Holy Carp it's FEBRUARY already!

Over on Medium, I've published an article about the perils of burnout...and a few escapes I gave myself to avoid this common curse of the driven. Creatomic founder and personal inspirational/aspirational creative entrepreneur Jon Westenberg posted a rallying cry for aspiring creatives, "How to Make Something People Give a F*ck About."

It's no surprise to anyone that I'm a curmudgeon. I struggle not to say exactly what I think to every person I meet because I don't think much of most people. So how does someone without more than a soupçon of the Milk of Human Kindness involve others in what matters to him? Find a passion that makes a difference, yes well...#ReadingIsResistance is it for me.

I want this nightmare kakistocracy to be over. Now. Yesterday, preferably. I can't manifest that reality, sorry. I can't do a lot except talk about it. Given the Trumpets' response to dissent, it's probably not the smartest thing to do. For me, it could mean being targeted on social media by the various Strumpets who still support Twitler...and more sinisterly, it could affect my status as a recipient of Medicare and a constellation of other benefits I paid for with many years of payroll tax payments.

Look at the image above. That's not an irrational or deluded worry. But ya know what? If #ReadingIsResistance draws that much attention, and makes even a tiny ripple in the shallow puddle that is this administration's talent pool, I will feel that the risk is so very worth it as to make the downside endurable.

If a guy who was just walking home with his groceries can go stand in front of a stonking great tank, I can write what I mean to say and tell everyone I can find about it. I hope y'all care enough about the beautiful, amazing country our ancestors did their bumbling best to make for us to resist the kakistocracy. I know not everyone thinks they can. But remember something really important: #ReadingIsResistance. No one can tell you what to read. No one can tell you what to think once you've read it. No one can make you shut up about your thoughts and feelings.

Yet.

And if you and I and all the people we can reach and all the people they can reach and on and on ad infinitum will read and resist, they...the kakistocrats...won't ever be able to. It's an investment in something so precious, so incredibly precious, that They really want you to give it up without a fight. They make distractions and They create perceptions of readers that are unflattering or attempts to marginalize us. That's plain old fear.

They fear us, our mental furniture is piled too high for them to casually push into our brains. We are the #Resistance. Don't let Them win this battle without a fight.

#ReadingIsResistance

I've read too many books to believe what I'm told. #ReadingIsResistance

It’s 2017…do you know where your values are? Mine, on this Martin Luther King, Junior, Day are aligned with Dr. King’s as outlined in the "I have a dream" speech. You can find it on YouTube if you've never seen it.

On Friday the 20th, a new administration will formally begin. For many of us this is a tragedy out of Greek drama. It seems to many of us that the gods must be angry with us, have decided to punish us by having the least qualified, most appalling kind of human being sworn in as the leader of our country despite the fact he’ll be in violation of the Constitution he’ll be swearing to uphold from the instant he swears the oath. See the Emoluments Clause for just one, but a very powerful one, of the reasons for this. I don’t know what will happen after this act of treason takes place, but in my fantasies, a bolt of lightning will fry the slab of bacon with his hand on the Bible and the lie on his lips before the oath can be completed. A boy can dream.

In an earlier post, I outlined my purpose for this year of change: I want to bring the act of resistance to kakistocracy, to scumbagarchy, to the ascendance of the very worst that our beautiful, powerful, gigantically capable country can offer, right down to your head. No one can tell you what to read. No one can tell you how to feel about what you read. No one can (yet) tell you what books, magazines, newspapers, you can own, subscribe to, read on your various electronic devices. The very act of reading is resistance to the authoritarian…and soon to be, in my worried opinion, totalitarian…chants of the opinion influencers sent forth like the Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys in an ever-stronger assault on your independence of thought.

Reading cannot be controlled in the way that watching can be. The act prevents it. Reading is direct communication between a writer and a reader, unmediated by manipulative images or voiceovers, undistracted by advertising messages or unrelated messages in “crawls” across part of the visual field. There is a reason our elites have done their most strenuous best to make reading unpopular: Whatever the message of the author, the reader receives it whole and entire. Many are not able to perceive the didactic purpose of the writer, others misinterpret the message, some simply disagree with what the author is saying. (My Goodreads reviews of the bullshit written by Ann Coulter and the homophobe Orson Scott Card are examples of the latter.) None of this changes the unsafe truth that, once eyeballs receive and brain interprets the written word, the outside world cannot erase and can only in a limited way amend the author’s ideas in the reader’s head.

There is a very, very good reason that freedom of speech and freedom of the press were of great concern to the Founding Fathers. There is a reason that no license to own and operate a printing press has ever been required in the US. To redress the error of “allowing freedom of the press” (take a moment to unpack that…freedom allowed? how is that meant to work, if it’s allowed it can be disallowed and therefore is not freedom…this same headscratching tautology applies to “granting rights”), the Powers That Be determined that broadcasting would be licensed (“to prevent chaos” since there would be no stopping use of any channel by anyone and that would be bad, wouldn’t it) and regulated and controlled. For more than fifty years, those controls required broadcasters to perform civic duties, which led to “Meet the Press” and its ilk; but the Reagan Administration lifted those requirements among a host of others and the snakepit of cable news channels spewing unfair and imbalanced vitriolic lies took less than a decade to form. No licensing agency can enforce standards that aren’t defined, as the standards for news once were. And thus was the liberal majority of the bygone era betrayed by their ideological enemies who came into power at last in the 1980s.

The Great Satan shown in the act of sucking the life from the USA

The “vast right-wing conspiracy” as Mrs. Clinton so honestly, but ineptly, named them got the bit in their teeth and began to trample the truth under the cloven hooves of pundits, commentators, talk show hosts “independent” of that new shibboleth, “the Liberal Media.” (What Liberal Media? is an instructive analysis of what actually happened. I recommend it whole-heartedly.) Public trust in the institution Constitutionally protected from legal and official restraint plummeted as the endless lying bullshit flew at them from every direction. The onslaught was coordinated, as the perspective of hindsight demonstrates with blinding clarity. And it was unstoppable because it was not from any official source; it was not a conspiracy because it is not illegal to organize a campaign of words that is not criminal in its nature; and it was, therefore, wildly successful. A knife was applied to the throats of opposing pundits, very frequently academics and intellectuals, as the eternal US suspicion of intellectuals was fanned to a white heat and the efficacy of public education was pumped full of hot air to delegitimize academia and therefore academics daring to speak against the unfolding authoritarian dumbing-down of a population primed to find fault with a system stacked, blatantly and undisguisably, against them. A bit of distraction, a lot of misinformation, titanic waves of misdirection funded by people with oceans of money and rip-currents of purpose, and one dupe to lead them all: Here we are.

The Guiltiest of the Guilty Parties in the long national nightmare that will be the new administration

It felt to me, as I watched this debacle unfold before my disbelieving eyes, hopeless and unstoppable. It has proven to be unstoppable. Nothing is hopeless. Hope is internal. Hope is generated from within, not received from without. That simple truth saved my sanity in the aftermath of the first Russian candidate for the US presidency becoming the president elect.
Hope comes from within; words come from without. How can reading grow hope? The only place you can ever put your money that no one can take it away from you is inside your head. Education, formal or not, happens when you read. Whatever you choose to read, two things are inherent in the act: You are the sole actor, yours is the choice that can’t be compelled, yours the ideas that come from reading the words. Any words. Novels, plays, encyclopedias, comic books, biographies, essays, magazines, websites, satires. It does not matter. YOU selected the reading material. YOU read it. YOU grew your own thoughts inside your own head after reading it.

