Two Stars

Best for:
People interested in learning about various thought leaders who might be related to socialism (but probably more likely communism?) throughout history, but not so much the practical applications behind their ideas.

In a nutshell:
This felt a bit like a History of Communism 101, as opposed to a primer on the different beliefs and implementations of socialist beliefs (which is what I was expecting).

Worth quoting:
N/A

Why I chose it:
I’m very clear that capitalism is not working. I’m also not comfortable subscribing to political or philosophical systems that I’m not well-versed in. I thought this might help me better understand the different schools of thoughts and practical applications of socialism.

What it left me feeling:
Vaguely annoyed

Review:
Obviously it’s an absolute challenge to try to fit information about a single political theory into a small 250-page book, but the cover description really doesn’t feel like it matches what’s on the inside.

The book roughly follows a time line, but it jumps around a lot. Sometimes it feels like it’s chronological description of various communist and socialist movements; other times it feels like it’s more a regional description. Most of the focus is on the people involved, from folks like Marx through to Bernie Sanders. I don’t know if the people and the actions those people are taking are socialist or not – or how they are viewed by other socialists. Sometimes Sears will say one faction disagree with another contemporary faction in one country, but that doesn’t really help me understand what the core tenets are. Or if there even are any!

There are like four pages devoted to Scandanavian-style socialism, but that’s the kind of stuff I’m interested in. People talk about how communism has always failed – has it? What are the examples and were these failures because of communism itself or because of the leaders choosing instead to be dictators? What are the specific policies that can be viewed as socialism? And why are we talking about Margaret Thatcher?

I think what Sears was trying to do was cover everything, when what I was looking for was much more focused: a description of socialism and what that looks like in practice. There are a couple of pages at the start, but then it turns into a history book that jumps all around space and time. In looking up the author while writing this review, I see that she has written many ‘101’ books, so I think that explains it. Socialism is just another book she’s researched and written for this series of books; I think readers interested in the topic should instead seek out people who either are socialists or have extensively studied the topic.

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Donate it

Four Stars

Best for:
People interested in a novel way of looking at the complexities of modern politics.

In a nutshell:
Author Klein explores the different political realities people inhabit in areas as vast as vaccines and middle east policies.

Worth quoting:
We are told that the way things are is the only way they can be, because every other model has supposedly already been tried, and all have failed. But these ideas about different ways of being and thinking and living did not all fail; rather, many of them fell, crushed by political violence and racial terror. Being crushed is not the same as failing, because what was crushed can be revived, reimagined anew.

Why I chose it:
I’ve heard a lot of people talking about it, and I had some long travel coming up so decided to get the audio book (especially after I heard it was read by the author).

What it left me feeling:
Challenged

Review:
This is a hard book to review. It was fascinating – really interesting. But hard to review, mostly because I think I need to re-read it next year, and read a physical copy.

Naomi Klein is often confused with Naomi Wolfe. They are both white Jewish women, both have the same first name, and for a time, both known for having liberal (or in Klein’s case, lefitst) politics. Wolfe wrote the Beauty Myth, which I recall reading and recall thinking highly of. Klein has written about disaster capitalism, climate catastrophe, and other critical political and cultural topics. But sometimes over the last few years, Wolfe has taken a hard right turn, delving deep into conspiracies – she’s a regular on Steve Bannon’s podcast. And when she offers a hot take, people mistakenly attribute it Klein, who then feels a need to defend herself.

In this book, Klein uses this as a stepping off point to explore how people ostensibly living in the same world have such vastly different experiences of reality. She uses fictional accounts of the concept of the double or doppelganger to illustrate the sections, which shows I think a really complex level of thinking, but one that I had trouble following in the audio version of the book.

The last chapter of the book focuses on the conflict between Israel and Palestine – obviously written before what is going on there now. But it was interesting to read, to get her thoughts as a Jewish woman and a leftist. I think it’s a chapter a lot of people would benefit from reading right now.

As I said, I’m thinking this would be a good one to read again next year, because I know there’s a lot in here that I didn’t absorb as much as I could have. I really should stick to mysteries and memoirs when it comes to audio books.

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Recommend to a Friend

Three Stars

Best for:
People who are already VERY familiar with Marx’s work and are looking for an outside opinion on how to defend different aspects of it.

In a nutshell:
Author Eagleton looks at what he believes are common arguments uses against Marxism and refutes them.

Worth quoting:
“Only through others can we come into our own.”

