THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR, it seems to be drawing to a close

THE HOUR OF THE PREDATOR
GIULIANO DA EMPOLI (tr. Sam Taylor)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A chilling assessment of international politics in our time, from an internationally bestselling author whose work has sparked controversy and debate across the world

Blending the author’s personal insight with startling historical comparisons to the days of Machiavelli and the Spanish conquest of Mexico, The Hour of the Predator describes the growing influence of tech billionaires, the rise of autocratic regimes and the erosion of traditional diplomacy, to paint a chilling picture of a disintegrating world order.

Giuliano Da Empoli’s The Hour of the Predator is a timely and incisive examination of the shifting power dynamics in global politics, where traditional governments find themselves increasingly outmatched by technology tycoons and autocratic geopolitical predators who shape the world through brute force, deception, and disruption.

Drawing on his experience as a political advisor to a former Italian Prime Minister, Da Empoli takes the reader on an eye-opening journey around the international political circuit—from New York to Riyadh, and from the United Nations to Mohammed bin Salman’s Ritz-Carlton— and through the looking glass to a world of ruthless power struggles, where the tech lords already seem to inhabit another world and AI is already out of control.

The Hour of the Predator is the latest book from the internationally bestselling author of The Wizard of the Kremlin, which has been translated into thirty-five languages and is now being adapted for a major movie by Olivier Assayas.

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My Review: Author da Empoli states a truth we're all familiar with succinctly: "All the guardrails of the old world—the respect for the independence of certain institutions, human and minority rights, a concern for international repercussions—have no value now that the hour of the predator is upon us." This has been true for forty-plus years, starting with the election interference that installed Ronald Reagan in office in 1981 and ushered in the most efficient, nost rapacious looting of the US national treasure by the greediest scum on the planet.

It is now a beautiful moment in our cultural history. The US Congress is, at last, returning to the control of the president's political enemies so will be able to function as Congress again. The greedy scum that's risen to the top has finally made we-the-people suffer privations bad enough to deliver "Them" a ringing rebuke: "Enough."

Author da Empoli has crystallized a large portion of the reasons why in this book. The Cold War gave the greediest capitalists and other grifters an extremely useful straw man to wave in the hoi polloi's faces as they steadily set the stage for their revolution of greed. When the straw fell out slightly before the stage directions were fully drafted, "They" were forced to share the benefits of peace "They" had not planned on ever occurring while scrambling for another way to keep accumulating more. More what? Whatever. Just MORE. Money, power, toys, MORE.

There is no satiating this greed. The story of "Golden Age" Spain in these pages is vivid proof of that. The wildly misinterpreted guidebooks for greed by Baltasar Gracián, for conquest and dominion by Machiavelli, became morally celebrated by many bad-faith actors over the centuries. Always, always ending in the practicioners steadily growing more and more incompetent at exercising the (wrong) lessons they learned from these misinterpretations.

Our present moment is seeing the collapse of kakistocracy across the globe: Hungary rejecting Orban. deeply admired by felonious yam, was the one that stunned me the most. Macron is in a lot of trouble for trying to take things away from the French that they do not want to lose; and his mistake? The only reason for this is to make the banksters richer. Our Gross Old Pedophiles did better for decades by promising they were fighting the insiders who make we-the-people poorer by loading up their wallets with taxes not dollars. The illusion popped when diesel hit $8 a gallon because the war felonious yam and his stooge Kegsbreath the TV presenter who wanted to cosplay soldiers catastrophically failed to do what their boardgame view of the world wanted.

Reading Author da Empoli's refreshingly snarky and irreverent words in this moment of unbelievable possibility is an excellent way to solidify the startling fragility of "Their" power. Elon Musk alone spent close to HALF A BILLION DOLLARS to get the Gross Old Pedophiles party's candidates elected. He lost all those races with "Them" because money = speech = influence only works on docile people.

I am neverendingly astonished at "Their" inability to see why FDR should be "Their" God: his reforms quieted the socialist revolution well underway and that would've taken a lot more from "Them" that actually, by right of conquest, was defensibly theirs. Whatever else one can say about elite education, it has signally failed to teach any one of its graduates the importance of making concessions to get long-term buy-in to an inherently unfair system. "They" are once again on the precipice of losing the war because "They" don't see the point of strategic retreat that can be sold as "Their" loss to appease, re-docilify, us.

I'm glad. We-the-people need to win the war this time.

PROGRESS: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It, food for deep thinking before you yell at the new Congress

PROGRESS: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It
SAMUEL MILLER McDONALD
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, and Jared Diamond: A bold, provocative, wide-ranging argument about the human idea of progress that offers a new vision of our future

Progress is power. Narratives of progress, the stories we tell about whether a society is moving in the right or the wrong direction, are immensely potent. Progress has built cities, flattened mountains, charted the globe, delved the oceans and space, created wealth, opportunity, and remarkable innovation, and ushered in a new epoch unique in our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history.

But the modern story of progress is also a very dangerous fiction. It shapes our sense of what progress means, and justifies what we will do to achieve it—no matter the cost. We continue to subscribe to a set of myths, about dominion, growth, extraction, and expansion, that have fueled our success, but now threaten our—and all species’—existence on a planet in crisis.

In Progress, geographer Samuel Miller McDonald offers a radical new perspective on the myths upon which the modern world is built, illuminating its destructive lineage and suggesting an urgent alternative. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across anthropology, history, philosophy and geography, McDonald argues that if humanity is to thrive, then we must dismantle, reimagine, and create anew what progress means.

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My Review: Progress is like success, or victory: what exactly do you mean by that? Progress is responsible for all the good things we, the richest country in the richest civilization the planet has ever seen, have right now. I don't know that I agree with that assertion, but I know that it or its twin underpins assumptions about the way we perceive the world. What do people in the US talk about when they discuss "The Economy"? Wall Street indexes of "performance" and the pieces of that puzzle like meeting analysts' expectations, announcing restructurings of debts and offerings of shares...debts companies take on to finance progress and profits that will pay shareholders....

It's a casino, the croupiers at the roulette table of the exchange floor are analysts and brokers and other members of the casino staff who must all get paid, but only after the casino owners are given their majority of the funds. The way this money is created: Destruction. Extraction. Exploitation.

In no way does that represent "THE Economy." This book takes us through what the present systemic definitions of progress are, why they exist, what economic activity they promote and why on multiple axes. Then Author McDonald asks "...and why is it like this again?"

There is no one single model for how best to organize a society since what's best will depend on local ecologies and circumstances. The Anthropocene is likely to be an epoch of re-diversifying human cultures and societies even as coastlines shift, deserts expand and climate zones climb latitudes. What I am most concerned with is that the faulty relationship between human systems and ecological systems at the heart of the last 5,000 years. A relationship built on expansion and exploitation should be forever destroyed. Freedom from parasitism will ensure long-term survival of some sort.

Okay! Great!

How, exactly?

So no, this is not the teacher's edition with the answers in it. But considering how much time I spend thinking about this stuff and the pretty incoherent rant above is the best memory approximation I can come up with after reading and taking notes on this book, I'm going to say most all y'all could benefit mightily from the read. It will prepare us all for the intense, loud, really really rude arguments to come about that hydra in lamb's clothing that we unthinkingly call "The Economy." (Spoiler: there's more than one, and they do not follow the same rules! Oh fun!)

But y'all listen a minute. I bet anyone who reads my reviews is aware of how bad the economy is treating you and yours. The only way to know if some bloviating gasbag is lying to you to steal from you, like certain fat immigrant asswipes and some revoltingly orange pedophiles I needn't name, unless you have some information they did not give you to measure their ideas against, how will you ever be able to spot the con? No one wants to be duped. No one who knows enough to form questions to ask is sure as shootin' to fall for it.

