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Saturday, April 5, 2025 Book RoundupLast Book Roundup was way back on April 25, 2024 and, well, much has happened since then. When I started looking around, I found a lot of new and urgent 2025 books -- including the first books on the 2024 elections, as well as taking stock of major events, like genocide in Gaza -- that should jump to the top of the queue. Rest assured that I'm working on them, and will have a report (or two, or maybe three) soon. But I also had a ton of stuff in my leftover draft file, so after a wee bit of thought, I decided to try to flush a bunch of those notices out first. My usual rules call for 20 (previously 40) books in the main section, some with bullet lists for extra books related by author or subject, followed by a second "briefly noted" section, for books I don't have a lot more to say about, or feel like putting the time and effort into (reserving the option of returning to them later). I'll follow that format here, but no need to be strict on counts. One rule I will enforce is no 2025 releases (for the main books, but I did slip a few into the extended lists). After four days of working on this, I might as well go ahead and post. One could, of course, keep working indefinitely, but what I missed can always be rolled into another post. The exception might be for books I want to slot under sectional lists. I'm thinking of doing a Loose Tabs post on Sunday, and Music Week on Monday, but holding off on another Book Roundup until late next week (at earliest, more likely a week or two later), so until I start working in earnest on the next books post, it will be relatively easy to patch changes in here (which I'll mark with change bars, unless they seem insignificant). Book cover images indicate books I've read (added to my Recent Reading, or in a few cases have bought and intend to read, but haven't gotten to yet). Internal links to authors/subjects (+ extended lists; the numbering has no meaning other than it saves me from being tempted to count):
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian: The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks
the World (2024, Riverhead): The richest people in the world
have such extraordinary wealth that they are effectively nations unto
themselves, or at least are able to shop around for convenience ports
whenever they need to stash some cash, with little regard for where
they came from, or where they're going. I don't know of many books on
this phenomenon, but this at least gives us a rough sketch. One of
the first things Biden tried to do was to negotiate an international
system to collect taxes from foreign havens. Getting agreement on
principle was surprisingly easy, but implementing an actual system
has been elusive. No one expects Trump, even with his nationalist
rhetoric, to lift a finger on this, which gives the superrich four
more years to work their graft.
Sohrab Ahmari: Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty -- and What to Do About It (2023, Forum Books): Quasi-conservative intellectual, one of the few to focus more on the dangers of power held by capitalists than government. One result is that he gets favorable blurbs from Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley, James Galbraith and Slavoj Zizek, Michael Lind and John Gray. Max Boot: Reagan: His Life and Legend (2024, Liveright): At 880 pages, the author assumes his subject is a man of great importance, but he was a cipher onto whom you could project whatever you wanted, which his own acts rarely contradicted, because he was just a front for a cabal of crooked, greedy bigots. After his embarrassing start as advocate and enabler for military blunders -- I recommend his 2002 book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power as a sobering catalog of horrors, which belies his ghoulishly cheery conclusion -- he's turned on Trump and drifted left. That he's bothered to bring this baggage along is testament to the shallowness of his thinking. Bob Bauer: The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics Without Ethics and Democracy (2024, Rowman & Littlefield): Memoir and manifesto by former White House Counsel under Obama. His argument that "renewing American democracy begins with restoring political ethics" sounds about right, but he also asks "where does the line fall between the 'hardball' of politics and attacks on the very foundation of democracy?" While "hardball" doesn't necessarily mean abandoning ethics, politics in America sure seems to. Virtually no one gets to even run for president without sucking up to the donor class, which is just the first of many things they have to deceive the voters about. Once in office, they have more interests to serve, and more secrets to protect, so much so that their political skills are largely measured in how successful they are at lying. And then there's the pretty universal ethic of "thou shall not kill," which Obama (to pick an example who's not Bush or Trump) violated only a few days after taking office, first when he ordered Somali pirates to be killed, then drone strikes, and for the biggest brag of all, the raid that killed Bin Laden. (Bush ordered bombing of Iraq on his first day, months before 9/11, and later much more, including full blown wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump did more drone attacks than Obama.) Still, there is a bigger problem than the ethical lapses of politicians. It's that voters seem to prefer the least ethical candidates. No one voted for Trump because they thought he was the less corrupt, less stable, less violent choice. Trump won because voters saw him as the baddest ass in the game. Maybe if Democrats hadn't played into that game, if they had provided a genuine alternative to show that honesty, integrity, and decency actually worked -- such an ideal may not exist, but Bernie Sanders is a much better example than Obama -- Trump wouldn't have seemed so attractive.
