Kathleen's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 17 Apr 2025 11:01:57 -0700 60 Kathleen's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union]]> 57615568
In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four-million strong, five-thousand nuclear-tipped missiles, and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century.

Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances—and the fragility of authoritarian state power.]]> 576 Vladislav M. Zubok 0300257309 Kathleen 0 4.24 Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
author: Vladislav M. Zubok
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution, currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China's Superpower Future]]> 62976867
Party of One shatters the many myths and caricatures that shroud one of the world’s most secretive political organizations and its leader. Many observers misread Xi during his early years in power, projecting their own hopes that he would steer China toward more political openness, rule of law, and pro-market economics. Having masked his beliefs while climbing the party hierarchy, Xi has centralized decision-making powers, encouraged a cult of personality around himself, and moved toward indefinite rule by scrapping presidential term limits—stirring fears of a return to a Mao-style dictatorship. Today, the party of Xi favors political zeal over technical expertise, trumpets its faith in Marxism, and proclaims its reach into every corner of Chinese society with Xi portraits and hammer-and-sickle logos. Under Xi, China has challenged Western preeminence in global affairs and cast its authoritarian system as a model of governance worthy of international emulation.

As a China reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Chun Han Wong has chronicled Xi Jinping’s hard-line strategy for crushing dissent against his strongman rule, his political repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and his increasingly coercive efforts to reel in the island democracy of Taiwan, as well as the domestic and diplomatic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. When the Chinese government refused to renew Wong’s press credentials and forced him to leave mainland China in 2019, he moved to Hong Kong to continue covering Chinese politics and its autocratic turn under Xi. Now, Wong has drawn on his years of firsthand reporting across China—including conversations with party insiders, insights from scholars and diplomats, and analyses of official speeches and documents—to create a lucid and historically rooted account of China’s leader and how he inspires fear and fervor in his party, his nation, and beyond.

Timely, revelatory, and important, Party of One explains how the future Xi imagines for China will reshape the future of the entire world.]]> 416 Chun Han Wong 1982185732 Kathleen 0 4.20 Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China's Superpower Future
author: Chun Han Wong
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/15
shelves: to-read, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World]]> 205478740
We embraced the mediated life—from Facetune and Venmo to meme culture and the Metaverse—because these technologies offer novelty and convenience. But they also transform our sense of self and warp the boundaries between virtual and real. What are the costs? Who are we in a disembodied world?

In The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen investigates the cultural and emotional shifts that accompany our embrace of technology. In warm, philosophical prose, Rosen reveals key human experiences at risk of going extinct, including face-to-face communication, sense of place, authentic emotion, and even boredom. Considering cultural trends, like TikTok challenges and mukbang, and politically unsettling phenomena, like sociometric trackers and online conspiracy culture, Rosen exposes an unprecedented shift in the human condition, one that habituates us to alienation and control. To recover our humanity and come back to the real world, we must reclaim serendipity, community, patience, and risk.]]> 272 Christine Rosen 0393241718 Kathleen 0 to-read, non-fiction 3.70 2024 The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World
author: Christine Rosen
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: to-read, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis]]> 205900042 Both a forceful polemic and a practical guide, Abolish Rent takes aim at one of the foremost engines of inequality and injustice.

Rent is a wealth transfer from the poorest to the richest, the most vulnerable to the least, a monthly tribute that drives millions to debt, despair, and into the streets. In the context of a permanent housing crisis and governments in the pocket of real estate interests, Abolish Rent reorients the politics of housing around tenants political actors who can, through organizing, direct action, and collective bargaining, bring about a housing system that meets their needs.Ìę

Abolish Rent is the first book-length engagement with the resurgent tenant movement. Authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis—cofounders of Los Angles’s many thousand member tenant union—offer a deeply-reported account centering poor and working class tenants who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. They take us to trilingual strategy meetings, raucous marches against gentrification, and daring eviction defenses where immigrants put their lives on the line.Ìę

If rent abolition is our aim, tenant power must be the means—built through everyday resistance in our buildings and on our blocks. This is the revolutionary project we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.]]> 200 Tracy Rosenthal Kathleen 0 currently-reading 4.54 Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis
author: Tracy Rosenthal
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.54
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Death on the Nile (Hercule Poirot, #18)]]> 131359
Who is also on board? Christie's great detective Hercule Poirot is on holiday. He recalls an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: ‘I’d like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger.â€� Despite the exotic setting, nothing is ever quite what it seems
]]> 352 Agatha Christie Kathleen 0 to-read, fiction 4.13 1937 Death on the Nile (Hercule Poirot, #18)
author: Agatha Christie
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1937
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life after Loss]]> 214151212 From grief quests to Dungeons & Dragons to altar making and dinner parties, Renegade Grief is a profound and vulnerable exploration of care practices and rituals that empower grievers in a culture that expects us to simply “give it time.â€�

So, you’ve lost someone. At first, there is an outpour of support and phone calls and care packages. But after the services are done and the phone stops ringing, there is a quiet in the air and an expectation to get on with your life as previously planned. The problem is that death has a way of making all plans go out the window. Renegade Grief offers the support in this next stage of grieving—when you feel isolated in your loss and are figuring out how to navigate it.

Shaped by her own experience with the death of her father and her time cofounding The Dinner Party, a leading grief support organization for young people, Carla Fernandez pushes back on the death-denying culture we live in and encourages you to explore how the intensity (or shittiness) of a loss experience can transform into a source of deep connection, personal purpose, and creative expression. Through inspiring stories of real grievers, patterns from across history, and fresh science, Renegade Grief enlivens you with the permission and possibility to explore your grief in your own unique way and reminds you that you’re not alone in doing it.

Renegade Grief is an indispensable resource for people at any stage of the grieving process and with Carla’s candid and compassionate guidance, you learn that life after loss isn’t about the futile attempt of arriving at some other side. Rather, it’s about building your community, adjusting to change, and finding the way for your grief to become a pathway into your own version of a soulful life.]]> 288 Carla Fernandez 1668001810 Kathleen 0 to-read, non-fiction 4.49 Renegade Grief: A Guide to the Wild Ride of Life after Loss
author: Carla Fernandez
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.49
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: to-read, non-fiction
review:

]]> The Electric State 38642323 A teen girl and her robot embark on a cross-country mission in this illustrated science fiction story, perfect for fans of Ready Player One and Black Mirror.

In late 1997, a runaway teenager and her small yellow toy robot travel west through a strange American landscape where the ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside, along with the discarded trash of a high-tech consumerist society addicted to a virtual-reality system. As they approach the edge of the continent, the world outside the car window seems to unravel at an ever faster pace, as if somewhere beyond the horizon, the hollow core of civilization has finally caved in.]]> 144 Simon StÄlenhag 1501181416 Kathleen 0 4.42 2017 The Electric State
author: Simon StÄlenhag
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read, 911terrorismwar, graphicnovels
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause]]> 216351864
At thirty-six, Naomi Watts had just completed filming King Kong and was trying to start a family when she was told that she was on the brink of menopause. It is estimated that seventy-five million women in the United States are currently dealing with menopause symptoms (dry itchy skin, raging hormones, night sweats), and yet the very word “menopauseâ€� continues to be associated with stigma and confusion. With so little information, many women feel unprepared, ashamed, and deeply alone when the time comes.

This is the book Naomi Watts wishes she had when she first started experiencing symptoms. Like sitting down over coffee and having an intimate chat with your girlfriend, Dare I Say It blends funny and poignant stories from Naomi and her friends with advice from doctors, hormone experts, and nutritionists to take the secrecy and shame out of menopause and aging. Answering questions such as: What’s hormone therapy and should I be on it? Will I ever sleep again? Will I get myself back? What happened to my libido? Do I need eighteen serums for my aging skin? Whose body is this anyway? Who am I now? Naomi Watts shares the most up-to-date research on how to manage menopause symptoms and tackle the physical and emotional challenges we encounter as we age.

Irreverent, bold, and reassuring, Dare I Say It is the companion every woman needs to embrace the best version of herself as she moves into what can be the most powerful and satisfying period of her life.]]> 256 Naomi Watts 059372903X Kathleen 3 3.97 2025 Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause
author: Naomi Watts
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: diethealthwellbeing, non-fiction, read-in-2025
review:
Marginally informative and mildly entertaining (when it’s not acting as an advertisement for the author’s beauty products company).
]]> <![CDATA[Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People]]> 25666062 From the bestselling author of What's the Matter With Kansas, a scathing look at the standard-bearers of liberal politics -- a book that asks: what's the matter with Democrats?

It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course.

But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming.

With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, Frank's Listen, Liberal lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party's philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality. In this critical election year, Frank recalls the Democrats to their historic goals-the only way to reverse the ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor in America.]]> 320 Thomas Frank 1627795391 Kathleen 5 read-in-2025 4.17 2016 Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People
author: Thomas Frank
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: read-in-2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle]]> 214988432 If not communism, what comes after capitalism?

