Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution--the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy." "As historian Edward Baptist reveals . . . , the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War, Baptist explains, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Thus the United States seized control of the world markets for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence." "Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history. It forces readers to reckon with the violence at the root of American supremacy, but also with the survival and resistance that brought about slavery's end--and created a culture that sustains America's deepest dreams of Freedom." Also see Eric Foner, "A Brutal Process," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/5/2014: "A historian argues that the slave states were not a world apart but were crucial to American development.").
Robert H. Bates, Avner Grief, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, & Barry R.Weingast, Analytic Narratives (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1998) (From the bookjacket: "Students of comparative politics have long faced a vexing dilemma: how can social scientists draw broad, applicable principles of political order from specific historical examples? In Analytic Narratives, five senior scholars offer a new and ambitious methodological response to this important question. By employing rational-choice and game theory, the authors propose a way of extracting empirically testable, general hypotheses, from particular cases. The result is both a methodological manifesto and an applied handbook that political scientists, economic historians, sociologists, and students of political economy will find essential.").
Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014) ("And that's when it dawned on him, how he'd heard of The Little Review. The edits had been among Emma Goldman's supporters during her 1917 espionage trial. A glance at their magazine was enough to indicate that Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap were feminists of the most radical kind. Far beyond legitimizing the children of unwed mothers, they openly supported anarchism and homosexual rights. They eschewed marriage. And they lived together. The magazine was loaded with foreign contributors. The July-August issue that the DA gave him featured several un-American names: Ben Hecht, Djuna Barnes, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. And there, just inside the cover, adoringly pasted in, was a picture of the writer James Joyce--the glasses, the slicked-back hair, the mustache and pointed beard. His heavy coat was pulled up at the neck as he gazed off, unsmiling, into the distance, like some art of Irish Trotsky. You could tell a radical just by looking at him" Id. at 161-162. "When the solicitor's judgment was handed down, officials in Boston and at the General Post Office Building gathered up nearly five hundred copies of Ulysses they had been collecting through the fall, wheeled them down the basement's dim corridors and unloaded them in the furnace room. The piles of books sat before the furnace's black doors and a row of lower chambers, narrow like catacombs. The men opened the round cast-iron hatches and began tossing James Joyce's Ulysses into the chambers. Paper burns brighter than coal. Seven years of writing, months of revisions and typesetting, weeks of printing and hours of packaging and shipping were incinerated in seconds." Id. at 249.).
Margaret F. Brinig & Nicole Stelle Garnett, Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools' Importance in Urban America (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2014) (Nationwide, over 1,600 Catholic Schools have closed in the past two decades, displacing more than 300,000 students. [] The 60,000 students enrolled in the [Archdiocese of Philadelphia] schools in 2011 were the same number that the Archdiocese served in 1911. At its peak in 1961, enrollment in Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia exceeded 250,00 children.Total enrollment in U.S. Catholic schools fell from 5.2 million to 2.1 million during the same period." "The reason for the Catholic school crisis are complex. . . For now it suffices to simply observe that the persistence of the economic and demographic realities underlying Catholic school closures suggests that the trend likely will continue or even accelerate in future years, at least absent a shift in education policy favoring a dramatic expansion in school choice. This book represents our effort, the first of its kind, to measure the effects of the school closure trend on the urban neighborhoods where Catholic schools have served for decades, and in some cases, for over a century." Id. at ix. "In contrast to previous scholarship, this book has focused primarily on the Catholic schools as community institutions--on the consequences, beyond classroom walls, of their disappearance from urban neighborhoods. These community effects, of course, are not the only consequences of Catholic school closures. In closing, we therefore think it appropriate to restate, in an abbreviated manner, the implications of losing Catholic schools as educational institutions. These implications are twofold. First, Catholic schools' departure from cities will have the direct effect of reducing the number of quality educational options available to the students who need them the most--disadvantaged urban residents. This alone is a sobering fact given these schools' demonstrated record of educating at-risk children. Second, the reduction in educational options also may affect the residential choices of middle-class parents who frequently opt to leave urban communities for suburban ones precisely to search for good schools for their children. The educational consequences of Catholic schools closures therefore are not only related to the community effects of Catholic school closures but are likely to be felt most acutely in the very neighborhoods that will suffer most from the loss of social capital that appears to be triggered when Catholic schools close." Id, at 157.).
Robert P. Burns, Kafka's Law: The Trial and American Criminal Justice (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "With Kafka's Law, Robert P. Burns shows how The Trial provides an uncanny lens through which to consider flaws in the American criminal justice system today." Burns argues that "in the overwhelming majority of contemporary cases, police interrogation is followed by a pleas bargain, in which the court's only function is to set a largely predetermined sentence for an individual already presumed guilty. Like Kafka's nightmarish vision, much of American criminal law and procedure has become unknowable, ubiquitous, and bureaucratic. It, too, has come to rely on deception in dealing with suspects and jurors, to limit the role of defense, and to increasingly dispense justice without the protection of formal procedures.").
Andrea Louise Campbell, Trapped in America's Safety Net: One Family's Struggle (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2014) ("As a social policy scholar, I thought I knew a lot about these programs. I had been teaching and writing about them for years, first at Harvard and then at MIT. Little did I anticipate how useless I would be to Dave and Marcella as they tried to navigate the extraordinarily complex American system of social assistance. And nothing prepared me for the Dickensian reality we encountered. I will never read the sober, measured manuals form government programs or the academic analyses of social policy in the same way again. Behind the statistics--and beyond the ideological battles over policy design--are human beings whose lives are molded, distorted, and stunted by policies purported to help them. I have come to wonder: if I as a social policy expert had little idea what these policies really do on the ground, how much do the politicians who created them know?" "Not much, I suspect, and so the idea for this book was born." Id. at x.).
Danielle Keats Citron, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "Most Internet users are familiar with trolling--aggressive, foul-mouthed posts designed to elicit angry responses in a site's comments. Less familiar but far more serious is the way some use networked technologies to target real people, subjecting them, by name and address, to vicious, often terrifying, online abuse. In an in-depth investigation of a problem that is too often trivialized by lawmakers and the media, Danielle Keats Citron exposes the startling event of personal cyber-attacks and proposes practical, lawful ways to prevent and punish online harassment. A refutation of those who claim that these attacks are legal, or at least impossible to stop, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace reveals the serious emotional, professional, and financial harms incurred by victims." "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace rejects the view of the Internet as an anarchic Wild West, where those who venture online must be thick-skinned enough to endure all manner of verbal assault in the name of free speech protection, no matter how distasteful or abusive. Cyber-harassment is a matter of civil rights law, Citron contends, and legal percedents as well as social norms of decency and civility must be leveraged to stop it.").
Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, & Astrid Henry, Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women's Movements (New York: Liveright, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "While most histories focus on the 1960s and 1970s, coloring it in a nostalgic glow, Feminism Unfinished eschews this popular--though incomplete--narrative of feminism and traces the world-changing social movement to the 1920s. [] This broader canvas allows for the struggles of all women, including now working-class women--those who had to work--to come to the foreground. [] Feminism Unfinished provides a much-needed counterpoint to the contemporary corporate-backed 'lean-in' feminist philosophy; the authors argue that this is the equivalent of 'trickledown' economics, assuming that gains for a tiny elite will help all women. They demonstrate that, to the contrary, the extraordinary gains women have made were created by working together for social change rather than by striving individually for personal success. [] Working against the wave of conservative cultural backlash and neoliberal economic hegemony that has metastasized since the late 1970s, Cobble, Gordon, and Henry demonstrate that so much more remains to be done, particularly among young people--both female and make--who will have to know of this history as they create their own.").
Rana Dasgupta, Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014) ("You can become--since all of history, since all the world, is a battlefield--a warrior." "This was the way that many people, especially businesspeople, chose to see themselves after the partition; and the free-for-all of liberalisation only served to deepen the need for martial resolve. While most businesspeople in the West considered themselves to be civilians, their counterparts entering the global system in this place--and other like it--thought of themselves as soldiers. . . ." Id. at 212. "The first decade of the [twenty-first] century also saw gathering waves of urban protest against its corruption and cruelty. It was increasingly common to see the city taken over by gatherings of a hundred thousand or more united in outrage towards society's ills or the machinations of its rulers. Though some of this discontent could be accommodated with the prevailing rubric of self-interest--middle-class resentment towards the fortunes made by corrupt politicians could be seen in this way, for instance--it was clear from the grief and euphoria on display at such gatherings that there was more than this at stake. There were other, humbler ambitions at play: the desire to live in a more tender society; the desire for a loftier idea of human relations, for something other, indeed, than self-interest; the desire for a respite from the world's conspicuous cruelty. Cruel societies are often the most dynamic and productive--nineteenth-century Europe was one of the most creative societies ever to exist--but even if you are one of those borne up on this dynamism, cruelty is less easy to live with then one imagines. Only the most hardened warriors are able to assume total ownership of their cruelty, and indeed of the mercilessness of capitalism. Middle-class Indians did not actually want to be responsible for cruelty any more than middle-class Canadians or Swedes did. It is part of the ideology of our 'neolibeal' moment that only self-aggrandising drives are 'natural' to human beings, but in fact sympathy for others is more difficult to defeat than we imagine." Id. at 272. "Delhi is obsessed with money, it is the only language it understands, and to buy myself out of its vulgarity and its money-mindedness, I need lots of money. It is a strange, self-defeating logic which obviously universalizes the escalation of that which it hates." Id. at 412. From the book jacket: "In Capital, . . . Dasgupta examines one of the great trends of out time: the expansion of the global elite. Capital is an intimate portrait of Delhi that bears witness to the extraordinary transmogrification of India's capital. But it also offers a glimpse of what capitalism will become in the post-Western world. The story of Delhi is a parable for where we are all headed." Also, see Samanth Subramanian, "Glare of a Gilded Age," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/11/2014.).
William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and The Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014) ("The problem is that students have been taught that that is all that education is: doing your homework, getting the answers, acing the test. Nothing in their training has endowed them with the sense that something larger is at stake. They've learned to 'be a student,' not to use their minds. [] I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League--bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development, one that they directed by themselves and for themselves." Id. at 13. "And here I fear I have to quite another Bush, the elder one. His 1988 opponent, Michael Dukakis (Swarthmore, Harvard Law), the first of the meritocratic major-party presidential nominees, had famously announced, in his own convention address, that 'this election isn't about ideology; it's about competence'--the technocrat's creed in a nutshell.To which the first George Bush replied: 'Competence makes the trains run on time but doesn't know where they're going.' What the election should be about he added--what every one should be about--is, precisely, beliefs, values, and principles." "The great exemplar of the technocrat, however, is not the hapless Dukakis, a high-IQ moron if there ever was one, but our current president himself. His book was called The Audacity of Hope, but only his ambition is audacious. A centrist, a pragmatist, a seeker of consensus: he plays it safe, like every other product of the system. He seeks to wear the mantle of the visionary, but his vision is technocracy itself--those 'common sense' solutions that he always likes to talk about. If politics is the art of the possible, Obama's failure as a leader is precisely his conception of what is possible, his meek acceptance of the limits of the status quo." Id. at 229. Also see Dwight Garner, "Lowered Ambitions In Higher Education," Books of the Times, NYT, Wednesday, 8/13/2014.).
William Deresiewicz, A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011) (From the bookjacket: "Before Jane Austen, Deresiewicz was a very different young man. A sullen and arrogant graduate student, he never thought that Austen would have anything to offer him. But when he had read Emma for a class, something extraordinary happened. Austen's devotion to the everyday, and her faith in the value of ordinary lives, changed him in ways he could never have imagined. As he viewed the world through Austen's generous eyes, he was amazed to discover that the people in his life began to develop the depth and richness of literary characters--and that his own life had suddenly acquired all the fascination of a novel. He real education had finally begun.").
Dave Eggers, The Circle: A Novel (New York: Knopf; San Francisco: McSweeeny's Book, 2013) (Brave New World meets Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Also see the entries for Siva Vaidhyanathan below.).
