BERNIE FOR BURLINGTON: The Rise of the People's Politician, not great not bad

BERNIE FOR BURLINGTON: The Rise of the People's Politician
DAN CHIASSON
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: a scant 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The story of Bernie Sanders's quixotic but inexorable rise is told by a son of Burlington on a broad and vivid canvas, depicting the shaping of a people's politics, as he tracks a political signal that traveled from the hard-luck neighborhoods, general stores, traditional businesses, and county fairs to the Town Meetings and the ballot boxes of the last century, predicting much of what has happened to our nation writ large since then.

This utterly captivating symphonic story of city, a visionary, and the way our politics changed forever is told through the very specific people of Burlington, beginning with Dan Chiasson's own mall-punk friends of the 1980 in a video that would go viral decades later in 2020, they engaged with the itinerant carpenter turned socialist mayoral candidate, and there in that food court, the seeds of everything that was Bernie were sown. Dan, uniquely placed to bring a deep insider's perspective, knew all the the conservative French-Canadian Catholics whose great grandparents had worked in the mills (his own); the puppeteers and hippies and NYC transplants looking for land and "authenticity" in Vermont; the developers involved in the era's Robert Moses urban-renewal schemes; the corrupt old-school Dems at their table in the local dive; and even Ben and Jerry who became Ben and Jerry's right there in town. They all made up the mosh pit of the Burlington that Bernie captivated, running on the slogan "Burlington is not for sale," to become the modern era’s first socialist mayor, intimate with his constituents across workers, cops, lefties, and the little old ladies who organized their streets; he also boasted a foreign policy, a sudden national profile, and a bullhorn to speak to Ronald Reagan.

In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground and the documentary films of Frederick Wiseman, this epic of American city life delves into the gossip—and the exhilaration—around Bernie's unlikely rise, as we watch an American place transformed one diner coffee, one neighborhood door-knock at a time.

Full of Sanders himself, reflecting and raging, hitting his themes, forging alliances with all comers, this is a mesmerizing portrait of a politician, a place, and a movement that would change America.

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My Review: Poet and academic Chiasson came of age under Mayor Bernie Sanders' Socialist administration in Burlington, Vermont. It's no surprise that he decided to write Senator Sanders' political biography.

The Bernie Bros were never a thing. The likeliest explanation for the chimera was state-sponsored misinformation campaigns led by an authoritarian polity that supports the current administration taking socially divisive cyberaction to help the 2016 campaign waged by the current president succeed. As is the norm in the US, the main supporters of progressivism are young women and people of color. It's a relief in one way...those trolls were obnoxious...and very sad in another, because so much hate and rage has been sown in young white men so successfully for so long it's hard to see a path back from the ugliness for them.

This story is about one of the few remaining Sixties radicals who stayed true to his vision and who made it a point to live out those principles loudly and publicly. A terrific opposition leader, in other words...but not a person of Presidential timber any more than the current occupant of the White House is. (Albeit I'd take Bernie in that office every damn day over felonious yam.)

I wasn't raised in Burlington, saw none of Bernie's achievements, and was not engaged by the nostalgic-bordering-on-elegiac tone of the read. I'm glad to have a blunt, mouthy, principled person in the Senate, and wish Bernie a long, useful life. I don't think anything in this book altered my overall positive opinion of him, I don't find the book a must-read, but am very glad it's out there. Someday we'll need a reminder there *were* idealists in US politics. As it is now, this feels more like a finger wagged in my face for not getting on board with Bernie. Offered the choice between voting for Harris or Sanders, I'd still vote for Harris.

COMPOUND FRACTURE, accepting the gulf between what is and what could be is optional

COMPOUND FRACTURE
ANDREW JOSEPH WHITE
Peachtree Teen (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Bestselling and award-winning author Andrew Joseph White returns with a queer Appalachian thriller, that pulls no punches, for teens who see the failures in our world and are pushing for radical change.

A gut-wrenching story following a trans autistic teen who survives an attempted murder, only to be drawn into the generational struggle between the rural poor and those who exploit them.

On the night Miles Abernathy—sixteen-year-old socialist and proud West Virginian—comes out as trans to his parents, he sneaks off to a party, carrying evidence that may finally turn the tide of the blood feud plaguing Twist Creek: Photos that prove the county’s Sheriff Davies was responsible for the so-called “accident” that injured his dad, killed others, and crushed their grassroots efforts to unseat him.

The feud began a hundred years ago when Miles’s great-great-grandfather, Saint Abernathy, incited a miners’ rebellion that ended with a public execution at the hands of law enforcement. Now, Miles becomes the feud’s latest victim as the sheriff’s son and his friends sniff out the evidence, follow him through the woods, and beat him nearly to death.

In the hospital, the ghost of a soot-covered man hovers over Miles’s bedside while Sheriff Davies threatens Miles into silence. But when Miles accidentally kills one of the boys who hurt him, he learns of other folks in Twist Creek who want out from under the sheriff’s heel. To free their families from this cycle of cruelty, they’re willing to put everything on the line—is Miles?