#ReadingIsResistance.

All of my reviews for 2017 will be about the act of resistance. I read something. I chose it. I resisted the shouts and the screams and the distractions and I fed my head. I want you to do the same thing. I’ll tell you about the things I read and I hope you’ll want to read at least some of them. But even if you’re not interested in a single book that I review, I want you to realize something that applies to you as well as to me: If an old poor disabled guy who can’t march in protests, can’t go to meetings, can’t give to worthy causes, can resist the tsunami of terror, so can you. Read a book. Tell everyone you can reach what you read. Your very act of reading resists the drumbeat of dumbing-down, of getting inside your head by making so much noise that you can’t form a thought for yourself. Tell everyone you can reach, every time you can reach them, how you claimed your head for yourself and how they can too:

#ReadingIsResistance

It's 2025. Now what? #ReadingIsResistance, that's what.

2025 GOALS
I wrote an unprecedented 413 reviews in 2024, though certainly not all those books were read in 2024! I'm not counting books read, but reviews written. Decades of pilf I've been offered from the review aggregators Edelweiss+ and NetGalley that never got a real review written, just got some notes about my thoughts made on my various computers. This year I went back to all my old computers and vacuumed notes onto a data stick. It's my purpose now to write at least a Burgoine review from those notes, post it here and on the DRC aggregator's site, and that will be my annual count.

For those who think I should follow the "books read in 2025" model, that's very interesting, and thank you for sharing your judgment with me. I will, however, be using the various book-review sites the way I want to, not how you think I should.

Numerical goals aren't really the point for me. I've shown I can meet or exceed them often enough now to think they're just unnecessary, and not a little show-offy, for me. I will focus my efforts on getting my unwritten count down, and on focusing my efforts on reviewing #ReadingIsResistance titles. Dynamic list here.

It's #Booksgiving again...a version of the Jólabókaflóð Iceland loves!

As we slide into another Turkey Day, I'm supposed to feel thankful for things by US custom. 2024 hasn't showered me with news or events or trends I feel at all accepting of, still less thankful for, and has taken away from me some comforting illusions about how resistant to manipulation, and how vigilant against lies and incitements of base urges, people are. Apparently all y'all gotta learn the hardest way there is to believe Them when They tell you what the plan is.



Apparently 2024 is going to be a year where, in my struggle to find some hope if not happiness, it's going to be in pursuing a program based around #ReadingIsResistance...again. So I'm grateful for the beauty and the abundance and the variety of experience that lives in the books we have such a smorgasbord of available to us. (If we vigilantly protect our right to access it, of course.) The year had so many top-flight reads for me, in so many categories, that I didn't think I'd be able to squeeze them all into the few weeks between Turkey Day and Yule.



Jólabókaflóðið is, this year, a more important holiday tradition to start than usual. I'm very distressed at how little books mean to modern kids. The best way I know to make books meaningful to these impressionable minds is to show them your own interest in the art of reading. Share books with kids every way you can. Buy them for your own kids and grands and niblings. Don't have the means, or the kids? Donate what you can afford to Dolly Parton's Imagination Library! In this era of crowdfunding, I really shouldn't need to explain the multiplicative effect of small donations.



The Icelandic tradition began as a response to privation, as Lauren Oster wrote in Smithsonian Magazine:

The Jólabókaflóð traces back to Iceland’s transformation in World War II. In 1944, Iceland was a newly independent nation with a beleaguered wartime economy and 15,000 occupying Allied troops. {Per Heiðar Ingi Svansson,the president of the Icelandic Publishers Association:} “Because of the bad economy and depression, there were quotas or very strict restrictions on many things you could import...that limited very much the selection of commodity goods that you could choose as Christmas gifts. But paper was one of the few commodities not rationed during the war—so paper was imported to produce books that were written and then printed in Iceland.” That fortuitous supply—and an infusion of occupation-related money—dovetailed beautifully with Icelanders’ literary leanings.

Their tradition of reading together on long winter nights without any other entertainment is, of course, very much not the media landscape we in the West now inhabit. There's no denying, however, that the looming economic threats presented by the incoming administration's stated goal of raising tariffs on consumer goods bids fair to make books a vastly more appealing and affordable gift for all your giftees, of all ages.



I'll focus #Booksgiving, as has been my habit, on books as gifts in the first part of the lead-up to Yule. I hope the books I'm excited about will excite you, too, and suggest themselves as gifts for your circle of loved ones.

As the delivery times begin to bite, though, I'll shift to those things you can gift yourself as supplies to hoard against what my old friend Stasia contends is the imminent "Worldwide Book Famine" that looms over every librocubicularist's nightmares. My very first suggestion, and my 2024 pick for the six-stars-of-five peak reading experience, can't be anything other than the unforgettable, thrilling GLORIOUS EXPLOITS by the Irish debut novelist FERDIA LENNON. He took the absolutely grim fate of defeated Athenian soldiers in the quarries of Syracuse, infused it with hope and a kind of energy not usually found in Classical stories retold, and made it fresh thereby. I have thought about this story, in its oddly fitting Irish intonations, as the year has unfolded very, very much against my preferences and needs. I felt ever-greater kinship with these beleaguered, even doomed men as they sought respite from their hopeless circumstances. Even among the victors their belief in the power of creative storytelling to alleviate misery and offer what comfort there can be in the darkest of times found resonances.

There is always hope for our shared humanity to come through, and come together.


Still missing my dear, departed Dutch friend Anita.

This #Booksgiving, then, is unusually relevant to the need we as readers should all feel to make a positive difference in our world. The best way, bar none, to do this is to model values that are crucial to the mental health of the world: tolerance, kindness, communication, and acceptance. I'll say to the inevitable complainer that tolerance does NOT include the intolerant in its circumference. This is called the paradox of tolerance, and it is a refutation in fact of "both-sides"ism. During this Holiday-rich season, you're going to face someone (quite possibly someone you love) who will trot out this long-disproven fallacy with the triumphant air of one who has struck a killer blow. This is the moment where #ReadingIsResistance shows its worth. Read up in advance; the list of books I've reviewed includes stuff from the technocratic through the popularized to the expanded listicle, all replete with rejoinders to that entrenched bunkerized ignorance.


This #Booksgiving review blast being a standing tradition on my blog, I'll suggest that you browse your way through past reviews, looking at the books I've included under the tag since 2017. The list is self-updating, and can be accessed here.


An author book reading in December at Gunnarshús, the home of the Writers’ Union of Iceland.

In a world of Lady Bracknells, strive instead to be Cecily Cardew.

