THE PRIVATE IS POLITICAL: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, what to pay attention to in order to stop "Them"

THE PRIVATE IS POLITICAL: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
RAY BRESCIA
NYU Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$35.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Exposes the threats to our personal and political identity in the age of surveillance

It has become alarmingly clear that our online actions are less private than we’re led to believe. Our data is routinely sold and shared with companies who want to sell us something, political actors who want to analyze our behavior, and law enforcement who seek to limit our actions.

The Private is Political explores the failure of existing legal systems and institutions to protect our online presence and identities. Examining the ways in which the digital space is under threat from both governments and private actors, Ray Brescia reveals how the rise of private surveillance prevents individuals from organizing with others who might help to catalyze change in their lives. Brescia argues that we are not far from a world where surveillance chills not just our speech, but our very identities. This will ultimately stifle our ability to live full lives, realize democracy, and even shape the laws that affect our privacy itself.

Beyond merely identifying the harms to individuals from privacy violations, Brescia furthers our understanding of privacy by identifying and naming political privacy and the integrity of identity as central to democracy.

The Private is Political empowers consumers by outlining a roadmap for a comprehensive privacy regime, leveraging various institutions to collectively safeguard privacy rights.

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

My Review: Author Ray Brescia is well-known for his activities in public-interest legal matters. If anyone knows, from long professional experience, what "Their" endgame is with the surveillance-capitalism regime we have so blithely and unthinkingly accepted, it is him.

His chosen format of shorter chapters that read like trimmed law-journal essays, copious notes, and a solid, real-world grounding in where and why there are leverage points on both sides of his argument, Author Brescia is doing everyone on the internet a huge favor. While we have been dreading state surveillance, corporations sell us the very tools that, in state hands, would have the MAGAts in the streets. Google is not a state entity, but arguably has even more data about you than Amazon. Both want to pick your pockets after picking your brain so hard there's little left in it they do not directly know, or can with high confidence infer.

Author Brescia's gift is laying out the steps of gaining his knowledge. He understands the systems of lawmaking and enforcement, sees the careful designs for encroaching on our personal autonomy, and leads the reader along as he pulls aside decades of distracting obfuscation to show us what the plan truly is.

There might still be time to heed Author Brescia's warnings. I'll leave it to you to spend your time, even your treasure if you have it, learning some pressure points you can use or demand your legislators use.

CAPTAIN KIDD: A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal, past as prologue?

CAPTAIN KIDD: A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal
SAMUEL MARQUIS
Diversion Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$34.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The breakneck adventure of war, romance, politics, and betrayal, where noble gentleman privateer William Kidd becomes a scapegoat, and Crown and crew sink to unfathomable depths to brand him pirate enemy #1.

Captain William Kidd stands as one of the most notorious “pirate” outlaws ever, but his notorious legend is tainted by a bed of lies. Captain Kidd has captivated imaginations for over three hundred years and inspired many stories about pirates, but was he really a criminal? Just how many ships did he plunder, how many men did he force to walk the plank, and how many throats did he slit? Or is the truth more inconvenient, that he was a buccaneer’s worst nightmare, a revered pirate hunter turned fall guy for scheming politicians?

In Captain Kidd, his ninth-great-grandson, writer Samuel Marquis, reveals the real story. Kidd was an English-American privateer and leading New York husband and father, dubbed “trusty and well-beloved” by the King of England himself and described by historians as a “worthy, honest-hearted, steadfast, much-enduring sailor” who was the “victim of a deliberate travesty of justice.” With honors far more esteemed than the menacing Blackbeard or any other sea rover at the turn of the seventeenth century, how can Kidd be considered both gentleman and pirate, both hero and villain?

Marquis’ biography clears the foggy haze of five centuries of legend and British propaganda to illuminate the seafaring adventurer and civic leader. He scrupulously recreates Kidd’s perilous world of explosive naval warfare, the daring integrity he exemplified as a pirate hunter, and the political scandal that entangled Kidd in British-American history, rocking the New World and the Old and threatening England’s valuable trade with India.

Captain Kidd is both thrilling and tragic. Behind the legend is a real man woven into the tapestry of early America, rendering him a unique colonial hero and scapegoat, whose life story was fascinating, exciting, bizarre, and heartrending.

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

My Review: From "privateer" (government-endorsed pirate) to "pirate" (privateer who pissed someone powerful off), Captain Kidd really comes alive in his ninth(!)-great-grandson's retelling of his biography. It's quite a tale indeed. Even sticking to well-attested facts in court records and sources of like stature, it reads like a novel.

That is not an indictment of the author's veracity but a comment on his story's narrative flow. The endnotes, hugely extensive, are not included in the ebook. They are redirected to the publisher's website via a link or a QR code, both of which I followed to be sure they went where I expected them to go. I'm mildly disgruntled by this.It is a decision that, I suppose, stems from the publisher's presumption that most people don't give a toss about endnotes, so why not...what? does it cost less to do it this way? is the same thing done in the print book?...anyway, it cost the book a star.

While the horror of what happened to Kidd was in no way acceptable to modern eyes, neither were his actions. A privateer might be commissioned by the government of the day to do damage to others' economic well-being, that kind of mercenary fig-leaf is seen in today's world as dishonest whole and entire. It still happens, especially where official government involvement in an activity would cause major PR problems (as ICE is demonstrating very capably right now), but we can ignore it until someone gets pissed off who has the power to make the one they're mad at suffer the consequences widely spreadable.

Any of this ringing some bells?

Kidd's execution was awful to read about, again because the author's storytelling chops are very much on display. It is amazing how much documentary evidence, anecdotal or not, still exists about Kidd. Author Marquis has, I am morally certain, clapped eyes on every single extant source for this grisly tale. It is a feat that took decades, and determination far greater than the ordinary, to accomplish. That he is a descendant of the man unjustly accused, and hanged—twice!—no doubt turbocharged his natural-to-writers research skills. What made it fun to read was both the subject matter...what little boy, however old he may be, isn't delighted by a pirate story?...and knowing while reading it that the author's telling a true family tale.

Maps, and notes, added to the text and I'd be warbling my fool lungs out about the story. as it is, I/ recommend you procure one if you're a superannuated pirate-loving kid like me, or if your dad/grandpa is, or if you're in the market for a story of government-by-grumpiness story to make today feel a tiny bit less unprecedented.

You might not feel better but knowing it's happened before has much to teach us.

