sexualization, and emotional intelligence. This guide empowers parents to help kids break out of pinkĚýand blue boxes to become their authentic selves.]]> 240 Christia Spears Brown 160774502X Andrew 0 to-read 3.99 2014 Parenting Beyond Pink & Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes
author: Christia Spears Brown
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bless This Mess: A Modern Guide to Faith and Parenting in a Chaotic World]]> 42880491 Pairing modern psychology with liberal Christian spirituality, Dr. Ellen O'Donnell and Rev. Molly Baskette deliver a clear and compelling modus operandi for making family life work--one rooted in research on parenting and Christian values, peppered with personal stories and a heavy dose of humor.

When authors Ellen O'Donnell and Molly Baskette became parents, they read lots of books on parenting--many of them great. But when it came to practical suggestions that would help their family spiritually and psychologically, they came up short. Together, they sought out brainstorming actionable steps to help their families in ways that weren't being discussed in parenting books. This book is the fruit of their brainstorming and discussions.

In Bless This Mess, readers will gain tools as they learn how to talk to kids about money, bodies, God, ethics, disability, and difference; how to stress less (really); how to embody an ethic of service to others; how to live a practice of deep generosity and gratitude; and, most of all, how to stop being so afraid all the damn time, as we raise our kids in an increasingly chaotic and often scary world. Both Christian spirituality and modern science can help us parent more fearlessly in an age of anxiety. With real-life examples and strategies to address the challenges of raising a toddler, preteen, or teenager, Bless This Mess guides parents of children at all stages of their development.
Readers will shed stress with this resource they can turn to again and again for practical guidance as their children grow and the family encounters new challenges. Most important, readers will not feel alone, as they peruse relatable stories and are reminded of the companionship of God in their parenting journey.]]> 320 Molly Baskette 1984824120 Andrew 0 to-read 4.17 2019 Bless This Mess: A Modern Guide to Faith and Parenting in a Chaotic World
author: Molly Baskette
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future]]> 34146147
Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. There is now simply no way to prevent the planet breaching the threshold of two degrees Celsius set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What are the likely political and economic outcomes of this? Where is the overheating world heading?

To further the struggle for climate justice, we need to have some idea how the existing global order is likely to adjust to a rapidly changing environment. Climate Leviathan provides a radical way of thinking about the intensifying challenges to the global order. Drawing on a wide range of political thought, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue that rapid climate change will transform the world’s political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted. The result will be a capitalist planetary sovereignty, a terrifying eventuality that makes the construction of viable, radical alternatives truly imperative.]]> 224 Joel Wainwright 1786634295 Andrew 5 fave-reads-2020 3.64 2018 Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future
author: Joel Wainwright
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: fave-reads-2020
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or to quote Ronnie Reagan, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.�
]]> <![CDATA[Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic]]> 2067306 208 Mark Edmundson 0674874846 Andrew 5 3.80 1997 Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic
author: Mark Edmundson
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1997
rating: 5
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date added: 2021/01/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America]]> 52269471 For the first time, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower tells the inside story of the data mining and psychological manipulation behind the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum, connecting Facebook, WikiLeaks, Russian intelligence, and international hackers.

Mindf*ck goes deep inside Cambridge Analytica's "American operations," which were driven by Steve Bannon's vision to remake America and fueled by mysterious billionaire Robert Mercer's money, as it weaponized and wielded the massive store of data it had harvested on individuals in--excess of 87 million--to disunite the United States and set Americans against each other through psychological manipulation. Bannon had long sensed that deep within America's soul lurked an explosive tension. Cambridge Analytica had the data to prove it, and in 2016 Bannon had a presidential campaign to use as his proving ground.

Christopher Wylie might have seemed an unlikely figure to be at the center of such an operation. Canadian and liberal in his politics, he was only twenty-four when he got a job with a London firm that worked with the U.K. Ministry of Defense and was charged putatively with helping to build a team of data scientists to create new tools to identify and combat radical extremism online. In short order, those same military tools were turned to political purposes, and Cambridge Analytica was born.

Wylie's decision to become a whistleblower prompted the largest data crime investigation in history. His story is both exposé and dire warning about a sudden problem born of very new and powerful capabilities. It has not only exposed the profound vulnerabilities and profound carelessness in the enormous companies that drive the attention economy, it has also exposed the profound vulnerabilities of democracy itself. What happened in 2016 was just a trial run. Ruthless actors are coming for your data, and they want to control what you think.]]> 288 Christopher Wylie 1984854631 Andrew 1 4.35 2019 Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
author: Christopher Wylie
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2019
rating: 1
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date added: 2021/01/05
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]]> Why We're Polarized 52098718
Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, it offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Donald Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.]]> 336 Ezra Klein 147670032X Andrew 3 4.19 2020 Why We're Polarized
author: Ezra Klein
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2020
rating: 3
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date added: 2021/01/05
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality]]> 12841648 Techniques of Pleasure is an ethnography of the San Francisco Bay Area’s pansexual BDSM scene, a community of practitioners of bondage, domination/submission, role-playing, fetishes, and other forms of eroticism.

Margot Weiss’s research entailed attending dungeon play parties, workshops on SM techniques, and business meetings of the Society of Janus, one of America’s oldest BDSM organizations. She interviewed more than sixty SM practitioners, including dungeon owners, well-known prodommes (professional dominants), and community experts. Weiss vividly evokes the feel of the BDSM scene in San Francisco area in the early 2000s.

At the same time, she challenges notions of SM as inherently transgressive, revealing a technique-oriented community, largely organized around classes, rules, and the acquisition of expensive sex toys. Most members of the Bay Area’s BDSM community were white, heterosexual, middle-aged, well-off, and involved in long-term relationships.