SUPER EXTRA GRANDE, Cuban SF giant Yoss's hilarious, trenchant space opera

SUPER EXTRA GRANDE
YOSS (translated by David Frye)
Restless Books
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: “Intergalactic space travel meets outrageous, biting satire in Super Extra Grande…. Its author [Yoss] is one of the most celebrated—and controversial—Cuban writers of science fiction…. Reminiscent of Douglas Adams—but even more so, the satire of Rabelais and Swift.” —The Washington Post

In a distant future in which Latin Americans have pioneered faster-than-light space travel, Dr. Jan Amos Sangan Dongo has a job with large and unusual responsibilities: he’s a veterinarian who specializes in treating enormous alien animals. Mountain-sized amoebas, multisex species with bizarre reproductive processes, razor-nailed, carnivorous humanoid hunters: Dr. Sangan has seen it all. When a colonial conflict threatens the fragile peace between the galaxy’s seven intelligent species, he must embark on a daring mission through the insides of a gigantic creature and find two swallowed ambassadors—who also happen to be his competing love interests.

Funny, witty, raunchy, and irrepressibly vivacious, Super Extra Grande is a rare specimen in the richly parodic tradition of Cuban science fiction, and could only have been written by a Cuban heavy-metal rock star with a biology degree: the inimitable Yoss.

My Review: Page one, first paragraph:

"Boss Sangan, sludge al frente and a la derecha, ten centímetros knee," Narbuck peevishly announces through my earbuds.

His voice reminds me unpleasantly of a screechy old machine in need of lube job. But that's not the worst of it. Worst is, he seems to go out of his way to mangle the grammar and syntax of the Spanglish language, stubbornly dropping prepositions and mutilating verbs like he's doing a bad impression of a native in a third-rate holoseries.

That's all you need to know to determine of this is a read for you. If this grates or fails to strike an agreeable note, go away now, because it's not gonna change and I like it, so I'll be quoting more of it.

Okay, all ashore who's goin' ashore? Bueno. Andemos al ruedo.

I'm tempted to make a stab at writing this review in Spanglish just because it would be fun and would make me feel all cool and stuff. Then I realized that old white men, even ones with a decent command of Spanish, don't get to have that kind of fun. Then I realized that showing off really is a major hoot and fuck all the haters. They're gonna hate anyway, so....

Nope. Can't. #ReadingIsResistance all right, but the thing I need to resist is being the center of attention when this book is rightfully the star of this show. Yoss wrote this story seven years ago and is probably hazy, after all this time and all his intervening books, on exactly what he wrote and why. What he wrote is a comedic space opera set in a future where the González Drive, invented by an Ecuadorian Catholic priest who won two Nobel Prizes—Physics, Mathematics—for it, gave humanity unfettered access to the galaxy. Once out there, humanity discovered that one species made it out before us, and then five more followed in short order because that's how probability would arrange it, all the technologically capable species figuring the solution to the problem of how to run away from home around the same time.

That's enough right there for me to fall in love. Then add in the copious word-play, the multilingual puns, the rampant sexism, the unambiguous human male bisexual experiences, the interspecies communication in Spanglish because it's so much easier than trying to teach dimwitted Earthlings any one of the other species' languages (not to mention the hydrogen-breathing species' telepathy, a whole different level of impossible to teach), the narrator named Jan Amos Sangan Dongo (hint: if you speak any Spanish at all, if you know any Cubans, wear a lifter's belt while reading this book or your diaphragm will hurt like sixty tomorrow). I read the book in one uproarious sitting. It's like the slightly high, vaguely tipsy conversation you had with your Hispanic crush-object back in college. (Y'all had one of those, right?)

FIRST SYLLOGISM
First Premise: Garden planet with oxygen atmosphere, relatively nonaggressive fauna, and exuberant flora, third from a type G2 yellow dwarf star; that is, very similar to the humans' Sun. A tempting nugget for any colony scheme.

Second Premise: Planetary system on the border between the human and Cetian zones. Humans name the promising planet Canaan. Cetians call it Urgh-Yhaly-Mhan, which in the language of the Goddess means "we deserve this because we are who we are."

Third Premise: Both species are highly expansionistic and will not hesitate to turn to violence if they think it necessary to support and/or safeguard their interests.

Conclusion: To avoid sparking a large-scale armed conflict, in the years following the First Battle of Canaan (a minor skirmish that left thousands of casualties on both sides), neither race risks settling the tempting border world. They sign a solemn treaty sanctioning this unstable but reassuring equilibrium. A tiny joint garrison of troops from both species will oversee compliance.

Some points: First, the Cetians are not, as you're saying it in your head, SEE-shuns. They're SETTEE-uns, beings from a planet around Tau Ceti. Second, Jan Sangan (chuckle) is a biological veterinarian specializing in the biggest of the big creatures around the galaxy. He's almost eight feet tall and very strong. You gettin' the vibe for why this is Super Extra Grande? He's a graduate of the Anima Mundi (Animal Planet, get it?) University for Biological Sciences where he had to study logic, hence the syllogistic format. Up to speed? Okay:

SECOND SYLLOGISM
First Premise: Far, far from Canaan, the grassland planet Olduvaila, a First Wave human colony world, has barely eight-tenths the gravity of Earth. Its inhabitants, descendants of the Maasai people, average seven feet in height as adults and specialize in cattle ranching.

Second Premise: Bwana, a gas giant approximately the size of Saturn and the fourth planet in the same system, passes near Olduvaila every fourteen years, and with each pass it overwhelms the colonial world's weaker gravity and captures a bit more of its atmosphere. This process has been going on for millions of years...but after two or three more passes, the declining density of the local atmosphere will leave it too thin for the humans and their herds to breathe. Already the air on Olduvaila is barely equivalent the atmosphere at an altitude of five thousand meters on Earth.

Third Premise: The Maasai, a cattle-herding African people from whom the human colonizers on Olduvaila are descended, have a strong warrior tradition and have never resigned themselves to being defeated by drought, famine, other natural disasters...or any enemy.

Conclusion: The warlike and desperate inhabitants of the dying planet Olduvaila are seeking another world where they can move. Urgently and en masse, no matter where it is and no matter whose bodies they have to step over to get there.

Some points: The wonderful planet name Canaan/"we deserve this because we are who we are" now meets the equally wonderful "Olduvai-la." The Maasai do indeed count the Olduvai Gorge in their territory. The Cradle of Humankind, Lucy's backyard. Planet Bwana, "master," is stealing the very air from the Africans. If there's a more amusing and apt way to handle an info-dump, I've yet to encounter it.

And on goes Yoss for four more syllogisms, outlining the course of a cracking good space opera replete with battleships and explosions and feats of derring-do! And not one bit of that happens! Well, there's a battleship, but it's the place where the telepathic hydrogen-breathing Juhungans have offered to host a diplomatic summit (shades of the Enterprise, eh what?) to avoid the looming interspecies war. Enter Jan Sangan (chuckle), Biological Veterinarian to the Super Extra Grande, because the negotiators are trapped on Brobdingnag (Swift is spinning about now) inside a two-hundred-kilometer living lake of protoplasm called Cosita. (The closest English equivalent I can come up with for this in its intended nickname use is the Southern American affectionate contronym "Little Bit.") Bonus: the negotiators are both former employees of his! Added extra bonus: they're both female and desirable! But wait, there's more: they're each in love with Jan Sangan (chuckle), quite famously and publicly, even though he fired them because he won't sleep with the help!

