bookreviews
American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, by Michael Willrich, Basic Books, 480 pages, $35 The lawmaking and policing powers of late 19th and early 20th century America did not think anarchist agitators deserved the protective penumbra of our Constitution. After Emma Goldman immigrated to the United States in 1885 from czarist Russia, she became a dynamic and hugely popular traveling lecturer on anarchism and other rebellious causes, such as draft resistance and contraception. Consequently, she was arrested a lot—...
Reason
The Wealth of a Nation: Institutional Foundations of English Capitalism, by Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Princeton University Press, 304 pages, $39.95 A galaxy of brilliant scholars have tried to account for the economic transformation of England in the 18th and early 19th centuries—the period that began the Great Enrichment that created the modern world. What could Geoffrey M. Hodgson'sThe Wealth of a Nation add to this mountain of scholarship and disputation? Quite a lot. Building on his earlier work, especially 2015's Conceptualising Capitalism, the British economist argues that the Great Enrichmen...
Reason
My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous, by Barrett Brown, MCD, 416 pages, $30 Seven years after his release from federal prison, Barrett Brown has published a memoir recounting his time in the company of the hacker group Anonymous and his time behind bars, as well as an updated list of every person he now despises. Lest followers of the social media star turned transparency martyr think they've heard all this before, My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous digs deeper into Brown's psyche than anything he's divulged before. To wit: "The institution of bed-makery w...
Reason
Sheila Vakharia, who now works for the Drug Policy Alliance, began her career as a clinical social worker at a conventional addiction treatment center, where she soon became disenchanted. "Few of my clients attended treatment voluntarily, most did not think they had a drug problem, and most never completed the program," she recalls in her new book The Harm Reduction Gap, "because they could not maintain abstinence and comply with our tight structure," which included regular urine testing that she was required to supervise, much to her dismay. Vakharia's next job, at a program that provided ste...
Reason
Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, by Kliph Nesteroff, Abrams, 312 pages, $30 The first paragraph of the book jacket lays it out: "There is a common belief that we live in unprecedented times, that people are too sensitive today, that nobody objected to the actions of actors, comedians, and filmmakers in the past. Modern pundits would have us believe that Americans of a previous generation had tougher skin and seldom complained. But does this argument hold up to scrutiny?" There's a good point underneath the hyperbole. People tend to believe—and pundits, politicians, and ac...
Reason
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, by John Ganz, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pages, $30 When the Clock Broke, by the progressive essayist John Ganz, is a solidly educational and entertaining work of political history. While Ganz winningly doesn't bash you over the head page by page with the larger point he's trying to make, the stories he chooses to tell about the early 1990s are meant to hit home how elements of American political, cultural, economic, and ideological life back then laid the groundwork for Donald Trump's "Make Americ...
Reason
Charles Fort lived a century ago but is still invoked fairly frequently today: the "inspired clown" (as the screenwriter and playwright Ben Hecht called him) who haunted the New York Public Library, collecting reports of anomalous events and devising wild theories to account for them. Fort's influence after he died isn't as widely appreciated. But Joshua Blu Buhs makes a strong case in Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers that the eccentric writer cast a long shadow, leaving a mark not only on the world of Bigfoot hunters and UFO buffs but also in literat...
Reason
ValueWalk
The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, W.W. Norton & Company, 384 pages, $29.99 Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank, thinks that taxation is a precondition for freedom, not a threat to it. The current political problem, he argues in The Road to Freedom, is that the right (which for Stiglitz includes libertarians as well as conservatives) rejects the Founding Fathers' idea of no taxation without representation in favor of opposing any taxation at all. This is a problem, he continues, because market failures are more extensive and seve...
Reason
The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence and the Politics of Policing in America, by Michelle S. Phelps, Princeton University Press, 304 pages, $29.95 Being a writer at the right place at the right moment is a mix of chance and preparation. Michelle Phelps, a University of Minnesota sociologist, began researching lethal police encounters and the politics of policing in Minneapolis in 2015. She was sitting at her desk writing up the results of her research on May 25, 2020, when a Minneapolis cop killed George Floyd. Phelps has now published The Minneapolis Reckoning, the results of reviewing h...
Reason
閲覧を続けるには、ノアドット株式会社が「プライバシーポリシー」に定める「アクセスデータ」を取得することを含む「nor.利用規約」に同意する必要があります。
「これは何?」という方はこちら