The fact that communism did not prevail does not mean we are still in capitalism. In Capital's Grave, Jodi Dean outlines how capitalist relations and forces of production are undergoing systemic transformation and transitioning into a different mode of production.

After forty years of neoliberalism, society has been afflicted up parcellated sovereignty, power distributed between new lords and serfs, Ìęand a process of hinterlandization. This has resulted in the everyday psychosis of catastrophic anxiety.

Bringing together analyses from different fields—law, technology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis—Jodi Dean shows how the contemporary world’s different elements comprise a single tendency marking the direction capitalism is neofeudalism. Feudalism isn’t just a metaphor. It’s the operating system for the present. The question in a society of serfs and servants, how do we get free?]]> 192 Jodi Dean 1804295191 Kathleen 0 3.93 Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle
author: Jodi Dean
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> The Iron Heel & Other Stories 367707 340 Jack London 1846770114 Kathleen 0 3.66 2005 The Iron Heel & Other Stories
author: Jack London
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read, fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America]]> 61214931 WINNER NELLIE BLY AWARD BEST JOURNALISTIC NON-FICTION

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state has become the most toxic site in the Western Hemisphere. Once home to the United States's largest plutonium production site, the reservation is laced with 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. The threat of an explosive accident at Hanford is all too real—an event that could be more catastrophic than Chernobyl.

The EPA designated Hanford the most toxic place in America; it is also the most expensive environmental clean-up job the world has ever seen, with a $677 billion price tag that keeps growing. Huge underground tanks, well past their life expectancy and full of boiling radioactive gunk, are leaking, infecting groundwater supplies and threatening the Columbia River.

Whistleblowers, worried that the worst is ahead, are now speaking out, begging to be heard and hoping their pleas help bring attention to the dire situation at Hanford. Aside from a few feisty community groups and handful of Indigenous activists, there is very little public scrutiny of the clean-up process, which is managed by the Department of Energy and carried out by contractors with shoddy track records, like Bechtel.

In the context of renewed support for atomic power as a means of combating climate change, Atomic Days provides a much-needed refutation of the myths of nuclear technology—from weapons to electricity—and shines a spotlight on the ravages of Hanford and its threat to communities, workers, and the global environment.]]> 258 Joshua Frank 1642598283 Kathleen 0 nuclear, currently-reading 4.18 Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America
author: Joshua Frank
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.18
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: nuclear, currently-reading
review:

]]> The Burnout Society 25490360
]]> 60 Byung-Chul Han 0804795096 Kathleen 0 did-not-finish, to-read 3.87 2010 The Burnout Society
author: Byung-Chul Han
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: did-not-finish, to-read
review:

]]> The Crash 216223604 The nightmare she’s running from is nothing compared to where she’s headed.

Tegan is eight months pregnant, alone, and desperately wants to put her crumbling life in the rearview mirror. So she hits the road, planning to stay with her brother until she can figure out her next move. But she doesn’t realize she’s heading straight into a blizzard.

She never arrives at her destination.

Stranded in rural Maine with a dead car and broken ankle, Tegan worries she’s made a terrible mistake. Then a miracle she is rescued by a couple who offers her a room in their warm cabin until the snow clears.

But something isn’t right. Tegan believed she was waiting out the storm, but as time ticks by, she comes to realize she is in grave danger. This safe haven isn’t what she thought it was, and staying here may have been her most deadly mistake yet.

And now she must do whatever it takes to save herself—and her unborn child.

A gut-wrenching story of motherhood, survival, and twisted expectations, #1 New York Times bestselling author Freida McFadden delivers a snowbound thriller that will chill you to the bone.
]]> 384 Freida McFadden 1464232989 Kathleen 3 read-in-2025 3.58 2025 The Crash
author: Freida McFadden
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: read-in-2025
review:
A moderately engaging thriller entwined with a life lesson on the dangers of making assumptions about people. The character of Tegan felt a bit thin, and one of the twists at the end was a bit ridiculous, but it did keep me reading to the end.
]]> <![CDATA[Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory]]> 39828240 Davis consults a vast archive of labor history to illuminate new aspects of Marx’s theoretical texts and political journalism. He offers a “lost Marx,â€� whose analyses of historical agency, nationalism, and the “middle landscapeâ€� of class struggle are crucial to the renewal of revolutionary thought in our darkening age. Davis presents a critique of the current fetishism of the “anthropocene,â€� which suppresses the links between the global employment crisis and capitalism’s failure to ensure human survival in a more extreme climate. In a finale, Old Gods, New Enigmas looks backward to the great forgotten debates on alternative socialist urbanism (1880â€�1934) to find the conceptual keys to a universal high quality of life in a sustainable environment.]]> 320 Mike Davis 1788732197 Kathleen 0 3.95 2018 Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory
author: Mike Davis
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read, non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11]]> 43821581
Read by a 45-person cast, with Holter Graham and the author

Over the past eighteen years, monumental literature has been published about 9/11, from Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower to The 9/11 Commission Report. But one perspective has been missing up to this point—a 360-degree account of the day told through firsthand.

Now, in The Only Plane in the Sky, Garrett Graff tells the story of the day as it was lived—in the words of those who lived it. Drawing on never-before-published transcripts, declassified documents, original interviews, and oral histories from nearly five hundred government officials, first responders, witnesses, survivors, friends, and family members, he paints the most vivid and human portrait of the September 11 attacks yet.

Beginning in the predawn hours of airports in the Northeast, we meet the ticket agents who unknowingly usher terrorists onto their flights, and the flight attendants inside the hijacked planes. In New York, first responders confront a scene of unimaginable horror at the Twin Towers. From a secret bunker under the White House, officials watch for incoming planes on radar. Aboard unarmed fighter jets in the air, pilots make a pact to fly into a hijacked airliner if necessary to bring it down. In the skies above Pennsylvania, civilians aboard United 93 make the ultimate sacrifice in their place. Then, as the day moves forward and flights are grounded nationwide, Air Force One circles the country alone, its passengers isolated and afraid.

More than simply a collection of eyewitness testimonies, The Only Plane in the Sky is the historic narrative of how ordinary people grappled with extraordinary events in real time: the father and son caught on different ends of the impact zone; the firefighter searching for his wife who works at the World Trade Center; the operator of in-flight telephone calls who promises to share a passenger’s last words with his family; the beloved FDNY chaplain who bravely performs last rites for the dying, losing his own life when the Towers collapse; and the generals at the Pentagon who break down and weep when they are barred from trying to rescue their colleagues.

At once a powerful tribute to the courage of everyday Americans and an essential addition to the literature of 9/11, The Only Plane in the Sky weaves together the unforgettable personal experiences of the men and women who found themselves caught at the center of an unprecedented human drama. The result is a unique, profound, and searing exploration of humanity on a day that changed the course of history, and all of our lives.]]> 513 Garrett M. Graff Kathleen 4 4.73 2019 The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11
author: Garrett M. Graff
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.73
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: 911terrorismwar, non-fiction, read-in-2025
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880]]> 184612 ]]> 746 W.E.B. Du Bois 0684856573 Kathleen 0 to-read, non-fiction 4.50 1935 Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
author: W.E.B. Du Bois
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1935
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union]]> 2029452 -Norman Markowitz, author of The Rise and Fall of the People's Century "I have not read anything else with such detailed and intimate knowledge of what took place. This manuscript is the most important contribution I have read."
-Phillip Bonosky, author of Afghanistan-Washington's Secret War "A well-researched work containing a great deal of useful historical information. Everyone will benefit greatly from the mass of historical data and the thought-provoking arguments contained in the book."
-Bahman Azad, author of Heroic Struggle Bitter Factors Contributing to the Dismantling of the Socialist State in the USSR]]> 230 Roger Keeran 071780738X Kathleen 0 4.35 2004 Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union
author: Roger Keeran
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Series Q)]]> 292240 As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture. From the fantasy of the American dream to the lessons of Forrest Gump, Lisa Simpson to Queer Nation, the reactionary culture of imperilled privilege to the testimony of Anita Hill, Berlant charts the landscape of American politics and culture. She examines the consequences of a shrinking and privatized concept of citizenship on increasing class, racial, sexual, and gender animosity and explores the contradictions of a conservative politics that maintains the sacredness of privacy, the virtue of the free market, and the immorality of state overregulation—except when it comes to issues of intimacy.
Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City is a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. As it opens a critical space for new theory of agency, its narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be American and to seek salvation in its promise.]]> 320 Lauren Berlant 0822319241 Kathleen 0 4.19 1997 The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Series Q)
author: Lauren Berlant
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: currently-reading, non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> Capitalism & Slavery 178651
Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development.

Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies.

In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.]]> 307 Eric Williams 0807844888 Kathleen 0 4.25 1944 Capitalism & Slavery
author: Eric Williams
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1944
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read, non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> The Worldly Philosophers 82120 The bestselling classic that examines the history of economic thought from Adam Smith to Karl Marx—“all the economic lore most general readers conceivably could want to know, served up with a flourishâ€� (The New York Times).