Patrick Bergemann: Judge Thy Neighbor: Denunciations in the Spanish Inquisition, Romanov Russia, and Nazi Germany (2019; paperback, 2021, Columbia University Press): This book came up in reference to Trump's anti-immigrant abductions, which in turn bring back memories of the postwar US Red Scares. That didn't strike me as very exact, but all of these (and many more) cases do fit under the flagrant abuse of arbitrary power. The insistence on convincing people to denounce one another is a way of testifying to that power, in the hope that it will intimidate others. The book itself has just the three historical sections, with some generalizations -- perhaps also further examples? -- in the introductory "A Theory of Denunciation" and the concluding "Denunciations: Present and Future." HW Brands: America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War (2024, Doubleday): Wide-ranging popular biographer, much of what I know about Franklin Roosevelt I gleaned from his 2008 biography, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which left me wondering why I, born just 5 years after Roosevelt died, heard so very little about him during my super-patriotic childhood. (I now suspect that the main point of the Red Scare, which Democrats were all too complicit in, was to wipe the New Deal from American memory. You certainly can't indict the Democrats for running on their legacy, like Republicans did with their mania for naming things after Lincoln and Reagan.) This book takes a small slice of the biography, probably occasioned by Trump's embrace of the Nazi-simp America First slogan, and inflates it to 464 pages. I must admit a bit of trepidation here: I've long admired the (mostly Republican) progressives who were later slandered as "isolationists" for their reluctance to leap into foreign wars, and I'm at least a bit skeptical that Lindbergh was really the pro-Nazi strawman he's made out to be -- although I have no problem believing that the two Freds, Koch and Trump, were. I'm also fully conscious of the downside of Roosevelt's engagement and management of the war effort -- although, once the decision to fight had become unavoidable, I doubt any other politician could have handled it as masterfully. Perhaps therein lies a lesson for Joe Biden, who didn't even have to suffer a stroke to screw up worse than Woodrow Wilson.
David S Brown: A Hell of a Storm: The Battle for Kansas, the
End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War (2024,
Scribner): Just as we're still writing new books about WWII, we're
still reading books about the Civil War. But this one looks more
interesting than most, and not just because I appreciate the Kansas
angle. This looks deep into the political and intellectual ferment
of the 1850s, which first turned bloody in Kansas, but was rubbed
raw everywhere. There are, for instance, contending chapters not
just on "Bibles and Guns" but on Thoreau and Fitzhugh.
Philip Bump: The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom
and the Future of Power in America (2023, Viking): So, what?
The "baby boom" started in 1946 (a few months after WWII ended in
August 1945, followed by a massive military demobilization), and
"lasted until 1964" (seems pretty arbitrary, but one of the charts
here shows births plateauing around 1955-62, then dropping off,
more precipitously after 1964). Lots of charts here, as the author
beats this horse into the ground. The division of American life
into generational cohorts has generally struck me as arbitrary and
useless -- the differences within each are much greater than from
one to the next, although I have to admit that people born in the
late 1940s grew up in a very different world from their parents --
although I'd push the start point back 5-8 years (to the first
children with no real memory of the slump and war, but who were
first to ride the postwar boom). I was born in 1950, so barely
into the second quartile of the 20-year window, but by the time
I got to college, it was already clear that opportunities (e.g.,
for teaching) had started to dwindle. So had our faith in good
times -- especially disillusioning was the Vietnam War. These
days Boomers get bad press for the world they left behind, but
it's hard to see how we really inherited it: the big disaster
was the Vietnam War, which was the work of the so-called Greatest
Generation, as was the turn toward greed with Nixon and Reagan.
Granted, the klatch of presidents born on the leading edge --
1946 for Trump, Clinton, and Bush; Biden, from 1942, fits closer
than Obama, from 1961 -- did little to stop the slide.
Ben Burgis: Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A
Critique of the Contemporary Left (2021, Zero Books): Jacobin
writer, podcaster (Dead Pundits Society), wrote a short book (136 pp),
"calling for a smarter, funnier, more strategic left." That sounds
fine to me, but the book is long on dumb and/or offensive things
attributed to supposed leftists, and who needs that? Possibly I'm
in denial, thinking that such examples are best ignored.
Erwin Chemerinsky: No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution
Threatens the United States (2024, Liveright): One of our most
valuable experts on constitutional law, after having written a number
of books against The Conservative Assault on the Constitution
(a 2011 title) and in offering a A Progressive Reading of the
Constitution for the Twenty-First Century (a 2018 subtitle, the
title being We the People) seems to have switched tunes, seeing
the Constitution as itself a big part of the problem. He's probably
right, but without a political consensus in favor of a much better
text, the only practical option is to defend the one we got. To do
that, Democrats need to win elections, and by margins that overcome
the obstacles to reform built into the old system.
Joe Conason: The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (2024, St Martin's Press): Veteran journalist, wrote for Village Voice, has several books, soft on the Clintons but strong on the vast right-wing conspiracy. This one includes a foreword by Clinton-nemesis-turned-never-Trumper George T Conway III (aka Mr Kellyanne Conway). [07-09] Also by Conason:
David Daley: Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's 50-Year
Plot to Control American Elections (2024, Mariner Books):
Author has been following Republican efforts to rig elections for
some while now, with this his third exposé timed to come out in
the heat of a presidential election: in 2016, he looked deep into
the nuts-and-bolts of gerrymandering in Ratf**ked: The True
Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy; in
2020, he shifted focus to Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling
Back to Save Democracy. Back to the bad guys in 2024, with his
biggest book yet (464 pp), including a look at "the crucial role
that Chief Justice John Roberts has played in determining how we
vote." We shouldn't be surprised that Republicans hate democracy
and seek to exploit every trick to subvert it. Their real agenda
is sharply opposed to the best interests of most people, so the
only way they can win is to misdirect voters, and even there they
don't have enough faith in their con to just let the votes count.