Weiss analyzed SM “scenes”—sexual encounters involving roles, costumes, and props—including dramatizations of slave markets and the creation of the Abu Ghraib photographs. She contends that such performances eroticize social inequality, reproducing hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, rather than offering a safe space, separate from real-world inequities.]]> 336 Margot Danielle Weiss 0822351595 Andrew 5 3.85 2011 Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality
author: Margot Danielle Weiss
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century]]> 36236147 704 Geoffrey R. Stone 1631494287 Andrew 4 4.59 2017 Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America's Origins to the Twenty-First Century
author: Geoffrey R. Stone
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic]]> 48703097 Ěý
First published in 1971, How to Read Donald Duck shocked readers by revealing how capitalist ideology operates in our most beloved cartoons. Having survived bonfires, impounding and being dumped into the ocean by the Chilean army, this controversial book is once again back on our shelves.
Ěý
Written and published during the blossoming of Salvador Allende's revolutionary socialism in Chile, the book examines how Disney products reflect capitalist ideology, and are active agents working in this ideology’s favor. Focusing on the hapless mice and ducks of Disney, curiously parentless, marginalized and always short of cash, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart expose how these characters established hegemonic ideas about capital, race, gender and the relationship between developed countries and the Third World.
Ěý
A devastating indictment of a media giant, a document of twentieth-century political upheaval, and a reminder of the dark undercurrent of pop culture, How to Read Donald Duck is once again available, together with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman in which he writes.
Ěý
"It is that joy in liberation, that alegria, that spirit of resistance, that I wish to share with America, as the book that Pinochet’s soldiers could not liquidate or Disney’s lawyers stop from entering the United States finally finds its way to its new home, deep into the land that invented Donald Duck and Donald Trump. Is the same country that gave me such a warm welcome as a child, and perhaps may now equally greet with open arms this critique of oppression and it certainty that we don’t have to leave the world as it was when we first encountered it."]]> 208 Ariel Dorfman 0745339786 Andrew 5 4.00 1971 How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic
author: Ariel Dorfman
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1971
rating: 5
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date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization]]> 25330145 Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

Coming home from the war in Iraq, US Army private Roy Scranton thought he'd left the world of strife behind. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or Al Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, megadrought--the shock and awe of global warming.

Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter. From war-stricken Baghdad to the melting Arctic, human-caused climate change poses a danger not only to political and economic stability, but to civilization itself . . . and to what it means to be human. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in--the Anthropocene--demands a radical new vision of human life.

In this bracing response to climate change, Roy Scranton combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world, taking readers on a journey through street protests, the latest findings of earth scientists, a historic UN summit, millennia of geological history, and the persistent vitality of ancient literature. Expanding on his influential New York Times essay (the #1 most-emailed article the day it appeared, and selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014), Scranton responds to the existential problem of global warming by arguing that in order to survive, we must come to terms with death.

Plato argued that to philosophize is to learn to die. If that’s true, says Scranton, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age—or this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The trouble now is that we must learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.

AĚýwar veteran, journalist, author, and Princeton PhD candidate, Roy Scranton has published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, and Theory and Event, and has been interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, among other media.

More praise for Learning to Die in the Anthropocene:
"Perhaps it is because he is a soldier, perhaps it is because he is a literate human being, but the fact is--Roy Scranton gets it. He knows in his bones that this civilization is over. He knows it is high time to start again the human dance of making some other way to live. In his distinctive and original way he works though a common cultural inheritance, making it something fresh and new for these all too interesting times. This compressed, essential text offers both uncomfortable truths and unexpected joy."--McKenzie Wark, author of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene


]]> 142 Roy Scranton 0872866696 Andrew 3 3.73 2015 Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization
author: Roy Scranton
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2015
rating: 3
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it’s hard not to be carried away by Roy’s pessimism but somewhat ahistorical in eliding the potential (and hope!) in revolution
]]> <![CDATA[The Collapse of American Criminal Justice]]> 17804408
"The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" takes us deep into the dramatic history of American crime--bar fights in nineteenth-century Chicago, New Orleans bordellos, Prohibition, and decades of murderous lynching. Digging into these crimes and the strategies that attempted to control them, Stuntz reveals the costs of abandoning local democratic control. The system has become more centralized, with state legislators and federal judges given increasing power. The liberal Warren Supreme Court's emphasis on procedures, not equity, joined hands with conservative insistence on severe punishment to create a system that is both harsh and ineffective.

What would get us out of this Kafkaesque world? More trials with local juries; laws that accurately define what prosecutors seek to punish; and an equal protection guarantee like the one that died in the 1870s, to make prosecution and punishment less discriminatory. Above all, Stuntz eloquently argues, Americans need to remember again that criminal punishment is a necessary but terrible tool, to use effectively, and sparingly.]]> 432 William J. Stuntz 0674725875 Andrew 0 to-read 4.23 2011 The Collapse of American Criminal Justice
author: William J. Stuntz
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy]]> 17118984
Walsh first charts the genealogy of this hybrid scientific-prophetic ethos back to its roots in ancient oracles before exploring its flourishing in 17th century Europe. She then tracks its performances and mutations through several important late-modern events in Robert Oppenheimer's role in the opening of the atomic age; Rachel Carson's interventions in pesticide use; the mass-media polemics of science popularizers such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Stephen Jay Gould; and finally the UN's climate change panel and their role in Climategate. Along the way, Walsh highlights the special ethical and political defects embedded in the genealogy of the scientist-prophet, and she finishes by evaluating proposed remedies. She concludes that without a radical shift in our style of deliberative policy-making, there is little chance of remedying the dysfunctions in our current science-advising system. A cogent rhetorical analysis of over 1,000 archival documents from 10 historic
cases, Scientists as Prophets engages scholars of scientific rhetoric, history, and literacy, but is also accessible to readers interested in the roots of current political debates about the environment, nuclear energy, and science education.]]> 276 Lynda Walsh 0199857113 Andrew 5 fave-reads-2020 now more than ever! 3.86 2013 Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy
author: Lynda Walsh
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: fave-reads-2020
review:
now more than ever!
]]> <![CDATA[Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism]]> 51808817 202 Toure F. Reed 1786634384 Andrew 4 fave-reads-2020
Reed is part of a loose coalition of thinkers who rebuke the practice of disaggregating race and class, most of whom have been published at least once over at Nonsite (Cedric Johnson, Adolph Reed Jr., Walter Been Michaels). The general premise is that the Civil Rights movement made a pivot around 1964 from race/class conscious/labor rights radicalism to a more narrow race-central framing.