Why I chose it:
I thought it would be an interesting and easier to read way to learn more about Marx’s thoughts and writing. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t, at least not for me.)

What it left me feeling:
Skeptical

Review:
I might have been led slightly astray by the pull quotes from reviews on the cover of the copy I purchased. ‘Irresistibly Lively and Thought-Provoking.’ ‘Short, Witty, and Highly Accessible.’ I think this is probably true (except the short part – a 250 page book is not short. It’s not long, but it’s not short), but the caveat should be on there somewhere that those only apply to readers who are already very well acquainted with the writing, theory, and discussion of Marx and Marxism. This is not a book where one LEARNS about Marxism. This is a book where one thinks more about it in relation to other areas of thought.

It is an easy read, in that the author is a decent writer. However, after reading the first half of the book very carefully, I ended up just skimming the latter half because I knew what was coming, and I knew it wasn’t going to be what I was looking for. Each chapter starts with what I think is a flaw in the set-up of the book: instead of pulling real quotes at the start to highlight the arguments opposing Marxism that he’s about to refute, he just has a sort of paragraph where he paraphrases the complaints. I think I get why he made that choice, but it doesn’t work nearly as well as real-world examples. It leaves Eagleton too open to complaints of strawmen.

In the chapters I read closely, a lot of Eagleton’s arguments seemed to boil down to this: Capitalists might make a claim about Marxism, but even if the claim is true, it’s also probably true of Capitalism. Or, because Marx (notoriously) doesn’t really talk about the details of what his version of society would look like, it’s easy to impose outside opinions on it in a negative way, and that’s not fair.

But here’s the thing – these arguments all sounds fine to me, but I don’t know enough about Marx to know if Eagleton’s commentary is accurate. Now, this is going to be an issue with pretty much all non-fiction books, right? We rely on the author to be something of an expert in their field, to have thought through and researched. When I read a Mary Roach book, I don’t just accept everything at face value, but generally I assume that her interpretation of the facts is generally accurate.

But with things like political philosophy, for me it gets much murkier. What values is the author bringing into the discussion? Are they the same as my values? What have they chosen to leave out that would change the entire discussion? Without some of my own first-hand reading of the text, this type of book isn’t really going to work. When I was in grad school for philosophy, yes, I definitely needed to read articles by contemporary writers that discussed Aristotle, but I also needed to read Aristotle myself, so I could come into the discussions with some first-hand understanding. And I think that in the same way, before I (or others) read works like this, we need to read the original arguments first.

Now, is that the author’s fault? Probably not, and that’s why this is a three star and not a two star rating for me.

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Keep and maybe revisit later

Four Stars

Best for:
Fat people looking for solidarity and words they can use when faced with anti-fat bias. Thinner people who need to learn some truths.

In a nutshell:
Writer and podcaster Gordon shared 20 well-researched essays tackling myths related to fatness and anti-fat bias.

Worth quoting:
“The cultural mandate for fat people to lose weight isn’t about health — it’s about power and privilege.”

“Doctors’ prejudices mean they provide fat patients with lesser care, in turn, leading fat patients to less accurate diagnoses and less effective treatments.”

“The fear of being fat is the fear of joining an underclass that you have so readily dismissed, looked down on, looked past, or found yourself grateful not to be a part of.”

Why I chose it:
I subscribe to her podcast ‘Maintenance Phase’ and read her previous book ‘What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat’ and enjoyed it.

What it left me feeling:
Motivated

Review:
I am someone who can usually find clothes that fit me in standard high street shops (the only restrictions usually being my height, as I’m quite tall), and I don’t identify as fat. I note this up front because I think my review and perspectives should be taken with a grain of salt, as I’ve generally only witnessed, not directly experienced, the impact of anti-fat bias and hatred.

Gordon came to prominence under the writing handle of ‘Your Fat Friend,’ and is a dedicated fat activist. She is a fat queer woman and an activist who spends some of her time debunking wellness and health myths on her podcast Maintenance Phase (which she co-hosts with Michael Hobbes). I’d describe her project as dedication to speaking truth to a world that doesn’t seem to care about truth when it comes to thinks like body size, weight, or health.

The book is a collection of 20 essays broken down into four sections: Being Fat is a Choice, But What About Your Health, Fat Acceptance Glorifies Obesity, and Fat People Should … Each section has 4-6 essays that are only 5-10 pages long, but includes not just Gordon’s opinions on these myths, but research to back up what she is saying.

