What books written in the past decade have had the most impact on how you view politics and the world?
Last week I posed that question to several of our contributing editors (and the site founder) and the results were interesting for several reasons. First, one book far and away stood out as having the most impact for a majority of the editors. Second, it was interesting to see places where as readers interests overlapped, and areas where they diverged. And third, the reasoning and explanations behind why individual editors were moved by particular books was fascinating.
I encourage community members to share in comments their favorite books of the past decade, with explanations of why they were important to them.
And without further ado, staff list favorites from 2000-2009.
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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
By Naomi Klein
Picador, 2007
The hands-down favorite of the contributing editors was Naomi Klein's tour-de-force, originally published in the fall of 2007. As I said in my review at the time:
The Shock Doctrine is a magnificent achievement on every level: beautifully written, intellectually engaging, paradigm challenging, thorough and haunting. It deserves a place as a defining book of this decade—when we all began to slowly wake up and see clearly what’s been done to the world ... largely in America’s name.
Klein's book is a painstakingly constructed examination of Milton Friedman's ruthless economic credo, its recruitment and expansion strategies, and its application as his acolytes hop-scotched around the globe, using any available weakness in any country as a laboratory for the most extreme free-market experiments imaginable.
Contributing editors who put the book on their "best of the decade" list included Jake McIntyre, Laura Clawson, mcjoan and David Waldman. And in explaining the power of the book and its place on his list, Devilstower explained:
...when I read it, I really was shocked at how much of what seemed chaotic suddenly came into hard focus. It could do with an update, because day by day I see that what she was warning about was a starting position, but this is the book of what the modern right means: destruction.
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Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books, 2001
A respectable second-place finish went to Barbara Ehrenreich's 2001 first-hand account of struggling to live on minimum wage in different parts of the country in a variety of jobs. Laura Clawson, Meteor Blades and Devilstower -- cited her work as influential in our thinking.
I admit to this day being unable to read about anything to do with WalMart without flashing back to Ehrenreich's account of the humiliation of working there, and every time I think hard about housing issues and minimum wage jobs, I find myself referring back to her experience of trying to amass enough to move out of cheap hotels, given the requirements for first- and last-month rents and cleaning deposits. Her journalistic, first-person rendering of her trials (and her admission that she knew she had it easy, knowing she could go back to her old life eventually) made the misery of the working poor -- both rural and urban, in their different manifestations -- visceral.
As Devilstower put it, "If you can't have Studs Terkel anymore, thank God for Barbara Ehrenreich."
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For recommendations and explanations of individual contributing editors, flip beneath the fold ... and remember to offer up your favored books in the comments.
Meteor Blades:
Ron Suskind’s fine 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine provided keen insight into the "philosophy" of the Bush administration. It wasn’t particularly revelatory about how vile that administration was. We had a very good idea by then. Nor did it provide any surprises about who was really in charge, certainly not George Bush, something confirmed a year later by a four-part, Pulitzer-winning series about Dick Cheney in the Washington Post. What wasn’t quite so clear, however, was how they might be working to cover up any criminal activity. The following excerpt from p. 174 explained clearly how things would come down after Bush left office if prosecutions were ever pushed.
Lying is something presidents so at some peril. Trust, after all, is a precious element upon which rests a president’s credibility, and, after a fashion, his power.
The thinking on this matter was, in many ways, a strategic response of Cheney and others to the Watergate scandal, in which Richard Nixon’s taped statement about "stonewalling" investigations of the Watregate break-ins meant he couldn’t then lie about what he knew. That was what placed him in violation of law pertaining to obstruction of justice. He was accountable, and that doomed his presidency.
The thinking of several former Nixon administration officials, including Cheney, was not that the break-in and smilar actions were the problem. The problem was that the President should have been "protected" from knowledge of such activities.
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It wasn’t the emeritus scholar Chalmers Johnson who revived the term "empire" into recent political discourse. That was the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, now dead, but with the bloody debris of its doctrine scattered all about us. Chalmers, however, put together a trilogy that makes empire understandable and ghastly to a general audience. Much ground is covered in The Sorrows of Empire, Blowback, and Nemesis that I’d seen before, including in my undergraduate days studying for a degree in International Relations. But Johnson, no radical, put together the pieces in a fresh way, rejecting the idea that the military-industrial-congressional complex is some kind of rogue, parasitical other, but rather both the product and process of U.S. empire since World War II. Until that empire is dismantled, he makes clear, the MIC cannot be.