HARBINGERS: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy

HARBINGERS: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy
TIMOTHY J. HEAPHY
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Amazonn link)
$9.99 ebook editions, avalable now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A crucial, clear-eyed assessment of what connects the 2 most influential moments of political violence in recent American history, and where we go from here
An unparalleled firsthand account from the foremost expert on American political violence, crucial for readers of Liz Cheney’s Oath and Honor, and How Democracies Die

This dramatic, revealing book offers an insider account of the planning and aftermath of the racist riot in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, and the insurrection at the US. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

As the lead investigator into both tragic days, Tim Heaphy has an absolutely unique perspective. Readers will travel alongside Heaphy as he organized his team and structured the massive investigations they were about to take, as he interacts with politicians and members of law enforcement, interviews planners, perpetrators, and bystanders, gathers and sorts evidence, and compels and records testimony in order to create a record for today’s voters as well as future generations.

In his page-turning book, he shares what he saw and came to understand about what those events say about state of American democracy. He examines how and why they took place with the hope that understanding the contexts of these events will be a crucial and helpful step toward avoiding similar episodes of political violence in the years ahead.

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

My Review: The manifold failings of the astonishingly huge, well-funded, and deeply entrenched domestic surveillance industry are laid out in this book.

I was taken aback on how much there was about the surveillance state I was correct to be paranoid about, and how little it did to prevent these acts of political violence from going ahead, or even getting off the ground. This is something that gives me the gravest kind of worry for the US as a still-slightly-functional civil society.

I will not tell you this is the most deft or entertaining read of 2025. It's dry, it's pedantic, it's explanatory not exciting. This being what it needed to be to convey its burden of information...and I use the term advisedly...I won't downrate it for being its proper self. A louder, more emotionally charged voice becomes part of the clangor of 2025's soundscape. I know more now than I did before I read this book about the ways and means used by the rebel forces within the US to bring about their desired repressive, totalitarian replacement government.

Project 2025 should have scared y'all a lot more than it did. I'm guessing most of you won't read this important informative book. Whatever your reasons are, they're not excuses. Very bad things are coming. Resisting them will be a lot of work and involve significant effort.

The option is passive acceptance.

Choose wisely.

KLAXON READS: DAY OF RECKONING: How the Far Right Declared War on Democracy, & THE COURT V. THE VOTERS: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights

THE COURT V. THE VOTERS: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights
JOSHUA A. DOUGLAS
Beacon Press
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An urgent and gripping look at the erosion of voting rights and its implications for democracy, told through the stories of 9 Supreme Court decisions—and the next looming case

In The Court v. The Voters, law professor Joshua Douglas takes us behind the scenes of significant cases in voting rights—some surprising and unknown, some familiar—to investigate the historic crossroads that have irrevocably changed our elections and the nation. In crisp and accessible prose, Douglas tells the story of each case, sheds light on the intractable election problems we face as a result, and highlights the unique role the highest court has played in producing a broken electoral system.

Douglas charts infamous cases like:

Bush v. Gore, which opened the door to many election law claims

Citizens United, which contributed to skewed representation—but perhaps not in the way you might think

Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the vital protections of the Voting Rights Act

Crawford v. Marion County Elections Board, which allowed states to enforce voter ID laws and make it harder for people to vote

The Court v. The Voters powerfully reminds us of the tangible, real-world effects from the Court’s voting rights decisions. While we can—and should—lament the democracy that might have been, Douglas argues that we can—and should—double down in our efforts to protect the right to vote.

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

My Review: I share the author's concerns over the ugliness our current Court has enabled to flourish and entrench itself in our country.

But the remedy, the true solution to the problem, lies in your control, not the Court's. You vote for the president of the United States of America, who nominates the Justices; you vote for the Senators who advise on and consent to the appointment of them. If you do not like the current Court, it is down to you and your (non-)votes.

There are enforcements of rules contra the Justices and their brazen flouting of even the most basic norms of judicial conduct not happening now that could happen if there is enough public pressure on Congress to act. The hideous horror of the 2024 election cycle is a very convenient smokescreen behind which inactivity's awful price is coming due. There are calls to expand the Supreme Court, as was done a hundred years ago, to match the number of Justices to the number of districts...thirteen, up from nine in 1891...in the Federal justice system. Right-wingers are *desperate* to prevent this. It would almost guarantee a liberal or moderate majority on the Court. But the single most important change needed is eliminating lifetime appointments for all Federal judges, which will require a Constitutional Amendment. That will be HUGELY difficult, no matter when we do it. It is another thing the current roiling atmosphere of hatred and distrust virtually guarantees that the status quo will remain, as long as the democratic institutions remain active.

All of which is just to touch on some of the immense stakes in this election.

Vote against the further degradation of the citizen's only remaining lever to use against the fascist billionaires and their economic pals of the Nerd Reich: hold your nose if you must, violate your principles if that's what it takes, but take the affirmative action of going to your designated polling place and casting your vote against Donald Trump and JD Vance. Love Harris or loathe her, she will not enable a furtherance of the coup enshrining the fascists into power.

It really is your last chance to vote.

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


DAY OF RECKONING: How the Far Right Declared War on Democracy
MIKE WENDLING
Pluto Press
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The United States has become an almost unrecognizable country—with millions in thrall to conspiracy theories, toxic populism, and the far right edging closer to total power—a dire threat to civil society and democratic institutions.

While the MAGA movement was in remission due to Donald Trump's defeat in 2020, the fascist fringes have not just survived but have continued to thrive and burrow into the mainstream. The January 6th Capitol Riot prosecutions have done little to curb their enthusiasm for mayhem. Trump's base in the Republican Party is committed to their candidate like never before. The institutionalization of racist voting suppression and the outdated logic behind the Electoral College means he could take back the White House. Apocalyptic messaging ensures the alt-right, anti-government, anti-LGBT, and white nationalist groups see the next election as a life or death struggle and are uniting to back the one person they can all agree on—guaranteeing another chaotic election.

In this chilling exposé, Wendling encounters Capital rioters, Covid deniers, QAnon supporters, and Proud Boys and uncovers the roots of a movement that threatens to shatter the foundations of democracy.

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

My Review: Told in tendentious, apocalyptic tones, this aptly labeled exposé of the late-stage progress of the fascist-billionaire/Nerd Reich's long-running, carefully coordinated reversion of the US to conditions prevailing a century-plus ago presents a very persuasive case...if you're not looking for academic rigor. That is not the remit of this book.

What you'll get here is primary sources telling their stories of regretted participation (Mrs. Alex Jones), and stories with legs about the perpetrators of the media rejiggering of our cultural norms...stuff that makes a positive difference to know, and to see synthesized in one place, but that is meant to inform you and awake you from denial. If you want a dissertation-level, fact-checked, peer-reviewed tome, seek elsewhere.

Well aimed at a suddenly jolted aware, smart layperson, this is a short and easy read. Not many words will send one to the dictionary. Few ideas here are going to be hard to grasp, and the few you'll run into that aren't geberally already familiar are researchable on Wikipedia with solidly reliable results. (Yes, I did it myself to be certain.)