Read before you think, think before you agree with anyone. #ReadingIsResistance

THE NUREMBERG WOMEN: The Untold Story of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Justice...chilling, informative stories

THE NUREMBERG WOMEN: The Untold Story of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Justice
NATALIE LIVINGSTONE
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The most famous trial of the twentieth century—told through the eyes of the women history forgot.

In November 1945, the world turned its gaze to Nuremberg. Inside a courtroom built by and for men, justice was being sought for crimes almost beyond comprehension. The spotlight fell on Nazi leaders, Allied prosecutors and military judges—but in the shadows, women were recording, interpreting, witnessing, painting, testifying. Yet their names were often missing from the headlines. Eighty years on, this book finally returns them to the centre of the story.

The Nuremberg Women follows eight extraordinary a young Soviet interpreter balancing political survival with truth-telling; a British painter capturing justice in oils; a French resistance fighter who survived Auschwitz to confront her persecutors; a Hungarian countess hosting both Nazis and survivors in a single house. Alongside them stand the sharpest literary minds of the day—Erika Mann, Rebecca West and others—each wielding the pen as a tool of reckoning.

Far from the official narrative, Natalie Livingstone reveals a trial that was more intimate, chaotic and human than history has allowed. It was a place of intense love affairs and political tensions, of personal reckonings and the first tremors of the Cold War. These women, often dismissed or sidelined, shaped how the trial unfolded—and how it was remembered.

This is Nuremberg as you've never seen not only a reckoning with the horrors of war, but a story of erasure, courage and transformation. The women's voices—once silenced—now ring out with clarity, offering a powerful new vision of the past, and of justice itself.

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My Review: The story of Erika Mann, the reporter and daughter of novelist Thomas Mann, was excerpted by LitHub this week. I link it here because it is a big ask to recommend a book about the Nuremberg Trials to y'all when the US readership is most likely in a celebratory mood. Erika Mann's story in this book is my lure to get you to see the

The stories of these women, eight of them, were not foregrounded at the time they were living them...kind of understandable, given what was happening in 1945 and 1946...but I'd only ever heard of two of them before, and we've had eighty years of endlessly rehashing their subjects' atrocities to be told this information about any of them. Rebecca West and Erika Mann are known to some to this day for their writing. Erika Mann, a lesbian and Red Scare victim, is much more well known in queer circles than among the cishet. Rebecca Weat, if you're reading this blog, needs no introduction. Her role in the reporting and the crafting of public opinion around the Nuremberg Trials is considerably less known or discussed at the least, even among people who fancy her writing.

The psychic toll on many of these selected women is well-represented by their fiendishly tough jobs...translating the defendants' words describing their crimes, catering to the mens' practical needs, the many and various ways they were required to treat monstrous people as ordinary when each had suffered to a greater or lesser degree from the evils they committed...it is impressive none of these women turned murderous vengeance-seeker. What is true of the defendants, that they were anti-semitic to the bone, was sadly true of most of the non-Jewish women in this story. While the main focus was on the Nazi bigwigs, there were witnesses to house and feed during the trials and they evoked different responses from these profiled women. Not all victims of crimes are saints and not a few are repulsive as people victims or no.

I enjoyed the reasonable tone Author Livingstone uses throughout the book. Where I would succumb to the inner prompting to say horrible things about the nastier cases, presenting their messy intimate lives with eagerly condemnatory insults, she is simply reporting (in more detail than I myownself wanted) the factual reality of the people unjustly ignored by history. "Warts and all" is more than just a nostrum peddled by biographers and memoirists to excuse spilling the tea on the dead. It reminds us that those who commit evil are, au fond, simply people; not good ones, but people; and so are the victims of evil.

It is important to make this information relatable, accessible to those of us living in a deeply polarized, deeply contentious world. Our comparatively recent past has great evildoers in it who worried about how their children were faring at the mercy of those who hate their parents. There were victims who hated other victims for their religion, and found sympathy for the perpetrators of crimes against those people, but not themselves of course.

Humans are complex beings with admixtures of admirable and awful traits. It will behoove all of us around the world to learn how our parents, grandparents faced the challenge of meting out justice even when they wanted revenge, and how many of those harmed were, by many people's lights, unworthhy of receiving justice because of their own turpitude.

It's also a thumping good read with lots of involving tales to tell.

OUTCLASSED: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, more important today than ever

OUTCLASSED: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back
JOAN C. WILLIAMS
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award 2025, Long list

An eye-opening, urgent call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races that is driving politics to the far right in the US.

Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? changing the class dynamics driving American politics.

The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In Outclassed, Joan C. Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide”, while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories―from the Portuguese admiral who led that country’s COVID response to the lawyer who led the ACLU’s gay marriage response (and more)―Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions disadvantaging the working-class. Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy or a politician or social justice warrior in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goals.

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My Review: Wonk heaven. Like data? Want the sources more than the resources? Here's us a book.

"'The reason voters don't vote based on economics is that they absolutely don't believe that either Democrats or Republicans will ever deliver for them,' pollster David Mermin remarked to me in 2023." A key insight into the absolute weirdest phenomenon I know of, one that's bewildered me my entire adult life from Reagan robbing Social Security in the 1980s to felonious yam's announced before election tariff debacle. I think I get it now. Five decades-plus of betrayal and backstabbing in the service of making the rich into obscenely rich by both sides has led to the resigned certainty that no one in power cares a bit about your problems because they started stealing and hoarding long enough ago they're immune to your problems.

Add in the emasculation of working-class men, the rendering of their traditional work and work ethic unimportant and without value, and you get people ready to do anything they can to stick it to the bastards sticking it to them.

I get it. I feel it myself.

It's a situation better explained to me now. It was not a prose delight to read, but a careful academic explication (endnoted to a fare-thee-well) of what the data we have shows that is relevant to this question of why working-class political behavior is so out of sync with their actual best interests. Back someone into a corner and then start removing the floorboards they're standing on and you get irrational behavior.

3 November 2026 was a resounding rebuke of the worst offenders against the working class. Elon Musk spent $474 million...million...on the midterms and every candidae he backed lost, every measure he backed lost. The defeat of Proposition 40 in California was a typical Californians fooling themselves moment and, well, might be the most short-lived victory of the night. But a victory it was, and not for people who need the government to step up and do its job. In "winning" this victory, the fools with money handed already angry people a real, sharp-edged weapon to use against them. And if the winners of 3 November's blowouts don't hear from we-the-people that we *want* them to use that weapon, they will leave it sheathed, because it's scary to go against someone with piles of money and hate in his heart...but a bit less so now we've seen the real power of that money's limits. Remind the winners that reality does not only obey rich scumbags/tech oligarchs.

I think it's a big ask to say "read this book" in the midst of a celebratory mood about happy results for hard work done. I also know from ugly experience what happens when we-the-people walk away from a good night at the polls and go back to bed. Turn on your lamp, pick up a book about Society's problems, and read a chapter. Every night. We *all* need to start doing the work, thinking the hard problems through, and so discover the topics to focus attention on to include our fellow citizens more broadly.

NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE: Essays for Uneven Terrain, we need to be ready for the work to come

NO STRAIGHT ROAD TAKES YOU THERE: Essays for Uneven Terrain
REBECCA SOLNIT
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty.

Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with on about a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean, No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Throughout she asks us to heed the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be, or should be changed. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world.

"I've tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take," Solnit writes in the introduction, "the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can't see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past."

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My Review: I really don't know how better to say what this collection reveals to the reader than: "...the future is not as it is so often spoken of—as a place that already exists, toward which we are trudging—but as a place that we are creating with what we do and how we do it (or don't) in the present.
... Hope is that recognition and a commitment to the pursuit of the better possibilities within the spaciousness of the unknown, the not yet created." And there it is.

