Dave
Hyper modern thriller in modern day France that grips readers with its central narrative while providing a deeply enriching portrait of the personalities that can be found among France's vital immigrant community. Provides more valuable insight into the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim French people than can be found in the works of other notable contemporary French authors, I submit.
Manages to provide detailed recreations of the timelines of Mohammed bin Salman's most dramatic and psychopathic moments, culminating in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi but including his consolidation of power in pursuit of the Crown Princedom, the warnings to the country's clerics, the crackdown on corruption (executed by jailing power-brokers at the Ritz Carlton), his bizarre kidnapping of the Lebanese Prime Minister, and others. Hubbard also does well to paint a portrait of life on the ground for ‘normal' people in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the changing sociopolitical climate there. Unfortunately MBS is so shrouded in mystery that the psychology behind his actions is often unclear, but this seems to be a result of the Crown Prince's proclivity to move in the shadows as well as his initial lack of proficiency in English.
A modern classic, and should be mandatory reading. Despite covering historical material, author Bevins' background as a journalist serves the subject matter well. In the spirit of what investigative journalism should be, Bevins performed extensive interviews with the (surviving) people effected by mid-20th Century anticommunism in Indonesia, Brazil, and Chile. Despite being an American, Bevins outlines the history of the early CIA's covert operations and counterintelligence scheming with the dispassionate perspective of an outsider, an angle that is all too rare in such works. The sheer ruthlessness and brutality of the events of the anti-communist killings are haunting and stomach-turning, but the urgency of understanding the logic and circumstances that can allow individuals and interest groups to perpetrate such violence cannot be overstated. With this book, Bevins performed the important work of demonstrating the way that global anti-communists collaborated and shaped their own plans based on the experiences of others, and it would serve any politically motivated person well to read The Jakarta Method and know what you may one day be up against.
Frans de Waal is the head primate researcher at Emory National Primate Research Center, the world's most prestigious research institute (formerly known as Yerkes). He is famous for his work which is critical of attitudes of anthrocentrism or human-supremacism. In this work, he selects a number of commonly presented assertions about the uniqueness of humanity, and demonstrates the ways that such claims are almost always dramatically overstated, if not outright false. The work is less focused around explicitly answering the question of the title, and more a reasoned critique of human arrogance regarding the scientific method. De Waal presents example after example of famous research studies of the past which produced results that fundamentally shaped the way 19th and 20th century humans understood animals then shows the ways that such studies ultimately were debunked due to limitations in research design (almost always resulting from overconfidence in the human way, or lack of ability to leave the human perspective).
De Waal's book is an easy read for the non-scientifically literate public and helps give those of us outside of science a better understanding of what science can and sometimes cannot tell us. It is a very empathetic book, which encourages us to have more humility when we consider the untold billions of species whom we share the Earth with, who down to even the strangest species of wasp, may be capable of higher levels of cognition than we would have ever imagined otherwise.
A history of the calamity of Hurricane Katrina, and the city of New Orleans itself of the span of a century, yes, but more than this, Horowitz's book is a work of political theory that uses history to demonstrate how disastrous the hollowing out of the state under neoliberalism has been for life in the United States. Between the hurricane of 1915 and the decade long recovery from 2005's Hurricane Katrina, the history of New Orleans was shaped by brutal racism and systematic oppression of blacks orchestrated by the interests of capital and the politicians in charge. By the time Hurricane Betsy struck the city in 1965 the geography of racial oppression (importantly, not just the geography of housing but the geography of resource distribution) meant that the storm was a devastating warning shot about the destruction such a status quo would allow to be wreaked. Instead of preparing for the next storm in any meaningful way, the political infrastructure of the State of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans was deteriorated under the regime of neoliberalism that began in the 1970s and continues to this day. Horowitz's book is a haunting and infuriating demonstration of the importance of state power and capacity.
As a huge fan of John Ford's work, I appreciated Eyman's biography for offering such detailed insight into the director's life. John Ford was a very strange man, closed off to almost everyone in his life, and capable of very bizarre moments ‘bullying', usually directed towards his actors. His life was centered around films and the film industry, and Eyman's work provides details about Ford's mindset and lifestyle heading into almost all of the dozens of films he directed. Ford would intentionally mislead others about his true beliefs and values, making the work of a biographer difficult, but Eyman is able to offer enough testimonial from those closest to him and enough quotes from movie sets and letters that the reader is able to piece together an image of a brilliant but unpleasant man who was capable of great kindness and was able to stand up for his convictions (which generally seem to have aligned with what seems ‘morally right' to a modern reader) when it mattered. Despite his strangeness, his political and moral understanding of the world seems to have been able to be boiled down to a strikingly simple dichotomy that motivated much of his artistic expression–that the British Empire were imperialistic bullies who dominated decent peoples, his beloved Irish, who represented a pastoral, working class, more egalitarian society. Through this prism a great number of Ford's films can be better understood: who represents the British and who represents the Irish. Thanks to Eyman's book I feel that I have at least a basic grasp of the great director's personality and a good outline of the course of his life.
Entertaining tour through a 140 year history of “populism” and the panics that its few surges in power have instigated. The prairie populists of the end of the 19th-century represented a new class-based political movement in the United States that has been largely forgotten. Frank gives an effective and concise overview of their history as a political movement (including their foibles, most notably being investing too much into William Jennings Bryan the man, as well as emphasizing the Free Silver movement as the end-all be-all) but more importantly, presents a survey of the absurdly frenzied panic that the movement promoted from those who represented the interests of capital.
Frank offers the term “Democracy Scare” (stemming from “red scares”) as a way of understanding the panics that emerged first in the 1890s, then the 1930s, then, 1960s, and finally again in the 2010s. The elites, coalescing around their preferred politicians, organizations, academic posts, magazines, and news outlets, Frank demonstrates, have consistently managed to present an all-encompassing response to the ebbs and flows of populist movements by painting their leaders and ideas as retrograde, insane, idiotic, and doomed to fail. Frank provides an excellent overview of the emergence of anti-populism as an academic movement among professors and researchers of political science, history, and sociology in the 1950s. The ideas and attitudes formed then have since been absorbed into the liberal worldview, centered around a belief in “meritocracy”, code for rule by elites over the ignorant masses of peons.
Frank's work is frustrating and hilarious, but ultimately hopeful, offering those sympathetic to the aims of American history's various populist movements some refreshing context, and a welcome reminder of one's own sanity in the face of repeated admonishment from the elite establishment who wishes to suppress the ideas hostile to capital at any cost.