Steven Epstein, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2007) (From the backcover: "With Inclusion, Steven Epstein argues that strategies to achieve diversity in medical research mask deeper problems, ones that might require a different approach and different solutions." "Formal concerns for this issue, Epstein shows, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Until the mid-1980s, scientists often studied groups of white, middle-aged men--and assumed that conclusions drawn from studying them would apply to the rest of the population. But struggles involving advocacy groups, experts, and Congress led to reforms that forced researchers to diversify the population from which they drew for clinical research. While the prominence of these inclusive practices has offered hope to traditionally underserved groups, Epstein argue that it has drawn attention away from the tremendous inequalities in health that are rooted not in biology but in society." From the text: "I call this set of changes in research policies, ideologies, and practices, and the accompanying creation of bureaucratic offices, procedures and monitoring systems, the 'inclusion-and-difference paradigm.' The name reflects two substantive goals: the inclusion of members of various groups generally considered to have been underrepresented previously as subjects in clinical studies; and the measurement, within those studies, of differences across groups with regard to treatment effects, disease progression, or biological processes." Id. at 6. "I also will argue that these reforms have unintended consequences that merit especially close study. By approaching health form the vantage point of categorical identity, they ignore other ways in which health risks are distributed in society. By valorizing certain categories of identity, they conceal others from view. By focusing on groups, they obscure individual-level differences raising the risk of improper 'racial profiling' or 'sex profilling' in health care. By treating each of the recognized categories in a consistent fashion, they often ignore important differences across them. And by emphasizing the biology of difference, they encourage the belief that qualities such as race and gender are biological in their essence, as well as the mistaken conclusion that social inequalities are best remedied by attending to those biological particularities. While the inclusion-and-difference paradigm is certainly preferable to any narrow biomedical practice of exclusion, and while it may generate useful knowledge for specific purposes, the net effect of these unintended consequences is to make it a problematic tool for eliminating health disparities. Rather than tackle the problem of health disparities head on, we have adopted an oblique strategy that brings with it a new set of difficulties." Id. at 11.).
Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 1600-1757 (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) ("When the Company acknowledged the private trade as a legitimate pursuit for its employees, it was a signal that the Company recognized and even supported a high degree of autonomy for its employees. This was not merely a matter of allowing employees greater freedoms during their leisure time. The private trade practices affected the operations of the firm itself. In some cases, the legitimate private trading practices of factors grew so large that they helped shape the pattern of Company settlements in the East. For years overseas factors refused orders to abandon the troublesome fort at Bencoolen (now Bengkula, Indonesia) because they found it advantageous for their own private trade. And . . . captains regularly diverted the routes of their ships in order to pursue their own private trade in amenable ports. Thus decisions about the paths of its ships and the location of its forts devolved into the hands of lower-level employees. The private trade allowances were not just a means of accommodating employees; the legitimacy of private trade pursuits radically decentralized the firm and placed operational decisions into the purview of locally informed employees. The English East India Company in the private trading period is therefore an early example of a decentralized firm." "My central contribution to the historical literature on the private trade of the English East India Company is one that stresses the positive and systematic impact of decentralized decision making on the functions of the Company as a whole." Id. at 14-14 (citations omitted).).
Francois Furet, Lies, Passions and Illusions: The Democratic Imagination in the Twentieth Century, edited with an Introduction by Christophe Prochasson, translated by Deborah Furet (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2014) ("With respect to the idea of nation, I am struck by the twentieth century's constant replay of the drama of 1914. Fascism, of course, was a pathological exaltation of national sentiment. But Communism itself finally went the way of democratic universalism under the French Revolution. It became national. Stalin represents the transformation of Bolshevik universalism into Russian nationalism while still wearing the mask of Bolshevik universalism. In the end, we watched Europe die of its own most brilliant invention: the nation. This is one way of looking at the twentieth century. What Europe brought to the history of the world, as compared to Greek or Roman antiquity, was the nation, which is the historical form of modern civilization. And it all but killed us." Id. at 20-21. "There is no agreement on the meaning of the word 'lie.' When speaking of the Soviets' lies, I am not talking about any active lie on the part of Lenin or Trotsky. I'm talking about an objective lie. The lie about the Soviets and the workers' power is the false idea that the Soviets were ever a workers' power or even a democratic one. The lie refers to officially ratified contradictions between words and deeds." Id. at 32. "Hannah Arendt is certainly one of the great witnesses of the twentieth century, though my admiration of her work is not without reservations. Her thinking is often confused, sometimes contradictory, a little demagogic: you can't be simultaneously anti-modern, antibourgeois, anti-Communist, anti-Fascist, and anti-Zionist, and in the light of all these rejections still think clearly about the political history of the twentieth century. Id. at 59. "It is the illusion of universalism that keeps us from thinking about such conflicts in terms of national bodies. We live in a time when we would like to go beyond the phenomenon of nation, but politics still revolves largely around national passions. That is why history, as it has for the last two hundred years in democratic nations, still has a very important rile to play, the role of a pedagogical moral authority." Id. at 78.).
Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Knopf, 2014) ("As I had told President Bush and Condi Rice early in 2007, the challenge of the early twenty-first century is that crises don't come and go--they all seem to come and stay." Id. at 523. "While American politics has always been a shrill, partisan, and ugly business going back to the Founding Fathers, we have rarely been so polarized and so unable to execute even the basic functions of government, much less tackle the most difficult and divisive problems facing the country. I believe that is due to the incessant scorched-earth battling between Congress and the president (I saw it under both Bush and Obama) but even more so to the weakening of the moderate center of both parties in Congress. Progress in America historically has come from thinkers and ideologues on both the left and the right, but the best of those ideas have been enacted into law through compromise. Now moderation is equated with lacking principles, and compromise with 'selling out.' This problem goes deeper than personalities, and I have seen it intensify greatly since first arriving in Washington in 1966. As secretary, I greatly missed the 'bridge builders,' most of whom left Congress because of their own frustrations in the House and Senate." Id. at 582. Also see Thomas E. Ricks, "In Command," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/19/2014.).
Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (New York: Little, Brown, 2013) ("That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools." Id. at 87.).
Andreas Glaeser, Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning) (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2011) ("Likewise remarkable is how political action acquired new meanings. At the beginning, dissidents often took action along statutory paths: they did what they thought they were supposed to do as involved members of the communist youth organizations, as politically aware students, even as members of the SED. They asked critical questions, made critical comments, became active in organizing readings, wrote wall newspapers, and so forth. Retrospectively these actions appeared 'naive' because the addressee in no way reacted as statutorily described--answering questions, delighting in critique, engaging in dialogue. Thus they realized that they have been entrapped in literalist understandings. And the realization that the world was not as described in words also created a moral abyss. Hence, action became an experiment, probing what this world was like in fact. The reactions of party state agencies came to seen as much better indicators of the real state of the world than the written world of propagandistic self-description or the letters of statutes an law. Hence, political action in accordance with the law were undertaken with an ironic distance as a safety blanket. On these grounds the insistence of taking legal political actions could become assertion of an identity, a matter of self-respect in a warped world. This might at first have had a purely individual meaning. Yet, the self-asserting I eventually needed another to validate this identity, and thus action could become the basis of community, of a new network of authority. The experimenting and self-asserting I became a we and by necessity action became performative, and addressed to another and subsequently narrarativized. With the expansion of networks, with the emergence of a small public enabled by meetings and later techniques of mass mediation, the performances of action and the reaction of the state could become what mattered. The ecce homo strategy was born as a political move. The accent of attention in politics shifted from the action that had long lost any promise of real institutional consequences besides being an (albeit important) ingredient in self-politics to the communication of action and reaction as a means to form and validate critical political understandings." Id. at at 459-460.).
Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League (New York: Scribner, 2014) (See Anand Giridharadas, "Man Down," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/21/2014.).
Quarratulain Hyder, River of Fire (Aag ka Darya), translated from the original Urdu by the author (New York: New Directions Books, 1998) (From th backcover: "The most important novel of twentieth-century Urdu fiction, Quarratulain Hyder's River of Fire was first published as Aag ka Darya in 1959. River of Fire encompasses the fates of four recurring characters over two and a half millennia: Gautam, Champa, Kamal, and Cyril--Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian. In different eras, different relations form and reform among the four: romance and war, possession and dispossession. Lyrical and witty, Hyder's prose interweaves parables, legends, dreams, diaries, and letters. And she argues for a culture that is inclusive: River of Fire is a book that questions the relevance of religion in defining Indian identity.").
Jacqueline Jones, A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America (New York: Basic Books, 2013) ("Like countless other cultures and countries throughout the world, the United States has its own creation myth--its own unique, dramatic story intended to explain where we came from and who we are today." "According to this myth, the first Europeans who laid eyes on Africans were struck foremost by their physical appearance--the color of their skin and the texture of their hair--and concluded that these beings constituted a lower order of humans, an inferior race destined for enslavement. During the American Revolution, patriots spoke eloquently of liberty and equality, and though their lofty rhetoric went unfulfilled, they inadvertently challenged basic forms of racial categorization. And so white Northerners, deriving inspiration from the Revolution, emancipated their own slaves and ushered in a society free of the moral stain of race-based bondage. The Civil War destroyed the system of slavery nationwide, but new theories of scientific racism gave rise to new forms of racial oppression in the North and South. Not until the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 did the federal governments dismantle state-sponsored race-based segregation and thus pave the way for better race relations. Though hardly an unmitigated triumph, the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 signaled the dawn of a postracial society and offered a measure of the distance the country had traveled since slavery prevailed in British North America." "Yet America's creation myth is just that--a myth, one that itself rests entirely on a spurious concept: for 'race' itself is a fiction, one that has no basis in biology or any long-standing, consistent usage in human culture. As employed in the popular rendition of America's national origins, the word and its various iterations mask complex historical processes that have little or nothing to do with the physical makeup of the people who controlled or suffered from those processes." Id. at ix-x.).
Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011) ("This book is an effort, based n part on conversations with Chinese leaders, to explain the conceptual way the Chinese think about problems of peace and war and international order, and its relationship to the more pragmatic, case-by-case American approach. Different histories and cultures produce occasionally divergent conclusions. I do not always agree with the Chinese perspective, nor will every reader. But it is necessary to understand it, since China will play such a big role in the world that is emerging in the twenty-first century." Id. at xv-xvi. "The trouble with policy planning is that its analysis cannot foresee the mood of the moment when a decision has to be made." Id. at 129. "The basic direction of a society is shaped by its values, which define its ultimate goals. At the same time, accepting the limits of one's capacities is one of the tests of statesmanship; it implies a judgment of the possible. Philosophers are responsible to their intuition. Statesmen are judged by their ability to sustain their concepts over time." Id. at 426. "Democratic values and human rights are the core of America's belief in itself. But like all values they have an absolute character, and this challenges the elements of nuance by which foreign policy is generally obliged to operate. If adoption of American principles of governance is made the central condition for progress in all other areas of the relationship, deadlock is inevitable. At that point, both sides are obliged to balance the claims of national security against the imperatives of their principles of governance. Id. at 453.).
Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014) ("The mystery to be overcome is one all peoples share--how divergent historic experiences and values can be shaped into a common order." Id. at 10. "The United States has every reason from history and geopolitics to bolster the European Union and prevent its drifting off onto a geopolitical vacuum; the United States, if separated from Europe in politics, economics, and defense, would become geopolitically an island off the shores of Eurasia, and Europe itself could turn into an appendage to the reaches of Asia and the Middle East." Id. at 95. "Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy. In Asia, it must combine a balance of power with a concept of partnership. A purely military definition of the balance will shade into confrontation. A purely psychological approach to partnership will raise fears of hegemony. Wise statesmanship must try to find that balance. For outside it, disaster beckons." Id. at 213. "Former Secretary of State George Shultz has articulated the American ambivalence wisely: 'Americans, being a moral people, want their foreign policy to reflect the values we espouse as a nation. But Americans, being a practical people, also want their foreign policy to be effective.' The American domestic debate is frequently decried as a contest between idealism and realism. It may turn out--for America and the rest of the world--that if America cannot act in both modes, it will not be able to fulfill either." Id. at 329. "Cyberspace has become strategically indispensable. At this writing, users, whether individuals, corporations, or states, rely on their own judgment in conducting their activities. The Commander of U.S. Cyber Command has predicted that 'the next war will begin in cyberspace.' It will not be possible to conceive of international order when the region through which states' survival and progress are taking place remains without any international standards of conduct and is left to unilateral decisions." Id. at 346. Also, see John Micklethwait, "As the World Turns," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/14/2014.).
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) ("[T]he real reason we are failing to rise to the climate moment is because the actions required directly challenge our reigning economic paradigm (deregulated capitalism combined with public austerity), the stories on which Western cultures are founded (that we stand apart from nature and can outsmart its limits), as well as many of the activities that form our identities and define our communities (shopping, living virtually, shopping some more). They also spell extinction for the riches and most powerful industry the world has ever know--the oil and gas industry, which cannot survive in anything like its current form if we humans are to avoid our own extinction. In short, we have not responded to this challenge because we are locked in--politically, physically, and culturally. Only when we identify these chains do we have a chance of breaking free." Id. at 63. Also see Rob Nixon, "Force of Nature," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/9/2014; and Elizabeth Kolbert, "Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism," New York Review of Books, 12/4/2014.).
Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (New York: Knopf, 2014) ("Wonder Woman isn't only an Amazonian princess with badass boots. She's the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later. Feminism made Wonder Woman. And then Wonder Woman remade feminism, which hasn't been altogether good for feminism. Superheroes, who are supposed to be better than everyone else, are excellent at clobbering people; they're lousy at fighting for equality." Id. at xiii. Also see Carla Kaplin, "Courageous Womanhood," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/14/2014.).
Noel Maurer, The Empire Trap: The Rise and Fall of U.S. Intervention to Protect American Property Overseas, 1893-2013 (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) (Definition of 'empire trap': "one American administration's promise to interview on behalf of U.S. investors makes it harder for future administrations to refrain from such intervention. If a president credibly commits to use the power of the United States to defend property rights in a foreign country, the perceived risk of investing in that country will fall. More capital will flow in, increasing the political pull of investors in that area. In addition, investors (as a matter of historical fact) will perceive that the promise applies to similar countries--in fact, for such countries to become more attractive, investors need only perceive the possibility that the promise applies. More American capital will flow in. Future administrations can default on the implicit promise--but only if they are willing to confront the owners of those investments. That entails political costs, the more so the more wealth that investors have at risk. In short, successful intervention on behalf of overseas investors begets more overseas investments, which creates more pressure to intervene when those investments come under threat. The result is an 'empire trap,' where U.S. administrations find it difficult to resist pressures to defend American overseas property rights." Id. at 8. "One of the major distinguishing characteristics of the second American empire was its reliance on covert action. Such operations are typically associated with the fight against communism, but they were also deployed in the protection of American property. In fact, there is evidence that communism was not a cause but an excuse for intervention on behalf of private investors." Id. at 301.).
Ian McEwan, The Children Act: A Novel (New York: Nan A, Talese/Doubleday, 2014).
Atif Mian & Amir Sufi, House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2014) (Interesting ideas and discussion. However, no matter what system one put in place, human nature is to test it limits and, in so doing, take the system to and beyond its breaking point. No system, no solution, is fail safe. "Both student debt and mortgages illustrate a broader principle. If we're going to fix the financial system--if we are to avoid the painful boom-and-bust episodes that a re becoming all too frequent--we must address the key problem: the inflexibility of debut contracts. When someone finances the purchases of a home or a college education, the contract they sign must allow for some sharing of the downside risk. The contract must be made contingent on economic outcomes so that the financial system helps us. It must resemble equity more than debt." "This principle can be seen easily in the context of education. Student loans should be made contingent on measures of the job market at the time the student graduates. For example, in both Australia and the United Kingdom, students pay only a fixed percentage of their income to pay down student loans. If the student cannot find a job, she pays nothing on her student loan. [W]e believe a better system would make loan payment contingent on a broader measure of the labor market rather than the individual's income. But the principle is clear: recent graduates should be protected if they face a dismal job market upon completing their degrees. In return, they should compensate the lender more if they do well." Id. at 168-169.).
John Micklethwait & Adrain Wooldridge, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014) (See Rosa Brooks, "A Call to Rally," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/29/2014.).
Lt. Col. John A. Nagl (Ret.), Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014) ("The world's most advanced ground combat system--M1A1 tanks that only a year earlier had defeated the world's fourth-largest army on its homes turf with ease--were perversely vulnerable to small bands of determined human enemies whose language we could barely understand but who knew our vulnerabilities and had the right weapons to take advantage of them." Id. at 23. "You learn more from defeat than from a win, and both the Army and I had a lot to learn form that fight at the National training Center." Id. at 25. "The costs of the second Iraq war were staggering: nearly 4,500 Americans killed and more than 30,000 wounded, many grievously; hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians wounded or killed; more than $2 trillion in direct government expenditures, with the possibility of another $2 trillion in indirect costs over the generations to come, and the significant weakening of the major regional counterweight to Iran and consequent strengthening of that country's position and ambitions. Great powers rarely make national decisions that explode so quickly and completely in their faces, and the nation and the world will pay a heavy price for our arrogance and hubris for many decades." Id. at 211-212. "Saint Augustine taught that the purpose of war is to build a better peace, but we have not built the capacity to create the better peace in the American national security establishment." Id. at 237. Also see Dexter Filkins, "Casualties of War," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/16/2014.).
Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I, and Other Works, foreword by Laurie Olsen, introduction by Rebekah Edwards (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 2013) (From "A Vision of Fear and Hope": "Sometimes the young--discouraged, overwhelmed--ask me incredulously: 'You mean you still have hope?' And I hear myself saying, yes, I still have hope: beleaguered, starved, battered, based hope. Through horrors, blood, betrayals, apathy, callousness, retreats, defeats--in every decade of my now 82-years-old life that hope has been tested, affirmed. And more than hope: an exhaustless store of certainty, vision, belief--which came to me first in the time of my youthhood, the Depression '30s." Id. at 133, 133. "Today, the vision of full humanhood is battered, scorned, deemed 'unrealistic.' But I still remember what people can achieve when we act together. The 1930s were full of torture and brutality, but in this country, at least, history was more than a boot in the face. It was a time of human flowering, when the country was transformed by the hopes, dreams, actions of numerous, nameless human beings, hungry for more than food." Id. at 138.).
Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2011).
Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2002).
Charles Palliser, The Quincunx: A Novel (New York: Ballantine Books: 1989) ("'It matters not who has the suffrage since power will always lie with those who possess the wealth. And their interests must of necessity be opposed to those of the mass.'" Id. at 223.).
Jessica R. Pliley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 2014) ("Enforcement of the Mann Act in the early twentieth century reminds us that despite the distance between the brothel and the home the discursive, legal, and physical ties were many. That a law designed to police prostitution also policed domesticity should not come as a surprise, given the centrality of women to both institutions, and the embodiment of male sexual privilege in both spaces. The nexus of policing sex, under the mandate of 'any other immoral purpose,' centered on the sexual body of the woman. But as FBI agents policed the bodies of women they also determined appropriate male relationships to women's bodies. The claims of fathers and husbands to women's reproductive labor were upheld, and men were expected to bear the responsibility of their paternal obligations. The mandate within the Mann Act permitted the federal government to police an entirely new set of behaviors--a new governable space of sexuality--while also providing a framework and justification for the expansion of the Bureau into a truly national law enforcement agency." "... Ultimately, the enforcement of the Mann Act in the early twentieth century offers a cautionary take about the lingering effects of coverture. Most importantly, laws intended to police sex traffic rarely benefit those who have been trafficked; instead these laws mark women as bodies to be policed." Id. at 208-209.).