What Author Solnit does is always to present the case there is hope in a world presented to us by our media of informing and advising us as ever more hopeless, ever darker, a hellscape...and we bu it then despair of it being fixable. Despair immobilizes you. Sit quiet, no TV/internet noise, and observe the people around you. In the moments of life in the majority of the world where they are, people are carrying on being fathers and mothers and teachers and firemen and everything beyond...there is reason for hope in that, there are not roving gangs of armed bandits in the streets of New York or Peoria or Dallas.

Unhook yourself from believing news is The Truth, instead of the curated opinions that create profits by engaging you in a doom spiral that it, by design, is. Author Solnit will focus your attention on what work needs doing, to fix or repair the very real issues, problems, and do it without ignoring or sugarcoating the real, serious issues...climate change, official corruption...that exist.

It's the US midterm election today. No matter what happens in these elections, tomorrow's work will still need doing on every front from every last one of us, political agnostics/refuseniks or not. Feeding the hungry, cleaning the streets, the waterways, all of it still needs doing whoever happens to be in power.

Reading this book will remind you of what, and why, it's necessary to give your planet and your world the help and effort it needs, and you can give.

UNTOUCHABLE: How Powerful People Get Away With It, and why we need to make sure they don't again

UNTOUCHABLE: How Powerful People Get Away With It
ELIE HONIG
HarperCollins
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An exploration of America’s two-tier justice system, explaining how the rich, the famous, and the powerful— including, most notoriously, Donald Trump—manipulate the legal system to escape justice and get away with vast misdeeds

How does he get away with it? That question, more than any other, vexes observers of, and participants in, the American criminal justice process. How do powerful people weaponize their wealth, political power, and fame to beat the system? And how can prosecutors fight back?

In Untouchable, CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig exposes how the rich and powerful use the system to their benefit, revealing how notorious figures like Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby successfully evaded justice for decades. He demonstrates how the Trump children dodged a fraud indictment. He makes clear how countless CEOs and titans of Wall Street have been let off the hook, receiving financial penalties without suffering criminal consequences. This doesn’t happen by accident.

In this vital, incisive book, Honig explains how the system allows the powerful to become untouchable, takes us inside their heads, and offers solutions for making the system fairer and more honest, ensuring true justice for all—holding everyone, no matter their status, accountable for their criminal misdeeds.

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My Review: First, read this: "This is no defeatist eulogy for our justice system. This is, rather, a guide to navigate it. If we understand how bosses exploit systemic vulnerabilities, then we can meaningfully call upon the people who make the big decisions- primarily prosecutors- to fight back and pursue justice, no matter how daunting the challenge."

I'm sure every one of y'all can remember the Epstein Files by name. I'll wager far fewer can can summon a name or a picture of the figure(s) associated with the 2008 financial crash that very likely cost some of you a job, a home, your retirement savings; at the time all the focus was on people like Ben Bernanke and other high-minded banksters who switched to the government's side long enough to be sure there was no lasting damage to do it again when they changed sides back to banking. Because Epstein's name and his image dominate the perception of heinous crimes committed, there are zero other faces or names you're likely to put with the disgusting crime of trafficking young women to satisfy the Gross Old Pedophiles in their lustful desires' satisfaction...even if that meant dying for them. (Never happened, scream apologists and defenders, burying any mentions of a certain ranch in New Mexico tied to Epstein and its grisly murdered women's bodies. There's no coverage of investigation, their presence remains unexplained.)

Different crimes, same playbook. Distract attention, put a single face on crimes that harmed few in numbers and studiously work to keep faces out of sight when they could be attached to widespread harm. It's an old trick. The Mafia uses it, United Healthcare uses it, Paul Linebarger's post-Army intelligence life saw him publish Psychological Warfare in 1948, revised in 1954 (free Gutenberg download of that edition at the link), with many ideas for dirty tricks later developed into Mafia techniques. (Author Honig is an ex-prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, and he was involved in prosecutions of dozens of Mafia members, including capos and other high-ranking members; he's literally seen it all.)

You know what caused me to shelve this book for a couple years lest I have more strokes? Look into the Supreme Court's 8-0 decision (in a case litigated by Jack Smith) from 2016 to exonerate convicted bribe-taking Virginia governor Bob McDonnell from his crimes because the bribes were not in themselves official acts.

A Supreme Court ruling determining that taking a bribe is not an official act so it's not punishable. We will hear A LOT MORE ABOUT THAT in the next few years.

I'm putting this review up on Tuesday, Election Day 2026, because no matter what happens we as a Body Politic need to be informed and ready to see through the time-tested tactics that allow the guilty to go unpunished, whether legally or by the public exercising their inalienable right to talk about whatever factual matter they care to discuss, whether in public or in private. It is time to make the world hotter for the people who, by words and (mis)deeds, too hot for us all to survive. Talk about facts: El Ni&ntil;o is biting, and climate change is making the naturally occurring event worse.

WHAT NOW: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future, powerful alignment with anti-imperialism's historic chorus

WHAT NOW: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future
TAREQ BACONI
Washington Square Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 3 November 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A soul-stirring philosophical and political treatise on what liberation for Palestine—and all people—will look like in the twenty-first century, in the vein of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, and Edward Said.

Palestine is a litmus test for our global future. The ongoing genocide is showcasing what it means for Palestinians to be taken to the brink of extermination. The outcome will have repercussions that will go beyond the Middle East, extending outward across the world, and will determine whether the struggle for decolonization will succeed or fail, whether our world will move toward collective freedom or fascism.

Drawing from Tareq Baconi’s extensive academic and organizing work with Palestinian and international activists, and from decades of long-standing strategies, What Now distills three strategic principles for a free Palestine to guide activists and allies: refuse the prospect of a divided homeland, reclaim the historic revolutionary politics at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, and decompose Zionism.

Imagining a free Palestine is a political act of resistance. This is not the same as turning back the clock to pre-1948, Baconi writes, but a new struggle for a just future. A free Palestine would heal the wounds left in the wake of the Second World War, by challenging and upturning the racism, colonialism, and imperialism that continue to animate global politics. It will tilt the world off its axis, away from annihilatory racism toward justice and peace.

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My Review: A grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa who were forced out of their homes in 1948, Author Tareq has lived in a diaspora much like the Jews have done since Rome evicted them in the first century CE. It is foundational to his identity as he's lived in foreign places like Ammann, Jordan, and Beirut, Lebanon. It might just be that these foreign cities would not feel like home for a young queer man, regardless of his family origins; but an out queer Palestinian can expect to be an outsider.

A lifetime spent Othered has made Author Tareq an activist to his bones. I suspect that would always have been his fate, but his need to usher justice into the conversation and into the world is the driver behind the decolonial jeremiad of this book. It is simply incredible that, as the English were being forced out of India, they were setting up a Zionist settler-colonial state in Palestine as part of the world's attempt to make amends to the Jews for the Holocaust. Why they didn't simply hand over Austria and Bavaria to the Jews, and shoo the Germans out, I have never understood. Those were the cradles of Nazism. The Palestinians did nothing to aid the Holocaust that I've ever heard of...why punish them?

Ahem. Back to the book.

Given Islamic polities were generally more accepting of Jewish populations in their midst, there is no reason to imagine the cohabitation of Jewish and Palestinian Muslim would not have worked fine apart from the rise of the apartheid state post-1948. I think Author Tareq is on to something when he says the return of Palestine to its original people is the opening salvo of a second wave of decolonization, contra the United States' hegemonic control of the world's economies and militaries. The recent war on Iran, and its startling evidence of the loss of that hegemony, makes this the perfect time for readers on all sides of the political argument to read about how the idea of fairness and justice can re-enter the convesation.