According to Reed, this pivot has led to decades of activism that provides a barrier to addressing inequality, as it is allowed to co-exist alongside the growth politics that continue to pose barriers to upward mobility. In their view, race affinity, while demonstrating some utility in consolidating small BIPOC communities, nevertheless suffers from singling out culturalist theories of coalition building, while generally putting aside ideas of egalitarian restructuring. As a result, activism of this sort tends to be atomized, obfuscates solutions, and is generally antithetical to multi-ethnic coalition building.

Critiques of this perspective are more than fair: yearning for a class uprising is overly backward-looking, myopically hung up on some limited gains made by Blacks in the New Deal era, and their hostility to culturalist race-centered identity politics ignores what has historically motivated people.

Nostalgia aside, the critique of Reed that he engages with directly is that he is simply is engaging in “class reductionism,� no matter how much he acknowledges the lived reality of systemic discrimination. Of the few who have bothered to acknowledge Reed's book, critics dismiss the book's focus on neutral rhetoric of equity, and reject that there is solid evidence of multi-ethnic solidarity having ever led to real change. Seeing that the evidence shows “the more volatile claim� of racism is the motivating factor with the most potential to induce radical action, any claims otherwise are illusory.

Nevertheless, it's useful to look at how Reed challenges the utility of solutions that flow from a race-based approach. Reed often takes pains to remind his readers that the “Freedom Budget for All� agenda of Randolph and Rustin has mostly been black-holed, as well as the full policy agenda behind the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with the historical record more often than not leaving the “Jobs� part out.

The tragedy according to Reed was that actual change was within our reach, with calls for public works programs and a broad redistributive anti-poverty agenda that would have directly addressed the material sources of racial disparities. But ultimately the Johnson administration abandoned a public good model of governance in favor of a growth-oriented agenda, launching the neoliberal consensus that takes us all the way up to the present day.

There's a case to be made that Reed's socialist take may be essentialist in its own right. While Reed claims to be balancing economic structuralist critiques against how communities actually perceive themselves and each other (through culturalist and ontological theories of race), the thrust of his argument tends to be premised primarily on material interests. And as much as he claims to be sympathetic to the real world traumas and gravity of racial injustice, Reed has penned a polemic, which by nature takes the shape of Maslow’s hammer.]]> 4.28 Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism
author: Toure F. Reed
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.28
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: fave-reads-2020
review:
Toure synthesizes the argument that his dad's been making for quite some time, that the conversion of Black movement activism into an elite-driven, race-centered politics from the late 60s onward has served to negate the egalitarian goals articulated best by Civil Rights leaders Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph.

Reed is part of a loose coalition of thinkers who rebuke the practice of disaggregating race and class, most of whom have been published at least once over at Nonsite (Cedric Johnson, Adolph Reed Jr., Walter Been Michaels). The general premise is that the Civil Rights movement made a pivot around 1964 from race/class conscious/labor rights radicalism to a more narrow race-central framing.

According to Reed, this pivot has led to decades of activism that provides a barrier to addressing inequality, as it is allowed to co-exist alongside the growth politics that continue to pose barriers to upward mobility. In their view, race affinity, while demonstrating some utility in consolidating small BIPOC communities, nevertheless suffers from singling out culturalist theories of coalition building, while generally putting aside ideas of egalitarian restructuring. As a result, activism of this sort tends to be atomized, obfuscates solutions, and is generally antithetical to multi-ethnic coalition building.

Critiques of this perspective are more than fair: yearning for a class uprising is overly backward-looking, myopically hung up on some limited gains made by Blacks in the New Deal era, and their hostility to culturalist race-centered identity politics ignores what has historically motivated people.

Nostalgia aside, the critique of Reed that he engages with directly is that he is simply is engaging in “class reductionism,� no matter how much he acknowledges the lived reality of systemic discrimination. Of the few who have bothered to acknowledge Reed's book, critics dismiss the book's focus on neutral rhetoric of equity, and reject that there is solid evidence of multi-ethnic solidarity having ever led to real change. Seeing that the evidence shows “the more volatile claim� of racism is the motivating factor with the most potential to induce radical action, any claims otherwise are illusory.

Nevertheless, it's useful to look at how Reed challenges the utility of solutions that flow from a race-based approach. Reed often takes pains to remind his readers that the “Freedom Budget for All� agenda of Randolph and Rustin has mostly been black-holed, as well as the full policy agenda behind the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with the historical record more often than not leaving the “Jobs� part out.

The tragedy according to Reed was that actual change was within our reach, with calls for public works programs and a broad redistributive anti-poverty agenda that would have directly addressed the material sources of racial disparities. But ultimately the Johnson administration abandoned a public good model of governance in favor of a growth-oriented agenda, launching the neoliberal consensus that takes us all the way up to the present day.

