Wolfie
Written by the Father of Modern China in 1919, this text portrays the vision of a nation built by a man born a commoner, educated by the west, and baptized Christian. While written after seeing the end of World War One with the aims of ending trade wars still bears the hallmarks of colonialism as the roots of modern capitalism feeding into China we know today.
Appreciate the place from which this book stems, and as such it is specifically right in terms of navigating the aspects of the modern stock market; Unfortunately, that is somewhat undermined by the limits of understanding of money.
Over the last 10 years since this was published most of its wisdom has been assimilated into the discourse but does still provide a solid dig into the data while providing a lens into how other cultures have successfully practiced less property based ideas of sexuality.
Listen to the audio book when it came out, then reread it recently.
While Malcolm is able to move the frame from a broken interaction, to say a systemically broken policing, it still misses that policing is but a broken agent within its systemic.
When you get down to it; This book is just arguing about the flaws with the philosophic position of Original Sin and its real-world impacts, but fails to fully call out that worldview.
Written in 1999, All About Love offers a wonderfully precise critique of many of the failures of the American doctrine. Coming from an experience across cultural and class-based boundaries, hooks identifies and opens up with the systematic abuse of children and the culture of domination that follows. The strength of this work is how it speaks so precisely to the American context. Still, I also find this is part of its limit as it approaches the edges of a love-based society. It stands often, but not entirely, trapped within a frame of American biblical literalism.
This is an interesting and well-researched look at the history of institutional change into and out of extractive and inclusive systems. While the model presented does a pretty good job at articulating how these systems do transform, and some of the lessons that might be applied in the future during critical junctures, it does so from an economic grounded lens with a fixation on capitalistic-economic growth as the key metric of success.
While economic growth can certainly be used as a metric, and thus the basis of a model, to help understand what pluralized power and equality looks like as an abstraction from away from innovation, this does present certain blindspot becomes even more apparent in how the modern historical contexts, like the United States, are presented as more equal and free than is realistically true.