The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a good introduction to systemic racism in America as it exists currently. While it does discuss politics it very evenhandedly explains the forces that have led both the right and the left to contribute to the broken system. It's not a complete history nor does it cover all the relevant legal concepts that contribute to the system but it's a strong and persuasive introduction. It's also excruciatingly sad.

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Fight like a Mother by Shannon Watts

Fight like a Mother: How a Grassroots Movement Took on the Gun Lobby and Why Women Will Change the World by Shannon Watts
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

More than a book about gun policy! It's a book about activism, feminism, intersectionality, and generally making the world a better place. Strongly recommend this book!

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Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that really changed my perspective-- which is such a gift. I was certainly open to what he had to say, but there were many concepts in here that I hadn't considered in the way that Giridharadas analyzes it. Part of my preparation for this book includes having already read 56 "popular nonfiction" economics books and some additional behavioral economics books. I'm not sure if someone who doesn't otherwise read economics books would be open to the concepts in here.

The basic premise is that the richest 1% claim to be trying to help with social problems but what they should actually do is pay their employees living wages so that they don't need charity, stop polluting the environment so that the subsequent disaster areas don't need charity money, stop lobbying against things that help the 99% of citizens like regulations, stop creating tax shelters so that government can't function properly, stop impeding government in general. In other words, instead of being bad guys and covering up their sins with philanthropy, they should stop being bad guys. In addition, actual income equality creates a huge power inequality. Democracy cannot work when a small percent of the population wields such disproportionate power. Part of that is the money itself, part of that is the disaster of current day finance regulations. The central thesis is that the rich can't even fix problems with philanthropy because their solutions involve mostly self-interested band-aids that don't address the underlying causes: them.

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When by Daniel H. Pink

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A short book about how timing affects both our personal decisions and business plans. There is definitely some repeat information that most people are aware of already, but the book is so short that it's worth reading to get a sense of the overall psychological impact of timing decisions correctly.

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The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really want everyone to stop whatever they're doing and read this book. After reading this book, climate change now overshadows all my other concerns. It is worse than I thought, and of course, I knew it was already currently happening but he compiles the data on current natural disasters in a way that clearly separates them from previous weather events.

I moved to Nebraska a year ago. Nebraska is not even mentioned in the book. And yet, we have what are apparently new permanent bodies of water since the flooding events that have occurred since I moved here a year ago. They look like lakes or little rivers and they've survived even our record-breaking hot summer. There were multiple floods in the Spring, and the flooding in March cost over a billion in damages, a lot of which I think has not actually been repaired. See: https://www.npr.org/2019/03/21/705408364/nebraska-faces-over-1-3-billion-in-flood-losses. The book was already out by then, but I bet we still wouldn't have made it into the book because so many more damaging weather events are occurring all the time now.



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Deadly Spin by Wendell Potter

Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans by Wendell Potter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Every American should read this as soon as possible. It's a tell-all by a health care insurance insider. Reading this book is critical to understanding, and not just the health care debate taking place in this country right now, but many of the political debates we're all wallowing in.

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Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I put off reading this book for a couple of months because I was worried it would be about the shooting itself. Thankfully, it's not, and once I picked it up I flew through it. It's about the survivors of the Parkland shooting and their lives and political action since the shooting. A lot of it is instructive and inspirational to the rest of us and is so important. I think this book is a great companion to March by John Lewis, about the civil rights marches. Action is hard and takes a very long time, but history moves forward if we're all willing to work, and we really all need to get to work.

When I was 22 at my first job in DC, I met a Columbine kid who was working on some political action regarding th shooting at a nonprofit located in the building I worked at. Columbine is now seen as the beginning of the school shootings, and it's been 18 years, and many school children have died, and now I have my own kids in school. My kids regularly practice "active shooter" drills. They did so when they lived in New York, and they do so in Nebraska because nowhere in our country is safe now. It's a horror, and I wish I’d done more starting 18 years ago.

I really do not understand the conservative position in this country, especially regarding assault weapons. These people are opposed to abortion but are comfortable giving everyone the weapons to instantly "abort" hundreds of children and adults? Do they lose sleep worrying about their own children and grandchildren? Some of the Republican congressmen who were personally shot claim that they don't think guns are the problem. This is especially insincere because they refuse to give money to the National Institute of Health to study the problem so that we can all point to what is and isn't specifically the problem. And look, this isn't my first book on the gun problem, I get that the statistics point to a bigger problem with gun-related suicides, urban violence, or gun owners turning the guns on their own family members, but those issues are also important to me. It's not this gun problem versus that gun problem. It's the huge toll of all the gun deaths together. It's hard to imagine where we go from here beyond talking to the younger generation but it's clear that the gun control movement needs our time and our donations.

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The Puzzle Palace by James Bamford

The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization by James Bamford
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is sometimes surprising, often boring, and extremely quaint. The entire idea is how secretive the NSA is, and how few people even know that there is an NSA or what it has done. Oh, remember before Russia hacked our election in multiple different ways and NSA officials and ex-officials testified before Congress on television several times? Those were the good old days!