There's a case to be made that Reed's socialist take may be essentialist in its own right. While Reed claims to be balancing economic structuralist critiques against how communities actually perceive themselves and each other (through culturalist and ontological theories of race), the thrust of his argument tends to be premised primarily on material interests. And as much as he claims to be sympathetic to the real world traumas and gravity of racial injustice, Reed has penned a polemic, which by nature takes the shape of Maslow’s hammer.
]]> The Ministry for the Future 51284188
The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us � and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written.]]> 480 Kim Stanley Robinson Andrew 4 3.92 2020 The Ministry for the Future
author: Kim Stanley Robinson
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2020
rating: 4
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date added: 2021/01/05
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the only way out of the apocalypse is through
]]> The Age of Innocence 53835 The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people “dreaded scandal more than disease.�

This is Newland Archer’s world as he prepares to marry the beautiful but conventional May Welland. But when the mysterious Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a disastrous marriage, Archer falls deeply in love with her. Torn between duty and passion, Archer struggles to make a decision that will either courageously define his life—or mercilessly destroy it.]]> 293 Edith Wharton 159308143X Andrew 5 3.96 1920 The Age of Innocence
author: Edith Wharton
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1920
rating: 5
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a real slow-motion horror story, in its own way, a proto-Invasion of the Body Snatchers
]]> <![CDATA[Paul on Mazursky (Wesleyan Film)]]> 11360924
Paul Mazursky's nearly twenty films as writer/director represent Hollywood's most sustained comic expression of the 1970s and 1980s. But they have not been given their due, perhaps because Mazursky's films―both sincere and ridiculous, realistic and romantic―are pure emotion. This makes films like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, An Unmarried Woman, and Enemies, A Love Story difficult to classify, but that's what makes a human comedy human. In the first ever book-length examination of one of America's most important and least appreciated filmmakers, Sam Wasson sits down with Mazursky himself to talk about his movies and how he makes them. Going over Mazursky's oeuvre one film at a time, interviewer and interviewee delve into the director's life in and out of Hollywood, laughing, talking, and above all else, feeling―like Mazursky's people always do. The book includes a filmography and never-before-seen photos.]]> 348 Sam Wasson 0819571431 Andrew 4 4.18 2011 Paul on Mazursky (Wesleyan Film)
author: Sam Wasson
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2011
rating: 4
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date added: 2021/01/05
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It’s hard to imagine someone reading this and not wanting to just live in it forever, even if Paul at times is as insufferable as his characters. (Who among us?) Somehow Paul is able to weave together stories just like his films that play as satire and nostalgic elegy at the same time. Akin to Renoir’s “everyone has their reasons� bit, I guess, or Forsyth’s chill mix of dyspeptic warmth. Maybe the difference btwn them is Renoir and Forsyth’s approach is that of a God like generosity/benevolence, where with Mazursky you get the feeling that the only thing he knows for sure is that he’s just as lonely and insufferably narcissistic and open to satire as his characters, a mere mortal. Just beyond the frame, there’s no reason to think Paul wouldn’t be in the mix with his gallery of tragically hip beautiful fools
]]> <![CDATA[William Walker's Wars: How One Man's Private American Army Tried to Conquer Mexico, Nicaragua, and Honduras]]> 39305752
William Walker was the outlier. Short, slender, and soft-spoken with no military background—he trained as a doctor before becoming a lawyer and then a newspaper editor—Walker was an unlikely leader of rough-hewn men and adventurers. But in 1856 he managed to install himself as president of Nicaragua. Neighboring governments saw Walker as a risk to the region and worked together to drive him out—efforts aided, incongruously, by the United States� original tycoon, Cornelius Vanderbilt.

William Walker’s Wars is a story of greedy dreams and ambitions, the fate of nations and personal fortunes, and the dark side of Manifest Destiny, for among Walker’s many goals was to build his own empire based on slavery. This little-remembered story from US history is a cautionary tale for all who dream of empire.]]> 312 Scott Martelle 1613737297 Andrew 5 3.79 2018 William Walker's Wars: How One Man's Private American Army Tried to Conquer Mexico, Nicaragua, and Honduras
author: Scott Martelle
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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date added: 2021/01/05
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review:
it’s William Walker’s world we’re just living in it
]]> <![CDATA[Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre]]> 38521576 Jacqueline Riding's compelling book ties in to Mike Leigh's forthcoming film Peterloo, for which the author was historical advisor, in advance of the bicentenary of Peterloo in 2019.

]]> 400 Jacqueline Riding Andrew 5
]]> 3.93 2018 Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre
author: Jacqueline Riding
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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date added: 2021/01/05
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review:
if in an alternate timeline the political action of 2020 rallied with “defund white schools� as the chosen slogan (or something akin that would legit threaten those in power), it might surprise no one that shit would get ugly real fast. But if you want a picture of what ugly might look like, you cant do much worse than how the ruling class did the peaceable Manchester rabble in the pit, just over two centuries ago


]]> <![CDATA[A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy]]> 44890068 From longtime labor organizer Jane McAlevey, a vital call-to-arms in favor of unions, a key force capable of defending our democracy

For decades, racism, corporate greed, and a skewed political system have been eating away at the social and political fabric of the United States. Yet as McAlevey reminds us, there is one weapon whose effectiveness has been proven repeatedly throughout U.S. history: unions.

In A Collective Bargain, longtime labor organizer, environmental activist, and political campaigner Jane McAlevey makes the case that unions are a key institution capable of taking effective action against today’s super-rich corporate class. Since the 1930s, when unions flourished under New Deal protections, corporations have waged a stealthy and ruthless war against the labor movement. And they’ve been winning.

Until today. Because, as McAlevey shows, unions are making a comeback. Want to reverse the nation’s mounting wealth gap? Put an end to sexual harassment in the workplace? End racial disparities on the job? Negotiate climate justice? Bring back unions.

