Books [Draft File]

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

Last Book Roundup was way back on April 25,2024 and, well, much has happened since then. I promised then I'd drop the main section down to 20 books to try to get these out in a more timely manner, but if I do that now, it's going to take multiple posts just to deal with the leftovers from last year. But let's start with the obvious top priorities, and see where that gets us.

Andrew Boyd: I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor (paperback, 2023, New Society): Subtitle continues: "An existential manual for tragic optimists, can-do pessimists, and compassionate doomers." In other words, this is the current state of the climate change crisis, one where we no longer have the luxury of thinking that we're only talking about a hard-to-imagine future but have seen enough already to start realizing how unprepared we are for that future. Boyd starts out with several charts that plot "progress" vs. time, and winds up with the one I grabbed and pasted stage right.

Robert Chapman: Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (paperback, 2023, Pluto Press): Alternative term for "autism," author is "a neurodivergent philosopher" and professor, referred to here as "they," who "exposes the very myth of the 'normal' brain as a product of intensified capitalism." While I've never (as far as I know) been diagnosed as autistic, or assigned some peg on the spectrum, and I certainly don't have the superpowers of the French police archivist in Astrid, I am aware of seeing things and recalling details and relationships that few others recognize, so perhaps there is something to this "neurodiversity" beyond its euphemistic usage. As for capitalism, the author may be engaging in the usual leftist blame game -- which I tired of 50 years ago, without turning on the insights and ethics -- but it occurs to me to recast capitalism not as economics or culture but as a species of game theory, which forces people to think and act in certain prescribed ways -- so routine as to seem natural to most people, but patpently ridiculous to the few who can see through and beyond them.
This opens the door to an extensive literature I've rarely noticed before (although I read a lot of RD Laing and Thomas Szasz back in my day, so the dialectics of psychology and politics are old hat):

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

Tom Cotton: Seven Things You Can't Say About China (2025, Broadside Books): And yet here he is, saying them. His seven chapter heads give you a hint how obsessed he is:

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

In case you're wondering where the coronavirus pandemic fits in, he brings it up in the first line of the Prologue, adding "I've never taken the claims of Chinese Communists at face value." Nor is he phased by independent observations, or any understanding of how the world actually works. I've cited a bunch of anti-China sabre rattling previously, to which we can add:

• Hal Brands: The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World (2025, WW Norton).
• Kerry Brown: Why Taiwan Matters: A Short History of a Small Island That Will Dictate OUr Future (2025, St Martin's Press).
• Gordon G. Chang: Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America (2024, Humanix). Chang has previously written:
• Gordon G. Chang: China Is Going to War [Encounter Broadside No. 69] (paperback, 2023, Encounter Books).
• Gordon G. Chang: The Gerat U.S.-China Tech War [Encounter Broadside No. 61] (paperback, 2020, Encounter Books).
• Gordon G. Chang: The Coming Collapse of China (2001, Random House): This one is obviously a bit dated.
• James E Fanell/Bradley A Thayer: Embracing Communist China: America's Greatest Strategic Failure (2024, War Room Books).>
• Grant Newshawm: When China Attacks: A Warning to America (2023, Regnery).

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

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

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

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

Book writers are always slow off the mark, so there's much more written recently about older jazz. For example:

• Paul Alexander: Bitter Crop: The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year (2024, Knopf).
• William G Carter: Thriving on a Riff: Jazz and the Spiritual Life (2024, Broadleaf Books): Jazz pianist and Presbyterian minister, leads Presbybop Quartet.
• Josephine Baker: Fearless and Free: A Memoir (2025, Tiny Reparations Books): First English translation of the singer's autobiography, originally published in France in 1949.
• Con Chapman: Sax Expat: Don Byas (paperback, 2025, University Press of Mississippi).
• TJ English: Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld (paperback, 2023, William Morrow): Author has more books on organized crime than on music.
• Philip Freeman: In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor (paperback, 2024, Wolke Verlag).
• Jonathon Grosse: Jazz Revolutionary: The Life & Music of Eric Dolphy (paperback, 2024, Jawbone Press).
• James Kaplan: 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool (2024, Penguin Press).
• Aidan Levy: Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins (paperback, 2023, Da Capo): 800 pp.
• André Marmot: Unapologetic Expression: The Inside Story of the UK Jazz Explosion (2024, Faber & Faber).
• Daren Mueller: At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz (paperback, 2024, Duke University Press).
• Sam VH Reese, ed: The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins (paperback, 2024, New York Review Books): 176 pp.
• Ricky Riccardi: Stomp Off, Let's Go: The Early Years of Louis Armstrong (2025, Oxford University Press): "Celebrates Lillian 'Lil' Armstrong as the architect of Louis Armstrong's career." Previously wrote:
• Ricky Riccardi: What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong's Later Years (2011, Pantheon).
• Ricky Riccardi: Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong (2020, Oxford University Press).
• John Szwed: Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith (2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux; paperback, 2024, Picador).
• Henry Threadgill: Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music (2023, Knopf): Autobiography.
• Judith Tick: Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song (2023; paperback, 2025, WW Norton).
• Larry Tye: The Jazz Men: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America (2024, Mariner Books).
• Elijah Wald: Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories (2024, Da Capo).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Atef Abu Saif: Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide (paperback, 2024, Beacon Press): A Palestinian novelist, previously published The Drone Eats With Me: A Gaza Diary, about the siege of Gaza in 2014.
• Refaat Alareer: If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose (2024, OR Books): Renowned Palestinian poet and literature professor, killed by Israel shortly after writing the title poem.
• Peter Beinart: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (2025, Knopf).
• Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025, Knopf): Born in Egypt, lives in US, author of a novel (American War, which imagines a future civil war here), offers his "heartsick break letter with the West."
• Mohammed El-Kurd: Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal (paperback, 2025, Haymarket Books).
• Didier Fassin: Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza (paperback, 2025, Verso).
• Isabella Hammad: Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative (paperback, 2024, Grove Press): Short (96 pp), "shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing."
• Chris Hedges: A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine (paperback, 2025, Seven Stories Press). Famed war reporter, delivers "a scathing denunciation of the long violence of the Zionist project and its U.S. and European backers." Hedges has many books, from his early War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) to his prescient American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007) to The Greatest Evil Is War (2022). [04-08]
• Sim Kern: Genocide Bad.: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation (paperback, 2025, Interlink Books).
• Andreas Malm: The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth (paperback, 2025, Verso).
• Joe Sacco: War on Gaza (paperback, 2024, Fantagraphics): Short (32 pp) illustrated novella, returns to the scene of his previous books, Palestine (2001), and Footnotes in Gaza: A Graphic Novel (2009).
• Dan Steinbock: The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel's Politics, Economy & Military (paperback, 2025, Clarity Press): This looks more at what Israel's policies of ethnic cleansing are doing to the politics and economy of Israel itself, which is fraught with its own perils.
• Enzo Traverso: Gaza Faces History (paperback, 2024, Other Press): From Italy, but has taught in France and at Cornell, specifically on Jewish history and on The New Faces of Fascism, so easily sees through "the dishonest weaponization of anti-Semitism (in some cases by true anti-Semites on the far right) to attack supporters of Palestinian rights."
• Maya Wind: Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (paperback, 2014, Verso).

Needless to say, the Hasbara folks have been working on this too:

• Yair Agmon/Oriya Mevorach: One Day in October: Forty Heroes, Forty Stories (paperback, 2024, Maggid).
• Elkana (Kuno) Cohen: OCT 7: The War Against Hamas Through the Eyes of an Israeli Command Officer (paperback, 2024, Viva Editions).
• Alan Dershowitz: Defending Israel: Against Hamas and Its Radical Left Enablers (paperback, 2023, Hot Books).
• Alan Dershowitz: The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies: And How to Refute Them With Truth (paperback, 2024, Skyhorse).
• Seth J Frantzman: The October 7 War: Israel's Battle for Security in Gaza (paperback, 2024, Wicked Son).
• David Friedman: One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2024, Humanix Books): Foreword by Mike Pompeo.
• Raphael Israeli: The Mind-Boggling October 7 Savagery: How Western Minds Were Boggled by Islamic Machinations (paperback, 2024, Strategic Book Publishing).
• Adam Kirsch: On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (2024, WW Norton).
• Bernard-Henri Lévy: Israel Alone (paperback, 2024, Wicked Son).
• Douglas Murray: On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (2025, Broadside Books). My comment on the author's 2022 book, The War on the West: "Thin-skinned, xenophobic right-winger claiming victimhood 500+ years after Columbus."
• Brendan O'Neil: After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation (paperback, 2024, Spiked).
• Alon Penzel: Testimonies Without Boundaries: Israel: October 7th, 2023 (paperback, 2024, Spines).
• Amir Tibon: The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel's Borderlands (2024, Little Brown).
• Gil Troy: To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream (paperback, 2024, Wicked Son): Troy has several previous books, including "the most comprehensive Zionist collection ever published, The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland -- Then, Now, Tomorrow (2018, 608 pp).
• Asa Winstanley: Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (paperback, 2023, OR Books): This predates 10/7, but shows the same tactics at work, here as a preëmptive strike against anyone critical of Israel.
• Lee Yaron: 10/7: 100 Human Stories (2024, St Martin's Press): Haaretz writer, not clear whether the stories are exclusively Israeli -- there is an acknowledgment of 30,000 Gazans killed between 10/7 and when the book was written -- but most seem to be. Kai Bird wrote a favorable blurb, so I wouldn't dismiss this one out of hand.

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

• Nasser Abourahme: The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony (paperback, 2025, Duke University Press): "That struggle is a form of anticolonial refusal that draws its power not from any decisive finality, but precisely from irresolution and keeping time open."
• Teresa Aranguren/Sandra Barrilaro: Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba (2024, Haymarket Books).
• Ghassan Kanafani: On Zionist Literature (paperback, 2022, Ebb Books): First English translation of a 1967 book.
• Yardena Schwartz: Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2024, Union Square).
• Avi Shlaim: Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (2023; paperback, 2024, Oneworld).

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

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

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

• The Care Collective: The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (paperback, 2020, Verso).
• Leah Lakshmi Plepzna-Samarasinha: Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (paperback, 2018, Arsenal Pulp Press).
• Dean Spade: Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (paperback, 2020, Verso).

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

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

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

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

Michael Wolff: All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America (2025, Crown): Here I am still trying to figure out the election, and Wolff already has a 400 page book of intense reporting: "Threading a needle between tragedy and farce, the fate of the nation, the liberal ideal, and democracy at all, [he] paints a gobsmacking portrait of a man whose behavior is so unimaginable, so uncontrolled, so unmindful of cause and effect, that it defeats all the structures and logic of civic life." And then he squanders what little insight he has and calls it "one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history." How could it be a "comeback" when Trump never left? Even when Biden was in the White House, Trump was in our minds, not least because he was all over the media -- even the ones who hated him never let him go. More early takes on Trump and the 2024 election:

• Alex Isenstadt: Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump's Return to Power (2025, Grand Central).
• Jonathan Allen/Amie Parnes: Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House (2025, William Morrow). Also wrote quickie books on 2016 (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign) and 2020 (Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency).
• Josh Dawsey/Tyler Pager/Isaac Arnsdorf: 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America (2025, Penguin). [07-08]
• Chris Whipple: Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History (2025, Harper Influence). [04-08]
• Annie Karni/Luke Broadwater: Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress (2025, Random House).

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

• Jonathan Alter: American Reckoning: Inside Trump's Trial -- and My Own (2024, Ben Bella Books).
• Russ Buettner/Susanne Craig: Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success (2024, Penguin).
• Barbara A Res: Tower of Lies: What My Eighteen Years of Working With Donald Trump Reveals About Him (2020, Graymalkin Media).
• Fred Trump: All in the Family: THe Trumps and How We Got This Way (2024, Gallery Books).
• Mary L Trump: Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir (2024, St Martin's Press).
• Mary L Trump: The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal (2021, St Martin's Press).

A few more books briefly noted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dean Spade: Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together (paperback, 2025, Algonquin Books).

Alexander Vindman: The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and Betrayed Ukraine (2025, PublicAffairs): Made his name testifying against Trump in the first Trump impeachment, but his whole career is dedicated to promoting war with Russia.