The Worldly Philosophers not only enables us to see more deeply into our history but helps us better understand our own times. In this seventh edition, Robert L. Heilbroner provides a new theme that connects thinkers as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The theme is the common focus of their highly varied ideas—namely, the search to understand how a capitalist society works. It is a focus never more needed than in this age of confusing economic headlines.

In a bold new concluding chapter entitled “The End of the Worldly Philosophy?â€� Heilbroner reminds us that the word “endâ€� refers to both the purpose and limits of economics. This chapter conveys a concern that today’s increasingly “scientificâ€� economics may overlook fundamental social and political issues that are central to economics. Thus, unlike its predecessors, this new edition provides not just an indispensable illumination of our past but a call to action for our future.]]> 368 Robert L. Heilbroner 068486214X Kathleen 0 4.16 1953 The Worldly Philosophers
author: Robert L. Heilbroner
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read, non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History]]> 24453974 Based on archival research, Jack Ross’s study challenges the orthodoxies of both sides of the historiographical debate as well as assumptions about the Socialist Party in historical memory. Ross similarly covers the related emergence of neoconservatism and other facets of contemporary American politics and assesses some of the more sensational charges from the right about contemporary liberalism and the “radicalismâ€� of Barack Obama.]]> 824 Jack Ross 1612344909 Kathleen 0 3.67 2015 The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History
author: Jack Ross
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible]]> 18210783
Like King, many ostensibly “nonviolentâ€� civil rights activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection—yet this crucial dimension of the Afro-American freedom struggle has been long ignored by history. In This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed, civil rights scholar Charles E. Cobb Jr. describes the vital role that armed self-defense played in the survival and liberation of black communities in America during the Southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s. In the Deep South, blacks often safeguarded themselves and their loved ones from white supremacist violence by bearing—and, when necessary, using—firearms. In much the same way, Cobb shows, nonviolent civil rights workers received critical support from black gun owners in the regions where they worked. Whether patrolling their neighborhoods, garrisoning their homes, or firing back at attackers, these courageous men and women and the weapons they carried were crucial to the movement’s success.

Giving voice to the World War II veterans, rural activists, volunteer security guards, and self-defense groups who took up arms to defend their lives and liberties, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed lays bare the paradoxical relationship between the nonviolent civil rights struggle and the Second Amendment. Drawing on his firsthand experiences in the civil rights movement and interviews with fellow participants, Cobb provides a controversial examination of the crucial place of firearms in the fight for American freedom.]]> 294 Charles E. Cobb Jr. 0465033105 Kathleen 0 4.21 2014 This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible
author: Charles E. Cobb Jr.
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read, non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement]]> 17072350
The notion that the civil rights movement in the southern United States was a nonviolent movement remains a dominant theme of civil rights memory and representation in popular culture. Yet in dozens of southern communities, Black people picked up arms to defend their leaders, communities, and lives. In particular, Black people relied on armed self-defense in communities where federal government officials failed to safeguard activists and supporters from the violence of racists and segregationists, who were often supported by local law enforcement.

In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in Mississippi and most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. Armed self-defense was a major tool of survival in allowing some Black southern communities to maintain their integrity and existence in the face of White supremacist terror. By 1965, armed resistance, particularly self-defense, was a significant factor in the challenge of the descendants of enslaved Africans to overturning fear and intimidation and developing different political and social relationships between Black and White Mississippians.

This riveting historical narrative relies upon oral history, archival material, and scholarly literature to reconstruct the use of armed resistance by Black activists and supporters in Mississippi to challenge racist terrorism, segregation, and fight for human rights and political empowerment from the early 1950s through the late 1970s.

Akinyele Omowale Umoja is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of African-American Studies at Georgia State University, where he teaches courses on the history of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and other social movements.]]> 336 Akinyele Omowale Umoja 0814725244 Kathleen 0 4.47 2013 We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement
author: Akinyele Omowale Umoja
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read, non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s]]> 195790601
With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.â€� Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.

In When the Clock Broke , the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-conâ€� right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserkâ€� took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicalsâ€� whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.

In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.]]> 432 John Ganz 0374605440 Kathleen 0 to-read, non-fiction 4.08 2024 When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
author: John Ganz
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read, non-fiction
review:

]]> The Days of Abandonment 77810 The Days of Abandonment shocked and captivated its Italian public when first published. It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.]]> 188 Elena Ferrante 1933372001 Kathleen 4 fiction, read-in-2024 3.92 2002 The Days of Abandonment
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: fiction, read-in-2024
review:
A tumultuous and stressful book that comes to a lovely and touching end. It’s worth it to see it through.
]]> Cackle 61058915 The Return.
Ìę
All her life, Annie has played it nice and safe. After being unceremoniously dumped by her longtime boyfriend, Annie seeks a fresh start. She accepts a teaching position that moves her from Manhattan to a small village upstate. She’s stunned by how perfect and picturesque the town is. The people are all friendly and warm. Her new apartment is dreamy too, minus the oddly persistent spider infestation.ÌęÌę
Ìę
Then Annie meets Sophie. Beautiful, charming, magnetic Sophie, who takes a special interest in Annie, who wants to be her friend. More importantly, she wants Annie to stop apologizing and start living for herself. That’s how Sophie lives. Annie can’t help but gravitate toward the self-possessed Sophie, wanting to spend more and more time with her, despite the fact that the rest of the townsfolk seem
a little afraid of her. And like, okay. There are some things. Sophie’s appearance is uncanny and ageless, her mansion in the middle of the woods feels a little unearthly, and she does seem to wield a certain power
but she couldn’t be
could she?]]> 319 Rachel Harrison 0593202031 Kathleen 0 to-read, fiction 3.71 2021 Cackle
author: Rachel Harrison
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: to-read, fiction
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]]> <![CDATA[Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics]]> 26792268
An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster―and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today

When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country’s largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable. The city had to slash services, freeze wages, and fire thousands of workers, they insisted, or financial apocalypse would ensue.

In this vivid account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city. With unions and ordinary citizens refusing to accept retrenchment, the budget crunch became a struggle over the soul of New York, pitting fundamentally opposing visions of the city against each other. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources and interviews with key players in the crisis, Fear City shows how the brush with bankruptcy permanently transformed New York―and reshaped ideas about government across America.

At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in New York's past, a gripping narrative of last-minute machinations and backroom deals, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.]]> 416 Kim Phillips-Fein 080509525X Kathleen 0 4.21 2016 Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics
author: Kim Phillips-Fein
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: to-read, non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)]]> 59463840
“Identity politicsâ€� is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.

But the trouble, OlĂșfáșč́mi O. TĂĄĂ­wĂČ deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, TĂĄĂ­wĂČ identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.

TĂĄĂ­wĂČ’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “classâ€� vs. “race.â€� By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.]]> 157 OlĂșfáșč́mi O. TĂĄĂ­wĂČ 1642596884 Kathleen 0 4.00 2022 Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)
author: OlĂșfáșč́mi O. TĂĄĂ­wĂČ
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves: to-read, non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What Is Antiracism?: And Why It Means Anticapitalism]]> 121767501
Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and anthropologist Ruth Benedict called for teaching people, especially poor people, to be less prejudiced. Here lies the origin of today's liberal antiracism, from diversity training to Hollywood activism. Meanwhile, a more radical antiracism flowered in the Third World. Anticolonial revolutionaries traced racism to the broad economic and political structures of modernity. Thinkers like C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, and Frantz Fanon showed how racism was connected to colonialism and capitalism, a perspective adopted even by Martin Luther King.

Today, liberal antiracism has proven powerless against structural oppression. As Arun Kundnani demonstrates, white liberals can heroically confront their own whiteness all they want, yet these structures remain.

This deeply researched and swift-moving narrative history tells the story of the two antiracisms and their fates. As neoliberalism reordered the world in the last decades of the twentieth century, the case became fighting racism means striking at its capitalist roots.]]> 304 Arun Kundnani 1839762764 Kathleen 0 to-read, non-fiction 4.51 What Is Antiracism?: And Why It Means Anticapitalism
author: Arun Kundnani
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.51
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: to-read, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class]]> 56876312 90 Catherine Liu 1452966044 Kathleen 0 3.85 2021 Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class
author: Catherine Liu
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read, non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising]]> 216970657 How might a twenty-first-century revolution against class society succeed?

Communism comes from the future, but its hopes haunt our past. Reading revolutionary history from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising by the light of communist theory, from Marx to C. L. R. James, The Future of Revolution illuminates the possibilities for overcoming class society in the twenty-first century.