As McAlevey travels from Pennsylvania hospitals, where nurses are building a new kind of patient-centered unionism, to Silicon Valley, where tech workers have turned to old-fashioned collective action, to the battle being waged by America’s teachers, readers have a ringside seat at the struggles that will shape our country—and our future.]]> 304 Jane F. McAlevey 0062908596 Andrew 5 fave-reads-2020 all hail Queen Jane 4.31 2020 A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy
author: Jane F. McAlevey
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: fave-reads-2020
review:
all hail Queen Jane
]]> <![CDATA[Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex]]> 34220713 The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built.
In this fascinating book, investigative reporter Yasha Levine uncovers the secret origins of the internet, tracing it back to a Pentagon counterinsurgency surveillance project.
A visionary intelligence officer, William Godel, realized that the key to winning the war in Vietnam was not outgunning the enemy, but using new information technology to understand their motives and anticipate their movements. This idea--using computers to spy on people and groups perceived as a threat, both at home and abroad--drove ARPA to develop the internet in the 1960s, and continues to be at the heart of the modern internet we all know and use today. As Levine shows, surveillance wasn't something that suddenly appeared on the internet; it was woven into the fabric of the technology.
But this isn't just a story about the NSA or other domestic programs run by the government. As the book spins forward in time, Levine examines the private surveillance business that powers tech-industry giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, revealing how these companies spy on their users for profit, all while doing double duty as military and intelligence contractors. Levine shows that the military and Silicon Valley are effectively inseparable: a military-digital complex that permeates everything connected to the internet, even coopting and weaponizing the antigovernment privacy movement that sprang up in the wake of Edward Snowden.
With deep research, skilled storytelling, and provocative arguments, Surveillance Valley will change the way you think about the news--and the device on which you read it.]]> 384 Yasha Levine 1610398025 Andrew 5 fave-reads-2020 4.27 2018 Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
author: Yasha Levine
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: fave-reads-2020
review:
yasha seems to be struggling as of late, shitposting and starting fights (and on the edge of eviction) but this was before all that. Really canonical stuff, breaking down how the net was/is engineered for counterinsurgency, and laying out how the privacy civil liberties folks's good points are often undermined by their focus on the state, while eliding private surveillance. In many ways privacy advocates end up not so far off from the kind of rhetoric you get from the NRA. The fact that they're funded by corporate interests and the State Dept speaks to how they function as both war propagandists and Ayn Randian nutjobs
]]> <![CDATA[Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Near Future Series)]]> 31863388 An investigation of the roots of the alliance between free-market neoliberals and social conservatives.

Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues?

In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives.

Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socio-economic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged � and at the limit enforced � as a necessary counterpart to market freedom.

In a series of case studies ranging from Clinton’s welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic, and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.]]> 416 Melinda Cooper 1935408844 Andrew 5 fave-reads-2020
Bringing this mentality full circle, in late 2020, California revisited the foundational principles underlying Prop 13 and the 1970’s tax revolt through two ballot measures, Propositions 15 and 22. Collectively, these initiatives gave residents an opportunity to reconsider the state’s stance on dismantling social insurance.

Sadly, residents again rallied in opposition to the prospect of redistributive welfare, voting against raising taxes on the wealthy, and voting in favor of pushing gig workers into serfdom. In the aftermath of Prop 15 and 22, the downwardly mobile will be an endless source of kindling for the wildfires, and it's hard to think of a more apt visual metaphor for Cooper's epic genealogy of moral hazards, institutional and otherwise.]]> 4.55 Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Near Future Series)
author: Melinda Cooper
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.55
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: fave-reads-2020
review:
just God level stuff. The chapter on the California tax revolt is essential, more so paired with Mike Davis's "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn." Together they make the case that we can largely thank Prop 13 for the wildfires. Cooper's point is that Prop 13 synthesized fears about both racial and sexual degeneracy and entrenched the disproportionate political clout of California’s most affluent. Davis takes it from there, speaking to how this allowed the drawbridge to be pulled up, as it were, driving a growing population on the edge of precarity into fire-prone areas.

Bringing this mentality full circle, in late 2020, California revisited the foundational principles underlying Prop 13 and the 1970’s tax revolt through two ballot measures, Propositions 15 and 22. Collectively, these initiatives gave residents an opportunity to reconsider the state’s stance on dismantling social insurance.

Sadly, residents again rallied in opposition to the prospect of redistributive welfare, voting against raising taxes on the wealthy, and voting in favor of pushing gig workers into serfdom. In the aftermath of Prop 15 and 22, the downwardly mobile will be an endless source of kindling for the wildfires, and it's hard to think of a more apt visual metaphor for Cooper's epic genealogy of moral hazards, institutional and otherwise.
]]> <![CDATA[Automation and the Future of Work]]> 54797847 166 Aaron Benanav 1839761318 Andrew 4 fave-reads-2020 3.88 2020 Automation and the Future of Work
author: Aaron Benanav
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: fave-reads-2020
review:
Benanav calls bs on yang gang. TL;DR: robots aren't coming, they're too expensive, plus the rich are all in on short-term Ponzi schemes, which is why there's nothing for the robots to make, even if they were coming
]]> <![CDATA[The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism]]> 52376024 The fatal embrace of human rights and neoliberalism
Why did the rise of human rights in the 1970s coincide with the institutionalisation of neoliberalism? And why has the neoliberal age also been the age of human rights? Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society.In the wake of World War Two, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to â€civilisationâ€�. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects. Honing in on neoliberal political thought, Whyte shows that the neoliberals developed a stark dichotomy between politics, conceived as conflictual, coercive and violent, and civil society, which they depicted as a realm of mutually-beneficial, voluntary, market relations between individual subjects of rights. In mobilising human rights to provide a moral language for a market society, neoliberals contributed far more than is often realised to today’s politics of human rights.]]> 289 Jessica Whyte 1786633132 Andrew 4 fave-reads-2020 4.32 The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism
author: Jessica Whyte
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.32
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves: fave-reads-2020
review:
as they say, GET OUT is actually a documentary. And I can only guess that the same has been said about SORRY TO BOTHER YOU. In which case, this text would be considered snuff, in comparison. In both, the proles are now the precariat, and instead of chains being all they have to lose, now it’s their independent contractor status
]]> <![CDATA[The Mysterious Island (Captain Nemo, #3)]]> 32831
What unfolds in Jules Verne’s imaginative marvel is both an enthralling mystery and the ultimate in survivalist adventures.]]> 723 Jules Verne 0812972120 Andrew 2 4.14 1874 The Mysterious Island (Captain Nemo, #3)
author: Jules Verne
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1874
rating: 2
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date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:
plot is looney tunes, no idea what drugs they had on hand in 1870s but Verne was on some shit
]]> <![CDATA[Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World]]> 25894041



The definitive book on how the technology behind bitcoin and cryptocurrency is changing the world.