Some essays cover areas that I think many people who care about this topic will be familiar with, such as the absurdity of using the BMI for anything related to personal health, or the myriad ways society mistreats and abuses fat people. Other areas may not be as familiar, or might strike a note of discomfort with thin people, such as the myth ‘skinny shaming is just as bad as fat shaming.’ In many of the essays, Gordon speaks directly to thinner people, calling out the ways in which we can be unintentionally complicit, and the ways in which thinner people might think they are being supportive but are really being harmful.

I love how so much of what Gordon shares upends ideas that so much of our society have accepted as true. That whole ‘as long as you’re healthy’ trope – nope. She rightly points out that no one owns us their health. It’s okay to be fat and healthy, and it’s okay to be fat and unhealthy, just as it’s okay to be thin and healthy, and thin and unhealthy. People deserve access to health care and appropriate support for health ailments, but people are not more worthy of love or proper care and treatment in society if they are healthy.

I also found her last chapter to be an interesting choice to include: “Anti-fatness is the last socially acceptable form of discrimination.” That falls into the myth category for her not because anti-fatness is somehow no longer socially acceptable (it is) or that it isn’t discrimination (it is), but because it is not the LAST form of discrimination. She discusses racism, anti-trans hatred, anti-gay hatred, and points out that thinking that anti-fatness is the last discrimination that society deems acceptable shows a wild ignorance about the state of the world today.

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Keep and Recommend

4 Stars

Best for:
Anyone concerned about how inequity is perpetuated by seemingly ‘neutral’ or ‘scientific’ processes.

In a nutshell:
Data scientist O’Neil explores what she calls WMDs, or Weapons of Math Destruction – large algorithms that are largely opaque and control aspects of our lives, from college rankings and admissions to credit scores to voting. She argues that these systems are flawed and have biases built in that harm all of us.

Worth quoting:
“The human victims of WMDs, we’ll see time and again, are held to a far higher standard of evidence than the algorithms themselves.”

“A model’s blind spots reflect the judgments and priorities of its creators.”

Why I chose it:
Seemed appropriate given the recent A-level shitstorm we’ve lived through in the UK.

Review:
Every August in England, 17- and 18-year-olds find out their A-level scores. Unlike in the US, where basically unless you royally screw up in the final term of your senior year you are going to the University you were accepted to in March, in the UK students receive conditional offers. Let’s say you want to go study Chemistry. Well, at a top school, you might receive a condition offer of AAA – meaning you need As on three of your A-levels (the best mark is an A*), and one of those will need to be Chemistry. Okay, so come mid-August, you go to your school and learn that you received … AAA! Hurrah! You confirm your place at university, and start the following month.

This year, because of the pandemic, A-level exams were scrapped. Instead, the government put together an algorithm that was meant to sort out what grades students would have gotten had they sat their exams. It was based on a few things, like practice exams, coursework, etc. It also, apparently, took past performance of the school a student attended into account.

Do you see where this is going?

On results day, tens of thousands of students received A-level results DRAMATICALLY lower than what they had been predicted to get. And the general theme was that those lower scores were received by students in areas with overall poorer performing schools. Students were essentially punished by the algorithm for doing too well, and had their places in university pulled out from under them, upending their entire futures. In the end, the algorithm was scrapped, students were put through horrible stresses, and universities now have more students than they would have, in the middle of a pandemic.

I share this story because I can see it making its way into this book during the next revision. O’Neil is a great writer, making a book that could have been dry and confusing extremely easy to read and engaging. It’s also infuriating,

She looks at things like credit scores being used to rule people out of jobs, at recidivism models used in sentencing in the criminal punishment system, and even the college rankings in US News and World Report. She also touches on how Facebook and Google create profiles using all the data they have, adjusting their targeting accordingly.

She refers to algorithms as ‘opinions formalized in code,’ and that’s especially frightening considering how many people view such algorithms as value-neutral and just ‘showing data.’ The negative impacts – generally borne by people who are poor, or aren’t white – are seen not as self-perpetuated by the models themselves, but as moral failings of the individuals who are judged by these flawed systems. Its insidious.

It seems inescapable, but O’Neil does offer some suggestions at the end, and they don’t seem entirely out of the realm of possibility (GDPR, which is law in the EU, is one fix, and it passed). But man, it’s yet another thing that our society needs to fix.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Keep it

Four Stars

Best for:
Those interested in the history of enslaved people who successfully fought back.