They need every cheat, every edge they can find and exploit, and
they need to keep their bad faith and shabby ethics covered up.
Daley helps here.
Jonathan Darman: Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President (2022; paperback, 2023, Random House): Having risen to being the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1920, he contracted polio in 1921, was left partially paralyzed, but he found in his hardships, a humbling which many felt gave him special empathy for less fortunate Americans, he rose to new political heights, to governor of New York in 1928, and president in 1932.
Richard J Evans: Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third
Reich (2024, Penguin Press): The author's three-volume
history of Nazi Germany should be all anyone needs to know on the
subject, but interest never seems to wane, and Evans does have a
lifetime of study to draw on, so here he revisits the history
through a series of 25 biographical sketches, a substantial 475
pages plus notes, where Hitler himself claims 94 pages, admitting
"There is no way of beginning this book except with a biographical
essay on Hitler. Without Hitler, there would have been no Third
Reich, no World War II, and no Holocaust, at least not in the form
that those calamitous events took."
I have minimal interest in the military side of WWII, so I haven't paid much attention in the past, but I'm struck by how many recent books have appeared:
Also some books on prominent politicians in WWII:
Henry Farrell/Abraham Newman: Underground Empire: How America
Weaponized the World Economy (2023, Henry Holt): "Reveals how
the United States is like a spider at the heart of an international
web of surveillance and control." The original idea for spying on
business transactions everywhere was to fight terrorism, but the net
effect was to gain leverage that can be used for things like policing
sanctions, America's favorite form of bullying. It's a unique power
that the US wields, one that no other nation can counter or deter in
kind, and as such can be very destabilizing.
Drew Gilpin Faust: Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury (2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Memoir by the historian, who grew up in the 1950s, "a privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia," and "found resistance was necessary for her survival." That brought her into the civil rights and antiwar movements, and led her to become one of our more eminent historians of the Civil War: most famously for This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008). Michael R Fischbach: The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left (paperback, 2019, Stanford University Press): Argues that the American left split into multiple camps over the 1967 Israeli war, and that those divisions ultimately contributed to the demise of the left in later 1970s. But it's hard to tell what's cause and effect here, as there were many "divergent left-wing paths," both before and "after the storm." What I recall is that there were two small factions -- one that dropped every other left issue to embrace Israel (the editor of a mag I read at the time, The Minority of One, was in that camp), and another that was so universally anti-colonialist that it even turned against Israel (probably the larger group, as it included those who who went beyond opposing America's war in Vietnam to rooting for the Vietnamese) -- but both quickly made themselves irrelevant as the new left broadened its focus beyond civil rights and peace to include women's liberation and the environment. I would argue that the new left was pretty successful at winning the cultural struggle, but failed to achieve the political power that would be necessary to safeguard our gains. Fischbach also wrote:
George Friedman: The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond (2020, Doubleday; paperback, 2021, Anchor): Geopolitical forecaster, has a scheme that breaks American history up into 80-year cycles that start with strife, chaos, and upheaval -- the Revolution of 1776, the Civil War of 1861, the Great Depression/New Deal of 1933 and/or war of 1941, whatever you call what's happening now -- before we settle down and (usually) come out ahead. I have a somewhat similar scheme, but I'm skeptical about both his methods and conclusions: nothing in history works that mechanically. He also wrote:
John Ganz: When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (2024, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Looks like a signficant reconsideration of the rise of the far-right in the 1990s, as Republicans like Newt Gingrich gave up any pretense to offering a normal conservatism, let alone one dressed up as "kinder, gentler." He sees the Buchanan and Perot campaigns as pivotal, although we might also consider how Clinton's surrender of traditional Democratic principles and support like unions emboldened Republicans. Other factors include the end of the Cold War (and the push to remilitarize), the changing media landscape (which Fox soon came to dominate), and the seemingly intractable increase in inequality. Ganz seems to suggest that amounted to a rebuke to Reagan, but at the time it just seemed like the gloves were coming off, revealing the rottenness that had driven the Republican Party at least since Nixon. But now, of course, one also looks for harbingers of Trump. Arlie Russell Hochschild: Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (2024, New Press): Her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land got some press after Hillary Clinton's loss on a "6 books to understand Trump's win" list. That book was largely based on research in Louisiana. This sequel moves to Appalachia, the "second poorest congressional district in America," where Trump got 80% of the vote. No one has ever worked harder to make Trump supporters seem like decent human beings, as opposed to the "deplorables" Republicans say Democrats say they are. I never doubted that much, but it's not clear to me that replacing smug contempt with smug compassion helps much. CJ Hopkins: The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol III (2020-2021) (paperback, 2022, Consent Factory): Playwright and novelist, based in Berlin, sees the Covid-19 pandemic as a cynical power grab to force the world to conform to a new "pathologized-totalitarian ideology": the cover superimposes a swastika over a surgical mask. The book touts rave blurbs from Robert F Kennedy Jr, Matt Taibbi, Max Blumenthal, and Catherine Austin Fitts -- the middle two formerly valuable writers who once had a sharp eye but have wigged out over Covid-19 and other suspected conspiracies. Earlier volumes:
Gerald Horne: The Counterrevolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of American Fascism (paperback, 2022, Intl Pub): 622 pp. Author has a number of books, including The Counterrevolution of 1776: Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, which stresses how independence saved slavery in what became the United States. In 1836, Americans who had infiltrated Texas staged a revolt against Mexico, which had abolished slavery on its independence from Spain, and immediately restored slavery in the independent Texas Republic. Cover pic adds a swastika to the Texas flag. This is history where a kernel of truth is used to hook in a contemporary political argument, rather than helping us understand what happened and why. Peniel E Joseph: The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century (2022, Basic Books): The civil rights movement that led to legal breakthroughs in the 1950s and 1960s is sometimes described as a "second reconstruction" -- at least in terms of federal law enforcement to secure civil rights -- but do the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and the paltry police reforms that followed in some places really rate that high? At this point, the most common thread running through "reconstruction" is how fragile efforts to change behavior are given widespread indifference.
