Once I reached retirement age I started logging books I read. I started this partly because I’d often forget a title or author, and this would allow me a quick way to retrieve the lost info. I’ve always been fascinated by the kind of determined work that serious scholars do to track their intellectual teachers via references, footnotes or acknowledgements in their books.
So, I suppose it’s no small wonder that I’ve been thinking more and more about people who hold strong opinions, but who rarely endeavor to read a full-length book that dives deep into a subject. I believe this is particularly problematic of elected officials who are so busy chasing campaign dollars and trying to be relatively aware of the multitude of subjects they are asked to vote on that they don’t have time to read and reflect on a 200, 400, or god forbid, a 600 page analysis of any pertinent subject.
While I can’t describe with any certainty why I think exactly like I do about foreign policy or militarism, I do know those views have been shaped and formed in no small part from the following reads in recent years. I had the opportunity recently to moderate a discussion (all of 20 minutes of his time) with one of our U.S.Senators to address just two central issues of concern. That equals 5 minutes for citizens to state their concerns and solutions and 5 minutes for his response per issue. How does one condense tens of thousands of pages of scholarship into that? How does one even begin to address the complexities, the historical, social, cultural, environmental and political aspects in 5 minutes?
It should be no surprise that transforming opinions of legislators that are conditioned by the system they are part of, to follow the dominant cultural myth, especially of their party and their funders (who also have more lobbying access), is a Sisyphean task. Yet the inertia that drives the system, along with the powerful moneyed elite, must be challenged, alternatives offered. It takes persistence, often over decades if not lifetimes. My experience today with a Senator I have spoken with before, confirmed my suspicion that while politely listening, he really isn’t open to reconsidering his positions. I wonder, could his orientation be moved by sitting with any of these books that have absorb my attention over many hours of reading. (an average reader takes two minutes per page, thus a 400 page tome would consume 13-14 hours).
The list that follows includes books I have read that have in some way affected how I understand our world and the forces that drive it, especially as relates to global issues, foreign policy and militarism. I have left off the fiction and some other titles. The list is in reverse chronological order in which I read them. It does not include fiction I’ve read, save one title so designated, nor does it include articles, reports, or books I only started but never finished.
With so many books having been written, I’m quite certain this particular list is as unique as any readers of this blog own list would be. But shaped me it has. The list here only covers 2019 – 2022. My longer list goes back to 2014. I was tempted to try and rank them in some notion of importance but that felt like splitting hairs. I’m glad I read each one. As I look over this list again here, there is one title I had forgotten about, but which I remember being moved enough to blog about it, Mark Fleubaey, et. Al., – A Manifesto for Social Progress that might be a place to start. You likely will not find it in any bookstore. Maybe there is something in the list that will call to some of you.
2022
Sara Kreps – Taxing Wars (not finished yet)
Thomas Weiss – Would the World Be Better Without the UN?
David Fitzgerald – Militarization and the American Century
James Gustave Speth – They Knew
Toby Ord – The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
Kelly Denton-Borhaug – And Then Your Soul Is Gone: Moral Injury and U.S. War Culture
John Dryzek – Politics of the Anthropocene
Paul Nelson – Global Development and Human Rights (not finished)
Thomas Geoghegan – The History of Democracy Has Yet to be Written
Peter Newell – Global Green Politics
George Orwell – Collected Essays (mostly)
2021
Rebecca Solnit – Orwell’s Roses
Tim Jackson – Post Growth: Life After Capitalism
Anand Giridharandas – Winners Take All
Richad Falk – Public Intellectual
Robert Divine – Sustainable Economy
Steven Klees – Conscience of a Progressive
Andrew Bacevich – After the Apocalypse
Kai Bird – The Outlier
Mary Beth Rogers – Barbara Jordan: American Hero
George McGovern – What it Means to be a Democrat
Ned Dobos – Ethics, Security, and the War Machine
Kate Aronoff – Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet
Roman Krznaric – Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short Term World
George McGovern – A Time for War a Time for Peace
Kim Stanley Robinson – Ministry of the Future (fiction)
Thomas Knock – Rise of the Prairie Statesman: Life and Times of George McGovern
Michael Mann – New Climate Warns
Kathleen Dean Moore – Great Tide Rising
Michael Klare – All Hell Breaking Loose: Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change
Michael Brenes – For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy
Henry Wallace – The Price of Vision: Diaries 1942-46
Daniel Kemmis – Citizens Uniting to Restore Our Democracy (mostly)
2020
Rebecca Solnit – Recollections of My Disappearance
Stan Cox – Green New Deal
Rutger Bregman – Humankind
Rutger Bregman – Utopia for Realists
Joseph Stiglitz – People, Power and Progress
Eric Alterman – Lying in State
Jeffrey Sachs – A New Foreign Policy
Timothy Snyder – On Tyranny
Andrew Bacecvich – Age of Illusions
Gar Alperovitz – The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
David Orr – Democracy Unchained
Christian Felber – Trading for Good
Michael Nagler – Third Harmony
Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens
Brian Caplan – Open Border
Terry Tempest Williams - Erosion
2019
Lloyd Dumas – Building the Good Society
Stephen Lesserwich – Living Well at Other’s Expense: The Hidden Costs of Western Prosperity
Michael Schwalbe – Making a Difference: Using Sociology to Create a Better World
Giorgos Kallis – Degrowth
Emrys Westacott – Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less is More… More or Less
Erik Olin Wright – How to Be and Anti-Capitalist
Chris Armstrong – Why Global Justice Matters
Thomas Hanna – Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership
Russell Muirhead & Nancy Rosenbaum – A Lot of People Are Saying: Conspiracies and the Assault on Democracy
Lloyd Dumas – A Peacekeeping Economy
Gordon Adams – Mission Creep: The Militarization of US Foreign Policy
Sulak Sivaraksa – Wisdom of Sustainability: Buddhist Economics for the 21st Century
Colin Tudge - Six Steps Back to the Land
Mark Fleubaey – A Manifesto for Social Progress
John Leary – One Shot
I am at a loss to share how these and other ideas that have permeated my thick brain might offer as solutions to the challenges we face near and far. Yet, I feel strongly that in the merging of these ideas there are real possibilities that could be created. Clearly, I’ve read only an eyedrop of the ocean’s work published (even of just the English language titles). A different reading list may well have nudged me toward a different destination. Even the order that I read these selected items might have slightly shifted how I now think about things.
At the bottom of all this is a quest I think I share with these authors to truly understand what is a way to make a better world for all on a single finite planet, and to pass that possibility on to those that may follow when we are gone. I can’t be sure that what I think makes sense to me today, will ultimately be judged by history to have been accurate or wise. But it is where I am as we face so many challenges as a human species on this particular spinning sphere. There is something that resides in an author’s willingness to dig down and read and reflect and then write their truth to share that is admirable. Reading has been a gift. I wish our elected officials would delve deeper
