Politics
The Rising Tide: Among the Islands and Atolls of the Pacific Ocean by Tom Bamforth ($30, PB)
Vanuatu. Marshall Islands. Fiji. The names evoke white-sand beaches, swaying palms & lazy holidays. But in reality, these idyllic places are tropical maelstroms of global realpolitik, caught between the world’s superpowers, former colonial masters & tin-pot despots. Collectively the Pacific nations, which form one third of the globe’s surface area, are one of the most strategically important regions in the world—for military might, for energy security & geopolitical borders. Even more importantly, these nations are at the frontline of climate change, as rising sea levels, salinity, cyclones & pollution put their very existence at stake. Using his extensive personal experience in the Pacific, Tom Bamforth shows us the people of the islands, their cultures & how they live in these remote & increasingly challenging places.
Revolution Today by Susan Buck-Morss ($30, PB)
What does revolution look like today? How will the idea of revolution survive the inadequacy of the formula, ‘progress = modernisation through industrialisation,’ to which it has owed its political life? Socialism plus computer technology, citizen resistance plus a global agenda of concerns, revolutionary commitment to practices that are socially experimental and inclusive of difference—these are new forces being mobilised to make another future possible. The 21st century has already witnessed unprecedented popular mobilisations. Unencumbered by old dogmas, mobilisations of opposition are a chain of signifiers, creating solidarity across language, religion, ethnicity, gender & every other difference. Trans-local solidarities exist. They came first. The right-wing authoritarianism & anti-immigrant upsurge that has followed is a reaction against the amazing visual power of millions of citizens occupying public space in defiance of state power. We cannot know how to act politically without seeing others act. This book provides photographic evidence of that fact, while making us aware of how much of the new revolutionary vernacular we already share.
A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism by Adam Gopnik ($35, HB)
Not since the early 20th century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right & left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought. Adam Gopnik offers a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented & extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history—and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation.
Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky by Susie Linfield
In this lively intellectual history of the political Left, cultural critic Susie Linfield investigates how 8 prominent, mid-century public intellectuals struggled with the philosophy of Zionism and, then, with Israel & its conflicts with the Arab world. Constructed as a series of interrelated portraits that combine the personal & the political, the book includes philosophers, historians, journalists & activists such as Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, I. F. Stone & Noam Chomsky. In their engagement with Zionism, these influential thinkers also wrestled with the 20th century’s most crucial political dilemmas: socialism, nationalism, democracy, colonialism, terrorism & anti-Semitism. In other words, in probing Zionism, they confronted the very nature of modernity & the often catastrophic histories of our time. By examining these leftist intellectuals, Linfield also seeks to understand how the contemporary Left has become focused on anti-Zionism & how Israel itself has moved rightward. ($60, HB)
On the Other Side of Freedom: Race and Justice in a Divided America by DeRay Mckesson
Five years ago, DeRay Mckesson quit his job as a school teacher, moved to Ferguson, Missouri, and spent the next 400 days on the streets as an activist, helping to bring the Black Lives Matter movement into being. Even when the police made it illegal to stand still, they refused to back down. Drawing on his own experiences—of growing up without his mother, with a father in recovery, of having a house burn down and a bully chase him home from school, of pacifying a traffic cop at gunpoint, of determined activism on the streets and in the White House—Mckesson asks us to imagine the best of what is possible. Honouring the voices of a new generation of activists, this is a visionary’s call to take responsibility for imagining, and then building, the world we want to live in. ($23, PB)
Now in B Format How Democracy Ends by David Runciman, $23
Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze ($27, PB)
In September 2008 the GFC, triggered by the collapse of Lehman brothers, shook the world. A decade later its spectre still haunts us. As the appalling scope & scale of the crash was revealed, the financial institutions that had symbolised the West’s triumph since the end of the Cold War, seemed—through greed, malice & incompetence—to be about to bring the entire system to its knees. This is a brilliant analysis of what happened and how we were rescued from something even worse—but at a price which continues to undermine democracy across Europe & the US. Gnawing away at our institutions are the many billions of dollars which were conjured up to prevent complete collapse. Over & over again, the end of the crisis has been announced, but it continues to hound us—whether in Greece or Ukraine, whether through Brexit or Trump. Adam Tooze follows the trail in a compelling book compelling that is history, economic analysis & political horror story.
Places and Names: Dispatches of War by Elliot Ackerman ($40, HB)
In a refugee camp in southern Turkey, Elliot Ackerman sits across the table from Abu Hassar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq & whose connections to the Islamic State are murky. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after he establishes a rapport with Abu Hassar, he reveals that in fact he was a Marine. Ackerman then draws the shape of the Euphrates River on a large piece of paper, and his one-time adversary joins him, filling in the map with the names & dates of where they saw fighting during the war. They discover they had shadowed each other for some time, a realisation that brings them to a strange kind of intimacy. At once an intensely personal book about the terrible lure of combat & a meditation on the meaning of the past two decades of strife for America, the region and the world, is an extraordinary book about modern war.
Also New: The Three Dimensions of Freedom by Billy Bragg, $15 People, Power & Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph Stiglitz
A few corporations have come to dominate entire sectors of the economy, contributing to skyrocketing inequality and slow growth. This is how the financial industry has managed to write its own regulations, tech companies have accumulated reams of personal data with little oversight, and the US government has negotiated trade deals that fail to represent the best interests of workers. Too many have made their wealth through exploitation of others rather than through wealth creation. Nobel prizewinner Joseph Stiglitz suggests the economic solutions are often quite clear, and shows how a middle-class life can once again be attainable by all. An authoritative account shows us an America in crisis, but also lights a path through this challenging time. ($45, HB)
Licence to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us by Jonathan Aldred ($45, HB)
Over the past 50 years, the way we value what is ‘good’ & ‘right’ has changed dramatically. Behaviour that to our grandparents’ generation might have seemed stupid, harmful or simply wicked now seems rational, natural, woven into the very logic of things. And, Jonathan Aldred asserts, economics is to blame. From the logic of game theory, developed in the paranoid world of mathematical-military think tanks in the Cold War, which became the economists’ paradigm of rational choice; to the emergence of ‘free riding’—cooperation as irrational, because if you do it, no one else will—and the incentivising social engineering of Nudge, he tells the story of how a group of economics theorists changed our world, and how a handful of key ideas seeped into our decision-making and, indeed, almost all aspects of our lives. If, now, we’re happy to accept that there can be a market in anything, from queue-jumping to health & education, and to prisoners ‘upgrading’ to a better class of cell—though we may still draw the line at a market for babies—we have these theorists to thank.
Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy by Anders Aslund
In this penetrating look into the extreme plutocracy Vladimir Putin has created and its implications for Russia’s future, Anders Aslund explores how the economic system Vladimir Putin has developed in Russia works to consolidate control over the country. By appointing his close associates as heads of state enterprises and by giving control of the FSB and the judiciary to his friends from the KGB, he has enriched his business friends from Saint Petersburg with preferential government deals. Thus, Putin has created a super wealthy and loyal plutocracy that owes its existence to authoritarianism. Much of this wealth has been hidden in offshore havens in the United States and the United Kingdom, where companies with anonymous owners and black money transfers are allowed to thrive. Though beneficial to a select few, this system has left Russia’s economy in untenable stagnation, which Putin has tried to mask through military might. ($55, HB)
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