Dave Marsh: Kick Out the Jams: Jibes, Barbs, Tributes, and Rallying Cries From 35 Years of Music Writing (2023; paperback, 2024, Simon & Schuster). This seems to run from 1982-2017, so starts well after my first scrapes with his writing, and well into what I thought of as his MOR rut, although I suppose I should note that many of these pieces are reprinted from CounterPunch, where his dogged class consciousness won political favor. And within his limits, I imagine he does have some worthwhile things to say.
Clara E Mattei: The Capital Order: How Economists Invented
Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (2022, University of
Chicago Press): No doubt the original intent was liberal, in its
classic sense of promoting individual responsibility, not least by
offering no pity for those who fail, but the reasoning has always
been to protect and flaunt the power of capital, and the effect
has been to immiserate labor, driving them to revolt, or failing
that, to restore order by force (which is certainly one definition
of fascism). Starts with Italy and the UK in the 1920s, but the
pattern has recycled since -- Argentina offers several examples.
Tom McGrath: Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation (2024, Grand Central Publishing): Young Urban Professionals is a term I recall gaining currency in the 1990s, although the phenomenon got a big boost as Reagan became president and Wall Street rekindled its love affair with greed. It's hard to know how seriously to take this, not least the name -- McGrath opens with a chapter on Jerry Rubin, who gave up antiwar activism with the end of the Vietnam war and became a stock broker, literally going from Yippie to Yuppie, one caricature to another. But the bits I've read do offer a lot of detail on the mass culture of the period, and are likely to be interesting for that alone.
Susan Neiman: Left Is Not Woke (2023, Polity):
Philosopher who identifies as left picks apart the intellectual
roots of "wokeism," or perhaps more importantly, reasserts the
fundamental defining principles of the left. "What distinguishes
the left from the liberal is the view that, along with political
rights that guarantee freedoms to speak, worship, travel, and
vote as we choose, we also have claims to social rights, which
undergird the real exercise of political rights. Liberal writers
call them benefits, entitlements, or safety nets. All these terms
make th ings like fair labor practices, education, healthcare,
and housing appear as matters of charity rather than justice."
What I take from this is that the framing of "woke" as an issue
distracts and detracts from the more universal concerns of the
left. In misrepresenting the left, it also creates a useful
target for the right.
Ilan Pappe: Lobbying for Zionism: On Both Sides of the Atlantic (2024, Oneworld): A pretty extensive (608 pp) examination of the development of political influence in the UK -- leading up to the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate -- and in the US, but less (if any) on other lobbying efforts (France and Germany should be interesting case studies, as might be various other targets of interest). I've read various bits and pieces of this before, but it's nice to see them brought together, especially as without understanding this history, it's hard to understand why the US and UK have lined up so readily behind Israel's extremely self-centered nationalist agenda.
Paul Pierson/Eric Schickler: Partisan Nation: The Dangerous
New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era (2024,
University of Chicago Press): As political scientists, they're more
inclined to look at the structure and mechanics of elections and
parties than to the specific reasons people have for preferring one
over the other. As such, they are struck by the historically huge
degree of polarization these days, and see that as a vulnerability
in the system itself. That doesn't necessarily mean that they see
the two parties as symmetrical: Republicans not only wish to claim
the system for their own ends, but to become invulnerable by locking
Democrats out.
Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (2025, Heritage Foundation): This seems to be the actual title, edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves, foreword by Kevin D Roberts. I've seen think tanks put out pre-election wish-books for a long time now -- I have one from 1992 prepared for the Clinton campaign, which I long kept handy as a guide to generic policy wonkery -- but this one blew up to become a campaign issue, mostly because the Republican vision for America is so horrific even Trump took pains to walk it back. I didn't see it on Amazon, but had no trouble finding the 922-page PDF, so knock yourself out. Although Trump disavowed this, his own campaign had an extensive series of videos detailing his agenda. They were little noticed by Democrats, but were at least as horrific, and are probably a better guide to what Trump has actually done since taking office. We should see some more substantial books on this later in 2025 (e.g., David A Graham: The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America [04-22]), but for now I'll just note a few pre-election quickies (self-published if none noted):
Thomas E Ricks: Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 (2022, Farrar Straus and Giroux): I've read Ricks' first book on the Bush invasion of Iraq, where he was embedded with the general command but took long enough to craft his rah-rah reporting into book form that he wound up calling it Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Hobnobbing with generals is what he knows, so one can appreciate why he thought he could get away with recasting the civil rights movement as military strategy, but that's bound to mess up much more than the occasional insight he produces. David Rohde: Where Tyranny Begins: The Justice Department, the FBI, and the War on Democracy (2024, WW Norton): The author has a reputation as a competent journalist (including a couple of Pulitzer Prizes), but this, as well as his 2020 book (In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth About America's "Deep State") has the odor of echoing Trump talking points. Looking back, I was never all that enthusiastic about the Trump impeachments, the criminal charges against Trump and his circle, and the broader prosecutions related to the Jan. 6 riot. I know damn well that the FBI pursues criminal cases for political reasons -- they've done that since before I was born (J Edgar Hoover rose to power thanks to his Red Scare prosecutions c. 1919) -- so I had little trouble recognizing the political component here, but as far as I could tell, that worked more to Trump's advantage than not. Besides, Trump never appealed against the principle of using the FBI for political purposes: he just wanted to put the shoe on the other foot, which in my mind made him more despicable than his actual crimes (at least the ones he was prosecuted for; the ones he's so far got away with may well be another story). Similarly, I don't feel terribly bad that he dropped charges and pardoned his mob, although I do worry that doing so encourages them to commit more serious crimes. And that it signals a will to use law enforcement to run roughshod over our rights isn't so much a worry as an accomplished fact. We may regret the judge who let Hitler out of jail, but he has much less to answer for than the politicians who appointed him chancellor. The law shouldn't be tasked with protecting us from demagogues. That's the job of democracy, which failed far worse in 2024 than even the courts. But back to this book, does the title refer to a different "war on democracy" than the ones under Daley above? Or is it the same war? I could imagine the book being written that way, but this one probably isn't.
David Rothkopf: American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation (2022, PublicAffairs): This makes a rather problematic argument that Trump was repeatedly undercut by people within his own administration, by bureaucrats defending their vested interests against Trump's disruptive impulses. He draws blurbs from Miles Taylor (who bragged about subverting Trump as Anonymous in A Warning) and Alexander Vindman (who testified against Trump's handling of Ukraine). Such people seem to be especially entrenched in the defense/security sector, which is a big part of the reason no one seems to be able to budge American foreign policy away from its habitual war footing. That they may have steered Trump away from an even worse path isn't very comforting.
Troy Senik: A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable
Presidency of Grover Cleveland (2022, Threshold Editions).
He was the only Democrat elected President between 1860 (Republican
Abraham Lincoln) and 1912 (Woodrow Wilson), winning two terms in
1884 and 1892, separated by his loss in 1888 (to Benjamin Harrison,
the second of four Republicans to have won the electoral college despite
losing the popular vote). I expected he'd get some interest as Trump
attempts to get a second term à Cleveland. Aside from that, the
main thing Cleveland is notable for is being possibly the most
conservative president since emancipation, in the very old-fashioned
sense of never wanting to change or do anything. That left him with
a legacy of resistance against the imperial ambitions McKinley and
Roosevelt campaigned for. It also left him with the worst depression
in American history, at least up to the Great one in 1929. And while
it may have been little of his own doing, his "popular vote" majorities
were secured by increasing disenfranchisement of blacks in the South,
where Democrats were starting to run up huge majorities and turn them
into Jim Crow.
Timothy Shenk: Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics
(paperback, 2024, Columbia Global Reports): Historian, wrote a 2022 book
Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle
to Rule American Democracy, which I read and liked, and he writes
for some left journals. Still, I have very little idea what he thinks
the problem is here, let alone what he sees as the solution. I do know
that I have little patience for people who get their kicks from bashing
the left, especially as most of them are attacking phantoms of their own
imagination. As for the center, which may well be what he means by
"liberal politics," they certainly do have two major problems, which
go to the key problem of credibility: the first is the classic "which
side are you on?" (which is particularly problematic for politicians
who spend most of their time fundraising from the rich), and then
there's "but will what you're proposing actually work?" This book
was released last Oct. 8, which is to say a month before something
like it became urgently needed. But I have no idea whether this is
the book (or part of the book) that is needed. The one thing I do
know is that he leans heavily on two "political strategists" (more
like pollsters), Stan Greenberg and Doug Schoen. I've read Greenberg's
RIP GOP (2019), and found him useful.
Ganesh Sitaraman: Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It (paperback, 2023, Columbia Global Reports): Well, it's pretty simple: you take an industry that was once very regulated, which put a premium on safety and service, and deregulated it in ways that refocused it on cost cutting but allowed for all sorts of clever price manipulations, while allowing the industry to consolidate and eliminate choice. Arguably, most customers are ok with these tradeoffs, assuming they understand them -- which is deliberately not easy -- and those who actually do insist on a higher level of service still have recourse to paying extra, but much of what they do cannot simply be turned on or off with a checkbox. So it's likely that even those who can/would pay more for service won't be satisfied with the results.