Is your second cousin showing signs of coming out from the anesthesia of outrage dripped into them by red-meat right outlets? Here's a very good source of opening of the eyes. I can but hope that I know enough people with a spare twenty and some needy recipients in their orbit to get this to some young men the scum are targeting, in order to arrest his slide into fascism.

Before the election is better, but any time is good.

THE VOTE COLLECTORS: The True Story of the Scamsters, Politicians, and Preachers behind the Nation's Greatest Electoral Fraud, SECOND edition out soon

THE VOTE COLLECTORS: The True Story of the Scamsters, Politicians, and Preachers behind the Nation's Greatest Electoral Fraud
MICHAEL GRAFF & NICK OCHSNER
University of North Carolina Press/Ferris and Ferris Books
$23.00 trade paper, second edition preorders for March 2024 above|first edition $8.53 on Kindle, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In November 2018, Baptist preacher Mark Harris beat the odds, narrowly fending off a blue wave in the sprawling Ninth District of North Carolina. But word soon got around that something fishy was going on in rural Bladen County. At the center of the mess was a local political operative named McCrae Dowless. Dowless had learned the ins and outs of the absentee ballot system from Democrats before switching over to the Republican Party. Bladen County’s vote-collecting cottage industry made national headlines, led to multiple election fraud indictments, toppled North Carolina GOP leadership, and left hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians without congressional representation for nearly a year.

In The Vote Collectors, Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner tell the story of the political shenanigans in Bladen County, exposing the shocking vulnerability of local elections and explaining why our present systems are powerless to monitor and prevent fraud. In their hands, this tale of rural corruption becomes a fascinating narrative of the long clash of racism and electioneering—and a larger story about the challenges to democracy in the rural South.

In their preface to this second edition, Graff and Ochsner bring the story up to date, as accusations of voter fraud continue to pervade our national discourse. The Vote Collectors shows the reality of election stealing in one southern county, where democracy was undermined the old-fashioned way: one absentee ballot at a time.

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

My Review: While I did not love the book’s structure, I *did* resonate to its message and purpose: documenting and publicizing the voter fraud committed in the 2018 election by the North Carolina GOP in search of a national majority in the US Congress to further their regressive agenda. I have reaffirmed my belief that guilty people accuse others of their own crimes as a result of reading this book.

You should read it, too, as we approach the 2024 elections. If you imagine that catching these perpetrators of voter fraud is enough to scare the others out there into compliance with the law, think again...these are True Believers in A Cause, men—mostly—on a mission. Vigilance of the citizenry is the only resource we have left to combat this criminal undertaking. The authors are at pains to detail the toothlessness of oversight allowed by the state’s law on North Carolina’s local elections. It is not terribly different in the rest of the country.

The center of the 2018 plot was a man the authors seem to have a lot more sympathy and affection for than is warranted in my observation of their own descriptions of him: McCrae Dowless. A convicted insurance fraudster who transitioned to political fraud with apparent ease, Dowless was a Democratic operative who switched sides and ramped up the lawbreaking after he learned the ropes. His early death has failed to elicit from me more than a "what a relief at least one is gone" response.

Not a book to be dipped in and out of, because the level of detail can grow hazy in one's mind after too much time away. Also not a light little romp through one event in a bygone election. This stuff is going on now, and it will not stop until the silent, bored, apathetic parts of the electorate get off their "ignorance is bliss, if we don't think about it, it will go away" poses.

Voter suppression is real, and a real problem. It is time to Vay attention to it. Start here.

MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell into Tyranny, using History to explain the present pretty convincingly

MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell into Tyranny
EDWARD J. WATTS
Basic Books
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Learn why the Roman Republic collapsed—and how it could have continued to thrive—with this insightful history from an award-winning author.

In Mortal Republic, prize-winning historian Edward J. Watts offers a new history of the fall of the Roman Republic that explains why Rome exchanged freedom for autocracy. For centuries, even as Rome grew into the Mediterranean’s premier military and political power, its governing institutions, parliamentary rules, and political customs successfully fostered negotiation and compromise.

By the 130s BC, however, Rome’s leaders increasingly used these same tools to cynically pursue individual gain and obstruct their opponents. As the center decayed and dysfunction grew, arguments between politicians gave way to political violence in the streets. The stage was set for destructive civil wars—and ultimately the imperial reign of Augustus.

The death of Rome’s Republic was not inevitable. In Mortal Republic, Watts shows it died because it was allowed to, from thousands of small wounds inflicted by Romans who assumed that it would last forever.

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

My Review: The Mary Beard School of Skepticism About Past as Prologue is in session.

The past is no Oracle and historians are not prophets, but this does not mean that it is wrong to look to antiquity for help understanding the present.

This is intensely controversial. I am not at all sure it is true, but after reading this thoroughly researched and well sourced in the facts that we can know book, I'll put a pin in my inclination to doubt. I can enjoy this book on its factual merits quite well enough.

The author focuses his attention on the period between the victory of the Romans over Carthage in the Second Punic War, and Octavian's usurpation of power, effectively beginning the Empire. That time, its unrest and gradual normalization of political gridlock and, ultimately, violence, does bear a resemblance to the current pass in US–and world–politics.

I have no kick with that fact being pointed out. I am pretty confident the author's analysis of what led up to the events, and how what went down made the resolution of the problems seem pretty obvious. The way he has used the chapter order is, pretty clearly, tendentious...a downward slide from functioning, if troubled republic into one-man rule and autocracy just *feels* more and more inevitable as the facts we know are marshaled.

Where I go a little off his carefully laid rails is where he posits his ideas for how the slide was not inevitable, and the autocracy could've been avoided. That is allohistory which, by itself, is fine by me. But this is presented with a very authoritative air, not differentiated from the text based on facts that surrounds it, and that felt a bit like I was being led to agree without any facts or evidence that his conclusions were plausible. There can not be any such evidence or facts because that isn't how things *did* play out. I can't say he's wrong for all the same reasons.

The desire to show us how to fix the ugly, scary passage we're going through by using the past as a model makes a lot of sense. It still shouldn't be presented as being the equal of the fact-based narrative around it.

Your history-loving giftee, your anxious old uncle who just knows The End Is Nigh, will lap up this story. The good thing is that, as the facts pile up, the author hands the reader this double-edged aerçu:

No republic is eternal. It lives only as long as its citizens want it.

That is hopeful, if you believe there is a chance to warn and arm people against what is occurring; and disheartening, because look what happened to Rome.

The author is of the former opinion, and this book is the case he makes for it.

TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON, latest thriller from Pavone delivers a little too much

TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON
CHRIS PAVONE
MCD Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: You think you know a person . . .

Ariel Pryce wakes up in Lisbon, alone. Her husband is gone—no warning, no note, not answering his phone. Something is wrong.

She starts with hotel security, then the police, then the American embassy, at each confronting questions she can’t fully answer: What exactly is John doing in Lisbon? Why would he drag her along on his business trip? Who would want to harm him? And why does Ariel know so little about her new—much younger—husband?

The clock is ticking. Ariel is increasingly frustrated and desperate, running out of time, and the one person in the world who can help is the one person she least wants to ask.

With sparkling prose and razor-sharp insights, bestselling author Chris Pavone delivers a stunning and sophisticated international thriller that will linger long after the surprising final page.

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

My Review: Unreliable narrator tells unbelievable story with murky stakes attached to its outcome. And here I am giving it four stars.

Doesn't make sense, does it. Or does it....

What Author Pavone does is set the reader up for something from the get-go. Unlike many thriller writers, that "something" isn't glaringly obvious. What sets this thriller in motion is an older woman married to a handsome younger man. Who ups and disappears from their hotel room on an international trip.

Prepare the violins, right? Welllll...yes but not for her, as you'll see. Her fear at this catastrophe seems...performative...to the authorities who look at her late-middle-aged self, see the muffin she's so recently married, and all but say out loud, "well, little lady, what exactly can you expect? Men do stray...and he's been gone less than a day. Give him time to sober up and pay the, um, lady. He'll be back." But she's not having it.

Why is she not having it? It does, after all, make a grim kind of sense. Before their short marriage, she didn't know her husband well...he's a relative stranger, so why is it she's carrying on so?

Wheels within wheels, and here we are rollin' along beside Ariel...has that name, one the lady chose for herself, made its real force felt in you yet?...as the story's necessary force carries us along, stopping for some info-dumpy conversations/monologues/set pieces. It's not like there's any point where Author Pavone sticks it to us, the sad little readers wondering what the living hell possessed this hard-edged survivor to do something so stupid as this mishegas results from. And both parties are hard-edged survivors. So what's the situation underlying the story? It's a thriller! You *know* there is one.

The phrase "ripped-from-the-headlines" is a cliche to my generation of Movie of the Week veterans. It got a bad name for shoddy, indifferent storytelling. But it never needed to be that way, did it. What happens that makes the newspapers is a joyous rioting street party of story plots. Read this one and find out what the right dance partner can give.

I can't give the book all five stars because, despite the clarity of storytelling purpose that snaps into focus as the ending twists us up, there is a prolixity of speechifyin' that really grated on me. (I'm lookin' at you, Griffiths.) And the Epilogue is just a shade over the top I most wanted not to go over. But the story is a deeply, involvingly, satisfyingly real one, and I encourage y'all to read it.

HITLER'S AMERICAN FRIENDS: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States, traitorous fascist sympathizers aren't new

HITLER'S AMERICAN FRIENDS: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States
BRADLEY W. HART
Thomas Dunne Books
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II.

Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime.

Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee.

We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

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

My Review: It's always been a failing of the left-wing political folk to see the Apocalypse in each and every thunderation from the Christo-Fascist Right as the ongoing battle for the USA's soul continues. There are now, there were in the 1950s, there were in the 1930s and 1940s, traitorous scum whose personal vision of a Perfect World contains only people like them, who are willing to do anything legal or not to enforce their will on the eternal majority who don't want that. In an article in The Nation, the author of the think piece I've linked to comments most saliently on the Red Scare years' school-textbook battles, book burnings, and other such performative outrage with this pithy remark:

Most Americans don’t think that proponents of critical race theory are secretly spreading “Marxism” in the schools, either, or that woke corporations are somehow supporting the same evil project. The people who make such claims are a small minority, just as they were in the 1950s.

The fact is that our country's been under some form of internal attack from fascist and/or authoritarian right-wing rabble since Day One. So has every other political structure. Let's not forget the fate of Periclean Athens. It's the eternal project of greedy, selfish control freaks to get everything they can into their own hands and to control what they can't possess.

Author Hart made a well-researched and -written alarm call against calm, resigned acceptance of the culture coup attempted during the 45th president's term in this book. He uses the well-documented and clearly overcome existence, activities, and failures of Nazi sympathizers in the US. It is an effective technique; it uses as its organizing principle a simple structure: Each chapter is dedicated to a single organization active in promoting German/Nazi interests in the US, and gives some crucial details about how and why this choice was made. It also characterizes and puts into timely context the people who made up the institution in question. This avoids a common trap in histories of zeitgeists or social movements, the dreaded alphabet soup of initialism and too-similar or too-often-repeated names. That admittedly more synthetic approach can weave a tapestry of details. It more often than that causes severe MEGO disease.

The most disturbing take-away of this entire loudly rung tocsin is that these forces of anti-democratic rage failed because they lacked a credible, powerful leader. Today's versions, it is very frightening to realize, do not suffer from that lack. It isn't that Author Hart is unaware of this, it's that he seemed to feel he shouldn't make as much of the echoes I heard in each chapter of current events as I would've preferred. There is something to be said for taking off the gloves and hitting the enemy within hard. It's something "they" do a lot of (see my review of The Obama Hate Machine) and with a lot less factual basis than Author Hart presents.

Why this book only gets four stars from me is the quite startling number of uncorrected typos that made it from the DRC I read into the library copy I checked out. Scandalous! And, in the end, there were moments that I found myself not quite satisfied with the case the author made for some person or organization's motivation for opposing the US entry into WWII. Mixed motives are more common than pure ones on every gradation of the ideological spectrum, as (for example) morally based pacifism is present among right-wingers, too.

Perhaps the most telling thing that I noticed go underremarked was the utter ineffectuality of Hoover's FBI in going after right-wing terrorism. Red Scare propaganda against our nominal allies the Soviets was rife. How telling that is...British intelligence informed the US government better about domestic threats than Hoover's FBI.

I was still angered and unsettled and unnerved by this read. I am recommending it to all and sundry who think the Right's victory in the 2022 midterm elections is somehow inevitable. We who do not wish to have our country scourged by the hypocrites and religious nuts of this book's modern counterparts should heed Author Hart's dictum: "{U}nfortunately, the merchants of hate always seem to have someone to listen to them." Let's plug the holes in our national awareness. It can only help the side dedicated to the rights and duties of citizens against the Right's attacks on them.

GUNPOWDER MOON, a grown-up kick-ass murder mystery-cum-political-thriller

GUNPOWDER MOON
DAVID PEDREIRA
HarperVoyager
$14.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A realistic and chilling vision of life on the Moon, where dust kills as easily as the vacuum of space…but murder is even quicker—a fast-paced, cinematic science fiction thriller, this debut novel combines the inventiveness of The Martian, the intrigue of The Expanse, and the thrills of Red Rising.

The Moon smells like gunpowder. Every lunar walker since Apollo 11 has noticed it: a burnt-metal scent that reminds them of war. Caden Dechert, the chief of the U.S. mining operation on the edge of the Sea of Serenity, thinks the smell is just a trick of the mind—a reminder of his harrowing days as a Marine in the war-torn Middle East back on Earth.

It’s 2072, and lunar helium-3 mining is powering the fusion reactors that are bringing Earth back from environmental disaster. But competing for the richest prize in the history of the world has destroyed the oldest rule in space: Safety for All. When a bomb kills one of Dechert’s diggers on Mare Serenitatis, the haunted veteran goes on the hunt to expose the culprit before more blood is spilled.

But as Dechert races to solve the first murder in the history of the Moon, he gets caught in the crosshairs of two global powers spoiling for a fight. Reluctant to be the match that lights this powder-keg, Dechert knows his life and those of his crew are meaningless to the politicians. Even worse, he knows the killer is still out there, hunting.

In his desperate attempts to save his crew and prevent the catastrophe he sees coming, the former Marine uncovers a dangerous conspiracy that, with one spark, can ignite a full lunar war, wipe out his team . . . and perhaps plunge the Earth back into darkness.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA GOODREADS GIVEAWAY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

“I didn't realize our government considered altruism one of its core competencies," Dechert finally replied. "Is that why we're dropping a treaty that provides free helium-3 for the New Third World?" He started to unstrap his restraints. "I thought it was so we could prove to the orbital executives that we can keep up with their production demands.”
–and–
“Isn't that how most conflicts start? With a gross miscalculation of the possibilities of escalation? A village first, then a peninsula, and then a continent? It is cold up here, commander. Cold and distant. Just a point in space from their viewpoint - valuable but aesthetically detached.”

If we're not just meeting each other, you'll recall my oft-expressed fondness for a pacey, pleasingly noir thriller. That is indeed what we have here. It's 2072; the Moon is split between US and Chinese control; the energy extraction of Humanity's dreams has begun. Caden Dechert is a combat veteran, a polymath and a politically astute loner in charge of the mining operations on US sector of the Moon. After a gigantic disaster more than thirty years ago (Asteroid collisions you can prepare for, carbon emissions you can legislate against, but who expected a subsea methane eruption would plunge us back into the Dark Ages for more than a decade?, asks Caden rhetorically), lunar helium-3 is now the (limited; do we never learn?) resource we need to power the planet.

The thing about using the resources of another world is that it's complicated, requires humans to do complex and still-risky tasks, and exist in an environment that hates you and will kill you in a flash. Caden's job is, in part, to make sure that doesn't happen absent cataclysm...and to head off cataclysm whenever possible. To date he's been a success. Only now the Moon's a crime scene because person(s) unknown have decided to rid Humanity of an innocent waif called Specialist Cole Benson. (Unimportant detail, honestly; how often, in a thriller, does the deadee really matter? That's how one knows it's not a mystery, where it matters a lot.)

What happens from there is an astonishingly fast-paced series of ripples, enacted in meeting rooms and over long, long-distance conference calls. The bureaucracy, the meetings in the face of death, all that's so completely real, so calculatedly cool. No better way to bleed off righteous anger than to have a meeting with the brass. And Dechert, despite his rage and outrage, has caught a scent he really, really doesn't like, a corruption that not even the gunpowder smell of the Moon will hide.

What a truly well-made thriller does best is direct you through misdirection. Keep that in mind, readers. Very firmly in mind.

The dead settle in our mind like cooling embers. After a time they diminish, snuffed out by the immediate, and then a puff of memory rekindles them and for a moment they are hot and near once again.

In discovering the actual intent of the event that killed poor young Specialist Benson, Dechert grows extremely determined to bring true Justice, wearing her Nemesis hat, to the perpetrators of what he regards as appalling immoral acts in service of an unconscionable aim. You've read noir thrillers before. You know this means "badness up the food chain." And that's a discovery Dechert isn't going to let lie, quietly festering. He is, thankfully for his health, talked down off the ledge of taking immediate action. There's a new post awaiting him, one that makes the Moon look like West Virginia: He's shipped out to Europa!

The whys and the wherefores aren't utterly convincing, but I don't care, he's going to EUROPA!! A moon of Jupiter with a huge, huge ocean of liquid brine! Talk about coolness...and talk about remoteness, too, the speed of light takes just over forty minutes to get to Earth from there. That is one hell of a push-off assignment. (I'd take it in a heartbeat.)

So why am I not awarding it all five stars? Because, as much as it pains me to say it, while the tone of the book is right in that indefinable way you feel in your sinews, it's also a message that really, really concerns me at this juncture: Don't trust The Man is an evergreen trope for a reason...The Man's done a lot to earn mistrust over the millennia...but we're facing two severe crises that only The Man can fight effectively, climate change's acceleration and COVID's move from pandemic to endemic and the behavioral changes that NEED to follow on both those things. The noir-lone-wolf-iness of this tale, the one extraordinary man who can put it to rights, is not believable and not timely. That's why the other star fell off my review.

WHEN THE SPARROW FALLS, a debut SF novel with

WHEN THE SPARROW FALLS
NEIL SHARPSON
Tor Books
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.1* of five

The Publisher Says: Life in the Caspian Republic has taught Agent Nikolai South two rules. Trust No One. And work just hard enough not to make enemies.

Here, in the last sanctuary for the dying embers of the human race in a world run by artificial intelligence, if you stray from the path - your life is forfeit. But when a Party propagandist is killed - and is discovered as a "machine" - he's given a new mission: chaperone the widow, Lily, who has arrived to claim her husband's remains.

But when South sees that she, the first "machine" ever allowed into the country, bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife, he's thrown into a maelstrom of betrayal, murder, and conspiracy that may bring down the Republic for good.

WHEN THE SPARROW FALLS illuminates authoritarianism, complicity, and identity in the digital age, in a page turning, darkly-funny, frightening and touching story that recalls Philip K. Dick, John le Carré and Kurt Vonnegut in equal measure.

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

My Review: First, read this:

Nominally, the currency of the Caspian Republic is the moneta, but in truth the coin of the nation was fear. Whoever could inspire fear was rich, whoever lived in fear was poor.
–and–
For a writer's work to be circulated amongst the upper levels of the party was usually the precursor to them coming down with a rather permanent case of writer's block, but not this time. {He} was offered a position in The Truth (then viewed as a rather out of touch and elitist organ), and asked to bring his rough, authentic, working-class voice to the paper's readers, who were left with nothing to do but wonder what they had done to deserve it.

You know already where you are. You'd be stupid or frankly insentient if you didn't recognize the various totalitarian régimes of our present century. Here's what you don't know in the first few chapters of this extraordinarily exciting tale: You will not be leaving the Caspian Republic until events have reached their logical limits. Until then, settle in and surrender your schedule and your other plans.

I would love to spoil the bejabbers out of this read. It is almost painful not to. I want someone to kvell over the ending with; I want someone to be full of the rat's-nest of emotions with me...and not one soul I know can be!

I understand the feelings expressed at the ending of the book so very much better now.

When you send your request in to the bookery of your choice for this story, I think you should know that the author's purpose in writing it was to rob you of any sense of actual control over your life and the world around you. But it will, in fact, be okay. I can't tell you why but let's just say Epicurus's famous formulation of the Problem of Evil:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

Well-trodden tracks lead through this thicket. The response from the god-addled is, "She has Her Reasons, which Reason knoweth not," or something similar to that. In fact the story contains that very argument, put in the mouth of a deeply important figure. (It is only resolvable for the goddists by their huffy assumption that you, o skeptic, are nowhere near as smart as you think you are; and for the bare-faced atheists by using the same argument in reverse.) But what if there *is* a solution....

It was the face beneath mine on the beach when she had been pulled from the ocean and my breath had not been enough.

What, indeed.

Spending a day immersed in the Caspian Republic is a pleasure I'm deeply glad to inform you is exactly what this rather somber, for me at least, holiday required. I needed morally complex characters, ones whose simplest expressions of self are free of embarrassing innocence and unmarred by mawkish candor. I needed to be with my fellow hideously betrayed and painfully reassembled, then betrayed again...and again...and again...bitter, disappointed, unable to imagine what trust would even look like, romantics. They teem in the totalitarian terrors of the Caspian Republic. I needed to feel that my brain's energy was fully and unremittingly drawn down to understand the convolutions of the story's moral landscape.

"Everyone's soul is unique...{a}nd just as your body is built with the protein and calcium and iron you consume every day, your soul is built with words. The words you read, and the words you hear. The soul consumes words, and then it expresses itself through them in a way that is unique to that soul."

Success!

Love will always fuck you up; and the ways in which love fucks you up are truly epic in this story. Thee and me, fellow QUILTBAGgers, are presented on these pages as people of complexity and subtlety. There's really no sex of any sort; it's alluded to and it's very much part of the proceedings, but nobody gets down to business. In exchange, lesbians' love is utterly unremarkable. Men's love is less present; but it does come, when it shows up, as a moment of bathos and facetious secretiveness ("...what did he do?" Your husband, unless I completely misread the subtext, isn't particularly respectful from a cishet man no matter that it's amusingly phrased). Oh well...can't really expect otherwise, given the two men involved. There was absolutely no way on Earth I'd've picked those guys out as my fellows, gotta hand that to Author Sharpson!

So half-a-star gone for the three w-bombs dropped on my innocent, unsuspecting head; another half-star for being sniggeringly dismissive of the only gay male couple in the entire book.

But leaving the read, the ending, well...that has to put some luster back on the read...it's a delight, if a marred and flawed delight, of a read. It gives a reader a rare treat: Reading about grown people, the adult end of the room, is a rapturous and infrequently encountered pleasure in the YA-heavy lists of SF/F publishers. A novel of ideas, one that examines the cracks and the broken places in Love and Trust, one that asks you to spend more than just the usual amount of energy on the read deserves a warm and delighted welcome, louder and stronger for the fact that it's the first...hopefully in a long line.

But seriously. No more w-verbing. It's gross.

THE DELICATE APE, an oddly SFnal thriller by Dorothy B. Hughes

The cover of the 1947 Pocket Books mmpb edition that belonged to my father
THE DELICATE APE
DOROTHY B. HUGHES
Open Road Media
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Terror of the Hunted

Piers Hunt was followed—by a rat-faced little man, by a detective named Cassidy, and by a dark, soundless shadow, felt rather than seen. But worse than the fear of his followers was Hunt's terror of a beautiful and passionate girl. With his emotions he loved her violently; with his mind he hated her. She was evil—a seductive force in evil hands. They all wanted what he had: information which no one but himself must know for a week. On Sunday he would tell it, not to a chosen few, but to the entire world.

This story by Dorothy B. Hughes, author of The Fallen Sparrow and Dread Journey, is more than just a whirlwind tale of spies and intrigue. As Will Cuppy said, "Miss Hughes offers an exciting story wrapped in an idea that is certainly on the side of the angels. Complete with murder, valuable papers, problems to solve, and not one scrap of nonsense. A necessity for Grade-A addicts."

(The above is the back-cover copy of the 1947 Pocket Books mmpb edition that belonged to my father. I think it's better than the modern editions' efforts, so here it is.)

My Review: Look at her Wikipedia entry linked above...you'd never know how much of a Thing she was back in the day. She was Miss Hughes by the "courtesy" of the times; she had three children with her husband, Lewis Allan Hughes, Junior. Her burst of creativity came in the 1940s, when twelve of her fifteen novels appeared. The last was published in 1963, The Expendable Man; it had been eleven years since the novel before it appeared and none would follow. (A far better condensation of Author Hughes's affect and effect is in the LA Review of Books, not paywalled.)

Hughes was, however, astonishingly prolific as a writer of criticism (winning an Edgar for it in 1951); she was awarded a Grand Mastership by the Mystery Writers of America in 1983 for her decades of critical work, and, I believe, in no small part for her 1978 biography, Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason. It remains my very favorite biography—it's really what we'd call today "a life" in that it's not full of footnotable "and on Wednesday the nineteenth came a surprise" stuff—of a mystery writer. It's got the insider-thriller-writer knowingness and the loving appreciation of a fan, coupled with a woman (who rejected the label "feminist" her entire life) who sees what he's doing there's tolerant tutting.

I decided that this book, an oddity in Author Hughes's career, needed a review. Most of Author Hughes's most popular works feature a woman lead. Here, not for the first time, she writes from a man's point of view, though honestly Piers doesn't feel like a man so much as a machine-part, a character without that much character. It's no one's favorite of her works, poor thing, though possibly for that reason. She wrote it in 1942-1943, set it in 1955, and made a lot of assumptions about how the post-war world would work. They are all completely wrong.That should surprise no one. After all, SF writers get *gleefully* bashed and pointed at when they get things wrong, so why exempt Author Hughes?

In a weird way, this 1947 printing is a near-future story about the US Secretary of Peace and his dealings with an about-to-be de-occupied Germany. And that, we're let in on, is a Very Bad Idea...one that even gets people killed for so much as conceptualizing. If there is to be a change in Germany's occupation, you see, it must be one that allows Germany to rise again or it will cause more wars! (If they're released from under the occupation, of course, there will be more wars...so, one might wonder, what the hell's the difference?)

