SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME: Why the Artist Must Take Sides, truth told, action called for

SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME: Why the Artist Must Take Sides
SAUL WILLIAMS
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, avaiable now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending September 16, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Award-winning poet and performer Saul Williams explores how artists today must respond to systemic violence and injustice—in the words of Paul Robeson, by choosing sides.

Songs My Mother Taught Me is Williams’ clear-eyed exploration of the role of the artist in these times by answering the question: what radicalized you? He answers by examining how his role models—writers and artists, from Amiri Baraka to local musicians in Brazilian bars to Palestinian hip-hop heads—have responded to imperialist violence, oppression, and genocide. Riffing on Paul Robeson’s famous declaration, Williams builds a provocative case for why today’s artists cannot remain neutral in the face of injustice. “We need songs that crumble empires,” he writes, “films that teach, remind, and inspire, poems that would make a despot revoke your citizenship.”

The radical artists of the Vanguard Series offer new poetry and prose to answer the question, What does poetry have to do with politics?

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My Review: What does poetry have to do with anything, demands my inner poetry-averse Philistine. What all art has to do with politics, answers reasonable me.

Everything. Just as Reverend Jedidiah, here, says it does.

I was inclined to listen to the words of the Reverend from Sinners because everything he's saying in these barely-200 pages is so exactly what I'd like you to hear...art matters or "They" would not try to censor it, take it away from you, hide it if "They" don't approve of it...search engine enshittification is more complicated than a ban, but also flies under your radar and has built-in plausible deniability.

You are what you consume. Go light on the empty, sweet-tasting, pretty but pointless stuff for a healthy mind/body/spirit (health is the enemy of bullshit on every measurable axis). Reverend Jedidiah says so too, out of his complicated mind and mouth. I'm very impressed by Author Saul's meditations on the promises and beauties in spirituality being bait (my word) for the hook of obedience and deference to authority. It's deeply saddening, but true as even a brief glance at the world shows you. Taking sides in the culture wars is often hardest for people who see the misuse of their source of joy and consolaion in the world. So much of the noise in the world is, and always has been, intended to make it hard for you to focus for very long. Breaking through the noise is best done by listening to it, looking for what it's pushing you to accept. Advertising, for example, is pushing you to accept the "blessing" of capitalism...look at this maginificent abundance of stuff! see what an amazing life you can have!...without looking at the wages no one can live on, the cost of the plastic it's wrapped in, the fact that it's flimsy and will break. Begin your journey at church...why would Jesus say it's fine to rip kids away from parents, to take fathers from their families to be shipped away not even where they came from and might have needed to escape, when a huge part of the christian message is "love thy neighbor?" All very obvious. But the noise, the shouting, the struggle to afford all the brummagem gauds makes the obvious recede into shadows so it won't bother you with its obviousness.

"They" don't need to lie to you if "They" can distract you from the stone-cold obvious truth.

Author Saul follows in the footsteps of truly great souls, from Paul Robeson to his mother. He distills into readable, relatable prose the truths that can feel threatening to acknowledge, accept, and act on: You, no matter how "small" or "insignificant" you think you are, must take sides. You can't afford not to. There is too much at stake, too much happening that we can not let go on as it is.

Take comfort in reading Author Saul's wisdom. No, it's not easy. It never is.

It's necessary instead.

THE BEGINNING COMES AFTER THE END: Notes on a World of Change, essays about the one true constant

THE BEGINNING COMES AFTER THE END: Notes on a World of Change
REBECCA SOLNIT
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending October 6, 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling survey of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. She argues that, despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility, it is an inevitability, and the nature of that change is determined by who participates and how.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation has happened in so many disparate arenas, and within a longer arc of history, the scale of that change is seldom recognized.

While the backlash of white nationalist authoritarianism, Manosphere misogyny, and justifications for callousness, selfishness, economic inequality, and environmental destruction collectively drive individualism and isolation, the elements of this new world are related in their vision of more inclusion, equality, interconnection. This new vision embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, and indigenous and non-Western ideas, particularly Buddhism, as well as breakthroughs in the life sciences and neuroscience, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

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

My Review: Collections often draw from existing bodies of work. Author Solnit began drawing acclaim for her robust, tendentious writing in the early Aughts, and has never fallen out of the cultural conversation. She won't stop telling the truth, though, so her honesty wins her detractors and even enemies across the political spectrum.