This kind of playful, gonzo storytelling always gets my vote for escapist reading. Yoss's jabs at the Arab-Israeli conflict, his not-very-veiled anti-imperialism, and his willingness to subvert every convention he can find even while embracing them is more than the sum of the parts. He makes it very clear that, bumbling fools though we be, humanity survives and thrives in all its messy, smelly, squabbly squalor because.

Yep. That period is exactly where I intended it to be. And the ending Yoss made for the story is exactly where he intended it to be. Resist cultural blindness, read a genre not your usual, like science fiction. Resist social conformism, read a Cuban rocker-cum-writer's book publicly, displaying the cover for all your fellow commuters to see and wonder about. Resist your natural urge towards despair as the world, as it ever does and ever will, descends into ever-deeper chaos: Yoss reminds us that humanity is a glorious, idiotic, hyperbolic mess.

Thank goodness.

THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU, an adventure story about books and the people who love them

THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU
JOSHUA HAMMER
Simon & Schuster
$13.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven.

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world’s greatest and most brazen smugglers.

In 2012, thousands of Al Qaeda militants from northwest Africa seized control of most of Mali, including Timbuktu. They imposed Sharia law, chopped off the hands of accused thieves, stoned to death unmarried couples, and threatened to destroy the great manuscripts. As the militants tightened their control over Timbuktu, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali.

Over the past twenty years, journalist Joshua Hammer visited Timbuktu numerous times and is uniquely qualified to tell the story of Haidara’s heroic and ultimately successful effort to outwit Al Qaeda and preserve Mali’s—and the world’s—literary patrimony. Hammer explores the city’s manuscript heritage and offers never-before-reported details about the militants’ march into northwest Africa. But above all, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is an inspiring account of the victory of art and literature over extremism.

***I WON THIS BOOK IN A LITERARY HUB GIVEAWAY. THANK YOU TO S&S AND LIT HUB!***

My Review: A journalistic telling of a summer-blockbuster level tale...not that that's a bad thing!

What's most exciting in the book is the interaction of Al Qaeda and the resistance. What's least exciting about the whole story is the fact that we need to be told about the awful and hideous actions of the hate-filled anti-intellectuals who are, even as we speak, eviscerating an entire world's millennium of progress so their imaginary friend won't be mad at them.

And then there are the angry anti-intellectual greedy motherfuckers running the US government as an ATM for the world's wealthiest people.

And that, my dears, is 2017 in a nutshell. Books threaten these scumbags. They have to eliminate them somehow, and here in the US they've chosen the modern path of making them irrelevant, while in the old-school climes of Africa they physically destroy them. Same result. The forces of rage are out to stupidify the globe and it looks depressingly like they're succeeding.

But there are people like the brilliant, beautiful-souled Mr. Haidara. There are nooks in cyberspace where learning and passion for words still matter. There will always be a way to prevent the final night from falling.

It's more urgent than ever to remember that #READINGisResistance!

THE SOCIALIST AWAKENING: What's Different Now About the Left, & THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism

THE SOCIALIST AWAKENING: What's Different Now About the Left (Columbia Global Reports series)
JOHN B. JUDIS
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: John Judis is the author of one of the seminal books about the 2016 election, The Populist Explosion, which has sold 38,000 copies and was named One of six books to help understand Trump's win by The New York Times and The Economist called it "Well-written and well-researched, powerfully argued and perfectly timed." Judis is also the author of The Nationalist Revival, published in 2018, which was highly acclaimed and has sold over 9,000 copies. EJ Dionne in The American Prospect called it essential reading.

Both titles have been popular as course adoptions Judis is a veteran political reporter who examines national and global political trends through a nonpartisan lens. He specializes in speaking truth to liberals, wrote EJ Dionne in The Washington Post. Through his long career in progressive journalism, Judis has made a habit of seeing things that others were missing. With his new book examining the new socialism of the left, he once again provides a clarifying look at one of the biggest political trends of our time. Completes Judis's political trilogy explaining the Trump era.

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

My Review: I read this book, and I believed it was true. I do not now know if its analysis of Millennials is accurate, and thus what happened in November 2024 was an anomaly of some sort...read "the results were manipulated like they were in 2016"...or if Author Judis is just like the rest of us elitists on the left who just want to believe as much as Fox Mulder wanted to believe.

Maybe I'm an idiot (stop snickering) but I choose door number optimism.

My generation, like the one before us and the one immediately after, fell for the capitalist lies about socialism = totalitarianism, thus flat refused to see the way socialism rescued capitalism from a full-on leftist rebellion during the Great Depression, and created the most powerful economy in the history of the planet, and reduced immiseration on a scale so epic that the Economic Royalists have spent forty-five years fighting back all the gains made so their power will once again be unchallenged and unshared.

I am deeply distressed that the plan is succeeding still, accelerating even, as they roll out the fascist facets of their controlling regime. All it took was repeating the old lies about Others that regularly succeed in scaring the crap out of the delicate little manbabies who can't tolerate anyone not looking/acting/thinking exactly like them.

So reading this book felt a little like masochism. It also felt a lot like a call to arms, a path marked towards reclaiming the future from the tech scum of the Nerd Reich before it becomes nigh-on impossible.

Don't shirk your part in the battle for the future. #ReadingIsResistance

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



THE POLITICS OF OUR TIME: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism (Columbia Global Reports)
JOHN B. JUDIS
Columbia University Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$19.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The distinguished political analyst John Judis has brought out a book with Columbia Global Reports during each of the last three national political seasons: The Populist Explosion in 2016, The Nationalist Revival in 2018, and The Socialist Awakening in 2020. Together, these books chart the rise during the second decade of the twenty-first century of new and unexpected political movements in the United States and Europe that arose in the wake of the Great Recession, the conflict with al-Qaeda and ISIS, and encroaching climate change.

Judis has revised and updated these three books, and written a new introductory essay that seeks to explain the tumultuous last decade—most notably, Donald Trump's presidency and the response to a global pandemic and recession. This volume is an indispensable guide to understanding the deeply rooted disenchantment that gave rise to populist parties and politicians on the right and left—and to the global changes that have transformed the politics of our time.

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

My Review: Tendentious revisions and introductory essays, all with a cautiously hopeful tone.

Might shoulda waited until 2025 to assess the project in either its success or its failure.

Necessary reading...this omnibus edition is very useful indeed. I'm not at all sure Author Judis is related to Cassandra; I'm thinking more Pandora. But let's look at this editorial project for what it offers: Hope, faith in the malleability of the politically naïve in our direction not just theirs.

John B. Judis is able to point to the reasons for why we are where we are. That is an excellent starting point to get onto a new path.

Return to service announcement

Hello blog readers! I've been absent for quite a while, and I'm sure y'all have noticed how very behind I am in writing my reviews. I'd like to explain my absence and my seeming negligence. Well, real negligence, just not deliberate or malicious towards the authors and publishers I've promised reviews to.

Many of you know that I suffered a nervous collapse in 2014. For the first time in my then-55 years, the cumulative effect of childhood woes coupled with several years of psychological warfare waged against me by some people I lived with coupled with an unexpected betrayal led me to get very close to suicide.