Blockchain is the ingeniously simple technology that powers Bitcoin. But it is much more than that, too. It is a public ledger to which everyone has access, but which no single person controls. It allows for companies and individuals to collaborate with an unprecedented degree of trust and transparency. It is cryptographically secure, but fundamentally open. And soon it will be everywhere.

In Blockchain Revolution, Don and Alex Tapscott reveal how this game-changing technology will shape the future of the world economy, dramatically improving everything from healthcare records to online voting, and from insurance claims to artist royalty payments. Brilliantly researched and highly accessible, this is the essential text on the next major paradigm shift. Read it, or be left behind.]]> 368 Don Tapscott 0670069973 Andrew 1 3.34 2016 Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
author: Don Tapscott
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2016
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:
I have a good feeling that digital colonialism is going to work out even better than regular colonialism
]]> <![CDATA[Cotton Comes to Harlem (Harlem Cycle, #7)]]> 429940 160 Chester Himes 0394759990 Andrew 5
It’s legit impossible to imagine this coming out at any other time in history (if it was released right now, Chester would in all likelihood be dragged as a race traitor). Pure pulp, but also, inexplicably, runs the gamut from goofy, to grim, to funky as hell, while throughout a full-scale autopsy of black power, a movement still thriving and arguably at its peak.

Hardboiled crime through and through, but, uniquely, charged with the energy of a psychedelic burlesque, it has a POV of the era that is clear-eyed, never cruel/nihilistic, but not naive either. Wall to wall with unsparing acidic cultural commentary, never once feels like a sermon or a scolding]]> 3.78 1964 Cotton Comes to Harlem (Harlem Cycle, #7)
author: Chester Himes
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1964
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:
For whatever reason this isn’t mentioned in the same breath as INVISIBLE MAN and NATIVE SON, no idea why not. This is a low-down no-bullshit satire of all things cultural in the Black community at the end point of the 60s (art, activism, eros, fashion, race identity, religion, revolution). As per the hardboiled dick genre, everyone here has got a hustle, or (if you’re the one getting hustled) a predatory scam; nothing more American than that drop of poison in the apple pie.

It’s legit impossible to imagine this coming out at any other time in history (if it was released right now, Chester would in all likelihood be dragged as a race traitor). Pure pulp, but also, inexplicably, runs the gamut from goofy, to grim, to funky as hell, while throughout a full-scale autopsy of black power, a movement still thriving and arguably at its peak.

Hardboiled crime through and through, but, uniquely, charged with the energy of a psychedelic burlesque, it has a POV of the era that is clear-eyed, never cruel/nihilistic, but not naive either. Wall to wall with unsparing acidic cultural commentary, never once feels like a sermon or a scolding
]]> <![CDATA[The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther]]> 6561790
The Assassination of Fred Hampton is Haas’s personal account of how he and People’s Law Office partner Flint Taylor pursued Hampton’s assassins, ultimately prevailing over unlimited government resources and FBI conspiracy. Not only a story of justice delivered, the book puts Hampton in a new light as a dynamic community leader and an inspiration in the fight against injustice.]]> 424 Jeffrey Haas 1556527659 Andrew 5 4.46 2009 The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther
author: Jeffrey Haas
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:
or as Oscar Wilde might say, how Fred’s assassination went down could only be in a country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between
]]> <![CDATA[From Dictatorship to Democracy]]> 1119326 93 Gene Sharp Andrew 1
Instead, you’d be better suited to turn to a passage from Mr. Sam Clemens, at his grumpy old man peak, who speaks on how much non-violence can be somehow the worst outcome for everyone...

“Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood � a settlement of that hoary debt in proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,� if we would be remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors� of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by the older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.�

One more choice quote, summing up the Dr Strangelove level of apocalypse intrinsic to Sharp’s unique brand of neolib pacifism � after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the new Lithuanian defense minister remarked that, if forced to choose, he would prefer Sharp’s “nonviolent action weapons system� to the nuclear bomb.

]]> 3.83 1993 From Dictatorship to Democracy
author: Gene Sharp
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1993
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:
For true wisdom on the lifelong project of Gene Sharp—the “pacifist� theorist behind countless "color revolutions" across the world, ready-made tools for grift, from Yugoslavia to Ukraine, Iran to Hong Kong, Venezuela to Burma, the "Arab Spring" and beyond, responsible for more revolutions than anyone since Lenin or Mao, a dude with deep ties to the US national security state, the kind of Midwest yokel who thinks poverty is just an “act of God,� someone who ushered in all the liberating gifts of the free market to all who wanted it, as well as those would've rather opted out—this may not offer much.

Instead, you’d be better suited to turn to a passage from Mr. Sam Clemens, at his grumpy old man peak, who speaks on how much non-violence can be somehow the worst outcome for everyone...

“Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood � a settlement of that hoary debt in proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,� if we would be remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors� of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by the older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.�

One more choice quote, summing up the Dr Strangelove level of apocalypse intrinsic to Sharp’s unique brand of neolib pacifism � after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the new Lithuanian defense minister remarked that, if forced to choose, he would prefer Sharp’s “nonviolent action weapons system� to the nuclear bomb.