Joseph E Stiglitz: The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (2024, WW Norton). As Paul Krugman likes to say, "an insanely great economist," one who's able to advise presidents and the IMF, write dozens of mostly sensible books, and keep coming back with revisions and renunciations after conventional remedies fail, without losing his credibility. Part of his secret, I think, is that he's always looked for flaws in the system -- much of his research focused on imperfect information -- and he acknowledges that economies are not just the work of people, with their highly imperfect, often illogical foibles. So he's always refining his thinking, even if ever so subtly. It's not obvious how this edition of his standard book diverges from its predecessors: perhaps a bit more emphasis on linking freedom and "the good society," and more evidence of just where neoliberalism let us down. I still have enough respect for him that my first instinct is to grab every new book, but I'm starting to wonder if that's what we really need. Jonathan Taplin: The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto (2023, Public Affairs): Having previously written a book about how Facebook, Google, and Amazon have affected our economy and culture, here he turns to the political, the peculiar mix of libertarianism and techno-utopianism that gets fused together by egos backed with many billions of dollars. Starts with profiles of Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, and Elon Musk -- "the biggest wallets paying for the most blinding lights." This was written well before the 2024 election, where Musk became Trump's sugar daddy, and Thiel got his protégé Vance onto Trump's ticket, while Andreessen
Jeffrey Toobin: Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism (2023, Simon & Schuster): Lawyer turned journalist, his bestselling books divided between the courts (The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court) and infamous criminals (OJ Simpson, Donald Trump), adds one to the latter column. Geoffrey Wawro: The Vietnam War: A Military History (2024, Basic Books): 672 pages, the upshot of which is (or should be) that none of the military history mattered. It was undertaken mostly to show resolve, although on the American side, it mostly revealed contempt and cruelty for the people of Vietnam, reminding them of the need to drive the Americans out. I've read Wawro's big book Quicksand: America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle East (2010), and he's competent enough, so I don't imagine this will play out as some fantasy like Lewis Sorley's A Better War, but he is on the payroll, and he writes for that audience. Susan Williams: White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonialization of Africa (2021; paperback, 2023, PublicAffairs): CIA involvement started in the 1950s, as the prospect of independence from Britain, France, Belgium, etc., opened up the prospect of struggle that could damage business interests left behind by the former colonizers. The cover pic shows Kennedy and Johnson, and the story focuses on their plots to gain the upper hand in Ghana and Congo. But rest assured that the CIA never left Africa, even as the military has taken to larger scale intervention, with its AFRICOM. Related:
Tara Zahra: Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars (2023, WW Norton): The world shortly before World War I was supposedly a golden age of laissez-faire, open to mass migration as well as unfettered trade. I'm skeptical of those claims, especially given that a big part of the rationale for overseas empires was to exploit the colonies. But the growing nationalism behind the war carried over into the 1920s, and turned even more bitter after the 1929 depression. This picks out a couple dozen events in the US and Europe as examples, mostly early in the period (up to 1933, with just two later, one each from 1936 and 1939). This is my regular section on a few more books briefly noted. The idea here is to note the existence of books I don't have much more (or maybe just enough time) to comment on, especially where the books are self-explanatory: Reza Aslan: An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville (2022; paperback, 2023, WW Norton). John Berger: Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (2007; paperback, 2025, Verso). Ian Bremmer: The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats -- and Our Response -- Will Change the World (2022, Simon & Schuster): Consultant (Eurasia Group), in the business of diagnosing problems he can sell solutions to. David Browne: Talkin' Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America's Bohemian Music Capital (2024, Da Capo). Frank Bruni: The Age of Grievance (2024, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster): One of those books that could be about something, or nothing at all. That he writes columns for the New York Times that I almost never read doesn't help. Jonathan Elg: King: A Life (2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Big (688 pp) biography of Martin Luther King. Anthony Fauci: On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service (2024, Viking). Gaines M Foster: The Limits of the Lost Cause: Essays on Civil War Memory (2024, LSU Press): This soft-pedals the whole Lost Cause myth as harmless sentiment, something that wouldn't be out of place in a Trump rally. Paula Fredriksen: Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years (2024, Princeton University Press). Also wrote When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation (2018), and Paul: The Pagans' Apostle (2017). Scott Galloway: Adrift: America in 100 Charts (2022, Portfolio): Professor of marketing at NYU and "serial entrepreneur," promises a broad, statistical overview of the American economy since 1945. Malcolm Gladwell: Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering (2024, Little Brown). Jeffrey Goldberg: On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump (paperback, 2024, Zando/Atlantic Editions). Terry Golway: I Never Did Like Politics: How Fiorello La Guardia Became America's Mayor, and Why He Still Matters (2024, St Martin's Press). David Graeber: The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . : Essays (2012, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Posthumous collection, edited by Nika Dubrovsky. Brendan Greeves: Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen: An Authorized Biography (2024, Da Capo). David Greenberg: John Lewis: A Life (2024, Simon & Schuster): 704 pp. Yuval Noah Harari: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI (2024, Random House): 528 pp. Jonathan Healey: The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689 (2023, Knopf). Robert Hilburn: A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman (2024, Da Capo). Maurice Isserman: Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism (2024, Basic Books). Robert D Kaplan: The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, From the Mediterranean to China (2023, Random House). Greil Marcus: What Nails It (Why I Write) (2024, Yale University Press): Three essays (104 pp), on Titian, Pauline Kael, and Greil Gerstley (his birth name, but more likely his father). Alexei Navalny: Patriot: A Memoir (2024, Knopf): The late Russian dissident, seeking a little distance from his American fans. Nate Silver: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (2024, Penguin Press): Focus here on concepts of risk, although it sounds more like he has a gambling problem. Timothy Snyder: On Freedom (2024, Crown): Anti-Russia