I guarantee you, the US reader, will not like everything in this book. It is entirely sure that you won't agree with all his poposals...I didn't either. But all of us in the world need to know what all sides of the questions facing us in the world think, feel, want...and how they came to those ideas...as we decide how to steer the world with our votes, our money, our time and attention.

Starting here is painless. Author Tareq writes, and thinks, at a high level.

WHY NOT MODERATION?: Letters to Young Radicals, using Rilke's model to equally good effect

WHY NOT MODERATION?: Letters to Young Radicals
AURELIAN CRAIUTU
Cambridge University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Moderation is often presented as a simple virtue for lukewarm and indecisive minds, searching for a fuzzy center between the extremes. Not surprisingly, many politicians do not want to be labelled 'moderates' for fear of losing elections.

Why Not Moderation? challenges this conventional image and shows that moderation is a complex virtue with a rich tradition and unexplored radical sides. Through a series of imaginary letters between a passionate moderate and two young radicals, the book outlines the distinctive political vision undergirding moderation and makes a case for why we need this virtue today in America. Drawing on clearly written and compelling sources, Craiutu offers an opportunity to rethink moderation and participate in the important public debate on what kind of society we want to live in. His book reminds us that we cannot afford to bargain away the liberal civilization and open society we have inherited from our forefathers.

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My Review: In our time of polarization and extremism, being "moderate" is seen as synonymous with being indecisive, wishy-washy, uncommitted or non-committal; likely to be an untrustyworthy ally against the Hated "Them." I'm guilty of seeing the moderate in this light myownself, so I get it. I chose to read this political version of Letters to a Young Poet for that reason.

It begins by outlining moderation as a state or condition of its own, not merely something that is not radical. Like its cousin "liberalism" that shares it desuetude, moderation is a central virtue of inclusivity. Author Aurelian makes the point in his tendentious letters to the imaginary young radicals that the society within which they exercise freedom of conscience safely was founded on principle of moderating passions through discussion.

Civil discourse is both senses of civil before it can be effective. In advocating for the benefits of moderation, Author Aurelian offers competing conflation/separation paradigms when each suits his purpose; he seems to conflate throughut the existence of moderation with the ability to compromise and creates straw men to suit the needs of the moment in his argument. I say this not because I disagree, but because I know some academic or another is going to point out the "structural deficiency" of the technique. That might well be relevant when a book is written for a panel of dissertation judges. This is much more a book meant to reach the recent graduate from either secondary (better) or college (good) education. I doubt it will do much to persuade radicalized people. It is a psychic vaccine against the seductive allure of being Right that is so extremely addictive.

I'd encourage my readers to think about gifting this book to grands/niblings/young people between sixteen and twenty-four or so. We need, as a society as well as in our office as Old Authority Figures, to damp down the terrible destructive misuse of young people's passionate feelings. Providing them with an alternative that is not the squishy bland tedious thing they're taught it is, we stand a chance of keeping the best of our present society.

When the alternative is clashing authoritarianisms, the urgency becomes clear to y'all...or so I hope, since it only just happened to me.

IS IT TOO LATE TO MAKE A RUN FOR IT?, Dench at her storytelling best

IS IT TOO LATE TO MAKE A RUN FOR IT?
JUDI DENCH with Brendan O'Hea
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery 3 November 2026

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea chat about her life on the stage, on the screen, and, above all, behind the scenes…

In Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea take us on a heartfelt and hilarious tour of her extraordinary life and career. From growing up in York and being miffed at not getting the part of Mary in the school Nativity play, to playing before sold-out houses on Broadway and in London’s West End, she’s done it all. She walked the red carpets of Hollywood, turned James Bond’s M into the most astute, unflinching Head of MI6 anyone could ever have imagined, and won an Oscar, a Tony, Golden Globes, Oliviers, and BAFTAs along the way.

Yet despite the accolades, she has been accompanied by doubt. From the movie producer who said she had “everything wrong” with her face, to the theatre director who advised her against doing sitcom. Is it any wonder she leaves a bag by the rehearsal room door in case she has to make a run for it?

But stepping out of her comfort zone has been Judi’s guiding principle and in Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, she reveals all to Brendan - her friend and writing partner. She tells stories of pranks (both onstage and off), dissects her greatest screen roles, shares tales of her joyful marriage to actor Michael Williams, and talks about her passion for nature and animals.

As told to Brendan O’Hea, this is Judi Dench’s story—funny, honest, intimate, enlightening, surprising, moving, and deeply inspiring. Over ninety years in the making, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It? is the story of the world’s most beloved actor.

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My Review: The key word in the publisher's synopsis above is "chat"...it is a delight to be with Judi and Brendan as they sit at a comfy table, pretty flowers in the middle, an endlessly full teapot and cakestand between them, and reminisce, gossip, rehash, generally chat about Dame Judi's life and times. What times! Enough Oliviers to bowl into...BAFTAs galore...a Tony, an Oscar, some Golden Globes. Considering her career began seventy years ago, one would think she is living out her nineties in the comfort and quiet she's earned.

Nope. The lady says of that idea: "Don't retire, do not go gentle, and don't even think about going quietly."

Absolutely.

I'm extra impressed by this memoir's title because Dame Judi still suffers from performance anxiety, which leads to her keeping her bag by the rehearsal room door in case she is compelled to run! She puts it succinctly: "Every time I'm offered a new job it's like starting from scratch." That's a daunting thought for someone a lot younger, and with better eyesight, than Dame Judi has (macular degeneration takes more and more acuity as time passes). Nevertheless, she persists. It is so very heartening to me to hear this from a still-working ninety-one year old. While it is no longer safe for her to be on stages live or for films, she has transitioned into voice acting, with 2026's The Magic Faraway Tree's fridge being her latest role.

In going round the houses the structure of this memoir is more inviting, more personal than a chronological autobiography could ever be. It gives her space to discuss the late Michael Williams, husband for thirty years, partner to this day through fathering Finty (their daughter) and thus grandfathering Sam, her adored...adorable!...grandson. It's the best way for her to remember her departed friends like Maggie Smith, fellow actor and fellow Dame; her associations with renowned director Sam Mendes, musical legend Stephen Sondheim; her discomfort at doing a nude scene with Jeremy Irons in Langrishe, Go Down (though it doesn't keep her from discussing him!); all in an organic, messy, fun way.

Her sense of humor, bawdy and earthy and honest, has her reveling in how she's been able to have fun in her work by playing pranks on fellow cast and others. It's obvious she succeeds at life and at memoir for the same reasons: do it, go all-in, do the work and the fun with equal commitment. Her late-life partnership with a conservationist, David Mills, is less discussed, though as it is a current relationship with a living person this made sense to me; it isn't ignored or minimized, it's discreet. A classy way to behave as one would expect from Dame Judi.

Fellow actor Brendan O’Hea, in his role as catalyst of and amanuensis for her reminiscences, served the same function in 2023's Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent with the same aplomb and finesse. As a fellow actor, thus one familiar with the stage and the world of the theater, so it was predictable that their chats would go into details of theater life that might be of lesser interest for casual fans. His friendship with Dame Judi makes perfect sense given his lengthy involvement with Shakespeare's Globe, the theater and the acting company. They're very easy with each other because they love so much of the same cultural furniture...easy to find a nice place to sit and talk.

We're very lucky indeed they've invited us to join them again.

ARCHITECTS OF AUTHORITARIANISM: The Claremont Institute and the Making of the MAGA New Right

ARCHIECTS OF AUTHORITARIANISM: The Claremont Institute and the Making of the MAGA New Right
F. DARRELL MUNSELL
University Press of Kansas (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The eye-opening story of how a conservative think tank of political philosophers dedicated to the founding principles of the United States became the base of operations for Trump’s agenda of destroying civil rights and undoing American democracy.

