Consider This
Book Review: Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond Listen to your adversaries! No, really listen—not necessarily to abandon your position and adopt theirs, but to understand their perspective (whether flawed or not) and so increase your ability to communicate productively with them. This is the take away from Jared Diamond’s description of …
Continue reading “Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis”
Book Review: The French Revolution: From Enlightenment to Tyranny by Ian Davidson As a comprehensive collection and analysis of scholarly research, this book is an essential supplement to your secondary school education (and probably that from college too) about the French Revolution. Don’t venture citing the French Revolution without first reading this complete and objective history …
Continue reading “The French Revolution: From Enlightenment to Tyranny”
Book Review: Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century by Mark Blyth An excellent history lesson on how New Deal values began to be eroded, a process that accelerated in the 1970s. Documents how public acquiescence to supply side economics was no accident, but instead was the result of deliberate well funded …
Book Review: Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank Documents how some people who consider themselves to be Liberals are not living up to their proclaimed values. Points to how prosperity can be extended to those left behind. —
Book Review: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo This book is a worthy and indispensable read. It is about and for white people, and how to eliminate our unconscious and ubiquitous racism. Robin DiAngelo addresses white progressives in particular about the pervasive racism we all …
Continue reading “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism”
Book Review: If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How it Might Be Saved by Michael Tomasky For any hope of rectifying today’s dysfunctional polarization, this book is a must read. The title says it all, and the author delivers as it promises. Michael Tomasky takes the famous quote of Benjamin Franklin …
Continue reading “If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How it Might Be Saved”
Book Review: The Bankers’ New Clothes: Whats Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It by Anat Admati, Martin Hellwig This is a must read, especially if finance is not your forte. Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig take a topic that is as equally unbearably boring as it is essential for the well-being of …
Continue reading “The Bankers’ New Clothes: Whats Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It”
Book Review: The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels by Jon Meacham Chock full of actual history, all of it framed in meaningful context for our own time. Illustrates why it’s essential that all of good will must be active in politics, especially when demagogy is prominent; and that not to be …
Continue reading “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels”
Book Review: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges This book is an unpleasant but necessary read. Even if one is not absorbed in any of the spectacles Chris Hedges presents, the significantly large percentage of the population that is in the grip of at least one …
Continue reading “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle”
Book Review: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff This book will boil your blood. Supported by extensive empirical research, Professor Shoshana Zuboff exposes the effective digital implementation of the late B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity. It centers around three …