historian turned anti-Russia polemicist, the new book a sequel of sorts to his 2017 On Tyranny. John Szwed: Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith (2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux). Michael Tackett: The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party (2024, Simon & Schuster). Lucinda Williams: Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir (2023, Crown). Finally, a one-time section on books that I wrote something a bit more than "briefly noted," but don't feel like expanding to place in the already overloaded main section. In most cases, these are scraps that I wrote down on first perusal, then skipped over in assembling previous columns, so a big motivation here is to get them out of my system. I may, of course, return to them later, if I find some new reason to do so. Nate G Hilger: The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis (2022, The MIT Press): We expect children to learn more than ever before, basically because the world has gotten much more complicated. But we also demand exemplary character and social skills, and impose stiff penalties for failure. Schools only do some of this teaching, and often not well, at least for many students. Parents are expected not just to pick up the slack but to do much of the heavy lifting. Results are poor, partly because few parents have the skills and time, but also the competitive, individualist society we live in expects most people to fail. I was having trouble figuring out how he proposed to remedy this, but one reviewer stressed his is "a fresh way of seeing deep inequalities by race and class," and another noted he wants "policy changes to support parents and children in new ways." Rowan Hooper: How to Save the World for Just a Trillion Dollars: The Ten Biggest Problems We Can Actually Fix (paperback, 2022, The Experiment): Science writer thinks big, but list doesn't even look all that attractive -- "Go Carbon Neutral," ok, but "Settle Off-Planet"? "Find Some Aliens"? "Turn the World Vegan"? -- let alone possible. Yasheng Huang: The Rise and Fall of the East: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline (2023, Yale University Press). Seems like an odd list, but the idea is that bureaucracy, which in China can be dated back to the introduction of civil service exams in 587 CE, values stability and stifles innovation, eventually leading to ruin, or decline, or something like that. Peachy Keenan: Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War (2023, Regnery): Pearls of wisdom like: "babies are good, more babies are better; two sexes are plenty; your career is overrated; feminism is how the unpopular and undateable cope with life; mainstream American culture destroys families." Solution is parents have to reclaim their role as "bosses of their kids." Steve Krakauer: Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People (2023, Center Street): That about sums it up, but note that nearly all the people they collected blurbs from are well ensconced on the right (Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Piers Morgan, Mollie Hemingway; Glenn Greenwald these days doesn't make for much of an exception). Matt K Lewis: Filthy Rich Politicians: The Swamp Creatures, Latte Liberals, and Ruling-Class Elites Cashing in on America (2023, Center Street). Named one of the "50 Best Conservative Columnists" 2013-15, bit the hand that fed him with 2016's Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Went From the Party of Reagan to the Party of Trump, but looking to make amends here by depicting the other guys -- "latte liberals, ivy league populists, insider traders, trust-fund babies, and swamp creatures" -- as the ones who are insatiably corrupt, all the while insisting "this is not an 'eat the rich' kind of book." Brook Manville/Josiah Ober: The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives (2023, Princeton University Press): Fancy degrees, a stellar background in academia and business, runs his own consulting firm after being a partner at McKinsey, the sort of guy who reeks of elitism, whose commitment to democracy is pro forma because he's not worried it might change anything. Daniel McDowell: Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash Against the Dollar (paperback, 2023, Oxford University Press). The US is uniquely able to impose economic sanctions on other countries because the dollar is so widely used for transactions. But when the US imposes sanctions, targets and their business partners look for ways around, and that may include alternatives to the dollar. Todd McGowan: Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn't Try to Find Ourselves (paperback, 2024, Repeater): I've seen this plugged as "easily the best self-help book I have read," which makes me think I should hold it back for further research. Author has other books, and is co-editor of a series with Slavoj Zizek and Adrian Johnston. Brian Merchant: Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (2023, Little Brown): The history of the Luddites, who organized guerrilla raids in early 19th-century England to smash machines. Dana Milbank: Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down the House: Celebrity reporting on Capitol Hill, if you take the likes of Matt Gaetz, George Santos, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Loren Boebert for celebrities. While such show offs make for entertaining copy, there is little policy-wise to separate them from 200 other Republicans, every bit as committed to dragging us into their ruins. Ben Rhodes: After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We've Made (2021; paperback, 2022, Random House): Curious change of subtitle (from "Being American in the World We've Made"), as he seems to be admitting, if not necessarily bragging, that Obama paved the way for the far right. The main way he did so was in continuing to flout American military power, instead of working toward serious disarmament. Carol Roth: You Will Own Nothing: Your War With a New Financial World Order and How to Fight Back (2023, Broadside Books): TV pundit, self-described as a "strategic advisor and C-level consigliere." Critique could come from the left, but as an advocate for "small business, small government, and big hair" she lands on the right, meaning that her "fight back" solutions are hopeless. Batya Ungar-Sargon: Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women (2024, Encounter Books): One of those titles that could have been written by someone on the left, but was left in the hands of someone else. Richard Vinen: 1968: Radical Protest and Its Enemies (2018; paperback, 2019, Harper): Originally published in UK as The Long '68, with four central chapters on the US, France, West Germany, and Britain, before turning to themes (sexual liberation, workers, violence, "defeat and accommodation?"). Peter H Wilson: Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 (2023, Belknap Press): Big subject, big book (976 pp). Author specializes in the earlier period (see books below), before Prussia started pushing everyone else around. Current count: 57 links, 12453 words (14740 total) |
Zack Beauchamp: The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most
Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World (2024,
PublicAffairs): Vox journalist, offers comparative reporting on
far-right political movements around the world, with chapters on
America, Hungary, Israel, and India, plus occasional glances
elsewhere. I bought a copy of this but haven't gotten to it yet,
and intervening events may have made it less useful.
