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118 reviews for:
Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire
Jonathan M. Katz
4.3 AVERAGE
118 reviews for:
Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire
Jonathan M. Katz
4.3 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
challenging
informative
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
medium-paced
A well-written narrative that uses Smedley Butler as a vehicle to explore the rise of the American empire. A powerful primer for those unfamiliar, it leaves me wanting to learn more about different aspects of its history.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Gun violence, Colonisation, War
Moderate: Racial slurs, Racism, Slavery
Minor: Sexual assault
informative
medium-paced
This is a MUST read. After reading you'll have a better grasp of the history of the U.S.A. and our current moment in the year 2025.
adventurous
challenging
informative
tense
slow-paced
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
I enjoyed this as a sort of progressive spin on the dad military history/biography genre. Katz does a good job of avoiding hero worship of his subject. Butler's anti-militarism is frequently racist and paternalistic, far from any starry-eyed assessment of the general. The Fanon bit about facism being the strategies of colonialism turned inward to the metropole act as a governing thesis for the whole book. We follow Butler as he intervenes in Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America to forward the influence of American capitalist interests and subvert independent institutions and movements in those regions. His attacks on democracy anticipate the eventual fascist business plot against FDR, where Butler redeems himself by becoming an anti-war socialist and whistleblower.
The historical narrative is cut up with a contemporary travelogue following Butler's footsteps, which were probably the most expensive and least well done parts of the book. Katz is a good writer and researcher. There's plenty of good popular history in the storytelling here, but just the reality of dedicating a few pages each to a bunch of different countries means he ends up flattening a lot of history and nuance on contemporary figures like AMLO and Xi Jingping. I get that he's trying to show how the early 20th C american empire shaped our world today and paved the way for populism and authoritarianism but I could have done without the armchair analysis on a bunch of countries he doesn't have expertise in. Still, this is a good lefty dad history book — well worth your time if you're interested in Butler's biography in historical context.
The historical narrative is cut up with a contemporary travelogue following Butler's footsteps, which were probably the most expensive and least well done parts of the book. Katz is a good writer and researcher. There's plenty of good popular history in the storytelling here, but just the reality of dedicating a few pages each to a bunch of different countries means he ends up flattening a lot of history and nuance on contemporary figures like AMLO and Xi Jingping. I get that he's trying to show how the early 20th C american empire shaped our world today and paved the way for populism and authoritarianism but I could have done without the armchair analysis on a bunch of countries he doesn't have expertise in. Still, this is a good lefty dad history book — well worth your time if you're interested in Butler's biography in historical context.
5 stars for the book
0 stars for America’s aggressively imperialist history of foreign policy
0 stars for America’s aggressively imperialist history of foreign policy
informative
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced