FUCK NEOLIBERALISM: Translating Resistance, ignore the "worty dirds" to focus on what needs resisting

FUCK NEOLIBERALISM: Translating Resistance
SIMON SPRINGER
PM Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In a long history of ruination and destruction, neoliberalism is the most recent and virulent form of capitalism. This book is a call to action against the most persistent and pestilent disease of our time. Translated into over twenty different languages, the book offers a call to action that transcends local contexts and speaks to the violent global conditions of our neoliberal age.

Fuck Neoliberalism: Translating Resistance is a worldwide middle finger to the all-encompassing ideology of our era.

With translations into languages from across the globe, including Mandarin, German, Indonesian, Spanish, Hindi, Italian, Korean, and many more, this book brings those translations together, accompanied with short essays from each translator that explain the reasons why they translated the text and describes the struggles against neoliberalism in their regions. With these translations, this book highlights the international nature of resistance to the totalitarian ideology of neoliberalism.

Featuring a cover produced by renowned artist Ed Repka (a.k.a. the King of Thrash Metal Art), this internationalized, heavy-metal rant against the all-powerful ideology highlights a chink in its armor. When people across the world find a way to communicate a shared message and stand together, resistance can be both beautiful and inspiring.

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

My Review: You're on board with the sentiment or you're not; but on or off, it would do all y'all a power of good to read words from those who've chosen to translate this (surprisingly mild, given its épater-la-bourgeoisie title) essay into their languages of choice, usually of their homelands.

Understand that book-banning, speech-squelching, and thought-controlling has gone on forever and becomes the default when too many "nice" people do not make the affirmative effort to resist it. Yes, even when it bothers you, even when it...gasp...offends you. Unless the speech is advocating violence, hate crimes, or censorship of those disliked by the powerful, it is in your personal interest to actively support free speech.

Worty dirds are not grounds for censorship. Rude gestures are not grounds for censorship. Demands for brown-skinned people to "go home" are. Demands for personal enemies to be persecuted by state power are. Let's stay clear about this.

Even if you never read a word of this loudmouthed little book, buy one to support firebrand publishers in their mission to save us from the worst consequences of our lazy, "nice" conformity.

THE GODS OF NEW YORK: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990, wasn't that a time?

THE GODS OF NEW YORK: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990
JONATHAN MAHLER
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

Rating: ?5*?1*?

The Publisher Says: A sweeping chronicle of four years in 1980s New York, a crucible that would transform the city and leave it more divided than ever—a rollicking, real-life Bonfire of the Vanities featuring larger-than-life personalities of Donald Trump, Spike Lee, Ed Koch, Al Sharpton, Rudy Giuliani, and countless others

New York City entered 1986 as a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan and bringing a once-bankrupt, reeling city back to life.

But it also entered 1986 as a city divided. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets—and in many cases addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness. The manufacturing jobs that had once sustained a thriving middle class had vanished. Long-simmering racial tensions threatened to boil over.

Over the next four years, a singular confluence of events—involving a cast of outsized, unforgettable characters—would widen those divisions into chasms. Ed Koch. Donald Trump. Al Sharpton. The Central Park Five. Spike Lee. Rudy Giuliani. Howard Beach. Tawana Brawley. The Preppy Murder. Jimmy Breslin. Do the Right Thing, Wall Street, crack, the AIDS epidemic, and, of course, ready to pour gasoline on every fire—the tabloids. In The Gods of New York, Jonathan Mahler tells the story of these convulsive, defining years.

The Gods of New York is an exuberant, kaleidoscopic, and deeply immersive portrait of a city in transformation, one whose long-held identity was suddenly up for Could it be both the great working-class city, lifting up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture—a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker—when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the very systems intended to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This book is the story of how that happened.

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

My Review: That was the Manhattan I fell in love with. Not the one where St. Vincent's is a yuppie hutch. I watched the enshittification happen then; I was apparently ineffective in resisting it; now it's the entire country it's happening to, and I still feel ineffective.

Still slugging, though.

Michael Stewart, he of The Man Nobody Killed, kicks us off on our journey through the world that grew Felonious Yam into a cultural icon (mostly spite-driven because we all laughed at him then). After Ed Koch's second term ended, Giuliani became mayor, and shit went downhill fast.

If you know, you know.

The times were a-changin' and the seeds of the political hellscape of today were there and scaring some of us. I still feel bad we didn't stop it. Reading this year-by-year, carefully non-partisan reminder of my generation's abject failures on stages large and small did not fill me with ebullient glee. Fauci's horrific inaction during the AIDS crisis, lack of empathy and flexibility, reminded me of how loud the haters got when he was doing a much better job during COVID. If they'd been around for the ACT UP years....

This isn't history to me, the way it will be to all y'all who didn't live it; it's my past retold. I'm glad I read it. I got closure-sobs for things I'd forgotten I'd forgotten. It's not fun to live in interesting times...but who ever does not? The way the world works is upheaval and change and rage and hate simmer, then boil, then simmer...eternal cycles of it.

I'm so sorry we did not do better when there was a chance to stop the scum from rising above their capacity to understand basic morality. Mea culpa.