]]> The Phantom Tollbooth 378 Librarian's Note: For an alternate cover edition of the same ISBN, click here.

This beloved story -first published more than fifty years ago- introduces readers to Milo and his adventures in the Lands Beyond.

For Milo, everything’s a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only because he’s got nothing better to do. But on the other side, things seem different. Milo visits the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping), learns about time from a ticking watchdog named Tock, and even embarks on a quest to rescue Rhyme and Reason! Somewhere along the way, Milo realizes something astonishing. Life is far from dull. In fact, it’s exciting beyond his wildest dreams. . . .]]> 248 Norton Juster 0394820371 Andrew 3 4.19 1961 The Phantom Tollbooth
author: Norton Juster
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1961
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:
Man’s Search for Meaning, kid’s version. Aggressively didactic but Juster's talents make it more than bearable for the most part. I guess paved the way for INSIDE OUT, using the most literal means possible to tell a story of an adolescent anxious in the face of growing up and making sense of the absurdity of existence. Theres even some vague reference to the specific absurdities of existence at the time, being in the Global Village during post wartime, all that (most explicitly through the tale of two kingdoms refusing to negotiate, where message and medium are one). But by the end the thing is so entangled in competing vague bromides (the dangers of using words to obscure truth, of using apathy as a coping mechanism), without ever exploring one idea in depth that what remains is a collision of grand themes and slogans and messages that end up having an effect akin to doublespeak. It’s the sort of seemingly sound logic that is so open and unspecific as to be apathy-inducing and meaningless, which in other hands (Carroll, Dahl etc) was kind of the point
]]> The Spook Who Sat by the Door 33954 256 Sam Greenlee 1930097271 Andrew 5
]]> 4.36 1969 The Spook Who Sat by the Door
author: Sam Greenlee
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:
Fresh as ever, sadly enough. We couldn’t hang with it back then (thx FBI) and now, well we wouldn’t know what to do with it now, extra sad because it’s been long removed from the FBI’s shit list. Decades have passed but the discourse has grown even more indifferent to our imperial adventures overseas (or at least those that the outlets are less keen to amplify, from Yemen to Libya to coups in the Southern Cone and sub-Saharan Africa). According to Greenlee’s somewhat didactic though kind of inarguable logic, it’s impossible to see our expansionism as anything but entangled with the shit we do to our own back home. Per John Quincy Adams: when America becomes the dictatress of the world, “she’s no longer the ruler of her own spirit.�


]]> <![CDATA[Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg]]> 25422234 Only Ruth Bader Ginsburg can judge me.
The Ruth will set you free.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg never asked for fame—she was just trying to make the world a little better and a little freer. But along the way, the feminist pioneer's searing dissents and steely strength have inspired millions. Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, created by the young lawyer who began the Internet sensation and an award-winning journalist, takes you behind the myth for an intimate, irreverent look at the justice's life and work. As America struggles with the unfinished business of gender equality and civil rights, Ginsburg stays fierce. And if you don't know, now you know.]]> 240 Irin Carmon 0062415832 Andrew 3
Our high wizards may balk at the lack of standing or jurisprudence for bringing an “emperor has no clothes� claim to the highest court in the land, but if any police squad needs an �8 that can’t wait� it’s SCOTUS.]]> 4.18 2015 Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
author: Irin Carmon
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:
if RBG and bff Antonin “Applesauce� Scalia agreed on anything it was that it’s not the courts� role to be playing policymaker. In which case, what better way to honor her legacy (which would have been earned by the Shelby Cty dissent alone), than to all of us join hands, across the aisle, and reform this council of elders cult like BLM has been trying to do for the 5-0.

Our high wizards may balk at the lack of standing or jurisprudence for bringing an “emperor has no clothes� claim to the highest court in the land, but if any police squad needs an �8 that can’t wait� it’s SCOTUS.
]]> The Masque of the Red Death 204779
In the midst of their revelry, a mysterious figure disguised as a Red Death victim enters and makes his way through each of the rooms.

The story follows many traditions of Gothic fiction and is often analyzed as an allegory about the inevitability of death, though some critics advise against an allegorical reading. Many different interpretations have been presented, as well as attempts to identify the true nature of the titular disease.

Librarian's note: this entry relates to the story "The Masque of the Red Death." Collections of short stories by the author can be found elsewhere on Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ.]]> 129 Edgar Allan Poe 1594567395 Andrew 5 4.09 1842 The Masque of the Red Death
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1842
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
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review:
story of a nihilistic libertine who gets his rocks off by exposing hypocrisy of the elites/owning the libs while being opportunistic during a pandemic then climaxes with the sick fuck getting owned himself by succumbing to said pandemic out of sheer hubris yeah I don’t know super dated doesn’t really speak to our moment
]]> <![CDATA[American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History]]> 11887020
A native Texan who learned to shoot on childhood hunting trips with his father, Kyle was a champion saddle-bronc rider prior to joining the Navy. After 9/11, he was thrust onto the front lines of the War on Terror, and soon found his calling as a world-class sniper who performed best under fire. He recorded a personal-record 2,100-yard kill shot outside Baghdad; in Fallujah, Kyle braved heavy fire to rescue a group of Marines trapped on a street; in Ramadi, he stared down insurgents with his pistol in close combat. Kyle talks honestly about the pain of war—of twice being shot and experiencing the tragic deaths of two close friends.

American Sniper also honors Kyles fellow warriors, who raised hell on and off the battlefield. And in moving first-person accounts throughout, Kyles wife, Taya, speaks openly about the strains of war on their marriage and children, as well as on Chris.