Todd S. Purdum, An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (New York: Henry Holt, 2014) ("'Let it be clear in our own hearts and minds, that it is not merely because of the Cold War, and not merely because of the economic waste of discrimination, that we are committed to achieving true equality of opportunity,' the president [Kennedy] declared. 'The basic reason is because it is right.'" Id. at 28. "'That bill must be passed,' the president [Johnson] said. 'That kind of legislation must become the law of the land. We cannot see our democratic system spend sixty days on a bill like that and then fail. But it is going to fail unless the people, in righteous indignation let them know that they do not have that superior feeling and they do require legislation that protects a person because of his particular color. If Congress does not act on that legislation, we will have some very dark days in this country.'" Id. at 285. "In the short term, neither side of the bipartisan coalition that had made the Civil Rights Act possible reaped much political benefit from the bill. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee in the 1964 election, was, after all, one of the six Republicans who had voted against it, and for better or worse his candidacy set the Party of Lincoln on a course that turned it into the party of white backlash, as he carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Lyndon Johnson won election in his own right in a national landslide, but his gloomy presentiment that he had delivered the South to the Republicans for a generation proved correct. [] In the 1968, Richard Nixon and George Wallace between them won all the states of the Old Confederacy, except Johnson's own state of Texas, and four years later, Nixon's Southern strategy' made it a clean sweep. Only Nixon's resignation and the advent of a southerner, Jimmy Carter, put the South back in play for the Democrats in 1976, before Reagan recaptured it in 1980. More than a decade would pass until Bill Clinton, yet another southerner, again made the South competitive." Id. at 338-339.).
Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (New York: Knopf, 2013) ("Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation." Id. at 4. "By supporting market-based 'reforms,' [liberals, progressives, well-meaning people] have allied themselves with those who seek to destroy public education. They are being used by those who have an implacable hostility toward the public sector. The transfer of public funds to private management and the creation of thousands of deregulated, unsupervised, and unaccountable schools have opened the public coffers to profiteering, fraud, and exploitation by large and small entrepreneurs." Id. at 4. Solutions: "Provide good prenatal care for every pregnant woman." Id. at 227. "Make high-quality early childhood education available to all children." Id. at 230. "Every school should have a full, balanced and rich curriculum, including the arts, science, history, literature, civics, geography, foreign languages, mathematics, and physical education." Id at 234. "Reduce class sizes to improve student achievement and behavior." Id. at 244. Note, I do not think she is arguing that smaller size is always better. I think she is suggesting finding the right size; not too small, not to large. "Ban-for-profit charters and harder chains and ensure that charter schools collaborate with public schools to support better education for all children." Id. at 247. "[P]rovide the medical and social services that poor children need to keep up with their advantaged peers." Id. at 253. "Eliminate high-stakes standardized testing and rely instead on assessments that allow students to demonstrate what they know and can do." Id. at 261. "Insist that teachers, principals, and superintendents be professional educators." Id. at 274. "Public schools should be controlled by elected school boards or by boards in large cities appointed for a set term by more than one elected official." Id. at 278. "Devise actionable strategies and specific goals to reduce racial segregation and poverty." Id. at 290. "Recognize that public education is a public responsibility, not a consumer good." Id. at 300.).
Adam D. Reich, Selling Our Souls: The Commodification of Hospital Care in the United States (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) ("The questions raised in this book are relevant beyond the hospital as well. The United States is a market society. More than many other countries, we are willing to entrust the allocation of a wide range of goods--from health care to education to public safety--to the principle of exchange for gain. And while this book focused on the market for hospital care, one can easily imagine applying its lessons to other kinds of markets about which we feel ambivalent--from the market for higher education to the market for pollution credits." "Broadly, the lesson of this book is that markets do not inevitably eviscerate our social values or inexorably lead to disorganization and chaos; but neither do we easily reconcile our values with markets or bring markets under our control. On the one hand, at the macro level, institutions govern the sorts of exchanges that are permissible within markets. On a more micro level, organizations and the people within them use tremendous creativity and ingenuity to reconcile their social values with change relationships and use all sorts of formal and informal structures to make markets stable and predictable." "Nevertheless, despite these institutionalized rules of exchange, and despite the best efforts of organizations and individuals, the principle of exchange for gain is often difficult to reconcile with the values we attach to certain things. This does not mean that people do not try... But they do not fully succeed. Here I have begun to distinguish analytically among these different sorts of problems posed by the market for things like hospital care and to envision both the possibilities and perils embedded in our contradictory attempts to address them." Id at 196-197.).
Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (New York: Basic Books, 2014) ("Over the one hundred and sixty years of its history, Republicans have swung from one pole to another: sometimes they have been leftists, sometimes reactionaries. Today, once again, the Republican Party has positioned itself on the far right. How did the Republican Party--the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower--become the party of today." "The journey has not been straightforward." Id. at x. "McCarthy and his investigation had shown activists within the Taft wing of he Republican Party that they could advance an agenda by use of fiction, as long as that fiction spoke to Americans' fears and could be kept from pen scrutiny. McCarthy's demagoguery gave Taft's die-hard followers a new style. He yelled; he made crazy accusations; he leaked fragments of truth that misrepresented reality; he hectored and badgered. He got in the faces of people who mattered. His antics got attention. Although a senator--about as inside a job as one can get--he posed as an outsider taking on what he insisted was a corrupt system. Claiming his opponents were bent on destroying America, he promised to defend it. When his crusade faltered, he gave it up, but he left behind a following of true believers." Id. at 245-246. Sadly, we have returned to an updated 'McCarthyism,' led by Fox News. "No McCarthy supporter was more important than William F. Buckley Jr., who transformed McCarthy's themes into a new political movement. [] With techniques like McCarthy's, he determined to take on the Eastern Establishment that had stolen the 1952 nomination from Taft. In doing so, he transformed McCarthy's crude egocentrism into an ideology with the stunning premise that the central idea of the European Enlightenment--that societies advanced by reasoned argument--was dead wrong. The fact that Americans had chosen Eisenhower's Middle Way proved that people could not be trusted to choose what was right, he declared. Elites must retake control of America from the misguided masses and push the control of America toward religion and free-market capitalism. [] After graduating [from Yale], he took his crusade national with the 1951 publication of God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom." Modern universities embraced the Enlightenment tradition of a free search for knowledge in the belief that informed discussion fed by a wide range of ideas was the best way to reach toward truth. As idea were tested in public debate, people would be able to chose the best of them. Buckley denied this 'superstition.' Truth would not win out in a free contest of ideas, he said; students would simply be led astray. For proof, he offered the fact that most Americans had chosen the New Deal over Taft Republicanism." Id. at 246-247. And, thus, America entered its counter-Enlightenment.).