Noam Chomsky/Nathan J Robinson: The Myth of
American Idealism: How US Foreign Policy Endangers the World
(2024, Penguin Press): On my "nightstand," not because I expect at
this late date to learn much new -- I've followed him since his
seminal 1967 essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" and his
first 1969 book American Power and the New Mandarins, and
no one knows more or has thought deeper about American power --
but because I'm hopeful that Robinson will bring his mass of facts
and analysis into an even more coherent whole. As the Biden wars
and the Harris debacle prove, Democrats are in desperate need of
a complete rethink of US foreign policy. Even if they haven't quite
reached the answer, these are the questions one has to face.
Some other recent Chomsky books (I have 50+ on file, and am nowhere
near complete):
Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Message (2024, One World):
A travel memoir, with short stops in South Carolina and Senegal,
but the chapter on Israel makes the strongest impression, because
the parallels between Israeli and American racism are so obvious
if you have any sense of one or the other. Nothing specific to
Gaza, but the compulsion to grind Palestine to dust permeates all
of Israel -- indeed, it's all Israel has become.
H Bruce Franklin: Crash Course: From the Good War to the
Forever War (2018; paperback, 2024, Rutgers University Press):
Cultural historian (1934-2024), ran into legal and academic trouble
due to his antiwar activities, wrote widely, including works on war,
science fiction, prison literature, and marine ecology -- perhaps
most important was M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America (1992),
on the myth that Vietnam was still holding American prisoners. I
picked this up after he died, partly because I was thinking of my
own memoir, and sensed that he followed a parallel political and
intellectual path through much common history (although he had a
16-year head start).
Gideon Levy: The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe
(paperback, 2024, Verso): Israeli journalist, regular dispatches as the
genocide unfolded. He's done this before, e.g., in his 2010 book, The
Punishment of Gaza.
Ilan Pappe: A Very Short History of the
Israel-Palestine Conflict (paperback, 2024, Oneworld):
No one has written more history of Zionism and the Palestinians,
and few have written as well. So while I figured I already knew
everything I might find in this condensed 160 pp. primer, I was
curious just to see how he would organize the key points: what
to include, what to leave out. Turns out even I picked up some
significant new details.
Adam Shatz: The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of
Frantz Fanon (2024, Farrar Straus and Giroux): A major
biography of Fanon (1925-61), born in Martinique, fought against
the Vichy regime there and in Algeria, trained in France as a
psychiatrist, only to become one of the most important political
thinkers and writers of the anti-colonial era -- his most famous
books are Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched
of the Earth (1961), which were influential in my own thinking,
and have continued to resonate even to Black Lives Matter.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, ed: Did It Happen Here? Perspectives
on Fascism and America (2024, WW Norton): I mentioned this
briefly before, but since I wound up buying a copy, thought I would
expand on it. Historically-minded leftists tend to obsess over what
is or not fascism, partly because its complex history suggests many
prospective developments, but also because the simplest definition
is that the fascists are the people who want to kill you. Needless
to say, right and center have different takes. For the right, fascism
is what the people get for threatening to revolt: it may result from
counterrevolution, as in putting down the Hungarian Revolution in
1920, or it may be imposed by worried conservative elites, as with
Mussolini and Hitler. But as long as conservative order is secure,
it's something you know about but have no reason to show off. As for
the center, they are more confused, seeing fascists as an anomaly on
the right that only concerns them when its targets expand beyond the
left. Even Hitler didn't bother them much until his wars upset the
liberal world order, at which point they started mocking leftists as
"premature antifascists." One could just as easily call them "retarded
antifascists," but I don't think anyone ever did. Leftists may see
them as naive, indifferent, and/or hypocritical, but also as potential
allies when the situation turns really dire. Perhaps that's the point
of trying to argue that right-wing forces are not just bad but cross
the line into fascism, at which point even liberals and centrists
might drop their anti-left prejudices to join in a "common front"?
Of course, people who don't know squat about history -- which is to
say the overwhelming majority of American voters -- have no idea
what we're talking about, which makes the public argument pointless
or even counterproductive. Still, it's hard to turn your eyes away
when you see a wreck in real time, and we're certainly in the midst
of that. When you first noticed may vary: I started reading Robert
J Evans in the early Bush years, even before Chris Hedges published
American Fascists (2007), while others didn't notice until
the Jan. 6 Putsch attempt; still others are only being blind-sided
by Trump II, and even worse prospects are likely to follow. This
book rounds up the usual suspects, including some academic quibblers
(e.g., Robert Paxton, who denies that Franco was a fascist, which
literally everyone who volunteered to fight against him in the 1930s
would disagree with).