A chance phone call from a mental health worker named Julie prevented me from going through with the plan. She talked me down off the emotional ledge. I even put away the knife I had planned to use to sever my jugular vein because she jauntily assured me it was unnecessary, help would be there soon.

It was.

I spent 4-1/2 months in the locked psych ward at Nassau University Medical Center. The psychiatrists and social workers figured out the biochemical problem underlying my extreme and disproportionate emotional response to my situation. They *could* have discharged me after 6 weeks, I was stable emotionally, but I had no place to go. The social workers finally found this assisted living facility willing to accept me despite my suicide attempt and here I am today.

Regrettably I am still physically disabled by 36 years of cumulative effects from a severe case of tophaceous gout. The pain of the ginormous deposits of uric acid and calcium crystals on my joints and along my tendons is pretty damned awful. I find sitting for any length of time excruciating. I stand up and lie down well...it's the transitions that slay me. In today's opioid-fearing climate I am undermedicated by the pain management doctor because he's afraid he'll be investigated for giving out such a large prescription. Medicare doesn't pay for cannabinoids, which would do a better job at lower doses and I can't come close to paying the $350 a month the prescriptions cost.

So sometimes the hopelessness of a chronic and incurable condition plus the deep uncertainty that faces every person on Medicare as to whether our care will continue to be funded plus the absurdly deep cuts in Medicaid that pay for the facility I live in...well...in April I cratered. I couldn't read, let alone write reviews. I am still wobbly in the following-complex-arguments area. Getting a lot better! Adjustments to the thyroid medication made a **HUGE** difference, and upping my use of the facility's on-call psychologist has made things that much more manageable.

So to all of y'all miffed all the way up to ticked that I haven't reviewed your book(s): I most humbly apologize, and promise that I will make good on those reviews this year. I will be back on Twitter, I'm going to learn Instagram use now that I have a smartphone (thanks, Stephanie! *smooch*), and am generally announcing that #ReadingIsResistance is back up and running at 1/4 speed.

Feel free to contact me in all the ways you have if there is something you'd like to know or like for me to know. Remember that responding here on the blog requires that you be a member of the blog, an easy thing to accomplish provided you have a Google account. I hate spam so I never blast BS to my blog followers, just the posts I write.

And to the around 500 daily readers I garner from all my publicity-hounding, I love each and every one of y'all. I am so grateful that my ideas and opinions are that interesting to that many folks.

IGIFU...five out of five stars. No notes.

IGIFU
SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA (tr. Jordan Stump)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor. From the National Book Award finalist who Zadie Smith says, "rescues a million souls from the collective noun genocide."

Scholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent's bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba's mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival.

Her writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.

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

My Review: I don't have much to say except the banners and the stupidifiers are right: Reading is very dangerous, ideas are existentially threatening. To "Them." Good, says I.

Igifu, the personification of hunger. The viciousness of it. The endlessness of it. The demands of the body...unmet...the demands of the child, unmeetable...the demands of the future, just not your future, that you must meet. 5*

The Glorious Cow here's the way it sounds:

If we met any girls bringing the water home from Lake Cyohoha, my father would grumble: "That’s what they’ve done to us. Have you seen those calabashes they’re carrying on their heads? Back home in Rwanda, those calabashes were our butter churns. No one would have dared fill them with water. Shame be upon us! And I know what your mother does, but it’s no good, not even Ruganzu Ndori’s water can replace the milk from our cows."

Never think your inability to release the past, to move forward, to leave the dead in their graves, will ever do a single shred of good in, for, or to the world, the family, or yourself. 5*

Fear sounds like this:

"In Nyamata," my mother used to say, "you must never forget: we’re Inyenzi, we’re cockroaches, snakes, vermin. Whenever you meet a soldier or a militiaman or a stranger, remember: he’s planning to kill you, and he knows he will, one day or another, him or someone else. And if not today, then soon, in fact he’s wondering why you’re still alive at all. But he’s not in a hurry. He knows you won’t get away."

I feel physically ill typing this. A mother addressing her daughter with these words. What the actual fuck happened to my country to make it possible for me to hear this in my head, only in Spanish? 5*

The Curse of Beauty continues the abusiveness of the Othering, the cruelty of the powerful. There's a curse in being found beautiful by those who see first your powerlessness, after that your face, and then stop looking at you at all but seeing only themselves as warped reflections of smallness magnified. 4*

Grief exists for this line alone: "They’re inside you. They only survive in you, and you only survive through them."

Keep alive until you're forced not to be; you're now a vessel for the vanished, the only vessel for some (too many) to exist, to have existed. Any survivor will understand that, feel its massive, invisible weight, know its unshareable spiky penetration into your core. 5*

#ReadingIsResistance

ALL-NEGRO COMICS: America's First Black Comic Book, wonderful anthology that's a 2025 WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARD

ALL-NEGRO COMICS: America's First Black Comic Book
CHRIS ROBINSON (created by Orrin C. Evans)
Image Comics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARD • The first comic ever created by African Americans, for African Americans.

Three quarters of a century ago, Orrin C. Evans lead a team of cartoonists to create the first comic book anthology of original Black characters created by Black talent, with the expressed purpose of entertaining while rejecting harmful stereotypes and pushing boundaries in the industry. This was only 8 years after Action Comics #1, 6 years after Captain America #1 and a whole 19 years before Black Panther hit the pages of Fantastic Four.

All-Negro Comics #1 should be among those revered moments in comic book history, but the original print run was quickly removed from newsstands and faded into obscurity, remaining largely unknown for 75 years. . . until now.

All-Negro Comics 75th Anniversary Edition (an Eisner Award-winning collection) preserves that history for generations to come, containing All-Negro Comics #1, in full and digitally remastered for clarity, several essays for historical context and contemporary reflection, as well as new stories by Black writers and artists of today, featuring the original characters.

This award-winning volume includes:

• The complete single issue from 1947, digitally remastered! Consistent colors, crisp text, and no damage! • Contemporary comics and prose stories, featuring the All-Negro Comics characters, written by notable Black creators of today • Essays that provide historical and cultural context to deepen your reading experience • A discussion guide and resource list

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

My Review: I had no inkling (!) this series of comics ever existed. Which is the point of banning and suppressing books: If you don't see yourself in popular culture, you have no reason to think you belong in it. I myownself, standing on an already enormous mountain of white male privilege, was also given the gift of growing up after Stonewall...I know exactly how important it is to see your Self, your identity and looks, your behavior and thoughts, in the culture around you.

I can't even imagine how much more important it is today, and certainly was in the past, to Black children...adults, too, but comics reach both groups.

The Eisner Award has never been given more thoughtfully and necessarily than to honor these groundbreaking creators, ignored far, far too long:

I liked seeing the cover art, just as art, without the usual impedimenta to get in the way of its kinetic design. It's easier to enjoy as art:

In my defense of personal ignorance about this comic book's existence, I offer the fact I never read a comic book in my life until I was almost ten. I got books whenever I wanted, bought for me or from the library, so I never developed the interest or formed the habit. Of course, no one pitched them to me like Orrin C. Evans pitched these comics:

Silver-tongued devil, no?