When Marx wrote that the Paris Commune of 1871 showed that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes,â€� he identified a principle that will remain true as long as capitalism and its class antagonism persist. Historical revolutions reveal essential features of our communist horizon, which would-be revolutionaries, then as now, must negotiate one way or another. In chapters that move from a critical history of the workersâ€� council to a reading of Marx’s theory of value as an inverted description of communism, Jasper Bernes synthesizes from a history of failure the key criteria for success. He defines for our present moment the urgent mission of the world proletariat.]]> 235 Jasper Bernes 1788737563 Kathleen 0 0.0 The Future of Revolution: Communist Prospects from the Paris Commune to the George Floyd Uprising
author: Jasper Bernes
name: Kathleen
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read, non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
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]]> <![CDATA[Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence]]> 39089024
In a witty, irreverent op-ed piece that went viral, Kristen Ghodsee argued that women had better sex under socialism. The response was tremendous � clearly she articulated something many women had sensed for the problem is with capitalism, not with us.

Ghodsee, an acclaimed ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies, spent years researching what happened to women in countries that transitioned from state socialism to capitalism. She argues here that unregulated capitalism disproportionately harms women, and that we should learn from the past. By rejecting the bad and salvaging the good, we can adapt some socialist ideas to the 21st century and improve our lives.

She tackles all aspects of a woman's life - work, parenting, sex and relationships, citizenship, and leadership. In a chapter called " Like Men, But Cheaper," she talks about women in the workplace, discussing everything from the wage gap to harassment and discrimination. In "What To Expect When You're Expecting Exploitation," she addresses motherhood and how "having it all" is impossible under capitalism.

Women are standing up for themselves like never before, from the increase in the number of women running for office to the women's march to the long-overdue public outcry against sexual harassment. Interest in socialism is also on the rise -- whether it's the popularity of Bernie Sanders or the skyrocketing membership numbers of the Democratic Socialists of America. It's become increasingly clear to women that capitalism isn't working for us, and Ghodsee is the informed, lively guide who can show us the way forward.]]> 240 Kristen R. Ghodsee 1568588909 Kathleen 0 3.99 2018 Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence
author: Kristen R. Ghodsee
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read, non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life]]> 62919855 A dazzling tour through 2,000 years of audacious utopian thinking and experiments, exploring better ways to arrange our daily lives, plus a globetrotting jaunt to the communities already putting these seemingly fanciful visions into practice today.

In the 6th century BCE, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras—a man remembered today more for his theorem about right-angled triangles than for his progressive politics—founded a commune in a seaside village in what’s now southern Italy. The men and women there shared their property, lived as equals, and dedicated themselves to the study of mathematics and the mysteries of the universe.

Ever since, humans have been dreaming up better ways to organize how we live together, share our property, raise our children, and determine who’s part of our families. Some of these experiments burned brightly for only a brief while—but others carry on today.

In Everyday Utopia, fascinatingly feminist thinker Kristen R. Ghodsee whisks you away on a tour through history and around the world to explore those places that have boldly dared to reimagine how we might live our daily lives: from the Danish cohousing communities that share chores and deepen neighborly bonds to matriarchal Colombian ecovillages where residents grow all their own food; and from Connecticut, where new laws make it easier for extra “alloparentsâ€� to help raise children not their own, to China, where planned microdistricts ensure everything a busy household might need is nearby.

One of those startlingly rare books that upends what you think is possible, Everyday Utopia offers a radically hopeful vision for how to build more contented and connected societies, alongside a practical guide to what we all can do in the meantime to live the good life each and every day.]]> 352 Kristen R. Ghodsee 1982190213 Kathleen 0 3.96 2023 Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
author: Kristen R. Ghodsee
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read, non-fiction, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism]]> 220234244 The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism is the latest work from renowned revolutionary Torkil Lauesen, whose decades of activism and scholarship have made him a leading voice in global anti-imperialist movements. Drawing on his deep involvement in revolutionary struggles, Lauesen offers a comprehensive analysis of socialism's long, unfolding transition. By examining pivotal moments-from the 1848 revolutions to China's market reforms-Lauesen reframes these struggles not as isolated failures but as integral steps in the global shift away from the capitalist world-system. For those committed to socialist theory and anti-imperialism, The Long Transition provides essential insights into how the decline of capitalism and the rise of a global counter-hegemonies offer new opportunities for socialist transformation.]]> 418 Torkil Lauesen Kathleen 0 4.61 2024 The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism
author: Torkil Lauesen
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read, socialism-capitalism-revolution
review:

]]> The Boyfriend 208503280 She's looking for the perfect man. He's looking for the perfect victim.

Sydney Shaw, like every single woman in New York, has terrible luck with dating. She’s seen it men who lie in their dating profile, men who stick her with the dinner bill, and worst of all, men who can't shut up about their mothers. But finally, she hits the jackpot.

Her new boyfriend is utterly perfect. He's charming, handsome, and works as a doctor at a local hospital. Sydney is swept off her feet.

Then the brutal murder of a young woman―the latest in a string of deaths across the coast―confounds police. The primary suspect? A mystery man who dates his victims before he kills them.

Sydney should feel safe. After all, she is dating the guy of her dreams. But she can’t shake her own suspicions that the perfect man may not be as perfect as he seems. Because someone is watching her every move, and if she doesn’t get to the truth, she’ll be the killer’s next victim...

A dark story about obsession and the things we’ll do for love, #1 New York Times bestselling author Freida McFadden proves that crimes of passion are often the bloodiest
]]> 368 Freida McFadden 1728296226 Kathleen 4 read-in-2024 3.95 2024 The Boyfriend
author: Freida McFadden
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/16
date added: 2024/12/16
shelves: read-in-2024
review:
A fun, quick, and suspenseful read with an ending I did not see coming at all. I wasn’t fond of the narration device of switching back and forth from past to present and between characters, but this approach made more sense towards the end and I stopped being mad at it. May particularly appeal to those who’ve toiled in the thankless world of dating apps. This was my first Freida McFadden book and I will definitely be reading others.
]]> <![CDATA[Moon of the Crusted Snow (Moon, #1)]]> 39082248
The community leadership loses its grip on power as the visitors manipulate the tired and hungry to take control of the reserve. Tensions rise and, as the months pass, so does the death toll due to sickness and despair. Frustrated by the building chaos, a group of young friends and their families turn to the land and Anishinaabe tradition in hopes of helping their community thrive again. Guided through the chaos by an unlikely leader named Evan Whitesky, they endeavor to restore order while grappling with a grave decision.

Blending action and allegory, Moon of the Crusted Snow upends our expectations. Out of catastrophe comes resilience. And as one society collapses, another is reborn.]]> 213 Waubgeshig Rice 1770414002 Kathleen 0 to-read, fiction 3.83 2018 Moon of the Crusted Snow (Moon, #1)
author: Waubgeshig Rice
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> Winesburg, Ohio 80176 Winesburg, Ohio depicts the strange, secret lives of the inhabitants of a small town. In "Hands," Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented by his hands. In "Adventure," lonely Alice Hindman impulsively walks naked into the night rain. Threaded through the stories is the viewpoint of George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who, like his creator, stands witness to the dark and despairing dealings of a community of isolated people.]]> 240 Sherwood Anderson 0192839772 Kathleen 0 to-read, fiction 3.83 1919 Winesburg, Ohio
author: Sherwood Anderson
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1919
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dead in Long Beach, California]]> 127282888
"You can try bracing yourself for the ride this story takes you on, but it's best to just surrender. Your wig is going to fall off no matter what you do." ―Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives

A gut-busting and heartbreaking descent into one woman's fraying connection to reality, from a soon-to-be superstar.

Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother.

Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire , becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles ―and triples―down on posing as her brother, risking not only her own sanity but her relationship with her precocious niece, Khadijah. As Coral’s swirl of lies slowly closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes enmeshed in her own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas, and secrets dangerously into the present.

A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California , is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind’s capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and somewhere in between.]]> 230 Venita Blackburn 0374602824 Kathleen 0 to-read, fiction 3.12 2024 Dead in Long Beach, California
author: Venita Blackburn
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.12
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> Brothers 206728658 In this intimate and open account—nothing like any rock-and-roll memoir you’ve ever read—Alex Van Halen shares his personal story of family, friendship, music and brotherly love in a remarkable tribute to his beloved brother and band mate.

Told with acclaimed New Yorker writer Ariel Levy Brothers is seventy-year-old drummer Alex Van Halen’s love letter to his younger brother, Edward, (Maybe “Ed,â€� but never “Eddieâ€�), written while still mourning his untimely death.

In his rough yet sweet voice, Alex recounts the brothersâ€� childhood, first in the Netherlands and then in working class Pasadena, California, with an itinerant musician father and a very proper Indonesian-born mother—the kind of mom who admonished her boys to “always wear a suitâ€� no matter how famous they became—a woman who was both proud and practical, nonchalant about taking a doggie bag from a star-studded dinner. He also shares tales of musical politics, infighting, and plenty of bad-boy behavior. But mostly his is a story of brotherhood, music, and enduring love.

