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ethanhedman's reviews
150 reviews
In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.5
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis
I once heard it said "The English Empire was morally on par with the Third Reich" and I never really knew why that might be true. As an American, the Irish Potato Famine is unique in the way it is taught in that it is not understood as it is more broadly across the world - a genocide. What Mike Davis' brilliant book lays out, is that the forced and violent introduction of global, market-based economics on communities all over the world, combined with the ENSO cycle of El-Nino and La-Nina years of extreme drought and extreme flooding, brought destruction, social and economic upheaval, and death to nearly every corner of the world. Davis leaves no room for argument that the famines that the British Empire oversaw in India, China, and Brazil were holocausts, at the very least mitigable by the oversight regimes, and does put them morally on par with Nazi Germany.
From the introduction, on the reasons why photographs of these genocides were included:
"In her somberly measured reflections, Reading the Holocaust, Inga Glendinnen ventures this opinion about the slaughter of innocents: "If we grant that 'Holocaust,' the total consumption of offerings by fire, is sinisterly appropriator the murder of those millions who found their only graves in the air, it is equally appropriate for the victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden." Without using her capitalization (which implies too complete an equation between the Shoah and other carnages), it is the burden of this book to show that imperial policies towards starving "subjects" were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped at 18,000 feet. The contemporary photographs used in this book are thus intended as accusations not illustrations."
So when people are seen not mourning the death of the queen, or even celebrating it, a proper reaction would perhaps not be to scold that person outright, but to ask "what could a person have done in their life to have people react this way to news of their demise?"
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.75
I once heard it said "The English Empire was morally on par with the Third Reich" and I never really knew why that might be true. As an American, the Irish Potato Famine is unique in the way it is taught in that it is not understood as it is more broadly across the world - a genocide. What Mike Davis' brilliant book lays out, is that the forced and violent introduction of global, market-based economics on communities all over the world, combined with the ENSO cycle of El-Nino and La-Nina years of extreme drought and extreme flooding, brought destruction, social and economic upheaval, and death to nearly every corner of the world. Davis leaves no room for argument that the famines that the British Empire oversaw in India, China, and Brazil were holocausts, at the very least mitigable by the oversight regimes, and does put them morally on par with Nazi Germany.
From the introduction, on the reasons why photographs of these genocides were included:
"In her somberly measured reflections, Reading the Holocaust, Inga Glendinnen ventures this opinion about the slaughter of innocents: "If we grant that 'Holocaust,' the total consumption of offerings by fire, is sinisterly appropriator the murder of those millions who found their only graves in the air, it is equally appropriate for the victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden." Without using her capitalization (which implies too complete an equation between the Shoah and other carnages), it is the burden of this book to show that imperial policies towards starving "subjects" were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped at 18,000 feet. The contemporary photographs used in this book are thus intended as accusations not illustrations."
So when people are seen not mourning the death of the queen, or even celebrating it, a proper reaction would perhaps not be to scold that person outright, but to ask "what could a person have done in their life to have people react this way to news of their demise?"
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein
informative
medium-paced
3.5
Perlstein again chronicles the rise of conservatism in the US, first manifesting itself on a national scale unsuccessfully in the 1964 Presidential run of Barry Goldwater. In 'Before the Storm', there are the most clear parallels to the current moment, despite this being Perlstein's first book written nearly 20 years ago.
Perlstein depicts a time of 'firsts' when it comes to fundraising, campaigning, and what a candidate was willing to say in order to get elected (morality is brought up prominently as a reason to vote for one candidate over the other). While Perlstein's underlying opinion that Liberals can and perhaps will save the day limits his analysis in approaching the 'crisis of democracy' that we find ourselves in today, his work following people like Clif White, Richard Viguerie, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan through the 1940s, 50s, 60, and beyond should be lauded considerably as they expose an insane and inequitable system that, in conjunction with a horizon-less capitalism, may be on the precipice of destroying itself.
Perlstein depicts a time of 'firsts' when it comes to fundraising, campaigning, and what a candidate was willing to say in order to get elected (morality is brought up prominently as a reason to vote for one candidate over the other). While Perlstein's underlying opinion that Liberals can and perhaps will save the day limits his analysis in approaching the 'crisis of democracy' that we find ourselves in today, his work following people like Clif White, Richard Viguerie, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan through the 1940s, 50s, 60, and beyond should be lauded considerably as they expose an insane and inequitable system that, in conjunction with a horizon-less capitalism, may be on the precipice of destroying itself.
Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo
adventurous
funny
tense
fast-paced
3.5
I think I am too dumb to fully get this book so I will have to come back to it.
Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois
slow-paced
4.5
"Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood. Reconstruction was the turn of white Northern migration southward to new and sudden economic opportunity which followed the disaster and dislocation of war, and an attempt to organize capital and labor on a new pattern and build a new economy. Finally Reconstruction was a desperate effort of a dislodged, maimed, impoverished and ruined oligarchy and monopoly to restore an anachronism in economic organization by force, fraud and slander, in defiance of law and order, and in the face of a great labor movement of white and black, and in bitter strife with a new capitalism and a new political framework."
Du Bois pulls off a Herculean task in this book. He spends the majority laying the foundation for his argument of the history of America from 1860-1880, which Du Bois correctly perceived as being as much of a labor revolution as it is the emancipation proclamation or just the American Civil War. Du Bois throughout the book mates his argument with primary sources ranging from radical abolitionists to reactionary Lost Cause-ers. By applying the perspective he does, he chronicles the defeat of the South as only possible without the defection, arming, and disobedience of Black folks, then the Reconstruction government built as one that was able to take half measures that improved hundreds of thousands of lives, but half measures that would be erased by the counter-revolution of property.
Du Bois pulls off a Herculean task in this book. He spends the majority laying the foundation for his argument of the history of America from 1860-1880, which Du Bois correctly perceived as being as much of a labor revolution as it is the emancipation proclamation or just the American Civil War. Du Bois throughout the book mates his argument with primary sources ranging from radical abolitionists to reactionary Lost Cause-ers. By applying the perspective he does, he chronicles the defeat of the South as only possible without the defection, arming, and disobedience of Black folks, then the Reconstruction government built as one that was able to take half measures that improved hundreds of thousands of lives, but half measures that would be erased by the counter-revolution of property.
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow
challenging
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
Fascinating book to someone that has no background in Sociology, Anthropology, or Archaeology.
Graeber and Wengrow are attempting to answer the question "where does inequality come from?" and soon realize that the question is as futile as it is pointless to ask, but raises dozens of other questions along the way and poke holes in conventional wisdom from Rousseau to Diamond, using recently unearthed examples on every inhabited continent to do so. I have no background, but their arguments against previously accepted theories are mostly compelling and always fascinating.
The question the authors end up posing and attempting to answer is "How did humans become stuck in a world where we do not have the freedom to 1) move away, 2) to disobey, and 3) to create or transform social relationships?" Their conclusion is anything but definitive, like the rest of the book, but interesting nonetheless.
Graeber and Wengrow are attempting to answer the question "where does inequality come from?" and soon realize that the question is as futile as it is pointless to ask, but raises dozens of other questions along the way and poke holes in conventional wisdom from Rousseau to Diamond, using recently unearthed examples on every inhabited continent to do so. I have no background, but their arguments against previously accepted theories are mostly compelling and always fascinating.
The question the authors end up posing and attempting to answer is "How did humans become stuck in a world where we do not have the freedom to 1) move away, 2) to disobey, and 3) to create or transform social relationships?" Their conclusion is anything but definitive, like the rest of the book, but interesting nonetheless.