One knows a thinker is doing it right when everybody is mad at them for something.

This essay collection breaks no new ground in her public thinking. It is, if I'm honest, a highlight reel with a bit more sameness than I wanted to read. It is also a collection drawn from decades of work. I found myself thinking, "I remember this, move on," and finding it necessary to recall in the moment that it's collected not commissioned to be written anew or afresh. Not every essay chosen was necessarily up to the highest standards in the book. Again, it's a function of a collection...it's not possible to be perfect, but it's possible, like Author Solnit, to be trenchant and to add value to the consideration of organizing theme of this particular project.

Progress is relative. In any consideration of the societal norms prevailing now that has even a modest degree of perspective, things are hugely better for women, queers, trans folk, and people of color. We're always being bombarded with messaging to the contrary, for reasons y'all need to read Paul Linebarger's book to really connect with. A collection of work like this one is a good corrective to the easy-to-internalize message of the world sucks always has always will. It's true; it's also wrong; both these things can and do coexist because, faithless to your entire life's training, almost nothing in the observable universe is a binary. All physical systems are spectrums and there's mounting evidence literally everything is in fact spectrum...look into quantum physics and certainty vanishes to be replaced by probabilities (aka spectra). Author Solnit stressing that each ending is also a beginning is very much in line with this mode of thinking.

It's new enough to most of her audience that repetition is probably a good idea to deploy in examining the topic. Like any new-to-you theory, perspective, or fact, it's going to need some hammering home to become part of one's mental structural supports. I'm ahead of this curve so it wore on my nerve a bit more than it will for others. I hope you'll pick it up and give it a try if you're sinking under the wight of the world's idiocies and evils.

We need the perspective of one who has been decades in the trenches, struggling against the dying order's loud and lousy distractions, to remind us we've come far. We need to keep moving ahead. It's easier to find the will to do that if we've got a stedy hand and an encouraging voice like Author solnit's telling us to remember it can be done.

Because it has been done. It's not finished, this work; it never really is. Now, get back to it!

USING GIFT CARDS: Non-Fiction

Now that The Big Day's come and gone, lots of us have some giftcards, or some actual filthy lucre, to spend. There being no better way to spend that haul than on books, here are some reasonably priced options you might not've thought of to get your story needs met. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

QUEEN MOTHER: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore
ASHLEY D. FARMER
Pantheon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

2025 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Biography!

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From an award-winning historian of radical Black politics comes the definitive biography of Queen Mother Audley Moore—foremother of the Black Nationalism movement and trailblazer in the fight for reparations

In the world of radical Black politics, the name Audley Moore commands unquestioned respect. Across the nine decades of her life, Queen Mother Moore distinguished herself as a leading progenitor of Black Nationalism, the founder of the modern reparations movement, and a mentor to some of America's most influential Black activists from her homes in North Philadelphia and Harlem.

And yet, she is far less remembered than many of her peers and protégés—Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ahmad, to name just a few—and the ephemera of her life are either lost or plundered. In Queen Mother, celebrated writer and historian Ashley D. Farmer restores Moore's faded portrait, delivering the first ever definitive account of her life and enduring legacy.

Deeply researched and richly detailed, Queen Mother is more than just the biography of an American icon. It's a narrative history of 20th-century Black radicalism, told through the lens of the woman whose grit and determination sustained the movement.

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

My Review: Listen to the author on the Smarty Pants podcast!

Black nationalism. Reparations for slavery's ongoing horrors. A long lifetime of refusing to sit down and shut up, refusing to be a good girl, declining to accept partial and insincere and less-than sops and stop-gaps. "Queen Mother" is a very good title for Audley Moore and a good character analysis of her.

It pains me I knew little about her until now, until someone pulled together threads her proteges had deliberately unpicked and appropriated. She was truly unforgivable to the PTB within and without the Civil Rights movement because she was that powerless victim, a woman; yet her every act and every word gave the lie to that characterization. No one anywhere ever comes across less like a victim than Audley Moore.

She got done wrong to all the damn time, but that did not make her a victim...an identity she rejected, along with mainstreaming, assimilation, and capitalism. It's no wonder she was ignored by historians of the movement until now. She is guaranteed to scare, offend, and even radicalize the very kind of white guy who will commit racist violence. Since those guys are already doing it, empowered by the kakistocracy presently in government in the US, along comes Author Farmer to be introduced to Queen Mother Audley Moore as a child; galvanized by her Presence, her affect on those around her, Author Farmer became her biographer in due course. Outrage at not finding any records cache or archive of her life, the biographer took her considerable powers of persuasion and of study to pull back together the deliberately unpicked threads of an incredible life.

If you care at all about why, how, and at what our country needs to look honestly at itself, use some of your holiday pilf to procure this excellent, easy-to-read, necessary to understand book. Rescuing a major force from calculated desuetude is the act of a true apostle of truth.

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

ENSHITTIFICATION: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
CORY DOCTOROW
MCD x FSG (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

WINNER OF the 2026 Locus Award for NON-FICTION!

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Explaining the process of the “enshittification” of digital platforms over time and what to do about it.

Cory Doctorow's Enshittification takes a witty yet incisive look at the tech landscape, where platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Google start off great—before they inevitably turn terrible. In this contemporary moment of digital decline, Doctorow explores how tech giants lure users in with convenience and then degrade their services over time, squeezing profit at the cost of user experience. With a mix of sharp humor and deep insight, he unveils the slow creep of "enshittification," turning the online world into a worse place, one algorithm at a time.

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My Review: Enshittification...it's not just for tech anymore. Popularized by Author Doctorow beginning in 2022, the word appeared online in the teens and identified exactly the capitalist endgame of charging you more and delivering less for it.

The model's simplicity is its strength. It is really down to real, enforced regulation to prevent this appalling greed from costing the users huge sums of money.

As the tech scum were willing to share their stolen good with the regulators, guess what didn't happen. Ever. The current spate of online regulation is hunky-dory by the tech scum because it makes them in an even more powerful position, requiring more and more and more data to be collected...that they can use to surveil you,to extract ever more profit from surveiling you. Ten years ago, I reviewed David Brin's THE TRANSPARENT SOCIETY, his prescient 1999 warning about today's reality: NO PRIVACY only profit.

We weren't listening then, aren't listening to Author Doctorow's blaring klaxon now, and look where it's got us. Right about now is the time to read this book and heed its warning.

Please.

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

READ THIS WHEN THINGS FALL APART: Letters to Activists in Crisis
KELLY HAYES (Editor)
AK Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 all editions, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending May 18, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the co-author of Let This Radicalize You, a collection of letters to inspire activists to continue the fight

Organizers are well seasoned in defeat. We study movement histories, strategize collectively, and gather strength in direct action, knowing that liberation does not arrive overnight, but that the fight is worth it. But what happens when political and personal crises overlap, and the despair becomes overwhelming? Where do we turn when the process of organizing no longer feels like a site of refuge, but isolating, or even tragic?

Read This When Things Fall Apart is a collection of letters written to organizers in crisis who are struggling with the conflicts, heartbreaks, and catastrophes that activists so often experience. From grief to exhaustion, fractured relationships, state violence and interpersonal violence, the struggle for justice can be tumultuous. Each letter invites the reader to the writer’s particular world in abortion defense, organizing within prison walls, recuperating from state repression after the 2020 uprisings, or as a new parent struggling to find their way in movement spaces, and offers an authentic account of moving through difficult times.

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

My Review: Burnout to burning the candle at both ends, every human one of is hits the wall of what we can do eventually. Oftentimes that spells the end of that person's activism. It's hard to invent solutions to problems in yourself and your personal sphere that you've never faced before, all while trying to fix things The World℠ would prefer you left alone...and also shut up about so "They" don't have to hear it.

So what better self-gift than a collection of letters to you, teetering on the edge of or mired deep in the falling-apart of the world, that show you it's happened before and been overcome? Even if no idea in this book resonates with you...that would surprise me a lot...or you've already done it before, just the reminder that you are not the first to face this and it's been overcome before is hugely valuable. Support, understanding, fellow feeling, commiseration, are all available in these pages. It can do you a world of good just to know others are, were, have been where you are now.

We can not afford to let challenges met and surmounted by those who went on this journey of resistance to illegitimate authority before us halt our gift of energy and effort in bettering the world be snuffed out. We have a long way to go...we'll only get to the better, kinder, fairer world we want to see if we use every tool in the world's chest to make ourselves as capable and as forearmed as we can.

I recommend this read for its tonic properties because they worked on me.

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

PERFECT VICTIMS AND THE POLITICS OF APPEAL
MOHAMMED EL-KURD
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending September 29, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple dignity for the Palestinian.

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

My Review: Okay, I realize I'm unlikely to win this battle for your Yule gift card money. I'm gonna try because 2026 is not going to be an easy year for any of the warring parts of the world. In writing this book, Author El-Kurd did not use his polite appeaser voice. He does not pretend he is "reasonable" about the genocide being perpetrated on his people. He asks us to interrogate why this heinous act is not more in the foreground of our awareness. It is not the first time genocide has been perpetrated in this century. What allows that to continue?

How are good little capitalist consumers complicit in this media landscape that fails to condemn the crimes being committed? The mere mention of the crime of genocide is too divisive, is not acceptable discourse because...?

Those who dare to support Palestinians having full equal rights in their homeland are canceled, are required to prove they don't mean Israel should suffer consequences for committing this crime against humanity, and we accept it because...? Why is it The System℠ tells us what we may say about this ongoing crime against humanity and we obey?

It is time to interrogate our own (in)action regarding settler colonialism's record of injustices and crimes all over the world. Yes, that includes the US, Canada, Mexico, etc etc. This reckoning with the crimes committed by our ancestors, white people, will come no matter what. Get your mind ready by reading this book's very specific takedowns of the comfy little lies and ugly misdirections that have prevented a reckoning...but are failing at last, ever faster, ever more publicly to keep the cork in the bottle.

It's never a good idea to go into a discussion without any idea what you're discussing. Ignorance, in today's world, is a choice.

A very bad, stupid choice. Educate yourself before knowledge is thrust on you.

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

ISRAEL ON THE BRINK: And the Eight Revolutions that Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence
ILAN PAPPÉ
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A renowned Israeli-British historian argues Israel is fracturing, and considers the issues that must be centered for a peaceful future for Palestinians and Jews alike

In this timely book, historian Ilan Pappé argues that with the 2022 election of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza, political fractures inherent in the Jewish state have expanded dangerously—and will potentially lead to Israel's collapse. With the goal of working towards a transition that is as peaceful as possible, Pappé sets out his thoughts about the risks and opportunities emerging from this historical moment.

Eight “mini-revolutions,” he argues, will be necessary for this more hopeful future to emerge, including:

Relocating the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees to the center of the future vision

Establishing a new definition for the Jewish collective in historical Palestine

Finalizing a plan for the future of the Jewish settlements built in the West Bank since 1967, and

Creating a new strategy for a united Palestinian national movement

Pappé concretely envisions a more just future—a democratic decolonized state for both Palestinians and Israelis—and how we might get there.

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My Review: Ilan Pappé's PALESTINE IN A WORLD ON FIRE (q.v.) contained temperature-taking interviews with many of the world's eminent progressives on the subject of public perception of Palestine. Now there comes via Beacon Press the proposal for a roadmap out of this quagmire.

Considering more West Bank Jewish settlements were approved this week I don't foresee the proposals herein being enacted or taken seriously by Israeli officials.

Considering the state of the world's opinion of Bibi and his gang of thugs, it feels more like we should be preparing for a collapse of the state.

It is a good idea for honest, morally sound people to get their heads around what eminent and practical thinkers propose as the future course of this extremely troubled part of the world. Much disgusting vitriolic hysteria will be spewed as things change, so have the antidote in your head already so as not to add to the chaos that's coming.

NOT YOUR RESCUE PROJECT: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice, a book to confront good but blind people with Reality

NOT YOUR RESCUE PROJECT: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice
CHANELLE GALLANT & ELENE LAM (foreword Harsha Walia; afterword Robyn Maynard)
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A landmark abolitionist primer on migration, sex work, policing, and the “anti-trafficking industry”—and a powerful argument about who is really leading the way toward justice: migrant sex workers themselves.

In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration, sex work, and human trafficking, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing across North America and Europe. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to both human trafficking and the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy. Gallant and Lam illustrate how this movement is taking aim at the root causes of violence and abuse: the white supremacist securitization of borders, the criminalization of both migration and sex work, the patriarchial devaluation of women’s labor, and forced displacement due to climate disaster, war, and poverty—all fueled by racial capitalism.

An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration, sex work, and trafficking—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing. Throughout, Gallant and Lam place migrant sex workers at the center of struggles against border imperialism, carceral states, and capitalism—dispelling a range of poisonous myths and paving the way for deeper alliances across movements with the shared goal of dismantling and abolishing carceralism in all its forms.

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

My Review: "Impassioned" is code for "making assertions of your self-evident correctness while bashing their benighted foolishness." This book is impassioned.

I agree with it.

White saviors never save anyone or anything but their own sense of superiority. See the multitudes of debunked "charities" and crowdfunding scams and the like over the decades. Capitalism needs scary monsters, or else how will it convince you to keep paying huge money to them so they'll keep you "safe." High-control systems need enemies to keep you afraid of what will happen if you dare not to believe them. The intersection of those things is usually called "fascism."

The voices of those opposed to the fascistic, moralistic response to the "problem" of women immigrating to the US are worth attending to. These voices belong to people with an established base in the migrant communities most affected by this spurious "moral panic." They do not deny that the trafficking of females of all ages for sexual abuse exists, only that this is the real focus of most of those claiming to want to combat it.

The authors are people who have spent decades on the ground, investing time and energy into *real* moral crusades in aid of the actual people impacted by the actual criminals. That group includes some...many...of those loudest in calling for carceral solutions to the "problem" of immigration.

I found their message much in line with my sense of how the situation really is. I don't necessarily think the hectoring tone of the read will make converts. Nor will the outrage in their words (honest and well-founded in their real-world experiences it may be and is) do more for those not sure what the fuss is about than a blander tone might have.

I think those who genuinely believe in personal autonomy and actual liberty will accept their strongly worded and rooted-in-experience message with slightly revolted by the facts surprise. I hope some few of y'all will be moved to action in your own communities by the read.

FAKE WORK: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke, memoir of life in capitalism's trenches and how they changed her

FAKE WORK: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke
LEIGH CLAIRE LaBERGE
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this genre-bending memoir, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her stint at one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the country and what it teaches us about the absurdity of work—for readers of Bullshit Jobs and fans of Office Space and Sorry to Bother You

The year is 1999, and the world is about to end. The only thing standing between corporate America and certain annihilation is a freshly employed twenty-two year old and her three-ring binders.

While headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, our protagonist Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process—a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Anderson People (her fellow consultants) believe holds world saving powers. Her heroic printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. After a series of equally mundane tasks, and one well-timed deployment of an anecdote about a legendary quarterback, she soon found herself jet-setting on the firm's dime to thirty-minute lunch meetings in Johannesburg, giving impromptu lectures to Japanese executives about limiting liability at the end of the world, and leaping from burning vehicles on Mexico City's busiest highway.

As present-day Leigh Claire reflects on the inanity of her former employment, we're introduced to a carousel of characters plucked from a Mike Judge screenplay, and are treated to post-facto theoretical interjections about the nature of financialized capitalism that recall David Graeber at his best.

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

My Review: Best read by those already familiar with Marxism for Cats: A Radical Bestiary. A memoir of being a minor cog in a massive corporate machine, and working on what ended up being an unnecessary task since Y2K's predicted meltdown was averted by a lot of hard-working coders.

It's absolutely clear to me that this nightmarish experience would radicalize anyone with two functioning neurons and a conscience. The memoir aspect of the story is the more powerful to my mind because someone subjected to a vastly successful indoctrination process woke up and rejected it.

That's a take-away I can get behind.

Since leaving the corporate world, Author La Berge has made her career taking down this system's rottenness with academic books and articles all adding their mite to the reconceptualization of our present system. In her second book, Wages Against Artwork, she introduced me to the concept of "decommodified labor," or labor that is not recompensed. Labor being capitalism's lifeblood, this made a big shift in my worldview. Is art rightfully not a wage-earning pursuit? Discuss. I have. (My conclusion is redistribution via UBI is the fair solution.)

As someone who has never fitted into any large system I related to Author La Berge's increasing hostility to meaningless "productivity" goals, pointless groupthink reinforcement sessions (aka meetings), and supremely extravagant playthings, eg expensive, environmentally unjustifiable travel, absurdly an performatively wasteful meals, and the like.

In the face of post-pandemic disillusionment with The Bosses in general, it's time to reassess what The Bosses demand from us for the absolutely insecure, fire-at-will "jobs" that—by design—never quite pay enough. This is someone who can report from the inside and shed light on why The Bosses absolutely go all-in for AI as an alternative to the labor she performed that she's discussing. It's obvious these jobs are going away to anyone who even half-heartedly glances at unemployment statistics. Nothing being proposed to fill that gap in employment, it is clear the war on workers has ratcheted up.

This is a memoir; it's told more or less episodically; that means there's some irritating repetition of key points. I was familiar with the economic vocabulary but those who aren't might simply give up on the read. The insights Author La Berge delivers are important enough that I urge you to use a not-Google search engine to look up the concepts not familiar to you. The heart of this critique, while firmly personal, is...literally everywhere...being borne out as valid. You might or might not share he sense of humor, but Author La Berge is one helluva cicerone through the uselessness of capitalism as an organizing principle. It is not to be trusted, and here is an insider's experience of why.

PALESTINE IN A WORLD ON FIRE, aptly titled interviews with eminent thinkers

PALESTINE IN A WORLD ON FIRE
KATHERINE NATANEL & ILAN PAPPÉ
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A collection of interviews with some of the world’s leading progressive thinkers on the movement for Palestinian liberation and its connections to struggles for justice across the globe.

As more and more people align themselves with the Palestinian people, Palestine in a World on Fire provides the global perspective and analysis needed to inform how we forge ahead on this path of newfound solidarity. Editors Ilan Pappé and Katherine Natanel have gathered a collection of interviews that are intimate, challenging, and rigorous—many of them conducted before October 7th but still startlingly prescient. The interviewees connect the struggle for Palestinian liberation to various liberatory movements around the world, simultaneously interrogating and recontextualizing their own positions given the ongoing aggression in Palestine. This incredible group includes Angela Y. Davis, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Nadine El-Enany, Gabor Mate, Mustafa Barghouti, Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Gilroy, Elias Khoury, Gayatri Spivak, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.

Palestine in a World on Fire highlights the centrality of Palestine in struggles shared across the capitalism, imperialism, misogyny, neo-colonialism, racism, and more. Each conversation tackles urgent events and unfolding dynamics, and the scholar-activists interviewed here provide invaluable perspectives and insights, illuminating the richness and relevance of recent scholarship on Palestine.

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

My Review: Ask yourself why the US media does't have any, or not many, pro-Palestinian voices featured as speakers about the ongoing genocide Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians. An answer comes when you're ready to look at the roots of bias in a hypercapitalist world undergoing a multi-front fascist takeover across multiple countries. Populist values, such as they are, burn brightly when people are afraid and abused. Tech scum are in charge of huge pots of wealth and using it to forward the abusive, hypercapitalist agenda...the luckiest thing that has happened yet is the dopes from DOGE coming after the data and the money of the jerkoffs who voted the scumbags who can't even run a group chat properly.

Waking up to the threat to yourselves, at last, means we all have a small chance of making some of them see the pattern of abuse being used. It certainly also includes the murder and the eradication of people and cultures "They" do not like.

Palestinians are on the sharp edge of the sword. "They" do not plan to stop swinging it. If you and yours are not in its path, you will be.

Essentially this collection of softball interviews of Progressive figures across multiple scholarly disciplines is evidence that the reason libraries, universities, and "lower" schools are all under attack. The way to stop an idea is not to ban it, but to render it incomprehensible and unrelatable. Physics is doing that very handily and entirely to itself by getting really, really deeply up its own ass. Economics and social sciences are having it done to them by "Them" demanding their supply of new thinkers and believers be cut off from resources to learn about the disciplines. Stupid people are easier to lie to than educated ones.

It is a book that's been overtaken by events in some ways. It's a shame that many who could best benefit from its focus are likely not to read it as "the news" is hard enough to contend with, still less launch on a deep dive into how the Palestinian genocide is part of a larger playbook.

The terrible truth is it is working as it always has. Critics of the machinery of totalitarianism, like Alexei Navalny and Primo Levi, suffer awful fates if they're high enough profile to be threatening. The rest if us, the insignificant ones, are left alone to chatter amongst ourselves, as we can't do "Them" much inconvenience still less harm.

So take this as my considered advice: Learn more about what atrocities are going on right now; think about what will keep happening; get angry and resist. However small it is, act against "Them."

ENEMY FEMINISMS: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, challenging and emotionally difficult read...necessary, too

ENEMY FEMINISMS: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation
SOPHIE LEWIS
Haymarket Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of Abolish the Family, a provocative compendium of the feminisms we love to dismiss and making the case for the bold, liberatory feminist politics we’ll need to stand against fascism, nationalism, femmephobia, and cisness.

In recent years, “white feminism” and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that leaning in won’t make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need.

Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today’s anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategizing that is truly antifascist.

At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism.

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

My Review: Oh dear. Another excellent, necessary message to everyone in the US lost to a wide audience. I'm in the choir and I still felt hectored, lectured at, and blamed personally by the author's tone.

I did not enjoy the experience.

I can't fault Author Lewis's collection of facts or her citations. Capitalist feminism is indeed a huge existential threat to women's rights. I'd say, however, that the Cult of Mother needed a much, much more savage pounding than capitalism receives. Apparently not one of the author's targets, though, in spite of being so ready to condemn the woman-controlling bodily autonomy denial of abortion restriction.

I question how effective the chapter against "girl-boss" glamorization really is. It's gendered, but is this not a case where celebrating the still-rare sight of women in control of their economic future, and the economy in general, not worth it? I don't think this is the threat to female equality it's presented as, but it's certainly made me consider the issue in a new light. Which, come down to it, is the great strength of this book and books like it, as well as the reason I give it four stars.

So it's style, not substance, that I find unwelcoming and unpleasant. That does not mean I didn't take a lot of positive information, and a hefty amount of psychic homework, away from the read. I found her challenging the hidden enemy in us all bracing and grounds for a lot of self-reflection. Ironic given my whinging about her tone, I know, but in a review for readers I'm not aiming for critical standards of an essay but information, and I hope a shove to get it and read it, for the laity.

WAKING BEAUTY, Rebecca Solnit looks at fairy tales from her own unique angle

WAKING BEAUTY
REBECCA SOLNIT (illus. Arthur Rackham)
Haymarket Books
$19.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Expanding, transforming, and subverting the magical tale of Sleeping Beauty, Rebecca Solnit revitalizes this classic story with a new perspective: Maya, the sister who stayed awake.

Waking Beauty tells of Maya’s great adventures, the inspiring, extraordinary artist and changemaker who “found [beauty] everywhere and gave it to everyone”; Atlas, who guarded the golden apples and was definitely not a prince; and Ida, who slept for a century and woke up in a very different world. The perfect follow-up to Cinderella Liberator, Solnit seamlessly weaves these compelling narratives, crafting a story that is as delightful and enchanting as it is empowering.

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

My Review: The time to get a female to reject the toxic assumptions of the Overculture about her sex and gender is in childhood. If you have a granddaughter or niece who is of fairy-tale loving age, get her into Rebecca Solnit's mindset before damage that can't be undone occurs.

There's no denying Solnit's clarity of thought, no matter whether you agree with her conclusions or not. It's my theory that you, who're reading my reviews, aren't likely to dislike the message of agency and also of awareness that others have stories too...not the old way of "you're supposed to be kind and attentive to boys so they will like you " way but in the "everyone is the center of their own story, just like you" way. Arthur Rackham's lovely old silhouettes:

...exemplify the point Solnit's making about the way things look not being the whole story. I hope you'll make room for these retold fairy tales with a very modern spin to get into the heads of your just-barely-still-lap-reader kids.