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Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff


I'm not going to give this a star rating for the time being. I'm just going to share my thoughts for now.

For me, the first question is how do I know anything in this book is true? Well, the most convincing thing is that there isn't a lot of "new" information in this book so much as there is a more complete picture based on behind-the-scenes information from inside sources. A lot of what is in this book has been public information in terms of Trump speeches, interviews, and tweets. The author himself was given White House access and claims to have been there for a lot of the events. About a half of the book is information and impressions that must have been provided by Bannon. Bannon's information appears colored by his dislike of Jared and Ivanka Kushner but does not appear otherwise significantly biased. (By which I mean that Bannon is pretty open about the ways in which he's evil, and isn't too bothered about it.) Jared Kushner himself leaked a great deal of information which seems to be in play in the book as well-- especially trash talk about Bannon. That leaves very little which I have any reason to doubt. Perhaps there isn't any good reason to believe the details of Trump's relationship with Melania, but that appears to be it.

Even though there's not a lot of new or shocking information, I think the book's full narrative of events is useful. For example, before reading this book, I kept thinking that maybe Donald Trump was "crazy like a fox." But after reading this, my impression is that he's just really ignorant (more than I thought) and even less curious about reality than I thought he was. He seems to believe he can just invent his own reality and buys into it to a certain degree. All of this is puzzling and troubling and definitely gives different coloring to how I view recent political events.

The conclusion is that Trump is unfit to be president according to his own advisors. Additionally, his advisors are unable to educate him or restrain him in any meaningful way. He is inconsistent and has poor impulse control. The "fire and fury" quote which the title uses is from Trump's threats to North Korea, but the book ends before the bulk of his North Korea threats. The whole world is at danger from this presidency and everyone knows it, but the people with the power to do anything about it, Senate Republicans, refuse to do anything.

PS: The Prologue and Chapter 1 aren't written as well as the rest of the book. If you find the beginning annoying you might want to reserve judgment until Chapter 2.

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The Republic by Plato

The Republic by Plato
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am reading Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World and pausing to read any of the books mentioned that I have not already read. In this case, I had read most of The Republic before but couldn't remember it so I went back and read the whole thing.

Great Books didn't give me a lot of help in analyzing or dealing with The Republic so I listened to a library audiobook course about The Republic. This definitely helped in understanding all the confusing arguments Socrates makes.

Plato describes Socrates engaging in a dialogue with Glaucon and numerous other Athenians and non-citizens about a number of topics. The first part is about justice and it mostly matches up to a modern (even Christian) conception of justice. Justice is not about the force of the powerful. It's about the soul, goodness towards even enemies, and the rights of weak.

The next part is about the perfect society, but not really, because Plato didn't believe in a modern-day Western conception of legal equality based on human rights. To his credit, his perfect society is feminist- women can do whatever men can do except things requiring a lot of physical strength. Unfortunately, his society is also based on eugenics, hierarchy with little opportunity for social movement, communist, and without families. To modern ears his perfect society sounds like the perfect Young Adult Dystopian Novel; a cross between The Giver and Allegiant. According to my audiobook course, this Socrates's conception of the perfect society is the direct result of Athen's recent defeat to Sparta. Many of the aspects are either taken from Spartan society or a "correction" of something in Athenian society that Socrates perceives to be at fault for Athen's loss.

Socrates also wanted philosopher kings. As such, the book is also about Socrates's conception of making philosophy a fixed study in the way that math and geometry have fixed answers. Which is certainly an interesting concept. Philosophy (at least popular philosophy) has moved so far away from that idea that the idea of real answers in ethics and philosophy is very appealing.

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Evicted by Matthew Desmond

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I wish the author had put the "About This Project" at the beginning of the book, and I recommend that if you read this book you start with that section. When I began the book I had the expectation that the book would have a lot of history, politics, policy, with some personal examples, as many nonfiction books focusing on a particular legal or policy issue typically do. This book is not like that, it's an ethnography. It is more of a biography of several people going through evictions - and the one landlord that was willing to participate. The distance between my expectations of the book and the actual substance of it made it made it difficult to finish. Another thing that made it very difficult to finish the book was how deeply depressing the subject is (granted it's important that it feel depressing but it makes it very difficult). That said, I am very glad I finished it, despite- or because of- all the tears.

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We Were Feminists Once by Andi Zeisler

We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement by Andi Zeisler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a great collection of examples of the corporate co-opting of feminism for decidedly unfeminist goals. I enjoyed reading it and zipped through it very quickly.

The problem is, who is this book for exactly? She talks at length about how the younger generation does not understand the complexities of feminism. This is very true, I'm only recently starting to grapple with and understand all the issues related to feminism and I still don't have much of a complete picture. I can't really recommend this book to my many friends that are clueless about feminism. On the other hand, if you're already deep into the feminist weeds, the stuff in this book is probably fairly obvious to you? So I also can't really recommend this book to my friends that have been grappling with feminism for years now. I'm as close to the target audience as possible I suppose in that it provides just one small piece of the puzzle for me even though I still lack a foundational understanding.

