Other books that might interest you

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  Minority Rule - The Right-Wing...

  Ari Berman

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  The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represented an extreme form of the central danger facing American democracy today: a blatant disregard for the will of the majority. Through voter suppression, election subversion, gerrymandering, dark money, the takeover of the courts, and the whitewashing of history, reactionary white conservatives have strategically entrenched power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift. Ari Berman charts these efforts with sweeping historical research and incisive on-the-ground reporting, chronicling how a wide range of antidemocratic tactics interact with profound structural inequalities in institutions like the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court to threaten the survival of representative government in America.Some counter-majoritarian measures were built into the Constitution, which was designed in part to benefit a small propertied upper class, but they have metastasized to a degree that the Founding Fathers could never have anticipated, undermining the very notion of "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Chilling and revelatory, Minority Rule exposes the long history of the conflict between white supremacy and multiracial democracy that has reached a fever pitch today—while also telling the inspiring story of resistance to these regressive efforts.

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  The Postcatastrophe Economy -...

  Eric Janszen

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  How bad will the current recession get? According to Eric Janszen, we could be facing an unemployment rate of over 10 percent; half of all retail stores boarded up; skeletons of unfinished buildings in our cities; and tax revenues down by 30 percent, leading to big cuts in government services. Meanwhile, inflation will keep rising as the Fed is forced to devalue the dollar because foreign countries won't lend to us anymore.Sounds grim, but the good news is that this crisis will open the door to a saner economic future if we recognize the opportunity to correct decades of bad policy. America can wean itself from the debt-financed growth of the past thirty years and restructure to grow based on old-fashioned savings and investment.Janszen shows that the key is not more big government but deploying our unique capacity for innovation through private-public partnerships. He calls for a modern New Deal that develops twenty-first century industries such as biotechnology, alternative energy, and nanotechnology. And he shows how our financial markets can adapt to make it happen.This is an essential book for everyone who is struggling to understand our current predicament.

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  Old Dominion Industrial...

  Sean Patrick Adams

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  A look at the role of state policies in North-South economic divergence and in American industrial development leading up to the Civil War. 
   
  In 1796, famed engineer and architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe toured the coal fields outside Richmond, Virginia, declaring enthusiastically, “Such a mine of Wealth exists, I believe, nowhere else!” With its abundant and accessible deposits, growing industries, and network of rivers and ports, Virginia stood poised to serve as the center of the young nation’s coal trade. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Virginia’s leadership in the American coal industry had completely unraveled while Pennsylvania, at first slow to exploit its vast reserves of anthracite and bituminous coal, had become the country’s leading producer. 
   
  Sean Patrick Adams compares the political economies of coal in Virginia and Pennsylvania from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, examining the divergent paths these two states took in developing their ample coal reserves during a critical period of American industrialization. In both cases, Adams finds, state economic policies played a major role. Virginia’s failure to exploit the rich coal fields in the western part of the state can be traced to the legislature’s overriding concern to protect and promote the interests of the agrarian, slaveholding elite of eastern Virginia. Pennsylvania’s more factious legislature enthusiastically embraced a policy of economic growth that resulted in the construction of an extensive transportation network, a statewide geological survey, and support for private investment in its coal fields. 
   
  Using coal as a barometer of economic change, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth addresses longstanding questions about North-South economic divergence and the role of state government in American industrial development.

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  Reproductive Rights and Wrongs -...

  Betsy Hartmann

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  “Those involved in women’s health issues, Third World studies, and economic development should find food for thought” (Kirkus Reviews).   This is an updated edition of the “influential study” (Publishers Weekly) of issues surrounding childbirth and the history of population control programs.   Challenging conventional wisdom about overpopulation, and uncovering the deeper roots of poverty, environmental degradation, and gender inequalities, the author uses data and vivid case studies to explore how population control programs came to be promoted by powerful governments, foundations, and international agencies as an instrument of Cold War development and security policy. Mainly targeting poor women, these programs were designed to drive down birth rates as rapidly and cheaply as possible, with coercion often a matter of course. In the war on population growth, birth control was deployed as a weapon, rather than a tool of reproductive choice.   Threaded throughout is the story of how international women’s health activists fought to reform population control and promote a new agenda of sexual and reproductive health and rights for all. While their efforts bore fruit, obstacles remain. On one side is the anti-choice movement that wants to deny women access not only to abortion but to most methods of contraception. On the other is a resurgent, well-funded population control lobby that often obscures its motives with the language of women’s empowerment. Despite declining birth rates worldwide—average global family size is now 2.5 children—overpopulation alarm is on the rise, tied now to the threats of climate change and terrorism.  Reproductive Rights and Wrongs reveals how these developments are rooted in the longer history and politics of population control. In this book, a new generation of readers will find knowledge and inspiration for the ongoing struggle to achieve reproductive rights and social, environmental, and gender justice.

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  The Rise and Fall of Communism

  Archie Brown

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  “A work of considerable delicacy and nuance….Brown has crafted a readable and judicious account of Communist history…that is both controversial and commonsensical.”—Salon.com“Ranging wisely and lucidly across the decades and around the world, this is a splendid book.”—William Taubman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Khrushchev: The Man and His EraThe Rise and Fall of Communism is the definitive history from the internationally renowned Oxford authority on the subject. Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University, Archie Brown examines the origins of the most important political ideology of the 20th century, its development in different nations, its collapse in the Soviet Union following perestroika, and its current incarnations around the globe. Fans of John Lewis Gaddis, Samuel Huntington, and avid students of history will appreciate the sweep and insight of this epic and astonishing work.

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  A Macat Analysis of Antonio...

  Lorenzo Fusaro, Jason Xidias

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  First published in 1948, Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks is an important Marxist work that says we must understand societies both in terms of their economic relationships and their cultural beliefs.
  
  Gramsci wanted to explore why Russia had undergone a socialist revolution in 1917 while other European countries had not. So he developed the concept of hegemony, which is the idea that those who hold power in a society can maintain and use that power because of their own grip on cultural values and economic relationships. Using a combination of force and manipulation, they are able to convince most people that the existing social arrangement is logical and in their best interests. Gramsci says that for a society to truly be transformed, workers need to rise up against two things—the unfair economic system and the ideas and political institutions that sustain it.
  
  Gramsci’s analysis of capitalism, economics, and culture has helped explain current historical developments, such as the recent financial crisis that started in 2007.

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