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Crossposting from the What Did You Just Finish? thread:Gertrude Perkins posted:Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti. A well-argued and passionate history of 20th century geopolitics and politico-economics, charting the close ties between fascism and corporate capitalism from Mussolini and Hitler's rise to power to the mid-1990s. Rejecting a lot of past and contemporary anti-communist narratives, which he describes as dogmatic and propagandistic, Parenti discusses the fallacious approaches to communism and socialist states. From big-business sponsors of American imperial overreach and fascist dictatorships to anti-communist liberals, there are few who escape his criticism (and in some cases, personal grudges, as laid out in some particularly fun footnotes). I really wanna read his more recent stuff, too. Something about his style really gels with me.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:51
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Hocus Pocus posted:Despite being aware of Jon Ronson and his work, So You've Been Publicly Shamed, is the first of his books I've read. I really enjoyed his personal kind of journalism - it especially works when dealing with shaming because it humanizes the victims. I really felt like I was along for the ride as he pursued different angles of thinking. Yes, yes he does! And as for Ronson, I've not read his new book, but I've heard it pales in comparison to his earlier stuff - The Psychopath Test is really engaging, I've heard good things about Lost At Sea and my personal favourite is still The Men Who Stare At Goats.
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Jul 27, 2015 20:08
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Here's another frustrating and troubling politics book I read last weekend. It's becoming a theme with me.Gertrude Perkins posted:The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle Of The American 80's by Paul Slansky. A blow-by-blow (and sometimes even day-by-day) history of the Reagan presidency, serving as a catalogue of the bizarre mediatised waking nightmare of the 80s in American politics. The daily format gives Slansky room for plenty of juxtaposition, narrative threads and continuity, and makes it a pretty zippy read (I finished it over the weekend). There's plenty of decent snark to temper the sense of staggering frustration and dread that comes from having almost every major event of the Reagan administration laid out in sequence. Equally infuriating is the campaign coverage, with figures like Michael Dukakis eagerly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It's available as an eBook for pay-what-you-want, and it's definitely worth your time.
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Sep 7, 2015 13:08
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