"I was with him from day one,â€� Alex writes. “We shared the experience of coming to this country and figuring out how to fit in. We shared a record player, an 800 square foot house, a mom and dad, and a work ethic. Later, we shared the back of a tour bus, alcoholism, the experience of becoming famous, of becoming fathers and uncles, and of spending more hours in the studio than I’ve spent doing anything else in this life. We shared a depth of understanding that most people can only hope to achieve in a lifetime."Ìę

There has never been an accurate account of them or the band, and Alex wants to set the record straight on Edward’s life and death.Ìę

Brothers includes never-before-seen photos from the author’s private archives.]]> 240 Alex Van Halen 0063265729 Kathleen 0 4.06 2024 Brothers
author: Alex Van Halen
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: to-read, memoir, music, non-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America]]> 215362634 Through the unforgettable stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend—the dramatic rise of the “working homelessâ€� in cities across America

The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.

In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in the country’s “Black Meccaâ€� after being priced out of DC. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is in school to become a social worker. Celeste toils at her warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children—and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation’s working homeless.

Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation’s hidden homeless—omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem.

By turns heartbreaking and urgent, There Is No Place for Us illuminates the true magnitude, causes, and consequences of the new American homelessness—and shows that it won’t be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right.]]> 448 Brian Goldstone 0593237145 Kathleen 0 to-read, non-fiction 4.67 2025 There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
author: Brian Goldstone
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read, non-fiction
review:

]]> My Husband 63017297 In this suspenseful and darkly funny debut novel, a sophisticated French woman spends her life obsessing over her perfect husband--but can their marriage survive her passionate love?

At forty years old, she has an enviable life: a successful career, stunning looks, a beautiful house in the suburbs, two healthy children, and most importantly, an ideal husband. After fifteen years together, she is still besotted with him. But she's never quite sure that her passion is reciprocated. After all, would a truly infatuated man ever let go of his wife's hand when they're sitting on the couch together?

Determined to keep their relationship perfect, she meticulously prepares for every encounter they have, always taking care to make her actions seem effortless. She watches him attentively, charting every mistake and punishing him accordingly to help him improve. And she tests him--setting traps to make sure that he still loves her just as much as he did when they first met.

Until one day she realizes she may have gone too far . . .

The winner of France's First Novel Prize in 2021, My Husband builds on the premise of hits like Gone Girl and Fates and Furies--how well can you really know your spouse?--and adds the tension and creepy obsession of You. The result is an irresistible read--compelling, tense, and engaging, infused with sly subversive humor, and told in an utterly original voice that makes it unforgettable.

Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan]]> 272 Maud Ventura 0063274825 Kathleen 0 to-read, fiction 3.67 2021 My Husband
author: Maud Ventura
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> <![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.â€� â€� 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 Kathleen 0 to-read, non-fiction 4.19 2022 Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor
author: Kim Kelly
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: to-read, non-fiction
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]]> <![CDATA[Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space]]> 199798785
On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of a crew including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like 9/11 or JFK’s assassination, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th-century history—yet the details of what took place that day, and why, have largely been forgotten. Until now.

Based on extensive archival records and meticulous, original reporting, Challenger follows a handful of central protagonists—including each of the seven members of the doomed crew—through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself, and into the investigation that followed. It’s a tale of optimism and promise undermined by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubris and heroism; and of an investigation driven by leakers and whistleblowers determined to bring the truth to light. Throughout, there are the ominous warning signs of a tragedy to come, recognized but then ignored, and ultimately kept from the public.

Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster as well as the designers, engineers, and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space.]]> 563 Adam Higginbotham 198217661X Kathleen 0 4.52 2024 Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
author: Adam Higginbotham
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read, newengland, non-fiction
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]]> We Used to Live Here 199798006
As a young, queer couple who flip houses, Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just gotten on an old house in a picturesque neighborhood. As they’re working in the house one day, there’s a knock on the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. People pleaser to a fault, Eve lets them in.

As soon as the strangers enter their home, inexplicable things start happening, including the family’s youngest child going missing and a ghostly presence materializing in the basement. Even more weird, the family can’t seem to take the hint that their visit should be over. And when Charlie suddenly vanishes, Eve slowly loses her grip on reality. Something is terribly wrong with the house and with the visiting family—or is Eve just imagining things?

This unputdownable and spine-tingling novel “is like quicksand: the further you delve into its pages, the more immobilized you become by a spiral of terror. We Used to Live Here will haunt you even after you have finished itâ€� (Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender Is the Flesh).]]> 312 Marcus Kliewer 1982198788 Kathleen 0 to-read, fiction 3.67 2024 We Used to Live Here
author: Marcus Kliewer
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland]]> 40163119
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.

Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.]]> 441 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385521316 Kathleen 5 4.47 2018 Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: 911terrorismwar, non-fiction, read-in-2024
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy]]> 32564819 Reveals the ideal of a sustainable ecosocialist world in Marx's writings

Karl Marx, author of what is perhaps the world's most resounding and significant critique of bourgeois political economy, has frequently been described as a "Promethean." According to critics, Marx held an inherent belief in the necessity of humans to dominate the natural world, in order to end material want and create a new world of fulfillment and abundance--a world where nature is mastered, not by anarchic capitalism, but by a planned socialist economy. Understandably, this perspective has come under sharp attack, not only from mainstream environmentalists but also from ecosocialists, many of whom reject Marx outright.



Kohei Saito's Karl Marx's Ecosocialism lays waste to accusations of Marx's ecological shortcomings. Delving into Karl Marx's central works, as well as his natural scientific notebooks--published only recently and still being translated--Saito also builds on the works of scholars such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, to argue that Karl Marx actually saw the environmental crisis embedded in capitalism. "It is not possible to comprehend the full scope of [Marx's] critique of political economy," Saito writes, "if one ignores its ecological dimension."

Saito's book is crucial today, as we face unprecedented ecological catastrophes--crises that cannot be adequately addressed without a sound theoretical framework. Karl Marx's Ecosocialism shows us that Marx has given us more than we once thought, that we can now come closer to finishing Marx's critique, and to building a sustainable ecosocialist world.]]> 368 Kƍhei Saitƍ 1583676414 Kathleen 0 to-read, non-fiction 4.01 2017 Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy
author: Kƍhei Saitƍ
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/08
shelves: to-read, non-fiction
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]]> <![CDATA[Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz]]> 126918752 The first English language edition of a lost memoir by an Auschwitz survivor, offering a shocking and deeply moving perspective on life within the camps.

When JĂłzsef Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, his life expectancy was forty-five minutes. This was how long it took for the half-dead prisoners to be sorted into groups, stripped, and sent to the gas chambers. He beat the odds and survived the “selection,â€� which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the “Cold Crematorium”—the so-called hospital of the forced labor camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work awaited execution. But as Soviet and Allied troops closed in on the camps, local Nazi commanders—anxious about the possible consequences of outright murder—decided to leave the remaining prisoners to die.

Debreczeni survived the liberation of Auschwitz and immediately recorded his experiences in Cold Crematorium, one of the harshest, most merciless indictments of Nazism ever written. This haunting memoir, rendered in the precise and unsentimental prose of an accomplished journalist, is an eyewitness account of incomparable literary quality. It was published in the Hungarian language in 1950, but it was never translated, due to Cold War hostilities and rising antisemitism. More than 70 years later, this masterpiece that was nearly lost to time is now being published in more than 15 different languages for the first time, and will finally take its rightful place among the greatest works of Holocaust literature.]]> 248 JĂłzsef Debreczeni 1250290546 Kathleen 0 4.54 1950 Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz
author: JĂłzsef Debreczeni
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.54
book published: 1950
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/06
shelves: to-read, 911terrorismwar, non-fiction
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]]> The Mighty Red 199793431
Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.

Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.

Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own.

Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day.

The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

A new novel by Louise Erdrich is a major literary event; gorgeous and heartrending, The Mighty Red is a triumph.]]> 384 Louise Erdrich 0063277050 Kathleen 0 to-read, fiction 3.78 2024 The Mighty Red
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/05
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]]> <![CDATA[The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.14 2023 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
author: David Grann
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/05
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]]> <![CDATA[A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial]]> 124948662 A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.

At the age of four, Nguyen and his family are forced to flee his hometown of Ban MĂȘ Thuột and come to the USA as refugees. After being removed from his brother and parents and homed with a family on his own, Nguyen is later allowed to resettle into his own family in suburban San JosĂ©. But there is violence hidden behind the sunny façade of what he calls AMERICAâ„�. One Christmas Eve, when Nguyen is nine, while watching cartoons at home, he learns that his parents have been shot while working at their grocery store, the SĂ iGĂČn Mới, a place where he sometimes helps price tins of fruit with a sticker gun. Years later, as a teenager, the blood-stirring drama of the films of the Vietnam War such as Apocalypse Now throw Nguyen into an existential crisis: how can he be both American and Vietnamese, both the killer and the person being killed? When he learns about an adopted sister who has stayed back in Vietnam, and ultimately visits her, he grows to understand just how much his parents have left behind. And as his parents age, he worries increasingly about their comfort and care, and realizes that some of their older wounds are reopening,

Profound in its emotions and brilliant in its thinking about cultural power, A Man of Two Faces explores the necessity of both forgetting and of memory, the promises America so readily makes and breaks, and the exceptional life story of one of the most original and important writers working today.]]> 400 Viet Thanh Nguyen 0802160506 Kathleen 0 to-read, memoir, non-fiction 4.33 2023 A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial
author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read, memoir, non-fiction
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]]> <![CDATA[The Romance of American Communism]]> 301758
"Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class."