From the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and the Federalist Society’s decades-long campaign to shape the judiciary, private think tanks have long been the shadowy intellectual engine driving conservative politics. But the Claremont Institute remains the most consequential organization in shaping the MAGA agenda. Founded in southern California in 1979, Claremont’s original mission was “to restore the principles of the American Founding to its rightful, preeminent authority” in American society. Now, historian Darrell Munsell uncovers how the Claremont Institute went from being a home for erudite political philosophers to serving as the base camp for the January 6 insurrection, Project 2025, and President Trump’s authoritarian agenda.

The institute’s political activism began with its endorsement of Donald Trump for president in 2016, followed quickly by its entry into the cultural battles against Black Lives Matter, multiculturalism, critical race theory, and the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in public universities, government agencies, and commercial enterprises. By the end of Trump’s first term, Claremont believed that “wokeism” was an existential threat to the Founders’ Constitution and was fighting to win the culture war at any cost—including attempting to reverse the results of the 2020 election.

In the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat, Claremont lurched further rightward toward populism, Christian nationalism, and illiberalism. Led by John Eastman, Charles Kesler, Thomas D. Klingenstein, and a new generation of young, conservative activists—some from the furthest fringes of the far-right—the Claremont Institute is shaping the movement of National Conservatism with its devotion to replacing constitutional democracy with an authoritarian system of government. Claremont joined forces with the Heritage Foundation and other groups to draft Project 2025, the now-infamous blueprint for the second Trump administration.

Munsell’s revelatory history of the Claremont Institute pulls back the curtain on one of the most influential organizations in American politics and a driving force of the MAGA ascendency. A must read for anyone seeking to understand the hidden forces behind Trump’s agenda.

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My Review: Founded in 1979, the Claremont Graduate University professor Harry Jaffa with four students from his tenure at Claremont Men's College. Shortly after the school became coeducational, he led the establishment of the think tank, naming it "Claremont" despite it having no official ties to the conservative school consortium he left; the name does not reflect the Institute's present headquarters location in Uplands, California. In fact neither the school he left not the city the Institute is located in make any mention in their Wikipedia pages of Jaffa himself or the Claremont Institute. Telling, no?

The Institute was founded to provide the burgeoning conservative movement of Reagan/Falwell/Dobson times with intellectual underpinnings rooted in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. I will leave you to slug your way through verbiage like "paleoconservative versus neoconservative" and a most rigororous discussion about how the 1980s and 1990s were watershed moments for conswervative political philosophy. The radical right was born in places like the Claremont Institute, perhaps even principally there; reading about them made every ounce of my intolerance for this brummagem "philosophy" peddled by this Institute awaken and roar in blood-pressure spiking rage.

I am not neutral on this subject, this entire topic of human endeavor, but virulently opposed to it, so I took over five weeks to read the book. I feared for my brain's health more than once. As Author Munsell details how the Institute's truly reprehensible prioritization of cultural issues particularly their obsession with dismantling the teaching of Black history, as well as other elements of educational policy it saw as "left-wing indoctrination in our schools", he pays careful attention to explaining the Institute's complete domination over mainstream Republican Party economic policy.

It is genuinely sick-making for me to read that.

I did not vet all 600+ endnotes, because why? This is Kansas' most respected intellectual institution publishing a book criticizing fellow conservatives. I trust their ducks are in a row. I did very much appreciate Author Munsell's calm and even tone as he catalogs things done, things taught and "supported, that would inspire me to revive the jeremiad.

The Institute was a big contributor to Project 2025, which apparently y'all didn't read carefully enough...they laid out the agenda that Trump's second administrationused to set policies. which, Author Munsell, an historian by trade, says these policies have taken an increasingly authoritarian turn, which is really really worrying coming from a guy who achieved emeritus status at West Texas A&M.

Author Munsell, then, is to be reliably considered a more conservative person than I am, so when he contends (with supporting examples and endnotes) that both Trump and the Claremont Institute have embraced the notion that "...extreme, even anti-democratic measures {are} needed to achieve their policy goals," I read between the lines and start to feel very afraid. It's clear Author Munsell's understanding of the historical context of modern conservatism that informs his worries for our country's future as a democracy. He's written a nuanced examination of an important player on the paleoconservative side. It is also an accessible text that's supported by the previously mentioned mountain of endnotes. Architects of Authoritarianism: The Claremont Institute and the Making of the MAGA New Right is both an exhaustive, definitive history of the Claremont Institute, and damning indictment of the modern right (perhaps unintentionally) from within.

DECOLONIZING WEALTH, Second Edition: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance, & WEALTH SUPREMACY: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises

WEALTH SUPREMACY: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises
MARJORIE KELLY (foreword by Edgar Villanueva)
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A powerful analysis of how the bias towards wealth that is woven into the very fabric of American capitalism is damaging people, the economy, and the planet, and what the foundations of a new economy could be.This bold manifesto exposes seven myths underlying wealth supremacy, the bias that institutionalizes infinite extraction of wealth by and for the wealthy, and is the hidden force behind economic injustice, the climate crisis, and so many other problems of our day:

The Myth of Maximizing: No amount of wealth is ever enough.

The Myth of Fiduciary Duty: Corporate managers’ most sacred duty is to expand capital.

The Myth of Corporate Governance: Corporate membership must be reserved for capital alone.

The Myth of the Income Statement: Income to capital must always be increased, while income to labor must always be decreased.

The Myth of Materiality: Profit—material gain—alone is real, while social and environmental damages are not.

The Myth of Takings: The first duty of government must be the protection of private property.

The Myth of the Free Market: There should be no limits on the field of action of corporations and capital.

Kelly argues instead for the democratization of ownership: public ownership of vital services, worker-owned businesses, and more. And she sketches the outlines of a non-extractive capitalism that would be subordinate to the public interest. This is an ambitious reimagining of the very foundations of our economy and society.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: My essential problem with the thinking about climate change in the world today...and a lot of thinking is taking place, including bolstering "it's inevitable, we're doomed, nothing can fix this"...is that it's successful at only one thing: obscuring the causal role untrammelled, unregulated capitalism has played in causing it in the first place.

Author Kelly rips that band-aid off, and then dismantles capitalism's supporting mythology. It's thorough. it's detailed, and it's endnoted. There are also resources given, so there is no lack of detail to feed your curiosity and bolster your ability to argue the topic with a friend of a differing opinion.

I suspect the prose will be a sticking point for many of y'all. The scholarly will want the tedious, excruciatingly boring details spelled out in Scholarspeak, dismissing this as written for a magazine; the magazine-reading folk will seriously exoerience MEGO on every page.

What I'll offer is this: If a reader in the MEGO population will read one chapter at a time, on one topic of pernicious misdirection or manipulation of your attention away from alternative modes of action, then sit to really *think* about it for a day, looking up stuff you need to, then move forward (or quit) you'll get more out of it. Worst-case reading ie picking up a sample and throwing up your hands because it's talking about stuff you've been told you don't understand, will short-change you. Author Kelly does a really good job of explaining the complicated ideas in an urgent way...communicating urgency, not sounding breathlessly upset, to be clear...and it's literally existential to our society to find new ways and new thoughts to guide us before the climate really gets weird.

We can't stop what's already in progress. We can and should and must act now to save millions, billions, of lives even at the expense of lifestyles.

Please, whenever you think "too hard" and walk away, imagine firing a gun into a crowd: You'll hit someone, no knowing who, and deliberately, negligently change or end their life.

The stakes are that high.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

DECOLONIZING WEALTH, Second Edition: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
EDGAR VILLANUEVA (foreword by Bishop William J. Barber II)
Berrett-Koehler Publishers (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Decolonizing Wealth is a provocative analysis of the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance. Award-winning philanthropy executive Edgar Villanueva draws from the traditions from the Native way to prescribe the medicine for restoring balance and healing our divides.