Zeisler also doesn't provide a lot of direction in terms of what we can do to de-corporatize feminism or utilize the co-opting as a weapon, or even any other feminist action to take. By comparison, Gloria Steinem's essay collections discuss community organizing at some length.

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We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates
My rating: 54of 5 stars

This book is a collection of 8 previously published essays by Coates. I found the essay about Bill Cosby’s negative activism and the essay about Michelle Obama underwhelming and I wish they weren’t included in the book, or at least not at the beginning of the book. However, the other 6 essays are so phenomenal that even though I’d read some before I found myself wanting to scream in agreement. Possibly the 2017 context of these essays makes them even more powerful- or rather 2017 makes me more open to how correct and powerful the essays have always been.

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Free Will by Sam Harris

Free Will by Sam Harris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This makes me deeply uncomfortable, but nonetheless, it's difficult to dispute. I'm also not comfortable with a leap into public policy based on this, unless as Harris suggested we focus the prison system on containing dangers, instead of punishment.

There is a section about observing our thoughts arise on their own that might make more sense to people that have studied and attempted meditation.

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Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Despite being a very short book, this is a good critique of fanatical literal Christianity and fanatical religions in general. It is also a good critique of the liberal denial of the threat of Islamic fanaticism on Western society and its values. I agree for example that misogyny shouldn't get a pass just because it's Islamic misogyny. Does try to answer the question of why the more moderate religion Karen Armstrong proposes is still a danger and ethically harmful.

Nonetheless, he fails to address how he can preclude a superpower of some kind in a (multiple?) universe that operates under such totally unexpected and not-rational-seeming rules of physics. So he still comes off as sounding nearly as arrogant as the religious fanatics he critiques.

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What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton

What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bit of a hodgepodge. More revealing of her personality than her other memoirs, but still not that revealing. Things are a bit out of order sometimes. Mostly a defense. She's frustrated. Most of us are.

She gives a really good summary of what the intelligence agencies have confirmed about the Russian interference in the US 2016 election, along with incredibly suspicious things that she noted that Trump and others in the campaign stated publically.

She was not very gentle with Trump, Putin, Senator Bernie Sanders, candidate Jill Stein, FBI Director James Comey, or television personality Matt Lauer (I refuse to call Lauer a journalist).

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The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I first read this book in 2007, I gave it 4 stars. Since then I've read other books on the farming-industrial complex, and on a reread I found a lot to appreciate about this book in particular. It's a well-researched, thorough look at different ways we can choose to eat an omnivore diet. It talks about the corn industry, the chicken/egg industry, the beef industry, small sustainable farms and farmers' markets, and hunting and gathering in America.

My reread reminded me to pay more attention to what I'm eating since after 10 years I've slipped back a little to including some processed foods in our diet again.

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My Life by Bill Clinton

My Life by Bill Clinton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I feel like I should throw myself a party for finally reading this book- in its entirety- after owning it since July of 2004. Over 12 years!

This is a very in-depth autobiography/ memoir of Bill Clinton's life from birth to 2001. At first, I was frustrated that it appeared to mention everyone he ever met and every policy he ever implemented. As I gave in to the detailed nature of the book though I began to appreciate the opportunity of seeing a president's entire story. It was also a good opportunity to relive the important events of 1992-2000 when I was mostly too young to fully appreciate them.

I went to the book signing on July 7, 2004:



You had to go twice, the first time for a bracelet and the second time for the signing. This is me and my friend Julie in 2004 with our copy and our bracelets for the signing.



My copy :



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Without Conscience by Robert D. Hare

Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us by Robert D. Hare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was written in the 1990s, so there's a lot of new science on the topic. I recommend reading this along with The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain by James Fallon- but possibly start with that one. That one will give you the basic science known today, and the author is a functioning psychopath himself who gives a lot of insight into his personality.

This one focuses more on criminal psychopaths because those are the people that more often come to the attention of specialized experts though there are some mentions of more functional psychopaths. It's very heavy on personal accounts of psychopaths and their crimes which certainly keeps the book entertaining but is a little low on the actual science for my taste, perhaps because as previously mentioned there was just less known on the topic in the 1990s.

I think it's important to understand that there's this group of individuals at large in society (and likely heavily rewarded in business and politics) that just aren't subject to the same rules of empathy as the rest of us. Certainly, a lot of non-psychopath people can be emotionally damaged or even assholes for no reason at all, but this complete lack of empathy or authentic feeling is unique and especially dangerous in both criminal and successful noncriminal psychopaths.

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Etched in Sand by Regina Calcaterra

Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island by Regina Calcaterra
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The beginning of this was particularly good and I think it could have been a better memoir with tighter editing. Part of the issue is the main story of her abuse and overcoming the abuse to build a good life is over way before the memoir is over. It could have ended with her first job, quickly summarized her adult life- possibly with a focus on her role as a leader in Long Island.

I was particularly confused about the lengthy section about her paternity test suit, even though as an attorney myself I understood what she explained about the case itself. I understand why the lawsuit may be important to her, but that's different than what's likely to be important to a reader. In any case, I think she sounds like a remarkable person who views her past in a self-aware and rational manner.

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