So your comics maven will enjoy the Eisener winner part, your Black history maven will enjoy the recovered history and the prescience of Orrin C. Evans in doing it at all, and it looks lovely on the tablet if you've got an ereader! Now, enjoy some of Ace Harlem's adventures:

#ReadingIsResistance

Happy Yule, my friends!

The Solstice is upon us, the longest night of the Solar year. I'll be off, as in not posting, until a few reviews come out late next week. Today at 11:30am Eastern Standard Time, the day will begin its journey to night. This is the moment during the year that cultures more closely attuned to the seasons than Western cultures are have used to celebrate the brightness that begins its inexorable return to the Northern Hemisphere. Traditionally a toast offered at Yuletide is, "All the Yule blessings rain on {your friend's name here}!" This year, the Solstice coincides with a rare astrological alignment of the Sun and Jupiter in Capricorn.

For the astrologically illiterate, that means "whoa Nelly, this gonna be one really bad motherin' day." That toast would just rain hellfire on your friend this year, so don't use it!

I hesitate even to type this...how much worse could it be than the other 350-plus days of 45's totally illegitimate presidency?

What a year this was. What a difficult and complicated year! An illegitimate government based on fraud, lies, and misrepresentation. The worst sort of people, an actual kakistocracy, blatantly colluded with a foreign power for the first time in US history. They wrenched control of our country away from We The People on the 8th of November 2016. One full cycle of the Sun later, the horrors are unraveling but not fast enough, not soon enough, for the most vulnerable among us.

The "laws" passed by the Gross Old Pedophile Party's "lawmakers" are, as they themselves have proved by attacking Obama's very modestly progressive legislative legacy, susceptible to repeal and replacement. It's what they used voter suppression and Russian hackers to achieve, after all, a spurious and invalid "majority" to invalidate, erase the best true Republican president of modern times.

The one solid, reliable joy in this dark night of our national soul has been reading good books. It's a tough world out there. #ReadingIsResistance, my year-long scream of outrage at 45 and his cronies, has kept me from curling up and giving up and resigning from life. They can't colonize my mind if I stuff it full of ideas I want to support, believe in, guide myself by. This is their worst nightmare: The quiet small-time resister with a big mouth and an agenda.

I want everyone to resist the continuing drumbeat of stupidity battering each of us as media outlets report the inane and idiotic blather of the kakistocracy to us. Listen to what these idiots are saying, and in public no less, thinking that the US populace is less a body politic than a hoi polloi, a rabble to be roused then doused with the piss they've trickled down on us.

Here's my one and only positive idea for this Yule, this season of renewal and revival: Raise a glass and toast, "All the Yule blessings rain on you, {insert 45's horrible name here}!" Then so mote it be.

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, role model for anti-fascism this #Booksgiving

ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
MARIA ISABEL SÁNCHEZ VEGARA (Little People, BIG DREAMS series; illus. Martin Le Lapin)
Frances Lincoln Children's Books
$15.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this book from the critically acclaimed, multimillion-copy bestselling Little People, BIG DREAMS series, discover the life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the talented pilot and writer. Little Antoine grew up in Lyon, France. Ever since his first flight as a young boy, he dreamt of becoming a pilot. When he joined the French army during WWI, he finally got his chance. He spent a short time in the Air Force before leaving to become a mail pilot, all the while writing about his adventures.

However, in 1935, he crashed in the desert during a flight from Paris to Saigon. With little food and water to hand, he became very ill. Fortunately, after four days, he was found by a passerby and nursed back to health. This experience influenced much of Antoine's future writing. In WWII, he moved to the United States where he campaigned for France's freedom from Nazism. During this period, he wrote The Little Prince, a captivating story of love and loss, which went on to become one of the bestselling children's books of all time.

This powerful book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the writer’s life. Little People, BIG DREAMS is a bestselling biography series for kids that explores the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream.

This empowering series of books offers inspiring messages to children of all ages, in a range of formats. The board books are told in simple sentences, perfect for reading aloud to babies and toddlers. The hardback versions present expanded stories for beginning readers. With rewritten text for older children, the treasuries each bring together a multitude of dreamers in a single volume. You can also collect a selection of the books by theme in boxed gift sets. Activity books and a journal provide even more ways to make the lives of these role models accessible to children.

Inspire the next generation of outstanding people who will change the world with Little People, BIG DREAMS!

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

My Review: Start 'em young. Dreams are formed in earlier life. We need kids to form dreams now more than ever, so make this a bookish Yule of stories that inspire #ReadingIsResistance in younger minds.

Give them the start they deserve. A true story abut a man who always found a way to make a positive difference won't hurt any kid to learn. And learn from.

The kids who get this start have a great shot at becoming people with empathy. The Little Prince will likely teach these young readers about love and loss and how to make sense of them.

TEARS WE CANNOT STOP, a heartfelt sermon to an absent congregation

TEARS WE CANNOT STOP: A Sermon to White America
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON
St. Martin's Press
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Short, emotional, literary, powerful―Tears We Cannot Stop is the book that all Americans who care about the current and long-burning crisis in race relations will want to read.

As the country grapples with racist division at a level not seen since the 1960s, one man's voice soars above the rest with conviction and compassion. In his 2016 New York Times op-ed piece "Death in Black and White," Michael Eric Dyson moved a nation. Now he continues to speak out in Tears We Cannot Stop―a provocative and deeply personal call for change. Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, or discounted.

The time is at hand for reckoning with the past, recognizing the truth of the present, and moving together to redeem the nation for our future. If we don't act now, if you don't address race immediately, there very well may be no future.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU!

My Review: I don't take my white male privilege as my due. I recognize that, even in my state of disability and deeply offensive otherhood by being unapologetically gay and intelligent in a world that really really dislikes both those qualities, I am still protected by a halo of white maleness from the full force of contumely routinely piled on others. I'm not stopped by cops while walking on the boardwalk. I'm not made a target by predators as I wander through my wealthy little town. I'm not, in short, Black or Latinx or Desi.

Dyson is still speaking to me in my bastion of safety. I'm not immune to racism because I don't personally practice it. I am the beneficiary of racism's unbearable viciousness. Every unsolved murder of a Black man or teen or child hit by a stray bullet fired in a dispute over goodness knows what (that happened year before last in Hempstead, a few minutes from where I live) suffers from a lack of what I have without question: The full protection of the society I live in, however grudgingly offered. I can demand that the institutions in place give me what I need. Others can't. And that is institutionalized racism at its most disagreeable. Because I, and so many like me, can make these demands, others are perforce denied their access to them. It is a scarcity model, a zero-sum game, where my privilege comes at the expense of your access to the spoils.

How does one cause those who have abundant goods, easy access to services and wealth, to share with those who have not? Dyson exhorts and educates the white elite to enjoin us to see things as they are. Then we're left to question our consciences as to whether the way things are is okay with us. My answer is "no I'm not okay with it" and still that makes no difference in the world at large. It brings institutional racism no closer to collapse. And, crucially, it brings me into no significant danger of losing my white male privilege. Dyson has effectively presented me the case for my privilege to end; he and I together with the people of conscience can only exhort, can try to explain to any audience we can find that as "guiltless" as we may be in our own hearts, we need to put our hands to the divine work of ending our own luxury.

