I read Parting the Waters in college and I ember enjoying it. If you have the time to put in, I'd say it's worth it.

I bought all 3 on a whim a while ago. About halfway through the first and am enjoying it. Figure if someone devotes basically their entire adult life writing a trilogy on the man it's probably worth reading.

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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City - Matthew Desmond (2016)

NY Review of Books

Read this book if:

You've never read an ethnography of inner-city poverty.
You get confused when people talk about housing as a human right.
It's been a while since you haven't gotten some of that sweet mortgage interest deduction.

There are better reviews out there than what I can write, but this book had a profound enough impact on me when I read it a year ago that I felt it going unmentioned ITT couldn't stand.

Bull*hit Jobs - David Graeber (2018)

There are a lot of jobs now where the people doing them feel are BS in one way or another. Either they are doing close to literally nothing, managing people who don't need it, checking boxes for some bureaucracy, helping people navigate through unnecessary BS, working around fixable things that no one seems to want fixed, or doing something that does no one any good. Graeber did an article on the rise of these kinds of jobs and got a large response and turned it into a book.

I feel personally close to this subject myself as I went through a series of careers/jobs that I felt were BS for one reason or another, including poker, until a point where I just decided to quit doing whatever I just happened to fall into, step back, think about doing the kind of thing I really wanted to do, and started brand new in solar at almost 40 years old, with mixed results, but at least I don't feel like it's BS.

The author doesn't pretend that this is an in depth scientific analysis though he does refer to some studies. He goes more into detail though on people who responded to him and he note that these people are definitely not a random sampling of workers. I enjoyed the anecdotes though. Graeber has some interesting theories about why we have come to a point where so much BS is created - by capitalism no less - describing the system as a regression towards feudal systems where loot is distributed and status is measured by vassalls, flunkies, and goons in your service. Also he talks about the moral and religious influences on creating a culture that preaches the value and necessity of work and even moreso if it's unpleasant and diminishes the value of work that is rewarding in non-financial ways, particular caring work.

In the end he talks about one of the favorite subjects of the forum: UBI.

It's kind of clear that this is an article that turned into a book - though it doesn't seem padded - and that it wasn't something that he worked on for a really long time. I would have like to have heard more about comparing the jobs he's talking about in this book to work/life in places he's studied as an anthropologist (Madagascar mostly I think), but it does get mentioned and I've heard him talk a bit about it in interviews. It's a pretty quick and easy read. It's not a "must read", but I still recommend it.

Adults in the Room - Yanis Varoufakis (2017)

As most of you probably know, Yanis was the Minister of Finance for Greece for a time in 2015. Before he got there Greece had gotten into a lot of debt and been put under extreme austerity programs by the "troika" - the IMF, European Central Bank, and European Commission. Greece had just elected a leftist government lead by the Syriza. Some were looking to Grexit, but Yanis was looking to restructure the debt and end severe austerity allowing for growth so that Greece could be stably solvent eventually. The troika was looking to do a third bailout, put Greece under more debt and increase austerity.

As presented, it seems there were forces in the European Commission, especially from Germany who would privately admit that what they were forcing on Greece was impossible and Greece would fail and Yanis' plan was best, they wouldn't do it because they were worried about restructuring contagion spreading to Italy, Portugal, Spain, etc. and also because politicians would look bad admitting that the programs they pressured Greece into were bad. Some of the actions described are pretty damning if true. It is alleged that China was willing to buy billions in Greek t-bills, which would have provided liquidity needed for Greece to resist EC pressure, but withdrew the offer under pressure from Germany. Lots of stuff like that.

I recently read the End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs and he is mentioned in this book quite a bit and quite favorably. He helped Yanis prepare several papers in support of his plans and also enlisted the aid of people in America. A somewhat surprising person who comes off well, though not mentioned too many times, is Larry Summers. Bernie was helpful to Yanis a few times, expressing interest and writing letters to people like Angela Merkel and Christine Lagarde. Emmanuel Macron is also featured in quite a positive way. Merkel - mixed bag - not gonna spoiler that.

This is definitely presented from Yanis' POV and while he concedes that he could be wrong about some things, he's pretty damn sure of himself. If you're predisposed against at all, I could see this coming off as a not to be taken as gospel revenge book. If you are predisposed to give him the benefit of doubt, which I am, you will take it as him setting the record straight and supporting politics in the direction he'd like to see move in Europe.