Though it seems counterintuitive, the philanthropic industry has evolved to mirror colonial structures and reproduces hierarchy, ultimately doing more harm than good. After 14 years in philanthropy, Edgar Villanueva has seen past the field's glamorous, altruistic façade, and into its shadows: the old boy networks, the savior complexes, and the internalized oppression among the "house slaves," and those select few people of color who gain access. All these funders reflect and perpetuate the same underlying dynamics that divide Us from Them and the haves from have-nots. In equal measure, he denounces the reproduction of systems of oppression while also advocating for an orientation towards justice to open the floodgates for a rising tide that lifts all boats. In the third and final section, Villanueva offers radical provocations to funders and outlines his Seven Steps for Healing.

With great compassion—because the Native way is to bring the oppressor into the circle of healing—Villanueva is able to both diagnose the fatal flaws in philanthropy and provide thoughtful solutions to these systemic imbalances. Decolonizing Wealth is a timely and critical book that preaches for mutually assured liberation in which we are all inter-connected.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The US midterm elections are 3 November 2026, four days from now. No matter how they turn out...please, please turn out to vote!...there are issues now on blatant display that need to be addressed. Awareness of these issues, the extreme polarization of wealth centrally, is higher than it's been in over a generation.

You won't buy and read this book before the election. It's a topic that, now foregrounded in the awareness of many, needs thinking about as we head into the 2028 election without an incumbent. The old saying, "think before you speak; read before you think" has absolutely always been true. It is urgent now. What kind of world are you hoping to live in, from 2028 to your personal end? You should always vote with that in mind. The next few years are your chance to get ideas that resonate with you, then look for candidates running for office that best align with that world coming into being.

Edgar Villanueva, a charitable foundation consultant on Indigenous affairs and enrolled in the Lumbee tribe, offers a careful consideration of the manifold and manifest failings of a philanthropic solution to economic justice. As a Lumbee man he has seen philanthropies and social programs fail in their efforts to stem the submergence of Indigenous Americans into systemic poverty. Author Villanueva contends, with highly persuasive arguments, that this is all part of a system designed to support colonial, extractive economic activity. It is inherently racist, as it is controlled exclusively by white men, whether by birth or by training.

"If we are to escape the insidious hold racism has on our society, we must be intentional about truth and reconciliation. In Decolonizing Wealth, Edgar {Villanueva} lays a foundation that not only explains the history of wealth and racism but also provides a pathway to healing that we all need," reads Ibram X. Kendi's (National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist blurb for this read. It is a better distillation of Author Villanueva's purpose and intent than anything I could come up with. I know that I needed to see the techniques of wealth and resource extraction put into clear structures so I could perceive them as the problems for economic and social justice I want to live with for my remaining days.

It won't change my vote in 2026 because it changed me in 2022 when I read the book. I did not publish a review before the 2024 election because the fix was already in. Now is the time to buy or check out from the library this kind of reading. We need all hands on deck. We need informed, appalled, engaged citizens to *act* on their dissatisfaction, their offended sense of fairness and morality.

#ReadingIsResistance because and when it leads to actions. Like voting.

AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America

AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN: The Extraordinary Life of Lillian Smith, the Southerner Who Defied Jim Crow America
KERI LEIGH MERRITT
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A revelatory and immersive biography of a white Southern woman who was a key figure in the early civil rights movement, devoting her life to ending segregation in America only to be forgotten by history.

Born in Florida to a religious family, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: She lived with her lover, Paula, first running a summer camp in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, and then a magazine, devoted to creating a new vision of the South, one that passionately championed equality and integration. Smith published Black and white writers, a rare feat in those days, and herself wrote articles instructing white Southerners on why they shouldn’t support segregation—Smith firmly believed racism hurt white Americans, too. In 1944 she published a bestselling novel, Strange Fruit, which became a national sensation and was banned in Boston and Detroit. The FBI began a file on her, she received death threats, and her house caught fire three times, twice intentionally, resulting in the loss of all her works-in-progress and her correspondence.

Undaunted, she continued her ardent fight against segregation, maintaining correspondence with some of the great leaders of her day, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King Jr, W.E.B Dubois, Paul Robeson, and Pauli Murray. She continued to fight for both civil and human rights throughout the 1960s, helping nurture many of the activists in SNCC and CORE, only to succumb to cancer in 1966.

Drawing on previously unpublished archival research, and with a modern appreciation of Smith’s complex identity, An Inconvenient Woman is the definitive account of a woman who defied all expectations and dedicated her life to racial equality.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: We need another Lillian Smith after the upcoming midterms, regardless of the outcome. We need...have always needed...many Lillian Smiths, people willing to buck their systemic privilege to join the struggle for equity and equality.

She came by it honestly. Raised in a Methodist household that practiced (in theory) "love, acceptance, and understanding," Smith spent time doing missionary work in China where the actions of the white people often resembled their behaviors in her Georgia homeland. Awareness, once begun as a habit of mind, can not turn off or cease until death. Even a serious personal campaign to ignore awareness of injustice..."go along to get along"...is not turning awareness off, merely ignoring it. Lillian Smith remained fully aware of what she had seen, neither ignoring or avoiding her her perception guiding her actions in daily life. She was born into privilege, into a family whose wealth...in spite of their avowed christianity...was based on the exactions of slavery, and she was born with a voice.

Beginning at roughly the same moment as her forties, Lillian Smith began to pour out eloquent, cogent words against segregation and its legal and illegal rules, laws, customs. She and her lifelong partner, Paula Snelling, published a literary magazine called various things over its decade of issues. The women accepted submissions from Black writers, and submissions that quietly dealt with same-sex attraction. It became Lillian's conviction that she needed to write honestly about a miscegenous relationship. Thus was born her three-million-copy seller, Strange Fruit. (She insisted the title was unrelated to Billie Holiday's hit song {my favorite version from 1959 linked} but...)

Lillian Smith kept her romantic partnership with Paula Snelling masked until her death. It only made sense for them to do so in the Jim Crow South, riddled with hatred and violence as it was. They would've been in grave danger of death by mob. It was a worse time than any we've seen in the US until the invention of ICEstapo. It's been sixty years since Lillian Smith died of cancer. I like to think that her lesbian reincarnation was born on her centenary in 1997, and is preaparing to burst into outraged fury like Lillian Smith did, to goad decent but lazy or fearful people into action.

We need her. I think her biographer here has made a very good story out of Lillian Smith's life, filled with citations and with them, evidence of how important and inspiring Lillian Smith was to people across the spectrum of US society.

OBSOLETE: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us―and How to Stop It, BOO!!

OBSOLETE: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us―and How to Stop It
GARRISON LOVELY
O/R Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The biggest companies in history are racing to build a machine that replaces human labor—all of it. And, as this provocative new book insists, the only thing that can stop them is us.

Many people today don’t get further than regarding AI as a boondoggle—a new shiny shareholding for techno-capitalists to sink their cash into. Obsolete sees something more sinister, not to say scream-out-loud alarming: A tiny group of people, backed by the richest companies in the world, is attempting to render humanity obsolete.

Their project is unimaginably vast in scope. What we previously thought of as big—the Gilded Age monopolies, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program—doesn’t even come close to capturing its size. Almost none of us want this vast transformation to succeed. Yet it is proceeding virtually unchallenged. Why? Because we don’t know it’s happening, we don’t believe it will work, or we don’t think we can stop it.

Obsolete investigates each of these reasons for inaction and brings together key information from top researchers, advocates, and industry insiders to show why we really can’t afford to sit this one out.