Savonarola tried that. Got him burned at the stake. The Black Panther Party has advocated for this for over 50 years. Got their leaders jailed, murdered, marginalized. White America isn't in the pews listening to the sermon, Dr. Dyson. The converts are, I hope, already out there flapping their gums about the subject. I bash my keyboard to bring awareness to the issues of exclusion and denial. This is my way of encouraging all my fellows in privilege to resist the understandable desire to (silently, tacitly) accept the tainted gifts that the kakistocracy currently ascendant in US politics delivers to us.

Despite the urge to put a book that makes you feel ashamed of things you think you can't control or influence right down on the nightstand, I ask you please to stop yourself from the easy course. Please pick the book back up. Please understand that Dyson is extending a hand to you, palm up, to offer you reasons to take action and make decisions that support true equality. Put your palm to his. Take that action, make that decision, no matter how small or how "useless." There is a reason for you to do the right thing:

We don't hate you, white America. We hate that you terrorize us and then lie about it and then make us feel crazy for having to explain to you how crazy it makes us feel. We cannot hate you, not really, not most of us; that is our gift to you. We cannot halt you; that is our curse.

#ReadingIsResistance

ROSSET, the memoir of the man who made America safe for porn

ROSSET: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship
BARNEY ROSSET
OR Books
$10 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Genet…Beckett…Burroughs…Miller…Ionesco, Ōe, Duras. Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Hubert Selby Jr. and John Rechy. The legendary film I Am Curious (Yellow). The books that assaulted the fort of propriety that was the United States in the 1950s and ’60s, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Tropic of Cancer. The Evergreen Review. Victorian “erotica.” The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A bombing, a sit-in, and a near-fistfight with Norman Mailer. The common thread between these disparate elements, a number of which reshaped modern culture, was Barney Rosset.

Rosset was the antidote to the trope of the “gentleman publisher” personified by other pioneering figures of the industry such as Alfred A. Knopf, Bennett Cerf and James Laughlin. If Barney saw a crowd heading one way—he looked the other. If he knew something was forbidden, he regarded it as a plus. Unsurprisingly, financial ruin, along with the highs and lows of critical reception, marked his career. But his unswerving dedication to publishing what he wanted made him one of the most influential publishers ever.

Rosset began work on his autobiography a decade before his death in 2012, and several publishers and a number of editors worked with him on the project. Now, at last, in his own words, we have a portrait of the man who reshaped how we think about language, literature—and sex. Here are the stories behind the filming of Norman Mailer’s Maidstone and Samuel Beckett’s Film; the battles with the US government over Tropic of Cancer and much else; the search for Che’s diaries; his romance with the expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, and more.

At times appalling, more often inspiring, never boring or conventional: this is Barney Rosset, uncensored.

***I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM OR BOOKS. THANK YOU!***

My Review: Today is a dark day for me personally. A person I do not respect, in fact one I disrespect with a virulence approaching hatred, is taking the oath of office of the presidency of the United States of America. Appallingly enough, I am required by my conscience to wish this person good health and godspeed because, in the event of his demise, impeachment, or removal from this mortal coil, a worse person will assume the most powerful political office in the country and possibly the entire world.

Barney Rosset, had he lived, would be likely to take some loud and public and effective action in opposition to this horrible eventuality. Barney was a mouthy old bastard. Barney was an opponent of kakistocracy, an enemy of the brummagem and the bloated, overblown, pretentious, and useless in life and art. His life-long battle against the booboisie wouldn't have allowed him to remain silent in the teeth of the gale of poisonous poltroonery emitted by the president elect.

I was only acquainted with Barney for a short while in the 1990s. In the course of my work as a literary agent, his company Foxrock Books published Lo's Diary, a companion piece to Vladimir Nabokov's immortal Lolita. As the book was not a critical success in the US, my company's efforts to vend its paperback rights were unavailing. I'm still saddened and puzzled by this wrong-headed reception by US readers. Be that as it may, Barney's taste as a publisher was on clearest possible display at that point just as clearly as it was when he went to war with the United States Post Office to ensure US citizens legal and unrestricted access to literary greats like Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence.

Reading this memoir of one of the great iconoclasts of the 20th century was heartening to me in a way I cannot overstate. Barney faced the entire weight of the conservative establishment from the moment he made his first film, Strange Victory, to the moment he relinquished the reins of this life in 2012. He never stopped until he stopped forever. And that, my friends and neighbors, is a fable for me to guide the next four years of my own life. No less a scion of privilege than Barney himself, can I do less than my honored predecessor did in my pursuit of a world more open and liberal than it is? I want to do as much as Barney did, but I can't jump the height of the bar he set. I don't think many people of any age or station can.

I am most definitely inspired to try. I am most certainly heartened to face up to the battle against the gravity of the least and the last and the lowest that is even now doing its dead-level best to make America great at hate again. Or greater at it than it already is.

Buy this book, read it, and take heart from the fact that this battle we face is but one more in a war our elders and betters have fought before us. They succeeded; they failed; they changed and couldn't change and, most important to remember on this dark, difficult day, they did not give up and give in and give way.

Please help everyone, and I mean everyone, even those who don't see it as help, to stand up and stand for that most American of values: Personal liberty.

#ReadingIsResistance

THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN, economic stability at all costs

THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse
MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN
Random House
$18.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Our current economic path is coming to an end. The signposts are all around us: sluggish growth, rising inequality, stubbornly high pockets of unemployment, and jittery financial markets, to name a few. Soon we will reach a fork in the road: One path leads to renewed growth, prosperity, and financial stability, the other to recession and market disorder.

In The Only Game in Town, El-Erian casts his gaze toward the future of the global economy and markets, outlining the choices we face both individually and collectively in an era of economic uncertainty and financial insecurity. Beginning with their response to the 2008 global crisis, El-Erian explains how and why our central banks became the critical policy actors—and, most important, why they cannot continue is this role alone. They saved the financial system from collapse in 2008 and a multiyear economic depression, but lack the tools to enable a return to high inclusive growth and durable financial stability. The time has come for a policy handoff, from a prolonged period of monetary policy experimentation to a strategy that better targets what ails economies and distorts the financial sector—before we stumble into another crisis.

The future, critically, is not predestined. It is up to us to decide where we will go from here as households, investors, companies, and governments. Using a mix of insights from economics, finance, and behavioral science, this book gives us the tools we need to properly understand this turning point, prepare for it, and come out of it stronger. A comprehensive, controversial look at the realities of our global economy and markets, The Only Game in Town is required reading for investors, policymakers, and anyone interested in the future.

My Review: For those who remember the Bush Crash of 2008, and who really *got* what was at stake, have you ever wondered why we're not all eating snakes we trap in the back yard and dandelion greens grubbed up from the front lawn?

Ever since the 2008 global financial crisis, central banks had ventured, not by choice but by necessity, ever deeper into the unfamiliar and tricky terrain of “unconventional monetary policies.” They floored interest rates, heavily intervened in the functioning of markets, and pursued large-scale programs that outcompeted one another in purchasing securities in the marketplace; to top it all off, they aggressively sought to manipulate investor expectations and portfolio decisions.

That's why.