Piers is in possession of evidence that will somehow derail the whole peace convocation. It isn't like anyone doesn't know he has it...the femme fatale Morgen, the love of Piers's life, is sent to violate her marriage vows to collect the information from him on her husband the German General's certainty that he is still besotted...but Piers isn't having it. The Germans must be kept down! Like the Chinese are keeping those losers the Japanese in their place!

See? She really got everything seriously wrong here.

But what she didn't get wrong is the pacing of the chases. As Piers dodges bullets and babes, as he does every-damn-thing in his power to prevent a murderous cabal of powerful profiteers from returning this peaceful 1955 to the charnel house-filling state of perma-war Author Hughes cynically posits they want, she never once takes her foot off the gas pedal. In under two hundred pages, she delivers a set-piece of an ending that wraps the speeding car of story around the lamp-post of inevitability.

It's a weirdo, a little misshapen bump in the road of her career. I think it's all the more fun for that. I also think that the pleasures of reading it are sharpened if one deals with it as alternate history of World War II's ending.

Don't be fooled by Dorothy B. Hughes's factually unsupported claims for her fictional 1955...she saw what was coming. She wasn't a fan of the Germans. She wasn't fooled by the industrialists' patriotic mouthings. She was limpidly clear about what a raw deal ordinary people will always get, especially when they're standing up to be counted for the Right Thing to be done (read The Expendable Man!!).

And she wrapped it all in clear, clean prose that ages like single-malt whisky.

THE FIGHTING BUNCH, a little-remembered story of when elections mattered so much people rebelled to *retain* their vote

THE FIGHTING BUNCH: The Battle of Athens and How World War II Veterans Won the Only Successful Armed Rebellion Since the Revolution
CHRIS DeROSE
St. Martin's Press
$14.99 Kindle edition, available 3 November 2020...pre-order now!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The incredible, untold story of the WWII veterans who destroyed a corrupt political machine―the only successful armed rebellion on US soil since the War of Independence.

They fought for freedom abroad and returned to find that they had lost it at home. A corrupt political machine was in charge, kept in power by violence and stolen elections - the worst allegations of vote fraud ever brought to the attention of the Department of Justice, according to the Attorney General.

The GIs formed a nonpartisan, all-veteran ticket. On Election Day, the GIs and their supporters found themselves assaulted, intimidated, arrested, and even shot. A small band of veterans - the Fighting Bunch - armed themselves and marched on the jail to demand an honest count. The sheriff and his men refused. These men who thought they had seen the last of war returned to the battlefield, one last time.

This episode in U.S. history has never been more relevant, but has never been fully told. At the time of the rebellion, national news outlets jammed the phone lines into town, asking questions before the shooting had stopped. Journalists beat a path to Athens from across the country. Hollywood came calling, but the people of McMinn County had moved on.

After years of research, including exclusive interviews with the remaining witnesses, archival radio broadcast and interview tapes, scrapbooks, letters, and diaries, author Chris DeRose has reconstructed one of the seminal―yet untold―events in American election history.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS TITLE FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. (I THINK.)

My Review: This book made me so sad.

There were once people who stood up to machine politics. People whose sense of honor forbade them to participate in the establishment of a single-party state.

Their grandchildren are now actively seeking to make that sense of honor, that duty to accept others' rights of access to the ballot box as a means of free speech, obsolete in the USA.

If you want to know what the Greatest Generation, in their youth and idealism, went to war for, it was NOT the enshrinement of a single point of view as the only acceptable one to express and uphold.

The three-hundred-plus pages of Author Chris DeRose's astonishingly well-researched (honestly, it feels as though this book was played out in front of him) story of one unique moment in our country's ongoing history of voter suppression did not fly by. Not because Author DeRose did not write the story well. They slogged past my tear-blurred eyes because these passionate rejecters of Conformity and Submission did not go on to spark a movement against the real perpetrators of the atrocity: The Powerful, the elite that could not care less what "party" label you mark your vote next to. After all, Boss Tweed said it best:

If your nineteenth-century history is faded to sepia tones, this will remind you of who he was and why Tammany Hall has so many lessons for the erstwhile democracy of the USA.

That rebellion lies in our future.

I hope and pray that it will come before I go for good.

ON TYRANNY, the perfect inexpensive gift for your favorite high-school grad or college student

ON TYRANNY: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
TIMOTHY SNYDER
Tim Duggan Books
$9.99 trade paper or ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: An historian of fascism offers a guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism.

On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to the impossible: the election of Donald Trump as president. Against all predictions, one of the most-disliked presidential candidates in history had swept the electoral college, elevating a man with open contempt for democratic norms and institutions to the height of power.

Timothy Snyder is one of the most celebrated historians of the Holocaust. In his books Bloodlands and Black Earth, he has carefully dissected the events and values that enabled the rise of Hitler and Stalin and the execution of their catastrophic policies. With Twenty Lessons, Snyder draws from the darkest hours of the twentieth century to provide hope for the twenty-first. As he writes, “Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism and communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”

Twenty Lessons is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

My Review: Not for its perfection of style but for its perfection of wisdom and its amazing timeliness. As I write this today, 24 March 2018, I saw the face of our future president in Emma Gonzalez as she stood silent, focused, determined, at a march made by young people to demand their lives be protected from ammosexual assholes. She spoke for six minutes and twenty seconds in total, the same amount of time that it took one piece of shit human being to slaughter seventeen of her classmates.

I believe that her speech...the few words, the long silence...will be the spark of the youth revolution our country so very badly needs. I am hopeful that Emma Gonzalez will be, by her very adamantine sense of self and her charismatic gravitas, the voice that alerts her compatriots to Author Snyder's clarion call to clarity:

The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.

The most unbelievably high stakes are at risk in the November 2018 elections. Buy this book not for yourself but for your hopes of a reasonably happy future for the United States of America, buy it in quantity and give it to everyone you know and/or can find who is under 25, and talk to them about why you're giving them this short, clear, concise, and urgently necessary book.

Your life, my life, the life of a truly great nation, depends on them showing up at the ballot box on 6 November 2018. This is neither hyperbole nor alarmism. It is simply the truth. Looking away from the horrors of the current kakistocracy's rise to any position of power higher than hall monitor at the local middle school will only ensure the brutal and vicious agenda of these lowlife scumbags and their horrifying cadres of disgustingly venal and/or stupid supporters will succeed.

THE OBAMA HATE MACHINE, a 2012 title that should've prepared us for 2016

THE OBAMA HATE MACHINE: The Lies, Distortions, and Personal Attacks on the President--And Who Is Behind Them
BILL PRESS
St. Martin's Griffin Books
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In Toxic Talk, Bill Press exposed the ways in which the extreme right-wing media has done an end run around the American voting populace by exerting a disproportionate control over open political debate. In The Obama Hate Machine, Press returns to show how the Right has taken rhetoric to slanderous new levels in attacking the nation’s forty-fourth president.