So begins Vivian Gornick's exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project.

The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin's crimes became public.]]> 278 Vivian Gornick 0465071112 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.35 1978 The Romance of American Communism
author: Vivian Gornick
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> Cities of Salt (Ù…ŰŻÙ† Ű§Ù„Ù…Ù„Ű­ #1) 2722
Powerful political fiction that it is, CITIES OF SALT has been banned in several Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia. This novel, the first volume in a trilogy, has been translated from the Arabic to the English by Peter Theroux.]]> 627 Abdul Rahman Munif 039475526X Kathleen 0 to-read, fiction 3.86 1984 Cities of Salt (Ù…ŰŻÙ† Ű§Ù„Ù…Ù„Ű­ #1)
author: Abdul Rahman Munif
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: to-read, fiction
review:

]]> Oil! 54847 Oil! Upton Sinclair fashioned a novel out of the oil scandals of the Harding administration, providing in the process a detailed picture of the development of the oil industry in Southern California. Bribery of public officials, class warfare, and international rivalry over oil production are the context for Sinclair's story of a genial independent oil developer and his son, whose sympathy with the oilfield workers and socialist organizers fuels a running debate with his father. Senators, small investors, oil magnates, a Hollywood film star, and a crusading evangelist people the pages of this lively novel.]]> 528 Upton Sinclair 0520207270 Kathleen 0 to-read, fiction 3.74 1926 Oil!
author: Upton Sinclair
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1926
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: to-read, fiction
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]]> <![CDATA[Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class]]> 7856 Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis's brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world's most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the re-election of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.]]> 332 Mike Davis 1859842488 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.39 1986 Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class
author: Mike Davis
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown]]> 205309528 A scathing critique of proposals to geoengineer our way out of climate disaster by the bestselling author of How to Blow Up a PipelineIt might soon be far too hot on this planet. What do we do then? In the era of "overshoot," schemes abound for turning down the heat–not now, but a few decades down the road. We’re being told that we can return to liveable temperatures by means of technologies for removing CO2 from the air or blocking incoming sunlight.If they even exist, such technologies are not safe.They come with immense uncertainties and risks. Worse, like magical promises of future redemption, they might provide reasons for continuing to emit in the present. But do they also hold some potentials? In Overshoot two leading climate scholars subject the plans for saving the planet after it’s been wrecked to critical study. Carbon dioxide removal is already having effects, as an excuse for continuing business as usual, while geoengineering promises to bail out humanity if the heat reaches critical levels.Both distract from the one urgent to slash emissions now. There can be no further delay. The climate revolution is long overdue, and in the end, no technology can absolve us of its tasks.]]> 416 Andreas Malm 1804293989 Kathleen 0 currently-reading 4.39 Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown
author: Andreas Malm
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> The State and Revolution 179612 116 Vladimir Lenin 1419183478 Kathleen 5 read-in-2024 4.27 2021 The State and Revolution
author: Vladimir Lenin
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/11/15
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]]> Thirst 174156085 Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America’s feminist Gothic.

It is the twilight of Europe’s bloody bacchanals, of murder and feasting without end. In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires and, for the second time in her life, watches as villages transform into a cosmopolitan city, one that will soon be ravaged by yellow fever. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, and be discreet.

In present-day Buenos Aires, a woman finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with her mother's terminal illness and her own relationship with motherhood. When she first encounters the vampire in a cemetery, something ignites within the two women—and they cross a threshold from which there’s no turning back.

With echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.]]> 256 Marina Yuszczuk 0593472063 Kathleen 0 fiction, read-in-2024 3.43 2020 Thirst
author: Marina Yuszczuk
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: fiction, read-in-2024
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]]> <![CDATA[When We Cease to Understand the World]]> 62069739
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature

A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.Ìę

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives BenjamĂ­n Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.]]> 193 BenjamĂ­n Labatut Kathleen 0 to-read 4.10 2020 When We Cease to Understand the World
author: BenjamĂ­n Labatut
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> V13 61675059 368 Emmanuel CarrĂšre 2818056063 Kathleen 0 4.46 2022 V13
author: Emmanuel CarrĂšre
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read, 911terrorismwar, music
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]]> <![CDATA[The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.]]> 207611509
In the spring of 1980, an unexpected group of musical eccentrics came together to play their very first performance at a college party in Athens, Georgia. Within a few short years, they had taken over the world - with smash records like Out of Time, Automatic for the People, Monster and Green. Raw, outrageous, and expressive, R. E. M. 's distinctive musical flair was unmatched, and a string of mega-successes solidified them as generational spokesmen. In the tumultuous transition between the wide-open 80s and the anxiety of the early 90s, R. E. M. challenged the corporate and social order, chasing a vision and cultivating a magnetic, transgressive sound.

In this rich, intimate biography, critically acclaimed author Peter Ames Carlin looks beyond the sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll to open a window into the fascinating lives of four college friends - Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry - who stuck together at any cost, until the end. Deeply descriptive and remarkably poetic, steeped in 80s and 90s nostalgia, The Name of This Band is R. E. M. paints a cultural history of the commercial peak and near-total collapse of a great music era, and the story of the generation that came of age at the apotheosis of rock.]]> 464 Peter Ames Carlin 0385546947 Kathleen 0 to-read, music 3.99 The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.
author: Peter Ames Carlin
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.99
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/12
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]]> When Breath Becomes Air 25614898 When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naĂŻve medical student “possessed,â€� as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful lifeâ€� into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.]]> 229 Paul Kalanithi 081298840X Kathleen 0 to-read 4.37 2016 When Breath Becomes Air
author: Paul Kalanithi
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Critique of the Gotha Program by Marx,Karl. [1938] Paperback]]> 123934559 0 Karl Marx Kathleen 5 read-in-2024 5.00 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program by Marx,Karl. [1938] Paperback
author: Karl Marx
name: Kathleen
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1875
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/01
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves: read-in-2024
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]]> John Brown 89273
In the history of slavery and its legacy, John Brown looms large as a hero whose deeds partly precipitated the Civil War. As Frederick Douglass wrote: "When John Brown stretched forth his arm ... the clash of arms was at hand." DuBois's biography brings Brown stirringly to life and is a neglected classic.]]> 304 W.E.B. Du Bois 0679783539 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.33 1909 John Brown
author: W.E.B. Du Bois
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1909
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Communist Hypothesis 7324541
Alain Badiou’s “communist hypothesis,”Ìęfirst stated in 2008, cut through the cant and compromises of the past twenty years to reconceptualize the Left. The hypothesis is a fresh demand for universal emancipation and a galvanizing call to arms. Anyone concerned with the future of the planet needs to reckon with the ideas outlined within this book.]]> 288 Alain Badiou 1844676005 Kathleen 3 read-in-2024 3.58 2009 The Communist Hypothesis
author: Alain Badiou
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: read-in-2024
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]]> <![CDATA[Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success]]> 61079149 367 Miki Berenyi 1788705556 Kathleen 3 read-in-2024 4.42 Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success
author: Miki Berenyi
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.42
book published:
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: read-in-2024
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]]> Kindred 60931 The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

Dana, a modern Black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.]]> 288 Octavia E. Butler 0807083690 Kathleen 0 did-not-finish 4.30 1979 Kindred
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: did-not-finish
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China]]> 11472345
Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,â€� Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square.

Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.]]> 928 Ezra F. Vogel 0674055446 Kathleen 0 to-read, non-fiction 4.43 2011 Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
author: Ezra F. Vogel
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/12
shelves: to-read, non-fiction
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]]> <![CDATA[How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism]]> 23258219
How the West Came to Rule offers a unique interdisciplinary and international historical account of the origins of capitalism. It argues that contrary to the dominant wisdom, capitalism’s origins should not be understood as a development confined to the geographically and culturally sealed borders of Europe, but the outcome of a wider array of global processes in which non-European societies played a decisive role. Through an outline of the uneven histories of Mongolian expansion, New World discoveries, Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry, the development of the Asian colonies and bourgeois revolutions, Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu provide an account of how these diverse events and processes came together to produce capitalism.

Critically engaging with the concept of Eurocentrism across a variety of disciplines, How The West Came to Rule addresses some of the major debates in historical sociology, world history, political economy, postcolonial theory, and international relations and will be of interest to scholars in all these areas.]]> 296 Alexander Anievas 0745335217 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.23 2015 How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
author: Alexander Anievas
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division]]> 93502
Revered by his peers--Bono described his voice as "holy"--and idolized by his fans, musician Ian Curtis left behind a legacy rich in artistic genius. He was a mesmerizing performer on stage, yet also introverted and prone to mood swings. Enigmatic to the last, Ian Curtis died by his own hand on May 18, 1980.