James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) ("There were more than 1,200 government organizations and nearly 2,000 private companies working o counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence programs, the Washington Post found in 2010, and more than 850,000 people in America had top-secret clearances, producing 50,000 intelligence reports a year. The U.S.intelligence budget alone has at least doubled since 2001, and by 2013, stood at more than $70 billion a year, including both civilian and military intelligence spending/" "America has become accustomed to a permanent state of war. Only a small slice of society--including many poor and rural teenagers--fight and die, while a permanent national security elite rotates among the senior government posts, contracting companies,think tanks, and television commentary,opportunities that would disappear if America was suddenly at peace. To most Americans, war has become not only tolerable but profitable, and so there is no longer any great incentive to end it." "Thus, the creation of a homeland security complex at a time of endless war has bequeathed us with the central narrative of the war on terror--modern tales of greed joined hand in hand with stories of abuse of power. It was inevitable that those wise in the ways of the world would flock to Washington to try to cash in on the war on terror gold rush--and they have. This book offers just a few of those stories. But those trying to monetize America's obsession with terrorism are not the only ones who have sought to exploit 9/11." "Opportunism comes in many forms and is driven by more than just greed. Ambition and a hunger for power, status, and glory have become great engines of post-9/11 opportunism as well. The more troubling stories here concern abuse of power that have extended across two presidencies for all over a decade. After 9/11, the United States deregulated national security, stripping away the post-Watergate intelligence reforms of the 1970s that had constrained executive power for thirty years. The results are morally challenging--and continue to this day." Id. at xv-xvi. Also see Louise Richardson, "In Security," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/26/2014).
Michael S. Roth, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2014) ("Liberal education, as I use the term throughout this book, refers to the combination of the philosophical and rhetorical traditions of how one learns as a whole person. In contemporary higher education, the philosophical tradition has resulted in an emphasis on inquiry and critical thinking--learning to develop as an autonomous person by shedding illusions and acquiring knowledge through research. But a spirit of critique is only one aspect of a well-rounded education, and its overemphasis can lead to sterility rather than creativity. Modern universities that foster liberal education also depend on the rhetorical tradition, which has cone to frame how students learn to appreciate or to participate in traditions of compelling cultural interest. That framework helps students understand their connections with others and with canonical works in religion, art, literature, science, and music (to name just a some strands of cultural interest). Liberal education intertwines the philosophical and rhetorical so that we learn how to learn, so that we continue both inquiry and cultural participation throughout our lives because learning has become part of who we are." Id. at 4-5. "The bartender with a chemistry degree is the contemporary version of the farmer who reads the classics with pleasure and insight, or the industrial worker who can quote Shakespeare. Where once these 'incongruities' might have been hailed as signs of a healthy republic, today they are more likely to be cited as examples of a 'wasted''--nonmonetized--education." Id. at 147-148.).
Gini Graham Scott, A Survival Guide for Working with Bad Bosses: Dealing with Bullies, Idiots, Back-Stabbers, and Other Managers from Hell (New York: AMACOM, 2006).
Cass R. Sunstein, Valuing Life: Humanizing the Regulatory State (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is the United States' regulatory overseer. In Valuing Life, Cass R. Sunstein draws on his firsthand experience as the Administrator of OIRA from 2009 to 2013 to argue that we can humanize regulation--and save lives in the process.").
Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "BIOLOGICAL RACES DO NOT EXIST--AND NEVER HAVE. This view is shared by all scientists who study variations in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today." "The Myth of Race traces the origins of modern racist ideology to the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how sixteenth-century theorists of racial degeneration became a crucial justification for Western imperialism and slavery. In the nineteenth century, these theories fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified certain races, especially fair-skinned 'Aryans,' as superior to others. These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding, and human sterilization--policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide. Sussman examines how opponents of eugenics, guided by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas's new, scientifically supported concept of culture, exposed fallacies in racist thinking." "Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals today claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Sussman explains why--when it comes to race--too many people still mistake bigotry for science.").
Zephyr Teachout, Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("I seek to enrich the ways American judges, scholars, and citizens imagine the concept of corruption and its relationship to our legal system. The book challenges four commonly held misconceptions: that corruption law began in the post-Watergate era, that criminal bribery law is the dominant sphere in which corruption law plays out, that bribery law is coherent and consistent, and the quid pro quo is the heart of corruption law. A deeper understanding of the tradition of corruption can enrich our civic culture and our laws." Id. at 11-12. "What America now faces, if we do not change the fundamental structures of the relationship of money to legislative power, is neither mob rule nor democracy, but oligarchy." Id. at 16. "In this book I have shown how the Constitution was designed in significant part as protection against corruption, broadly conceived, and how courts and legislatures actively relied on this for most of American history. State courts today still treat virtue as the foundation of the republic and favor a broad approach, giving prosecutors the power to charge corrupt intent as the core of a gift crime and giving legislatures the power to pass broad anticorruption statutes that structure private money around elections. The framers' ideas about corruption survived long past the republican era, into the 1970s in the Supreme Court. But since 1976 the Supreme Court has seriously constrained public power to pass anticorruption statutes and since 2006 it has definitely rejected the traditional concept of corruption." Id. at 295. Also see Thomas Frank, "The Best Congress Money Can Buy," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/19/2014.).
Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1958) ("Parnell shook his head. 'In any case, Polly, I've watched this dreary business for many years, too damned many years, and it seems to me that most people in trouble tend to equate clamor and noise with astute criminal defense. It's a sad thing. But the Lord save us, it's not only confined to the law. There is a kind of intellectual smog abound in the land. In nearly all walks of life we betray our insatiable lust for the mediocre, our terrible hunger for the third rate.'" Id. at 16-17.).
Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004) ("This is a story of clashing ideologies and dizzying technologies. The ideologies did not arise with the popularity of America Online or the merger of Vivendi and Universal. In fact, they are among the oldest ideologies still around: anarchy and oligarchy. Anarchy is a governing system that eschews authority. Oligarchy governs from, through, and for authorities. These ideologies feed off each other dialectically. Oligarchy justifies itself through 'moral panic' over the potential effects of perceived or imagined anarchy. Anarchy and oligarchy have new resonance in our digital, connected age. These ideologies are rapidly remaking our global information ecosystem, and the information ecosystem is remaking these ideologies. Those of us who are uncomfortable with either vision grow increasingly frustrated with the ways our media, cultural information, and political system are changing. We thought we had gone a long way toward disposing of anarchy and oligarchy, but they are back in slick new forms." Id. at xi. "Anarchy is radical democracy. It has its limits as a governing tool; it also has its dangers. 'Smart mobs' are still mobs. In a mob, anyone who steps out of line or runs at a different pace can get trampled." "The great challenge in this new century is to mediate between two divergent and trends--anarchy and oligarchy. In the war between distribution and concentration of information, the issues and conflict seem intractable.""I won't accept intractability...." Id. at xvi-xvii.).
Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U. of California Press, 2011) ("This book argues that we should influence--even regulate--search systems actively and intentionally, and thus thane responsibility for how the Web delivers knowledge. We must build the sort of online ecosystem that can benefit the whole world over the long tern, not one that serves the short-term interests of one powerful company, no matter how brilliant." Id. at xii. "Google seems to offer us everything so cheaply, easily, and quickly. But nothing truly meaningful is cheap, easy, or quick." Id. at 4. "Because market fundamentalism declares that consumers have 'choice' in the market, doing little or no harm becomes just another tactic by which vendors exploit a niche market. Consumers have become depoliticized, unable to see that personal choices to buy Timberland shoes (not made in sweatshops by children) and Body Shop cosmetics (not tested on animals) makes no difference at all to the children and animals that suffer supplying the bulk of similar, less sensitively manufactured products to the vast majority of the world's consumers. Feeling good about our own choices is enough. And instead of organizing, lobbying, and campaigning for better rules and regulations to ensure safe toys and cars for people everywhere, we rely on expressions of disgruntlement as a weak proxy for real political action. Starting or joining a Facebook protest group suffices for many as political action." Id. at 43. "By focusing on the novelty of communicative technologies and assuming that their arrival in a place causes--rather than coincides with or aids--rapid change, we tend to downgrade the importance of factors as obvious and powerful as changing a government policy, opening a gate, or waging a disastrous and debilitating war in Central Asia. The introduction of a powerful and efficient mode of communication such as the fax machine or the Internet can amplify or accelerate a movement, provided that the movement already has form, support, substance, and momentum. Technologies are far from neutral, but neither do they inherently support with freedom or oppression. The same technologies . . . can be used both to monitor and oppress a group of people and to connect them in powerful ways. The way a society or state uses a technology is as important as the design and capacities of that technology." Id. at 123-124.).
Ludwig von Mises, Notes and Recollections with The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics, edited and with a preface by Betina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: The Liberty Fund, 2013) (From the "Foreword": "I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline." Id at xiii. From "First Writings on the Theory of Money": "An economist must deal with doctrines, not with men. He must criticize erroneous thought. It is not his function to reveal personal motives for protecting fallacies. An economist must face his opponents with the fictitious assumption that they are guided by objective considerations only. It is irrelevant whether the advocate of a fallacious opinion acts in good or bad faith; it matters only whether the stated opinion is correct or fallacious. It is the task of other people to reveal corruption and inform the public about it." Id. at 29, 35. From "First World War": "Only he who fully understands economic theory can comprehend the gre at questions of economic and social policy. Only he who masters the most difficult tasks of economics can determine whether capitalism, or socialism, or interventionism constitute suitable systems of social co-operation. However, political decisions are not made by economists, but by public opinion, that is, the people. The majority determines what shall be done. This is true of all systems of government. Even absolute kings and dictators can rule only as public opinion commands." Id. at 44, 45. "It is a matter of temperament how we shape our lives in the knowledge of an inescapable catastrophe. In high school I had chosen a verse by Virgil as m motto: Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito ('Do not yield to the bad, but always oppose it with courage')." Id. at 47.).
Lawrence Wright, Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David (New York: Knopf, 2014) ("Although it's usually assumed that the Palestinians are the same people as the Philistines, there's an opposing theory, which is that they are actually Jews. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, its second president, were notable advocates of this line of thinking. In 1918, when the two men were living in New york, hey wrote a book, titled Eretz Israel in the Past and Present. They noted that., although the Jewish community had undergone catastrophic diasporas in its history, there was a pattern of unbroken Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria. They proposed that the current inhabitants of Palestine were not Arab migrant but the descendants of Jewish peasants who had been forcibly converted to Christianity or Islam. Ben-Zvi in particular became obsessed with the historical intermingling of Jews with other peoples and what he thought was the loss of their Jewish identity over time. He used to wander in the Arab villages, among his 'long-forgotten brethren,' and he was struck by the resemblance of Arab place-names to Hebrew ones, and the similarity of religious practices. He and Ben-Gurion entertained the hope that the revelation of their shared ethnic origin would make it easier for the two peoples to unite as one.* The Israelites and the Palestinian Arabs both emerged from Canaanite culture. The David and Goliath story actually anticipates later scientific findings. In a Talmudic account, David reminds Goliath that their mothers were sisters, so they are actually first cousins. The intermingling of the tribes in ancient times was no doubt a fact as well as a fancy." "[* One notable study, by Antonio Arnaiz-Villena et al, 'The Origins of Palestinians and their Genetic Relatedness with Other Mediterranean Populations,' Human Immunology 62 (2001), pp. 889-900, which appeared should after 9/11. It compared genetic samples form Palestinian Arabs in Gaza with other Mediterranean peoples, and found that the aaa population was closely related to Ashkenazi Jews. Both are descended from the Canaanites. The article concludes that the 'rivalry' between Jews and Palestinians is 'based on cultural and religious, but not genetic, differences.' The European authors referred to the Israeli settlers as 'colonist' and asserted that Israel began the war with its neighbors when it was created in 1948. Although the science wasn't in question, the publisher of the journal fired the guest editor and withdrew the article from publication--deleting it from databases--and librarians and subscribers were directed to physically rip the pages out of the journal. See also Israel Finkelstein and Neil Siberman, The Bible Unearthed, p. 118."]" Id. at 165-166. Very interesting and executed book, from which this ignorant man learned quite a bit. Also see Joe Klein, "As the World Turns," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/14/2014; and Roger Cohen, "When Israelis and Arabs for Once Agreed," New York Review of Books, 12/4/2014.).
Of course, those law students who are not readers may take some comfort (if that is the right word) in the fact that no law firm hiring partner is going to ask, 'Have you read any good books lately?'