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My Review: Pause your reflexive eyerolling at the topic of AI's existential hsrms for a moment. Before acting on your "I am SO.SICK. of this scare-tactic crap!" and scrolling away, look at the author's bio as provided by the publisher:

Garrison Lovely is an AI expert and freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. In 2025, he was identified by the Pulitzer Center {on Crisis Reporting} as an AI journalist worth following. Lovely is known for his cover stories in The Nation ("Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower") and Jacobin ("Can Humanity Survive AI?"), as well as writing in The New York Times, BBC, Nature, MIT Technology Review, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, TIME, The Guardian, The Verge, and elsewhere. He was previously a Reporter in Residence at the Omidyar Network.

This is a very serious person's resume. Author Lovely is, for my money, more credible on the subject at hand because of his "Road to Damascus" moment while working for McKinsey. His evident chops in journalistic thinking as applied to the social issues raised by new, fast-developing technologies mean that he puts topics into understandable combinations. He treats the reader as you would an intelligent non-expert, going to the trouble of explaining his parallelisms. It gives the anxious reader a chance to see unsensationally why the relationships of technology to humanity are developing the way they are.

When heading into a frontier area of science, technology, and culture, some degree of fuzziness is inevitable. Author Lovely distinguishes among who is being fuzzy of necessity (techologists,researchers on creating AI technology), who is using fuzziness to grift (banksters, CEOs), and who's using fuzziness to distract everyone else from a social-restructuring agenda (tech bros, Aynholes, fascists, et alii). It's a big part of this book just to explain who's got this technology in its sights to misuse it for appalling and unprecedented control over us, the ordinary people.

I was sobered, alarmed, and angered by the sheer scope of the latter group's ambitions for controlling us. It truly is unprecedented what AI by its mere existence as an attainable technology has elicited from the base of these people's very base personalities, and let's not shy away fro the calling it the darkness of their souls. It pays to remember, when contemplating this subject, that "They" are not all the way to true AI...yet. There are institutions and laws we can enact that will slow down application of AI in the real world, and that must be part of any concerned person's agenda when voting on Tuesday, 3 November 2026 in the US.

But the fight to save our literal freedom as human beings can't be thought of as complete until we come up with ways, enforceable, verifiable, visible ways to use this technology...we can't turn it off, as proved by the hugging-face incident, which Open AI itself (see article at link) thinks is a problem and admits to the validity of people's concerns, demonstrated. One of the most worrying yet most heartening sections of the book is "Too Big to Guardrail". It outlines the complexity of oversight on the frontiers of society and technology. Author Lovely proposes using US anti-trust laws to accomplish the purpose. I'll confess that I think y'all won't read the details, I had to force myself to because the amount of googling I had to do was breathtaking, so let me put it in a nutshell for you: I'm on his side, and following his note-links never took me to any weird, out-there places with fringe ideas. Everything Author Lovely proposes can be argued from serious establishment principles to be implemented in existing frameworks of law and precedent.

That means it could realistically be sold to the pooh-bahs of the world. No factor of this argument as he made it heartened me more. No hectoring, out-there (but correct IMO) newfangled thinking needed. The Economic Royalists will fight dirty, hard, and long to stop anything from getting in the way of their greed being primary to the world's societies running...but the way Author Lovely lays out to defeat them can work.

We need to gain power in US politics, yes; but we need to get people concerned about the actual survival of people, not only societal structures, to support this agenda. Author Lovely is sharp-tongued in his criticisms of both US political parties, with truth and justice on his side. I think, however, many readers on both sides of this divide will switch off because the tone he uses is strong. Advocating for change is never effective when done politely, far as I know. Please look past any hurt feelings to see what is presented, and decide if it is a solution you can support.

Then it's time to do the work of supporting it.

THE KOA KANE SERIES: 4 & 5 – Treachery Times Two & Retribution plus The Complete Koa Kane Hawaiʻian Mystery Series Books 1 - 5

TREACHERY TIMES TWO (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #4)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Secret military weapons, saboteurs, a volcanic eruption—and a probe of Chief Detective Koa Kane’s criminal past

On Hawaiʻi Island, a volcanic earthquake disrupts an abandoned cemetery—unearthing the body of a woman mutilated by her killer to conceal her identity.

The search for her identity leads Hilo, Hawaii’s Chief Detective Koa Kane to a mysterious defense contractor with a politically connected board of directors. Defying his chief of police, Koa pursues the killer, only to become entangled in an FBI espionage investigation of Deimos, a powerful secret military weapon. Is the FBI telling all it knows—or does it, too, have a duplicitous agenda?

At the same time, Koa—a cop who thirty years earlier killed his father’s nemesis and covered up the murder—faces exposure by the dead man’s grandson. Koa is forced to investigate his own homicide, and step by step, his cover-up unravels until another man is falsely accused.

Can Koa stand by and let an innocent man pay for his crime?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Chickens always come home to roost, the damned things. We've spent three stories getting to know Koa, getting to see his complete willingness to follow a trail to terrible destinations, awful and condign punishments meted out to guilty people who thought they'd got aqay with it, whatever "it" was in that case.

And now the decision to find the guilty is the easiest it will ever be.

Look in the mirror.

His murder of his father's enemy, covered up for decades and the guilt used to power his investigations that prevent others from escaping justice is now a bill come due, a debt to be settled. While investigating his regular job's latest murder...a woman who wanted to disappear, not die horribly, still less have her body clumsily disposed of, but you lie down with tech scum that serve the military death machine you don't always get back up. Her mad coding skills were ultimately a defense contractor's problem as her Hawaiian-sovereignty ties were most exceptionally sus. An ever-expanding, ever-intensifying ring of ripples has his Chief of Police getting pressure from above, from the sides, and now from Koa humself: he'll finish this investigation, he'll see justice served, and he won't take any steps to hide from his decades-old crime and its consequences any longer.

This would be disastrous, because it would pave the way to potentially letting Muskolini-in-all-but-name to oil his way out of taking the blame for the dead woman's demise. This would be disastrous because Koa is not a criminal despite having committed that murder.

At no time does the tension let up. At no time do we feel sure things will be all right...which means Koa gets away with literal murder. We're suspended with the Sword of Damocles on a thread growing far too thin and way too stressed under all the weight on it.

I'll just remind y'all there's a book five and slide on outta here.

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RETRIBUTION (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #5)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: As people around him come under attack, Chief Detective Koa Kāne wonders if he might be the real target

In the back alley of a bar on Hawaiʻi's Big Island, a young man is found stabbed to death. When Hilo Chief Detective Koa Kane begins investigating the crime, the murder weapon is recovered only a few feet away from the body. Crime scene technicians find fingerprints on the knife—they are a perfect match for Koa's younger brother, Ikaika.

As the brothers scramble to prove Ikaika's innocence, another crime sends shockwaves through the Hilo police force. A sniper tries to take out Makanui, Koa's closest colleague. As Koa tries to figure out whether these crimes are linked, the sinister force continues their killing spree, threatening Koa and his loved ones at every turn.

Could Koa be the real target? If so, who is behind this trail of retribution? With his own secret criminal past, Koa confronts an all-out offensive against those closest to him and his police force to which he has devoted his life. As the bodies pile up, Koa finds himself the ultimate target of a ruthless adversary and must risk it all to survive.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A more reflective tone animates this story, last in the series...to date. Koa's day job hands him some fairly sobering food for thought. First his reformed ex-con brother is implicated in a murder; then a close friend on the police force is targeted by a sniper. In very close succession.

It is, after recent events and a long and successful police detective career ("As was his habit at a crime scene, Koa let his eyes scan the corpse absorbing every detail, no matter how gruesome. He called it listening to the dead, trying to envision their last moments. It sometimes yielded important clues and always empowered Koa's empathy for the victims"), feeling as though more chickens might be on the way to the roost.