But the casino always wins the end. In the case of the economy, in fact in the case of any and every complex human-designed system, the casino is entropy: Chaos and confusion will always triumph. Builders create magnificence; entropy carts it away.

As stable as it may seem on the surface to some, the current configuration of the global economy and the financial system is getting harder to maintain. Below the façade of the unusual calm of the last few years, interrupted by relatively few bouts of instability since 2008–09, tensions are rising and the effectiveness of central banks is coming under stress, so much so as to raise serious questions about the durability of the current path that the global economy is on.

And there it is: the central question this book aims to address. This is definitely well within Author El-Erian's capabilities. I didn't feel that the aim as stated was fully met. I wonder, though, if there is a way for the aim to be fully met absent a clear prescriptive course being outlined in great detail. Such a feat is beyond the capabilities of any mere mortal.

Author El-Erian has a quietly skeptical view of the incoming administration's economic policy. A modest stock-market rally doesn't seem to be within the author's hopes for a policy-driven course that, by its clarity and conciseness, would push stock values higher in a natural and sustainable way.

One road out of the T junction ahead involves a restoration of high-inclusive growth that creates jobs, reduces the risk of financial instability, and counters excessive inequality. It is a path that also lowers political tensions, eases governance dysfunction, and holds the hope of defusing some of the world’s geopolitical threats. The other road is the one of even lower growth, persistently high unemployment, and still worsening inequality. It is a road that involves renewed global financial instability, fuels political extremism, and erodes social cohesion as well as integrity.

My sense is that Author El-Erian does not see the positive as the likely course the US and world economies will take.

I am a pessimist in matters economic, so I tend to agree; I am deeply, deeply pessimistic about the incoming administration's intentions and aims, so I am almost certain that the deepest and darkest of economic nights is falling.

I read this book with a kind of knock-kneed pants-wetting childlike terror. If the grown-ups don't know how to fix it, all I can do is try to survive it. That's probably not the best way to persuade people to pick the book up. I can tell you that, having faced my fear, I not only don't feel better, I feel more afraid...but I also feel more able to watch the train speed ahead toward the collapsing bridge without the added stress of being awakened from a sound sleep by the squealing of the brakes and the screams of the dying in the cars ahead of me.

Author El-Erian falls short on the spotting of side-switches. I am not at all sure that he sees any. It is the function of this book not to comfort but to spur the reader into action. Take the advice of Mavis Staples: Touch A Hand, Make A Friend. We will get through the coming night better together.

#ReadingIsResistance

DAWN, first volume of Octavia E. Butler's amazing Xenogenesis trilogy

DAWN
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER (Xenogenesis #1)
Open Road Media
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Lilith Iyapo has just lost her husband and son when atomic fire consumes Earth—the last stage of the planet’s final war. Hundreds of years later Lilith awakes, deep in the hold of a massive alien spacecraft piloted by the Oankali—who arrived just in time to save humanity from extinction. They have kept Lilith and other survivors asleep for centuries, as they learned whatever they could about Earth. Now it is time for Lilith to lead them back to her home world, but life among the Oankali on the newly resettled planet will be nothing like it was before.

The Oankali survive by genetically merging with primitive civilizations—whether their new hosts like it or not. For the first time since the nuclear holocaust, Earth will be inhabited. Grass will grow, animals will run, and people will learn to survive the planet’s untamed wilderness. But their children will not be human. Not exactly.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler including rare images from the author’s estate.

2020 UPDATE: Amazon Prime will be the home for DuVernay's series! Victoria Mahoney, of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Lovecraft Country fame, is credited as creator and will adapt and direct the pilot.

2018 UPDATE Don't forget that, in this troubled passage in US and world history, the present Golden Age of Sci Fi on Screen will gift us with the first-ever adaptation of a Butler novel, this one, by no less a new voice than Ava DuVernay. She is the talent behind the good-buzzed adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time!
^^^Which I myownself really liked. Toxic fandom's victims abound.

My Review: I left publicly viewable notes from my Kindle reading on Goodreads. I think those are enough of a review of the specifics of the writing in this book. They're tied to passages I found important and so will, I hope, make the aesthetic points as to why I think you should read this book.

What I comment on now is the why of reading SF, fiction by women, fiction by people of color (a phrase I'm no more comfortable with than the "colored people" of my vanished youth), SF by women of color...reading and absorbing and thinking about the ideas given to you, amazingly freely and trustingly, by people you aren't like and maybe even people you don't like.

I think you should read these astounding gifts of personal creativity because they offer a close look into the ideas that someone unlike you finds important. If you don't learn what people unlike you find important, you run the risk of being caught in a labyrinth of dark sameness, a place where you don't need light because you know the contents of your environment so well already that there's no read need to take a good look at them.

And that is how we got to the point where we are as a country, here in the US as well as in the UK, and a culture, both in the West and the East. No one listens. We wait for our turn to talk without engaging our brains to process what our ears are hearing. And that's only if we're polite.

Open up a little by reading Butler's tale of the Oankali changing earthlings' genetics to improve their health and well-being. In the wake of a species-ending nuclear war, the earthlings aren't grateful to the Oankali for rescue, they're angry that they had no choice, no say, no chance to refuse being saved if it meant being used and manipulated for and by the Oankali.

Butler put her finger squarely on the conflict: The earthlings were given no choice. They were unquestionably manipulated before they were given any chance to comment on these things. They had also just blown their entire planet into an extinction event. Did they deserve a say? Butler gives Lilith the words to complain about the earthlings' treatment and the Oankali to explain but not apologize the whys of it.

In my never-humble opinion, a species that blew its home into an extinction event over stupid crap doesn't need any consultation to be offered, still less consent to be sought. Be damned good and grateful these interstellar gene machines arrived in time to do squat for you, which they didn't have to do at all. Given their culture's immense experience with and commodification of gene manipulation, they could simply have paused, grabbed some material (aka survivors of the holocaust) and used them before disposing of them.

The Oankali's ethics are superior to the earthlings', and they didn't do that. They set about repairing the damaged earth and improving the damned earthlings who caused the problem in the first place, while making every effort to understand and support them along the way.

A lot like animal researchers are doing today among cetaceans and great apes.

Oh my.

Don't like having done to us what we so blithely do to others, do we? And yet it's perfectly justified...the changes are being made for the earthlings' future benefit, after all.

After the weekend of 10 August when neo-Nazi and "alt-right" hate machines burst their closet doors of simply screaming at normal, decent people at last and began the hot war portion of their Civil War against goodness, kindness, and decency, reading a book like Dawn is an excellent primer in how this horror got started: A decent and perfectly reasonable human gets all bent out of shape and even decides she'd prefer to die rather than have her tiny little patch of personal control violated despite the certainty that she is and will continue to be better off for it.

I was never sanguine about human nature. I'm not turning any corners in that regard now. But I can see a tiny thread visible in the labyrinth: Read. Read the stuff that isn't just like you like the world to be. At least try that much, because it's no exaggeration to say your way of life is on the line. Try to hear what the Other is saying underneath the screams. We have to find the thread and follow it to our common source or we're headed the way of Butler's earthlings.

And I do not think there are any Oankali on the way to help us.

#ReadingIsResistance