A visceral, unabashedly political page-turner that won’t let you go until you’ve reached the end, Compound Fracture is not for the faint of heart, but it is for every reader who is ready to fight for a better world.

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

My Review: If ever a book was well-placed to meet its times, it's this trans YA story of rebellion turned existential.

There are so many stories that feature parents of trans kids that reject and demean their children that it felt very warming for Miles to have befuddled, but loving and willing to learn, parents that I was ready to five-star the reading experience. Even his grandparents weren't rejecting, as so many trans kids experience. The latter were even able to see Miles' outing as the huge emotional violation it was and not blame him for the violence that followed. It was outstanding, and I really hope more trans kids than ever experience that in their lives. Sounds more and more five-starry, right?

Didn't *quite* work out that way....

That's really down to my feeling that the politics were polemical not organic to Miles. Being a socialist firebrand in West Virginia is as risky as being trans; so why was one on display, and why the political one? Given the terrible suffering Miles endures in the course of the book, why was one so impersonal the choice he's depicted as making the one he's going to suffer for? Why fuss about identity politics in the middle of class war, a character asks...I wondered why class warfare does not include bodily autonomy before a political screed.

Miles' exploration of what masculinity means in his milieu is what earned back all but a token bit of a star. This issue is absolutely wonderfully handled. Miles is a man; Miles isn't most of the stereotypically Appalachian/Southern man-coded things, eg violent and aggressive, but is figuring out what that's going to look like. His own dad's experiences in the story, as a victim of male aggression to the point of disability, seemed to me to set the stakes for Miles pretty starkly.

It ends up being a cavil in the face of the story's many strengths. I hope the whole of West Virginia will read it, if only to see what critique from a place of love for a shared home looks like. It's a home that gets huge amounts of criticism from a place of contempt heaped on it from outside.

It's good to have a corrective to the attitude but not the substance of the critics.

THE SOCIALIST MANIFESTO: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, never more trenchant than today

THE SOCIALIST MANIFESTO: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
BHASKAR SUNKARA
Basic Books
$15.00 trade paper, purchased from the author's magazine website

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A "razor-sharp" introduction to this political and economic ideology makes a galvanizing argument for modern socialism (Naomi Klein)—and explains how its core tenets could effect positive change in America and worldwide.

In The Socialist Manifesto, Bhaskar Sunkara explores socialism's history since the mid-1800s and presents a realistic vision for its future. With the stunning popularity of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans are embracing the class politics of socialism. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would a socialist system in America look like?

The editor of Jacobin magazine, Sunkara shows that socialism, though often seen primarily as an economic system, in fact offers the means to fight all forms of oppression, including racism and sexism. The ultimate goal is not Soviet-style planning, but to win rights to healthcare, education, and housing, and to create new democratic institutions in workplaces and communities. A primer on socialism for the 21st century, this is a book for anyone seeking an end to the vast inequities of our age.

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

My Review: William M. Tweed said this about the way the US does politics:

I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating. As quoted in Understanding American Government (2003) by Susan Welch, p. 224

No good came from trying to talk sense into the Democratic Party; their loss on 5 November 2024 was catastrophic. It was not the resounding mandate the Nerd Reich and its tech scum boosters portray it as. The margin was not huge, but the impact will be *immense*, far-reaching, and vastly immiserating for millions.

It did not need to happen, even in the teeth of forty years of the carefully disguised radical coup orchestrated by the wealthy and powerful against the rest of us. The way to beat the radicals is not to appease or identify with them; it is to present an alternative to them.

This will never happen in the two-party system.

I wanted this not to be true, but this idiotic result has driven the last nail in the coffin of my faith in humanity, my trust in the US institutions of politics, and my desire to support the least-worst politicians in hopes they'll do some of the Right Thing. They won't.

Now what?

Now this, and before someone says "But socialism!" or even stupider "that's Communist!" I'll remind all y'all that the monster you've been Pavlovianly conditioned to fear and hate is totalitarianism relabeled to scare you away from realizing the socialist demands the owners hate were already met...to a degree...and they're the exact things your newly elected scum were put in place to destroy. When the way you live gets worse, do not open your yap. You either voted for, or decided not to vote against, this exact result.

It is your fault.

Now let's figure out what we can begin to do to make a few gains. Start by reading Bhaskar Sunkara's clear, cogent, carefully reasoned manifesto. If you're still reeling from the evidence of how immensely successful the scumbags' propaganda, misinformation, and misdirection were, here's a shred of hope to cling to. Here's a possibility that you already know works...you who receive "benefits" aka your own tax money returned to you (not some gift as the radical right wants you to believe) better than anyone...so lean into it.

Don't feel like you can do anything, don't want to think about it, are just too drained to give it your attention? That's their system for making you passive at work. If you won't do the work, spend your money to support those who will, and that shit-sure ain't the Democrats.

Support a real change for the better. Read this book to learn what that can mean.