Here’s the twelve best books I read this year (in no particular order):
- Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It
- James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
- James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
- Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
- George Seldes, Facts and Fascism: A Collection of Important Documents and Editorials that Prove How Fascism Works in Our Own Country and Throughout the World
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
- Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
- Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017
- Richard Falk, Power Shift: On the New Global Order
- Kevin Young, Tarun Banerjee, and Michael Schwartz, Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It
- AIP, The American Parliamentarian’s Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure (v. 2)
- The Cambridge History of Socialism (vol 2)
I would have added Lockard’s Societies, Networks, and Transitions, but I’m still reading that beast. It’s big – and wonderful.
I think if there is any three I would recommend to my friends and colleagues that are important for the moment, it would be Khalidi (because of the genocide in Gaza), Seldes (because of the surge of fascism in the US and elsewhere), and either Young et. al (because it’s the most eye-opening look at how our government works) or the AIP Standard Code (because I feel like none of us really knows what “democracy” means, much less how to organize a productive meeting for decision-making).