This is a fairly long book and a very detailed look at the events that took place in less than a year. I complained more than once while reading it that this is an awful lot to know about the Greek debt crisis. Still, it intersects with a lot of other stuff I've read and it's a look inside not just the EU, but the sausage making political process.

I recommend it.

About half way through this book. Very good so far. There is an awful lot of dense-enough information in there but Varoufakis' writing style is fairly engaging. He comes across as a very decent smart guy. Not surprising that Merkel isn't coming out of it too well.Her attitude to smaller, struggling EU countries during the economic crash was disgraceful (at least in the case of Ireland which I know about). And yet, in my mind, Merkel is a hero the last few years in opening up Germany to refugees from Syria. And of course, now she's one of the few leaders able/willing to stand up to Trump.

Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt (1964)

This is the book based on Arendt's series of articles on the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker. It's possibly most famous for Arendt's coining of the term 'banality of evil' at the very end of the book to describe Eichmann's wickedness.

I found the writing itself to be a little disappointing. Very clunky in places. Perhaps that is down to the fact that English wasn't the author's native tongue.

I've read other books on WWII and the Holocaust but the two new pieces of information for me were the extent to which the de-Nazification programme in post war W. Germany was incredibly superficial. Sure the very top guys who survived the war were executed at Nuremburg, but there were very many who had the lives of thousands of Jews (and others) on their hands who either never faced sanction and were once again senior government officials within a decade, or served a few years in prison before being fully rehabilitated. Arendt wryly suggests that if the post-war German govt had been too sensitive about employing officials with a serious Nazi past, there might have been no government at all.

The other shocking thing was the extent that Jewish leadership in Germany and occupied countries often facilitated the roundup and deportation of their own community. In pretty much every country, the Germans would form a local Jewish council and get them to document all the Jewish people who resided there. When the time came for deportation to the camps, Jewish 'police' would roundup the Jewish population. When they got to the camps, it was often Jewish prisoners who manned the crematoriums... Perhaps this shouldn't be shocking - people are people, and when put into horrible positions, some act horribly. It's still shocking though to read about one (Italian?) survivor's account who Arendt reported as saying that from the moment he was rounded up in Italy until the moment his friends and family died in the camps, they actually came across very few Germans. The Germans had subcontracted out much of the work to others (including the prisoners themselves.)

As interesting as the book itself, I found reading the Introduction by Amos Elon very good. It explained the hostility Arendt faced after the book's publication by many within the Jewish establishment in the US (and also, if less so, in Israel - the book wasn't translated into Hebrew until 1999!). Apparently, many felt that Arendt had "exonerated" Eichmann but "condemned the Jews" - which is nonsense when you've read the book.

12 rules for life : An antidote to Chaos by Jordon Peterson

my tea party god mother got me this recently. would recommend. if you take the shiny cover off it makes a pretty great coaster. absorption level: high. ease of use: fair to moderate. the spine is holding up well from never having opened it. 5 stars.

Slighted

An - I really gotta read Arendt.

Ta-Nehisi Coates - We Were Eight Years In Power

Not sure if I maybe want to write a longer review when I'm on a computer, but I finally finished this on vacation.

For all but the most dedicated Coates fans, at least a few of the essays in this book are probably ones you haven't read before - for me, the one about the American carceral state ("The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration") was as devastating and powerful as "The Case for Reparations", which we're all familiar with but is worth reading again. The last couple entries ("My President Was Black" and "The First White President") are amazing reminders about the sinister intentions behind arguments about economic anxiety that we must constantly re-read and never forget. If it looks like racism, and smells like racism, then it's probably some ****ing racism that elected Donald Trump.

Would recommend, would read again and cover in highliter. 5 stars

So Woodward's new book really reads like an extended version of that "I am the Shadow Resistance" essay. He doesn't name his sources explicitly, but it's very obvious that Gary Cohn, Reince Priebus, and John Kelly were feeding Woodward information and trying to portray themselves in the best possible light as Principled Republicans who tried to keep Trump from royally ****ing over the nation. It's a good read and I know Woodard has independent verification for what he reports on, so I don't doubt the facts, but it's clear some of these guys are going to use this to establish Sensible Republican cred after Trump is done.