Hello everyone and welcome to the penultimate edition of the reading list for 2024! It’s hard to believe we’re so close to the end of the year.
Lately I’ve been reading social accounts, both of the world and of social justice movements. That’s reflected in the list below. And, of course, I can’t pass on a good dystopia.
Brendan Ballou – Plunder
Ballou – a federal prosecutor – takes a close look at the role of private equity in the financialization of the U.S. economy after the 2008 recession. And he finds a lot.
Here’s how it works. Private equity buys up companies and then milks them for cash, usually in ways contrary to the company’s interests and the interests of its workers and their communities.
It extracts cash by selling company land, renting the land back to the company, laying off its employees, and charging ruinous junk fees. Often these equity firms even profit by running the company out of business. More than anything, these firms transfer resources from productive areas of the economy (i.e., the production of goods and services) to unproductive areas (e.g., finance).
Ballou covers these developments in industries from nursing homes to health care. He lays out how private equity bilks taxpayers and bribes legislators. He finishes by laying out public policy solutions. He’s obviously not a socialist, but we can learn a think or two about the areas of the economy to target in our organizing.
Fredrik DeBoer – How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
DeBoer comes from one of the more ‘cantankerous’ segments of the left. He argues that the social justice movement ultimately serves the interests of wealthy white progressives and black members of the PMC rather than working-class people.
In this book, DeBoer makes his case by documenting how U.S. progressives engage in navel-gazing, excess attention to white feelings, ineffective electoral politics, and overall toxicity and lack of structure. He uses the failure of the ‘defund the police’ slogan in 2020 as a case where all these things come together.
Along the way, he brings in non-profits and liberal politics. DeBoer repeatedly – and effectively – hammers home the point that the left needs to tone down the academic social justice jargon and instead speak with people as regular people do.
Most of DeBoer’s points aren’t exactly new. Nor does he get everything right. For example, his discussion of ‘class first’ politics leaves out many of the practical reasons why it makes sense to target messages to identity. But on the whole, DeBoer gives us a lot of good, well grounded, common sense discussion and ideas.
John Green – Looking for Alaska
This coming of age story about a high schooler going off to boarding school was a hit about 20 years ago. And for the most part, it holds up pretty well.
I found the basic story relatable. A socially awkward kid without friends sets off to find himself and find his people. For the most part, he does. He grows together with his new friend group.
But Green organizes the book around the death of one of those friends, which challenges our young protagonist and threatens to tear down what he has built. He struggles with this in a way we’d generally expect of an awkward young man who thought he found his friends and his first love.
The book doesn’t always age well. The character Alaska comes off as more of a ‘manic pixie’ character than I think readers in 2024 would like. But it all rings true to what readers would reasonably expect from a young man in our world. And, to Green’s credit, he does work in the second half of the book to undermine the main character’s understanding of Alaska.
Hilary Leichter – Temporary
This book surprised me. I read a description of it as a short novel about a temp agency employee who tries her hand at various occupations. That’s delightfully quaint, in the sense that temp agencies have been dead for years.
And there’s a sense in which this does happen in Leichter’s book. The main character, also the narrator, works a variety of jobs on a temporary basis, from office work to crew of a ship to CEO.
But the reviews didn’t stress the fantastical, even silly, nature of the jobs and the premise. What results is a flowing meditation on the nature of work and relationships in a neoliberal era. Not only are the jobs temporary, but so are the relationships. The main character has a series of temporary boyfriends that, by the end of the novel, end up living together in her apartment while she’s out on a job.
By the end, I’d say this perhaps wasn’t quite the book for me. But it’s a highly inventive one.
Witold Rybczynski – Mysteries of the Mall and Other Essays
This little collection of essays by Rybczynski covers architecture and its impact on our lives. He tackles everything from the suburban shopping mall to large opera houses to American homes.
Many of the essays are from the 1980s and 1990s, where he’s able to get at some of the problems hitting our shrinking cities in the late 20th century. He even covers an attempt by Disney to build a utopian community (later the target of attack from Ron DeSantis).
I found the essays perceptive, though some are noticeably dated. Despite that, I think readers can take away a few lessons about how the built environment imbibes and shapes social norms and everyday practices.
Robert Charles Wilson – Burning Paradise
To be honest, it’s been awhile since I’ve read sci-fi world building that didn’t involve space, galactic empires, and/or futuristic settings. And this one turned out well enough that I might try doing it more regularly.
In this story, Wilson develops the scenario of what it would be like if a non-intelligent alien species established control over humanity by secretly manipulating society at its highest levels. The alien species delivers a peaceful, non-aggressive world after World War I – the ‘paradise’ part of the title – but kills anyone onto their trail – the ‘burning’ part.
A secret society forms to fight them, and this book tells the story of that fight and its results. The story is well told, builds compelling characters, and speculates on the very interesting question of whether knowing the real nature of power is truly better.
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