Touching from a Distance describes Curtis's life from his early teenage years to his premature death on the eve of Joy Division's first American music tour. It tells how, with a wife, a child, and impending international fame, he was seduced by the glory of an early grave. What were the reasons for his fascination with death? Were his dark, brooding lyrics an artistic exorcism? In Touching from a Distance, Curtis's widow, Deborah, explains the drama of his life and the tragedy of his death.

Includes discography, gig list, and a full set of Curtis's lyrics, some of which appear in print for the first time.]]> 206 Deborah Curtis 0571224814 Kathleen 0 to-read 3.94 1995 Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division
author: Deborah Curtis
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> Money: A Suicide Note 1188779 extraordinaire. Rolling around New York and London, he makes deals, spends wildly and does reckless movie-world business, all the while grabbing everything he can to sate his massive appetites: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography, a mountain of junk food and more. Ceaselessly inventive and thrillingly savage, this is a tale of life lived without restraint; of money, the terrible things it can do and the disasters it can precipitate.]]> 394 Martin Amis 0141182393 Kathleen 0 3.58 1984 Money: A Suicide Note
author: Martin Amis
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.58
book published: 1984
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/05
shelves: to-read, bowiebookclub, fiction
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]]> The Grace Year 43263520
In Garner County, girls are told they have the power to lure grown men from their beds, to drive women mad with jealousy. They believe their very skin emits a powerful aphrodisiac, the potent essence of youth, of a girl on the edge of womanhood. That’s why they’re banished for their sixteenth year, to release their magic into the wild so they can return purified and ready for marriage. But not all of them will make it home alive.

Sixteen-year-old Tierney James dreams of a better life—a society that doesn’t pit friend against friend or woman against woman, but as her own grace year draws near, she quickly realizes that it’s not just the brutal elements they must fear. It’s not even the poachers in the woods, men who are waiting for a chance to grab one of the girls in order to make a fortune on the black market. Their greatest threat may very well be each other.

With sharp prose and gritty realism, The Grace Year examines the complex and sometimes twisted relationships between girls, the women they eventually become, and the difficult decisions they make in-between.]]> 416 Kim Liggett 1250145449 Kathleen 4 read-in-2024 4.11 2019 The Grace Year
author: Kim Liggett
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/25
date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: read-in-2024
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]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Kathleen 0 to-read, fiction 3.52 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: to-read, fiction
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]]> The Great Transition 62919387 For fans of Station Eleven and The Ministry for the Future, this richly imaginative, immersive, and electrifyingly relevant climate utopia novel follows a family navigating a crisis both personal and political, illuminating humanity’s capacity for change.

What happens after we save the world?

In the near future, humanity hasn’t avoided the worst of climate change—wildfires, rising oceans, mass migration, and skyrocketing inequality have become the daily reality. But just when it seems that it can’t get any worse, remarkably, a movement of workers, migrants, and refugees inspires the world to band together, save the planet, and rebuild a society for all. This is The Great Transition.

Teenager Emi Vargas was born post-Transition, into a utopia compared to the world known by previous generations. Her parents both suffered and sacrificed, playing pivotal roles in The Great Transition, but now their marriage is deteriorating. And when Emi’s mother goes missing amidst a shocking new political upheaval, Emi’s illusion of comfort and safety is shattered.

Alternating between Emi’s suspenseful search for her mother in the present and The Great Transition when her mother and father battled climate devastation and fell in love, this astonishing debut is a remarkable story of struggle, change, and hope.]]> 352 Nick Fuller Googins 1668010755 Kathleen 0 to-read, fiction 3.75 2023 The Great Transition
author: Nick Fuller Googins
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/01
shelves: to-read, fiction
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]]> Blindness 40495148 From Nobel Prize–winning author JosĂ© Saramago, a magnificent, mesmerizing parable of loss

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.]]> 349 JosĂ© Saramago Kathleen 0 to-read 4.17 1995 Blindness
author: José Saramago
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> Ten Days that Shook the World 185872
An American journalist and revolutionary writer, John Reed became a close friend of Lenin and was an eyewitness to the 1917 revolution in Russia. Ten Days That Shook the World is Reed's extraordinary record of that event. Writing in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm, he gives a gripping account of the events in Petrograd in November 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. Containing verbatim reports both of speeches by leaders and of the chance comments of bystanders, and set against an idealized backdrop of soldiers, sailors, peasants, and the proletariat uniting to throw off oppression, Reed's account is the product of passionate involvement and remains an unsurpassed classic of reporting.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 368 John Reed 0141442123 Kathleen 0 to-read 3.72 1919 Ten Days that Shook the World
author: John Reed
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1919
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/07
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]]> <![CDATA[The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World]]> 53054943 The hidden story of the wanton slaughter -- in Indonesia, Latin America, and around the world -- backed by the United States.

In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.

In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.]]> 320 Vincent Bevins 1541742400 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.62 2020 The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
author: Vincent Bevins
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/07
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]]> <![CDATA[Notes from the Larder: A Kitchen Diary with Recipes—A Cookbook]]> 17262525 ÌęÌęÌę
Britain’s foremost food writer returns with his quietly passionate, idiosyncratic musings on a year in the kitchen, alongside more than 250 simple and seasonal recipes. Based on Slater’s journal entries, Notes from the Larder Ìęis a collection of small kitchen celebrations, whether a casual supper of grilled lamb, or a quiet moment contemplating a bowl of cauliflower soup with toasted hazelnuts. Through this personal selection of recipes, Slater offers a glimpse into the daily inspiration behind his cooking and the pleasures of making food by hand, such as his thoughts on topics as various as the kitchen knife whose every nick and stain is familiar, how to make a little bit of cheese go a long way when the cupboards are bare, and his reluctance to share desserts.]]> 544 Nigel Slater 1607745437 Kathleen 0 cookbooks, foodwriting 4.27 2012 Notes from the Larder: A Kitchen Diary with Recipes—A Cookbook
author: Nigel Slater
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/07
date added: 2024/01/07
shelves: cookbooks, foodwriting
review:

]]> How to Blow Up a Pipeline 51686708
In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop—with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.

Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women’s suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.]]> 208 Andreas Malm 1839760257 Kathleen 0 read-in-2023 3.94 2021 How to Blow Up a Pipeline
author: Andreas Malm
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/07
date added: 2024/01/07
shelves: read-in-2023
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]]> <![CDATA[If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution]]> 62315875 The story of the recent uprisings that sought to change the world - and what comes next
Ìę
From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result. IF WE BURNÌęis a stirring work of history built around a single, vital question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?
Ìę
From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine’s Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, acclaimed journalist Vincent Bevins provides a blow-by-blow account of street movements and their consequences, recounted in gripping detail. He draws on four years of research and hundreds of interviews conducted around the world, as well as his own strange experiences in Brazil, where a progressive-led protest explosion led to an extreme-right government that torched the Amazon.
Ìę
Careful investigation reveals that conventional wisdom on revolutionary change is gravely misguided. In this groundbreaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors look back on successes and defeats, offering urgent lessons for the future.]]> 337 Vincent Bevins 1541788974 Kathleen 4 read-in-2024 4.26 If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
author: Vincent Bevins
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.26
book published:
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/01/07
shelves: read-in-2024
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]]> <![CDATA[Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones]]> 1478481 Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915â€�1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx—a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.

Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next thirty years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early twenties onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, “Half the World,â€� for the Daily Worker. As the U.S. government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a U.S. prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955. There she founded The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and the Caribbean Carnival, an annual London festival that continues today as the Notting Hill Carnival. Boyce Davies examines Jones’s thought and journalism, her political and community organizing, and poetry that the activist wrote while she was imprisoned. Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones’s own narration of her life with the federal government’s. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, black U.S. feminism, and the history of communism.]]> 311 Carole Boyce Davies 0822341166 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.18 2007 Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones
author: Carole Boyce Davies
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Mudhoney: The Sound & The Fury From Seattle]]> 17346930 272 Keith Cameron 1780386664 Kathleen 0 non-fiction, music, to-read 4.51 2013 Mudhoney: The Sound & The Fury From Seattle
author: Keith Cameron
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/28
shelves: non-fiction, music, to-read
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]]> Severance 41556003 Maybe it's the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma's offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance.

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she's had her fill of uncertainty. She's content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.

