UNDERSTANDING AMERICA
If rationality is not to be the motor of politics (a disconcerting realisation for thinkers across the political spectrum), what forces drive change and whose end does that change serve? We have laid out a few books that might help us get our heads around the current plight of the United States of America.
Vance's account of growing up in a Rust Belt town reveals the slow -and then fast- growth of disaffection in the poor white communities which formed the core Trump's support.
"You will not read a more important book about America this year." - Economist
Roy and Cusack discuss the nature of the state, empire, and surveillance in an era of perpetual war, the meaning of flags and patriotism, the role of foundations and NGOs in limiting dissent, and the ways in which capital but not people can freely cross borders.
A devastating portrait of urban poverty in the US, both of the mechanisms of inequality and its effects.
"Essential. A compelling and damning exploration of the abuse of one of our basic human rights: shelter." - Owen Jones
Written in a "fury of disbelief", Jacobson's cathartic satire is the tale of the unlikely Prince Fracassus. Idle, boastful, thin-skinned and egotistic, he has no manners, no curiosity, no knowledge, no idea and no words in which to express them. Could he, in that case, be the very leader to make the country great again?
>> "The consolation of savage satire".
The culmination of nearly 30 years of reporting on Donald Trump, Pulitzer Prize- winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston takes a revealingly close look at the mogul's rise to power and prominence. Covering the long arc of Trump's career, Johnston tells the full story of how a boy from a quiet section of Queens, NY would become an entirely new, and complex, kind of public figure.
A wide survey of disruptive protest in the US in the last forty years, drawing parallels between the efforts of environmentalists, black and indigenous activist, feminists and radical queers. What effect has protest had on shaping society, and what are the potentials for protest now?
A vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fearmongering demagogue runs for President of the United States - and wins. Sinclair Lewis's chilling 1935 bestseller is the story of Buzz Windrip, 'Professional Common Man', who promises poor, angry voters that he will make America proud and prosperous once more, but takes the country down a far darker path.
"A devastating front-line account of the police killings and the young activism that sparked one of the most significant racial justice movements since the 1960s: Black Lives Matter. Lowery more or less pulls the sheet off America. Essential reading." - Junot Diaz, The New York Times
How can we explain, let alone remedy, the wave of paranoia, racism, nationalism and misogyny that is sweeping the world and manifesting as reactionary government, violence and demagoguery? Mishra shows how disaffection has wide roots in our economic and social structures.
"Urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely. Throws light on our contemporary predicament, when the neglected and dispossessed of the world have suddenly risen up to transform the world we thought we knew." - John Banville
Doublethink: "The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."
As America and its allies use their military might in the misguided attempt to export a desiccated version democracy, and reactionary strands in mainstream political opinion abandon civil liberties, Ranciere argues that true democracy - government by all - is held in profound contempt by the new ruling class.
"In our time of the disorientation of the left, Ranciere's writings offer one the few consistent conceptualizations of how are to continue to resist." - Slavoj Zizek
This set of furiously affecting prose poems exposes racial prejudice and violence in various situations and contexts, from the everyday to the critical.
"Wonderfully capacious and innovative. In her riffs on the demotic, in her layering of incident, Rankine finds a new way of writing about race in America." - Nick Laird, New York Review of Books
Other paths could have been taken.
In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and Stalinism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and established rule by an elite with a monopoly on truth. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. Only a thorough knowledge of their failings can protect us from repeating them.
A paean to optimism in the face of an increasingly desperate world. Change is made by the hopeful.
The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 in the early 1970s to more than two million now. One in every 15 people is expected to go to prison. For black men, the most incarcerated group in America, this figure rises to one out of every three. Bryan Stevenson grew up a member of a poor black community in the racially segregated South. He was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of the US's criminal justice system.
As it says.
"The thing is, when you actually think about it, it's not funny. Given what's at stake, it's more like the opposite, like the first sign of the collapse of the United States as a global superpower. Twenty years from now, when we're all living like prehistory hominids and hunting rats with sticks, we'll probably look back at this moment as the beginning of the end." Incisive articles, many of which first appeared in Rolling Stone.
"Matt Taibbi is one of the few journalists in America who speaks truth to power." - Bernie Sanders
On Saturday 23 November 2013 ten children were shot dead. The youngest was nine; the oldest was nineteen. They fell in suburbs, hamlets and ghettos. None made the national news. It was just another day in the death of America, where on average seven children and teens are killed by guns daily.
On January 21st, 2017, five million people in 82 countries and on all seven continents stood up with one voice. The Women's March began with one cause, women's rights, but quickly became a movement around the many issues that were hotly debated during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign: immigration, health care, environmental protections, LGBTQ rights, racial justice, freedom of religion, and workers rights, among others.
>> Hope.
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