While presidents and presidential candidates routinely have been subject to personal attacks, the outright disdain Obama’s extremist opponents have for the facts has inspired an insidious brand of character assassination unique in contemporary politics.

Obama was born in Kenya . . . Obama sympathizes with Muslim terrorists . . . Obama is a communist who wants to institute death panels and touch off class warfare…The extent to which these unfounded assertions have taken hold in the American mindset shows just how ruthless, destructive, and all-powerful the right-wing machine—hijacked by extremists in the media and fueled by corporate coffers—has become. The author reveals how corporate interests such as the infamous Koch Brothers continue to steer political coverage away from fact-based dialogue into the realm of hysteria. Bill Press also observes this phenomenon is not limited to the airwaves and provides an “I Hate Obama Book Club” list, calling out the scores of anti-Obama tomes—and even some from the Left—that have helped drag politics even deeper into the mud. 

In his characteristic on-the-mark arguments sure to appeal to anyone on the Left or in the Center, Press shows how the peculiar nature of Obama-hating subverts issue-driven debate and threatens not only the outcome of the 2012 election but the future of the American democratic system.

***REPOSTING A 2013 REVIEW IN LIGHT OF RIGHT-WING DUMBFUCKERY ABOUT THEIR TREASONOUS ORANGE SHITGIBBON***

My Review: I do not know what to say about this book. The people who should read it won't. The people who do read it will, if not sociopathic by nature, weep uncontrollably for the horrific fate of our country.

I tell myself that it's good, this outrage and pain I feel when reading the horrors perpetrated in the name of partisan conservatism, because when I stop feeling those feelings it will mean that I have given up any hope for change AWAY from the viciousness, the brutal ignorant selfishness, that is characteristic of today's “conservatives.”

Go to the library. Read Chapter 5, “The Brothers.” Sixty pages of documented and repugnant thuggery perpetrated by the Koch brothers against the democratically elected president of the United States of America. If it stirs in you no outrage against the monstrous, vile, and greedy people who pretend to care about the fate of the Americans who do the work that makes them rich, go buy your jackboots and practice your “Sieg heils” because that's the world people like you are passively agreeing to live in.

The Right is WRONG. And their actions against President Obama (not my favorite person, but still he's the president) are very, very, very close to seditious. They talk treason and call it free speech...which they've paid their millions to ensure for themselves and their horrifying, selfish, greedy views.

I tell myself it's good that these betrayals hurt me so, these smacks in my besotted citizen's face, because when they don't hurt anymore, I'll have given up on change, on reason, on life. I skate ever closer to this dread eventuality.

THE PHOENIX YEAR, novel that feels more like an intelligence dossier

THE PHOENIX YEAR
DAVID L. BLOND
Wattle Publishing
$21.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “… from out of the fire, would rise a new order, like the legend of the phoenix. There would emerge a new world, a new super economy…”

So starts a sequence of events destined to rock world economies to their very core. On the 50th anniversary of their induction into the Society of the Phoenix, a group of billionaires is about to change the world dramatically, with devastating effect.

Overseen by the reclusive Heinrich Von Kleise, the Society has hatched an audacious plan to subvert world economies, by using and abusing some of the world’s wealthiest businessmen and their families; in some cases, holding them literally to ransom, or worse.

Michael Ross, an economic advisor to the US President, Ben Masters, a disgraced property tycoon, Natalya Avramowitz, a Russian economist and spy, and “Kim” a CIA Agent, find themselves at the center of this plot, involving inside trading, sex slavery, and political corruption.

As the world careens towards financial Armageddon, can Michael, Natalya and Kim prevent global disintegration, or are the world’s financial institutions fated to implode?

The Phoenix Year by David L. Blond is a gripping novel, encompassing many of the financial crises that have hit the headlines in the past decade. The author has skillfully woven these together to create an action-packed conspiracy thriller.

My Review: The Publisher refers to this book as "gripping"...I don't necessarily agree with that, but I finished the book in two sittings...and it's not short. I liked the policy stuff because I'm nerdy that way. I wasn't convinced it's all fiction, either. We've got ample circumstantial evidence to support the existence of a coordinated attack on world economies. I'm therefore inclined to offer an extra star over the generally clunky prose's merited two-and-a-half. This is more of an "eat-your-spinach" read than a sheer delight. It is definitely worth listening to!

THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country remains relevant

THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country
LATON McCARTNEY
Random House (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

***NOTE 7/11/18*** I'm amazed I wrote this review in 2012. Coulda been written today.

The Publisher Says: Big Oil bought the election of 1920 for Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio, because he was amenable to giving away huge amounts of money to the oil companies, including using American power in Mexico to undo the Mexican nationalization of the oil companies' assets there. Part of the payoff to the oil interests was assigning leases worth about $100 million (in 1920 dollars...well north of a billion now) in the US Navy's strategic petroleum reserve in several locations.

Including Teapot Dome, Wyoming.

It all unraveled, the leases were voided, and thanks to a crusading Montana populist Sen. Tom Walsh, several really rich and really corrupt men spent some token time in jail.

Despite his proven knowledge of the transactions, Harding's vice-president was re-elected in 1924 (Harding died in 1923, some suspect at Mrs. Harding's hand, so he would never have to testify before the Walsh Committee).

Oh for the good old days.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR COLLECTIONS, LEVERAGE THEIR REACH! DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT NEEDS THEM.

My Review: This book was published in 2008, an election year. I do not think this was an accident. The GOP, a sink of depravity and greed since the Taft Administration, did not need any help losing that election...the fact that the sitting vice-president didn't run as the candidate tells you all you need to know there, the GOP knew what was coming and wanted someone else to take the blame for it...but this book, about a conspiracy of evil, greedy GOP pols, their money-men, and the full intent to defraud We-the-People for private wealth, was still well-timed.

Lest any stupid damnfool conservative start mooing about bias, I rush to report that the author does not say the words I've said. The author reports the facts as history has them. The Committee reports, the papers of all parties concerned, all extant documentary evidence, was used in a careful reconstruction of the actual events that led to the Teapot Dome Scandal, as we've come to call it.

The fact that the documentary evidence makes the conservatives look like evil, greedy rotters is just a bonus. Embrace the demon within, GOP/Tea Party supporters! Align yourselves with those who think nothing of splashing out millions to buy the votes and influence the course of the river of money that flows from any government into their own pockets, with the minimum of trickle-down into the Public Good.

Do it openly, and in full knowledge of what kind of rotten sleazebags you're supporting...they've never been any different. Read this book and see why.

2022 ADDENDUM Lest my ire seem more partisan than it is, I rush to assure all readers that Senator Joe Manchin ("D"—Corporate America) has demonstrated the continuing susceptibility of our representative government to overt, money-based rigging in favor of those whose greed exceeds their common sense.