ethanhedman's reviews
148 reviews

Perlstein again chronicles the rise of conservatism in the US, first manifesting itself on a national scale unsuccessfully in the 1964 Presidential run of Barry Goldwater. In 'Before the Storm', there are the most clear parallels to the current moment, despite this being Perlstein's first book written nearly 20 years ago. 

Perlstein depicts a time of 'firsts' when it comes to fundraising, campaigning, and what a candidate was willing to say in order to get elected (morality is brought up prominently as a reason to vote for one candidate over the other). While Perlstein's underlying opinion that Liberals can and perhaps will save the day limits his analysis in approaching the 'crisis of democracy' that we find ourselves in today, his work following people like Clif White, Richard Viguerie, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan through the 1940s, 50s, 60, and beyond should be lauded considerably as they expose an insane and inequitable system that, in conjunction with a horizon-less capitalism, may be on the precipice of destroying itself. 

I think I am too dumb to fully get this book so I will have to come back to it. 

"Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood. Reconstruction was the turn of white Northern migration southward to new and sudden economic opportunity which followed the disaster and dislocation of war, and an attempt to organize capital and labor on a new pattern and build a new economy. Finally Reconstruction was a desperate effort of a dislodged, maimed, impoverished and ruined oligarchy and monopoly to restore an anachronism in economic organization by force, fraud and slander, in defiance of law and order, and in the face of a great labor movement of white and black, and in bitter strife with a new capitalism and a new political framework."

Du Bois pulls off a Herculean task in this book. He spends the majority laying the foundation for his argument of the history of America from 1860-1880, which Du Bois correctly perceived as being as much of a labor revolution as it is the emancipation proclamation or just the American Civil War. Du Bois throughout the book mates his argument with primary sources ranging from radical abolitionists to reactionary Lost Cause-ers. By applying the perspective he does, he chronicles the defeat of the South as only possible without the defection, arming, and disobedience of Black folks, then the Reconstruction government built as one that was able to take half measures that improved hundreds of thousands of lives, but half measures that would be erased by the counter-revolution of property. 

Fascinating book to someone that has no background in Sociology, Anthropology, or Archaeology. 

Graeber and Wengrow are attempting to answer the question "where does inequality come from?" and soon realize that the question is as futile as it is pointless to ask, but raises dozens of other questions along the way and poke holes in conventional wisdom from Rousseau to Diamond, using recently unearthed examples on every inhabited continent to do so. I have no background, but their arguments against previously accepted theories are mostly compelling and always fascinating. 

The question the authors end up posing and attempting to answer is "How did humans become stuck in a world where we do not have the freedom to 1) move away, 2) to disobey, and 3) to create or transform social relationships?" Their conclusion is anything but definitive, like the rest of the book, but interesting nonetheless. 

The most complete book I’ve read, Delillo is masterful. 

A solid introduction to history of many trends/events between 1490-1530. Wyman’s covers the Reformation, the commodification of military might in Europe, and the transformation of dynastic states, and manages to throw in a chapter on the Ottoman empire - Europe’s greatest outside threat. Wyman’s central argument is that the rise of capital as labor was expensive and things became more expensive to produce transformed empire during this time to mean alliances, exploratory voyages, and war itself took on a new shape that shaped the world we live in today. 

A compelling and thorough narrative of the Russian Revolution of 1917, primarily beginning with the end of the Russo-Japanese war and the rise of Bolshevism against defencism in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), follows the ousting of Tsar Nicholas II, and ending with the overthrow of the Provisional Government by the Bolsheviks who by October 1917 had gained popular support. 

In my opinion, Mieville does not superimpose their biases on this narrative, but is refreshingly conscientious and forthright in his analysis of the Revolution. Towards the end the author takes the time to blunt arguments that the path from Lenin to Stalin was inevitable, and that the Revolution is a bright spot in revolutionary history because it had the potential to be good, bloody though it was. 

"Those who count themselves on the side of the revolution must engage with these failures and crimes. To do otherwise is to fall into apologia, special pleading, hagiography - and to run the risk of repeating such mistakes. It is not for nostalgia's sake that the strange story of the first socialist revolution in history deserves celebration. The standard of October declares that things changed once, and they might do so again." (317)