In a nutshell:
Enslaved people revolt against the British, Spanish, and French over twelve years, eventually creating Haiti.

Worth quoting:
“The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression.”

Why I chose it:
I received this as a birthday gift this year.

Review:
You will be shocked to learn that I, a white woman raised and educated in the US, knew nothing about how Haiti came to be. I KNOW. It’s almost as though the history I was taught was incomplete in some very specific ways.

This fascinating book tells the story of how those who were enslaved in what is now Haiti revolted across over a dozen years to eventually claim victory by ensuring an end to slavery, expelling the French colonial government, and declaring independence.

The story told by this book begins 229 years ago this week (21 August 1791), and follows the complexities of race, class, slavery, and revolution. The main focus is on Toussaint Louverture, who led most of the revolution, though eventually he was taken to France and died in jail. He was a slave until 1776, then fought in multiple battles until undertaking, with others, a fight inspire by the French revolution.

I have some trouble following detailed military histories, especially when I don’t have the basics already in mind. I only recognized one name in this book before I read it – Napoleon, and he only shows up in the last 50 pages or so. I think to truly grasp everything in here, I would need to read it at least two more times, maybe more. But that speaks not to the quality of the writing, but to my lack of foundational knowledge of the subject.

I’d recommend this to anyone who is interested in history and the fight for freedom.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Keep it

Three Stars

Best for:
People interested in a sense of what the Marxist philosophers were saying in the 1900s. Admittedly a niche market at this point (for now, anyway).

In a nutshell:
The title basically nails it – Lenin argues that Imperialism is Capitalism at its end.

Worth quoting:
“..for both uneven development and a semi-starvation level of existence of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and constitute premises of this mode of production.”

Why I chose it:
It was assigned as part of the Marxist book club I’m in.

Review:
My how my life has changed. Never thought I’d be reading and reviewing Lenin, but here we are.

This fairly short book serves as a surprisingly relevant discussion of imperialism, and specifically how capitalism fuels the colonialist actions of nations. Lenin lays out the development of monopolies (along the way refuting the idea of truly free markets, as they eventually evolve into monopolies), the major role that banks play in consolidating wealth and capital, and how the need to further feed these monopolies needs nations and corporations to seek out further raw materials and financing.

In the book, the primary areas discussed are oil and coal, but substitute pretty much anything modern and its clear that monopolies have not gone anywhere, and imperialism is alive and well, though perhaps not in the exact same way. Amazon.com doesn’t invade countries and claim their land, but they do take over cities, making those cities dependent on them to survive (*cough* Seattle *cough*). Something like 40% of the box office in 2019 were came from Disney studios. Companies — and countries — continue to seek new customers and new materials for their products, further consolidating until all those ‘choices’ we think we have are just different ways of our money going to the same few individuals.

Some people may not find this disturbing. As long as they get their next season of Stranger Things, or their favorite shampoo arriving on their doorstep 24 hours after they order it, they don’t much care. And frankly, much of the time, when I’m not thinking about it, I don’t care either. But then I look at how Amazon treats their warehouse employees. In some places that might be the ‘best’ job available, but it’s still crap, and Amazon can get away with it because they’re the only game in town. Monopolies like this are harmful to nearly everyone in some way (except the people diving into their vault of cash, Scrooge McDuck-style).

There are a couple of areas that I picked up on that don’t seem to have held up (or at least, haven’t necessarily come to pass on the time line of 100+ years). At one point Lenin talks about how the Stock Markets have become less important and I get the impression that he thinks they will eventually fade away. However, in the US we can see that while Stock Markets are playing around with essentially fake value, how those markets move drives so much of the commentary about how ‘healthy’ the economy is. A company can lose millions of dollars in ‘value’ in the stock market in one day because of a news story, and that’s what’s reported. The overall value of the market is still shared at the end of newscasts. People care about it, even if it shouldn’t matter.

The other area (which may be the result of me not fully understanding the book) that I found didn’t quite hold up is the assumption that this imperialism is the last stage of capitalism, and that necessarily capitalism is decaying. To me this implies that soon after this writing (in the early 1900s), Lenin believed that capitalism would cease to be. Obviously that hasn’t held, but perhaps his other writings clarify this point or provide detail on what would need to happen to speed up this decay.

Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:
Toss it (I read a printout of a PDF, and as its in the public domain, anyone can read it online.)