Recent Reads Late September

 The Spoils of War – Andrew Cockburn

 

Reading these essays did remind me of having read them before, since a couple of them I know I already read in Harpers. But it’s worth it because what Cockburn does show just so many ways that the foreign policy priorities of the last 20 years goes against what should be our national priorities. Mainly it’s an appalling list of how many ways we direct our resources to stupid priorities and how these resources are poorly spent even with those priorities. Not only do we spend on the wrong things, but we also don’t even do it well. Well written and will make you justly angry.

 

 

The Souls of Black Folk – Du Bois

 

Du Boise was writing after the general failure of Reconstruction and reading this made me want to go deeper on the reconstruction history, especially the failure of the Freedman’s Bank. It’s just a throwaway paragraph, but it seems like a real important turning point to me. A lot of the essays are interesting as history, and there’s the sad thing where a lot of them still feel relevant and pertinent. However, others feel alien, talking about specific concerns that may have been forgotten. The style is interesting. It’s almost uncanny – like the cadences are off for a modern reader, maybe it is based on a then-current speaking style or something. This book is an important bridge from the postwar era to the rebirth of the civil rights era.

 

A World Without Police – Maher

 

This is one of those books that kind of go into greater detail on things you already know and just say it more fluently and with greater detail. The policing and justice system are interrelated with so much of the current social structure and it’s broken (as is the current political and economic system). Maher will teach you just how this is broken and calls strongly for abolition. What’s really important here is that it just isn’t a utopian idea. What Maher calls for is greater community involvement shows examples how different places have worked though abolition of this incredibly broken system, from police on the streets to the broader incarceration system.

 

Feminist Antifascism – Majewska

 

I’ve been reading more theory lately, and a lot of it does do that thing where it is written in a way that feels deliberately obtuse stylistically. Thankfully, Majewska does not do that here. Her book calls for important third places against fascism and for feminism (thus the title and subtitle). However, what this book does do is assume familiarity of the reader for a lot of different other theorists. There’s a section on 131-2 that just drops the names of 10 different theorists and though I have heard of most of them she didn’t really even give a shorthand of the ideas of all of them. Partly on me, but it makes following along a bit harder. What’s weird is that there’s a chapter on the Polish Solidarity movement where she goes over the movement’s history and I think that because she isn’t assuming that people know that history she goes into detail and though it is more alien to me, it is the most successful essay of the book. Overall, another interesting offering from Verso but had some hurdles for me.