So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won't be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They're traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma's Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it's a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.]]> 291 Ling Ma 1250214998 Kathleen 0 to-read 3.96 2018 Severance
author: Ling Ma
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (George Smiley, #3)]]> 19494 212 John Le Carré Kathleen 0 read-in-2023 4.07 1963 The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (George Smiley, #3)
author: John Le Carré
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1963
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/25
shelves: read-in-2023
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]]> The Long Twentieth Century 1010113 The Long Twentieth Century traces the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Arrighi argues that capitalism has unfolded as a succession of “long centuries,â€� each of which produced a new world power that secured control over an expanding world-economic space. Examining the changing fortunes of Florentine, Venetian, Genoese, Dutch, English and finally American capitalism, Arrighi concludes with an examination of the forces that have shaped and are now poised to undermine America’s world dominance. A masterpiece of historical sociology, The Long Twentieth Century rivals in scope and ambition contemporary classics by Perry Anderson, Charles Tilly and Michael Mann.]]> 416 Giovanni Arrighi 1859840159 Kathleen 0 read-in-2023 4.25 1994 The Long Twentieth Century
author: Giovanni Arrighi
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/25
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]]> Coal Black Mornings 36139204 Coal Black Mornings he traces the journey that took him from a childhood as 'a snotty, sniffy, slightly maudlin sort of boy raised on Salad Cream and milky tea and cheap meat' to becoming founder and lead singer of Suede.

Anderson grew up in Hayward's Heath on the grubby fringes of the Home Counties. As a teenager he clashed with his eccentric taxi-driving father (who would parade around their council house dressed as Lawrence of Arabia, air-conducting his favourite composers) and adored his beautiful, artistic mother. He brilliantly evokes the seventies, the suffocating discomfort of a very English kind of poverty and the burning need for escape that it breeds. Anderson charts the shabby romance of creativity as he travelled the tube in search of inspiration, fuelled by Marmite and nicotine, and Suede's rise from rehearsals in bedrooms, squats and pubs. And he catalogues the intense relationships that make and break bands as well as the devastating loss of his mother.

Coal Black Mornings is profoundly moving, funny and intense - a book which stands alongside the most emotionally truthful of personal stories.]]> 209 Brett Anderson 1408710501 Kathleen 0 read-in-2023 4.23 2018 Coal Black Mornings
author: Brett Anderson
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/25
shelves: read-in-2023
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]]> <![CDATA[No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism]]> 24693186
Other authors have debated the pros and cons of accelerationist politics; No Speed Limit makes the case for an accelerationist aesthetics. Our present moment is illuminated, both for good and for ill, in the cracked mirror of science-fictional futurity.]]> 60 Steven Shaviro 0816697671 Kathleen 0 to-read 3.78 2015 No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism
author: Steven Shaviro
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3)]]> 20588662 The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire.

With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoplesâ€� Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoplesâ€� History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoplesâ€� History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.â€�

Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples� history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.]]> 320 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz 080700040X Kathleen 0 to-read 4.38 2014 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3)
author: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California]]> 111975 Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom.

In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the “three strikesâ€� law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.]]> 412 Ruth Wilson Gilmore 0520242017 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.41 2007 Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
author: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance]]> 42851406 How two centuries of Indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming “Water is lifeâ€�

In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water Protectors knew this battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anticolonial struggle would continue. In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the #NoDAPL movement. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance.]]> 320 Nick Estes 1786636727 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.45 2019 Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
author: Nick Estes
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/04
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]]> <![CDATA[The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity]]> 59808026 INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this dialectic has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors illustrate how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual blinders and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing during all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organizations did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more open to playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and begins to imagine new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.]]> 720 David Graeber 1250858801 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.13 2021 The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
author: David Graeber
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/02
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]]> The Limits to Capital 183040
In his analyses of ‘fictitious capitalâ€� and ‘uneven geographical developmentâ€� Harvey takes the reader step by step through layers of crisis formation, beginning with Marx’s controversial argument concerning the falling rate of profit, moving through crises of credit and finance, and closing with a timely analysis geopolitical and geographical considerations.]]> 512 David Harvey 1844670953 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.18 1982 The Limits to Capital
author: David Harvey
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1982
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune]]> 22716641 Reclaiming the legacy of the Paris Commune for the twenty-first century

Kristin Ross’s highly acclaimed work on the thought and culture of the Communard uprising of 1871 resonates with the motivations and actions of contemporary protest, which has found its most powerful expression in the reclamation of public space. Today’s concerns—internationalism, education, the future of labor, the status of art, and ecological theory and practice—frame and inform her carefully researched restaging of the words and actions of individual Communards. This original analysis of an event and its centrifugal effects brings to life the workers in Paris who became revolutionaries, the significance they attributed to their struggle, and the elaboration and continuation of their thought in the encounters that transpired between the insurrection’s survivors and supporters like Marx, Kropotkin, and William Morris.

The Paris Commune was a laboratory of political invention, important simply and above all for, as Marx reminds us, its own “working existence.â€� Communal Luxury allows readers to revisit the intricate workings of an extraordinary experiment.]]> 156 Kristin Ross 1781688397 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.03 2015 Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune
author: Kristin Ross
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2015
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]]> <![CDATA[Four Futures: Life After Capitalism]]> 22551901 An exhilarating exploration into the utopias and dystopias that could develop from present society

Peter Frase argues that increasing automation and a growing scarcity of resources, thanks to climate change, will bring it all tumbling down. In Four Futures, Frase imagines how this post-capitalist world might look, deploying the tools of both social science and speculative fiction to explore what communism, rentism, socialism and exterminism might actually entail.

Could the current rise of real-life robocops usher in a world that resembles Ender’s Game? And sure, communism will bring an end to material scarcities and inequalities of wealth—but there’s no guarantee that social hierarchies, governed by an economy of “likes,â€� wouldn’t rise to take their place. A whirlwind tour through science fiction, social theory and the new technologies already shaping our lives, Four Futures is a balance sheet of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.]]> 150 Peter Frase 1781688133 Kathleen 0 to-read 3.77 2015 Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
author: Peter Frase
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2015
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]]> <![CDATA[Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway]]> 8077352 400 Cherie Currie 0061961361 Kathleen 0 to-read, music, non-fiction 4.10 2010 Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway
author: Cherie Currie
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/10/29
shelves: to-read, music, non-fiction
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]]> <![CDATA[Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party]]> 15722514
Black against Empire is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. The authors analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence. Bold, engrossing, and richly detailed, this book cuts through the mythology and obfuscation, revealing the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement, and its disastrous unraveling. Informed by twelve years of meticulous archival research, as well as familiarity with most of the former Party leadership and many rank-and-file members, this book is the definitive history of one of the greatest challenges ever posed to American state power.

Read an excerpt here:

by



Listen to an interview with the authors here:
]]> 552 Joshua Bloom 0520271858 Kathleen 0 to-read, blacklivesmatter 4.46 2013 Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
author: Joshua Bloom
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2013
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]]> <![CDATA[Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis]]> 59791579 A furious denunciation of America’s coronavirus criminalsHundreds of thousands of deaths were caused not by the vicissitudes of nature but by the callous and opportunistic decisions of powerful people, as revealed here by John Nichols.ÌęOn March 10, 2020, president Donald Trump told a nation worried about a novel coronavirus, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.â€� It has since been estimated that had Trump simply taken the same steps as other G7 countries, 40 percent fewer Americans would have died.ÌęAnd it was not just the president. His inner circle, including Mike Pence and Jared Kushner, downplayed the crisis and mishandled the response. Cabinet members such as Betsy DeVos and Mike Pompeo undermined public safety at home and abroad to advance their agendas. Senators Ron Johnson and Mitch McConnell, governors Kristi Noem and Andrew Cuomo, judges such as Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Rebecca Bradley all promulgated public policies that led to suffering and death. Meanwhile, profiteer Pfizer (and anti-government propagandists such as Grover Norquist) fed at the public trough, while the billionaire Jeff Bezos added pandemic profits to a grotesquely bloated fortune.ÌęJohn Nichols closes with a call for a version of the Pecora Commission, which took aim at what Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the “speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, and profiteeringâ€� that stoked the Depression. There must be accountability.]]> 337 John Nichols 1839764244 Kathleen 0 to-read 3.65 Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis
author: John Nichols
name: Kathleen
average rating: 3.65
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]]> <![CDATA[Imperialism in the 21st Century: Updating Lenin's Theory a Century Later]]> 25498743 233 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.12 2015 Imperialism in the 21st Century: Updating Lenin's Theory a Century Later
author: Party for Socialism and Liberation
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2015
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date added: 2022/03/01
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]]> <![CDATA[The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity]]> 56269264
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.]]> 692 David Graeber 0374157359 Kathleen 0 to-read 4.20 2021 The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
author: David Graeber
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2021
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]]> Washington Bullets 54169138 Washington Bullets is written in the best traditions of Marxist journalism and history-writing. It is a book of fluent and readable stories, full of detail about US imperialism, but never letting the minutiae obscure the larger political point. It is a book that could easily have been a song of despair â€� a lament of lost causes; it is, after all, a roll call of butchers and assassins; of plots against people’s movements and governments; of the assassinations of socialists, Marxists, communists all over the Third World by the country where liberty is a statue.

Despite all this, Washington Bullets is a book about possibilities, about hope, about genuine heroes. One such is Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso â€� also assassinated â€� who said: ‘You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.â€�

Washington Bullets is a book infused with this madness, the madness that dares to invent the future.]]> 162 Vijay Prashad Kathleen 0 to-read 4.38 2020 Washington Bullets
author: Vijay Prashad
name: Kathleen
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2020
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