Adrenaline-charged and deeply personal, American Sniper is a thrilling eyewitness account of war that only one man could tell.]]> 502 Chris Kyle 0062107062 Andrew 2 4.00 2012 American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History
author: Chris Kyle
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:
like TEAM AMERICA but played straight. Even the whole “sheep, sheepdog, wolf� speech is just the “dicks, pussies, assholes� bit
]]> The Hateful Eight 20658751
At the end of the Civil War, a stagecoach hurtles through the wintry Wyoming landscape. Bounty hunter John Ruth and his fugitive captive Daisy Domergue race toward the town of Red Rock, where Ruth will bring Domergue to justice. Along the road, they encounter Major Marquis Warren, a former Union soldier turned infamous bounty hunter; and Chris Mannix, a renegade who claims to be the town's new sheriff. Lost in a blizzard, Ruth, Domergue, Warren, and Mannix seek refuge at Minnie's Haberdashery, a stagecoach stopover. When they arrive, they are greeted by four unfamiliar faces: Bob, who takes care of Minnie's in the owner's absence; Oswaldo Mobray, the hangman of Red Rock; cow-puncher Joe Gage; and Confederate general Sanford Smithers. As the storm overtakes the mountainside, our eight travelers come to learn they may not make it to Red Rock after all ...

THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a Tarantino master class in tension-filled atmosphere, singular characters, and razor-sharp dialogue.]]> 141 Quentin Tarantino Andrew 3
To the extent that QT comes off like a narcissistic dumbass in nearly every interview, it’s kind of inconceivable how he made something with any insight beyond “isn’t this cool.� But with this, probably the most loathed of his works, single-mindedly repellent and seriously uncool, he finally has something on his mind. And it’s an answer to Rodney King.

Yes, the movie says, we can all get along, assuming we have a common enemy. Yes, two sides can put aside the horrors and deep wounds of racism and unite over all kinds of shared interests, revenge and greed being the two big ones long rooted in American history and tradition. But this movie says let’s not discount that our racial divides can be put aside in service of the one other thing just as deeply rooted in our nation’s tradition, acts of overt misogyny.

I bet an argument could be made that with this flick QT called 2016. I wouldn’t go that far but for those out there who think the very conceit of the neoliberal was coined to neg HRC, and that economic anxiety is some kind of myth, I’d argue it could be worth your time to a revisit and think of HRC as a more low key Daisy D.

Or to bring it up to 2020s results, where half the country just straight up rejects the premise of a nation having a soul, QTs parable speaks to how our nation’s deep-seeded bloodlust, toxic masculinity and greed can unite us, and even hold out some promise to heal our racial divides]]> 4.27 2014 The Hateful Eight
author: Quentin Tarantino
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:
no shade to our President Elect, but healing the soul of the nation is all talk until you’re ready to do some real deal “truth & reconciliation� work. And there’s no flick in recent memory that better shows what “doing the work� would actually look like.

To the extent that QT comes off like a narcissistic dumbass in nearly every interview, it’s kind of inconceivable how he made something with any insight beyond “isn’t this cool.� But with this, probably the most loathed of his works, single-mindedly repellent and seriously uncool, he finally has something on his mind. And it’s an answer to Rodney King.

Yes, the movie says, we can all get along, assuming we have a common enemy. Yes, two sides can put aside the horrors and deep wounds of racism and unite over all kinds of shared interests, revenge and greed being the two big ones long rooted in American history and tradition. But this movie says let’s not discount that our racial divides can be put aside in service of the one other thing just as deeply rooted in our nation’s tradition, acts of overt misogyny.

I bet an argument could be made that with this flick QT called 2016. I wouldn’t go that far but for those out there who think the very conceit of the neoliberal was coined to neg HRC, and that economic anxiety is some kind of myth, I’d argue it could be worth your time to a revisit and think of HRC as a more low key Daisy D.

Or to bring it up to 2020s results, where half the country just straight up rejects the premise of a nation having a soul, QTs parable speaks to how our nation’s deep-seeded bloodlust, toxic masculinity and greed can unite us, and even hold out some promise to heal our racial divides
]]> <![CDATA[The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon]]> 17660462 The definitive story of Amazon.com, one of the most successful companies in the world, and of its driven, brilliant founder, Jeff Bezos.

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Compared to tech's other elite innovators--Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg--Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing.

The Everything Store will be the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.]]> 384 Brad Stone 0316219266 Andrew 2 4.12 2013 The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
author: Brad Stone
name: Andrew
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:
solid Black Mirror ep though a little on the nose towards the end
]]> <![CDATA[Walt Disney: A Biography (Greenwood Biographies)]]> 8101904
Walt Disney has been dissected, criticized, and lauded in numerous biographies, most of which try to penetrate the psychology of the man and his motives. Walt A Biography takes a cultural approach, looking at Disney as both a product of his culture and a cultural innovator who influenced entertainment, education, leisure, and even history.

Drawing on many original sources, Walt Disney provides an overview of this genius's remarkable life and family. At the same time, the book places Disney in the context of his times as a way of exploring the roots of and inspiration for his creativity. Because Walt Disney's creations and ideas still affect our movies, play activities, vacation choices, and even our dreams and imagination, his influence is as important today as it was when he was alive, and this thoroughly engaging book shows why.]]> 192 Louise Krasniewicz 0313358303 Andrew 2 3.58 2010 Walt Disney: A Biography (Greenwood Biographies)
author: Louise Krasniewicz
name: Andrew
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2021/01/05
shelves:
review:
kudos for not shying away from Walt's union-busting and McCarthy snitching, but some missed opportunities in sidestepping the rampant anti-semitism, Nazi collabs, copyright law abuse and kid fucking. considering all the fucked up stuff Walt did, not to mention what goes on in his name, it's sad that the Smigel short is in many ways more illuminating than this, and 3 hours and 56 minutes shorter to boot. you want to talk about some classic animated IP worthy of a reboot/franchise it’s that Smigel short. open the vault!
]]>