This is where I get off the bus, Driver McCaw. I won't let anyone have their ticket punched too soon at my hands. I very much hope y'all will get the Koa fever this #Deathtober.

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THE COMPLETE KOA KĀNE HAWAIʻIAN MYSTERY SERIES: Books 1 – 5 ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing
$2.99 ebook, available now

All five in one epub file for $2.99 is the best deal of them all.

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THE KOA KANE SERIES: 1 – 3...Death of a Messenger; Off the Grid; & Fire and Vengeance

DEATH OF A MESSENGER (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #1)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Someone’s found a body at Pohakuloa, the army’s live-fire training area. Bearing all the marks of ancient ritual sacrifice—the murder is the grisliest of Detective Koa Kane's career.

The bizarre case draws Koa deep into his own Hawaiian roots. As Koa probes the victim’s past, he must sort through a rich roster of suspects—grave robbers, native activists, thieves, and star gazers. Koa surmounts a host of obstacles as he pursues the murderer—an incompetent local medical examiner, hostility from haoles (Westerners) and sovereignty advocates, and myriad lies.

Did the victim stumble upon a gang of high-tech archaeological thieves? Or did he learn a secret so shocking it cost him his life and put others, too, in mortal danger? Will Hilo’s most respected native detective catch this fiend in time, or will the killer strike again—with even deadlier consequences?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Pohakuloa Live Firing Range near Hilo, Hawaiʻi, is a place men go to practice their killing techniques, but not a place where dead men are usually found. This day is the exception.

The dead man is not military, so the nearest civilian authority is called to the scene. Hilo detective Koa Kane gets the job, seniority demands it; after, of course, the Army certifies the crime scene is free of live munitions. Koa starts with the victim's identity...no mean feat, with the grotesque and detailed damage done to him. From there a truly vast web of interconnected lines of relationships, a cast of what feels like dozens but isn't quite, and a lot of the stuff of Koa's ordinary life get chucked at the reader's head. Every step of the way Hilo is a palpable presence ("Far off to the west, trails of vaporous mist played eerily over the deeply shadowed valley where night had already fallen bewtween the Hawaiian mountains. Across the channel, Haleakala on Maui seemed to rise from the mists of some unseen netherworld. Hues of red, orange, yellow and pink glorified the darkening sky"), enough description given to bring the reder to the place the action's happening but never enough to make us feel we could get off a plane, into a car, and drive there without a map app. (Thank goodness, as I was not in the mood for that!)

As book one in a series I expect as author's hobbyhorses to show up. I'd say they did: Hawaiʻian culture, history, and archaeology, astronomy, a strong focus on Native Hawaiʻian rights and political grievances, and to my disappointment a condescending attitude towards fragile, pretty "girls."

Exercise tolerance for that, and escape to a truly fascinating place is on tap. A decent mystery with a lot to say; more will be sought by me!

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OFF THE GRID (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #2)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing(non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Perfect for fans of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux

A scrap of cloth fluttering in the wind leads Hilo police Chief Detective Koa Kāne to the tortured remains of an unfortunate soul, left to burn in the path of an advancing lava flow. For Koa, it’s the second gruesome homicide of the day, and he soon discovers the murders are linked. These grisly crimes on Hawaiʻi’s Big Island could rewrite history—or cost Chief Detective Koa Kāne his career.

The dead, a reclusive couple living off the grid, turn out to be mysterious fugitives. The CIA, the Chinese government, and the Defense Intelligence Agency attempt to thwart Koa’s investigation and obscure the victims’ true identities. Undeterred by mounting political pressure, Koa pursues the truth only to find himself drawn into a web of international intrigue.

While Koa investigates, the Big Island scrambles to prepare for the biggest and most explosive political rally in its history. Despite police resources stretched to the breaking point, Koa uncovers a government conspiracy so shocking its exposure topples senior officials far beyond Hawaiʻi’s shores.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Koa Kāne is a grouchy mensch. He looks at the obstructive efforts of people enmeshed in concerns that a detective with compassion and justice as his moral poles and can't be bothered to respect their shibboleths. Two people are dead. Their deaths were not natural or kind. He feels it incumbent on himself to make the guilty parties in this dreadful death-fest accountable. What could the dead guy possibly have done to merit someone immersing him in Kilauea's ever-flowing lava?!

No one will make it easy, as he learns when visiting the scene of a woman's death for the first time and damn near dying as the truck that hit the victim's car seems to cause a nearby vehicle to explode out of nowhere. He survives but that will sure as hell get a man's undivided attention after the murder by lava.

Establishing the link between them accomplished it becomes clearer that these victims were in some giant, far-reaching trouble involving international espionage, political skulduggery, and a side helping of maybe terrorism? The sheer amount of overt discouragement applied to Koa by local poerbrokers and the various security conccerns surrounding a governor's race rally being held in Koa's patch means his signature stubborn refusal to stop when told to is high-risk behavior.

Hawaiʻian indigenous culture, language, and history are present in this story though, as expected, there are only tenuous links to the highly populated story for much of it. I can't give perfect scoring to the story because some characters came and went before I could even figure out what the heck they had to do with anything (not much) and most of those were among the Hawaiʻian characters...well...at least I felt less annoyed by the misogyny. Because there were fewer women.

Well worth considering in #Deathtober reading days.

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FIRE AND VENGEANCE (Koa Kāne Hawaiʻian Mystery #3)
ROBERT McCAW
Oceanview Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$3.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A heinous conspiracy—a volcano exacting revenge—an island paradise in anguish Having killed his father's nemesis and gotten away with it, Hilo, Hawaiʻi Chief Detective Koa Kane, is not your ordinary cop. Estranged from his younger brother, who has been convicted of multiple crimes, he is not from a typical law enforcement family. Yet, Koa's secret demons fuel his unwavering drive to pursue justice.

Never has Koa's motivation been greater than when he learns that an elementary school was placed atop a volcanic vent, which has now exploded. The subsequent murders of the school's contractor and architect only add urgency to his search for the truth.

As Koa's investigation heats up, his brother collapses in jail from a previously undiagnosed brain tumor. Using his connections, Koa devises a risky plan to win his brother's freedom. As Koa gradually unravels the obscure connections between multiple suspects, he uncovers a forty-year-old conspiracy. When he is about to apprehend the perpetrators, his investigation suddenly becomes entwined with his brother's future, forcing Koa to choose between justice for the victims and his brother's freedom.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I really did not find this plot remotely credible...a school built over a fumarole? in HAWAIʻI, world capital of active volcanoes amid populated areas? not buyin' it...but I decided to move ahead with my read accepting the premise with a snort.

Then, after the hideous tragedy occurs, Koa is going to have to make the perpetrators of the negligence publicly accountable for their crime's hideous loss of life. The fact that there is not, at present, Chief of Police in Hilo means the buck stops with Koa. All the Chief of Detectives has to do is follow back the trail of documents forty years and figure out where the lying and covering up started while there's major politicking and finger-pointing going on, and everyone who ever touched this land and construction faud is pretty shifty, pretty slimy, and looks really really guilty.

Another moment where Koa will fail to do the politic thing because it is decidedly not the right thing. Of course by book three we're not the least surprised by this. I know I wasn't anyway. But what surprised me a lot was Koa going to the finest knife edge of the law to help his obnoxious criminally guilty brother. I can understand it, given that it's literally life and death. But it was so extreme, so complete a shift from the troubled relationship of their shared past, that it caused me to pause and look over the story...something niggled at me. I'm not seeing something important, I said inside my head.

Then the boom got lowered, it was ugly, and set up one of the most fun endings in the series to date. Unbelievable like the rest of the story, but entirely self-consistent, and as mentioned fun. Just not credible.

And I do not care. Fun to be had, y'all, and whatever the publisher tells you, you need to read the books in order.