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I hated almost every page of The Dark Side. Each was an indictment for how far off the tracks the Cheney-Bush administration had taken us. Not that the U.S. hadn't previously engaged in torture or other evils in pursuit of "national interests." But the brazen cowboy nature Jane Mayer describes was a giant step in a new direction for post-World War II policy. Those in charge flipped the Constitution the finger and felt good about it.So, yeah, I hated The Dark Side. But it's a great book that ought to be on every high school reading list for the next 20 years.
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kos:
George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant! single-handedly convinced the establishment of the importance of language in politics.
Millennial Makeover by Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais provided a compelling look at how the Millenial generation will change politics for the better.
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Steve Singiser:
I liked Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? because he manages to make a regional deconstruction of politics incredibly readable, and because it is something of an indictment of "flyover state" politics while still being somewhat affectionate towards what is, after all, his home state.
Brandon Friedman's The War I Always Wanted made my list. Besides his being a Daily Kos diarist, his book was powerful because it makes his gradual evolution on the subject of war come around without either being simplistic or horribly preachy. He doesn't bludgeon the reader with it... we just arrive at it through his experiences. (Daily Kos book review of Friedman's book was published in August 2007.)
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mcjoan:
Karen Greenberg's The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days is on my list. It was heartbreaking to see how the efforts of military commanders to do this by the book, to uphold the law, to uphold military regulations and traditions, was completely trumped by Rumsfeld and Cheney. It's a metaphor of how they broke the military. (Book review and author interview here.)
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Devilstower:
Matt Taibbi's Smells Like Dead Elephants because... because... damn it, it's not possible to even talk about the book without mentioning the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson. The book is a bit of a mixed bag, but some bits are just brilliant -- a bit like what I'd expect from a book by our -own Hunter (which would be, of course, 100% brilliant)
Douglas Rushkoff's Life Inc. hit me almost like The Shock Doctrine in making me see how much we have come to view the world through a corporate lens, even making our personal decisions in corporate terms. And making me realize that corporations are nothing but feudalism enshrined in law.
Jared Diamond's Collapse should be required reading in every high school in the country. One of those books that tells you little you didn't already know when it comes to the general picture, but both paints in the details to show the little tragedies (a "culture" that persisted for centuries on a tiny island where population rarely reached double digits) and expands the scope to show the big picture (the world is Easter Island writ not all that much larger, and the trees are coming down).
Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science lacks the sparkle of any of the previous works, but it's a diligent and necessary catalog of the GOP's attempt to stamp out evidence, logic, and sense from public debate.
Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class is one of those books that left me bursting with ideas, ready to start up a company, launch into a community project, or reform my local government. The best parts were the how it showed communities that had remade themselves through rapid adoption of new ideas and experimentation vs communities of similar size mired in stubbornness and rot.
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DavidNYC:
Nixonland: As Rick Perlstein points out at the start of his book, in 1964, LBJ won the highest share of the popular vote in American history. Yet just eight years later, Nixon won the third-highest. How did the country lurch from one landslide to the next, and in such a short time? Perlstein, relying on exceptionally thorough research and penetrating insight, delves into the dark fears and resentments many Americans harbored during this period of social turmoil - including Richard Milhous Nixon. Nixon was both a product of the time and a brilliant master of tapping into the same fears which animated him. While many histories of the 1960s focus on left-wing political movements, Perlstein astutely shines a spotlight on the right-wing counter-movements. He captures the essence of the period in such a vibrant way you can almost feel the upheaval. This is a deeply gripping book which helps explain not only the time period it covers, but the world we've since inherited. The 2008 election demonstrated that "Nixonland" has shrunk in size, but as Sarah Palin's popularity shows, the politics of resentment still have an unusually strong hold on a not-insignificant portion of the population.
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Laura Clawson:
Jacob Hacker is generally credited with having come up with the idea of the public health insurance option, but his book The Great Risk Shift goes beyond just health care, weaving together the erosion of employer-provided health insurance and pensions, the rise of bankruptcy and foreclosure, and sharply rising income instability, revealing them as closely related phenomena that consistently relocates risk onto individuals and families. Hacker's analysis shows how this is a sustained project that targets middle-class people as much as poor and working-class people, seeks to undermine trust in community and in government programs, and relentlessly tries to put American lives into the hands of the market in every way possible. The Great Risk Shift pulls together things you already know about our economy and the politics of that economy and makes them coherent and newly outrageous. As we watch battles over health care reform and jobs legislation it has renewed relevance. (Daily Kos review can be found here.)
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SusanG:
Drew Westen's The Political Brain (2007) provided one of the best-researched looks at political preferences, grounded in empirical testing that covered a whole range of emotional responses to visual ads, evocative words and reasoned persuasion. Ultimately Westen argued that progressives need to learn to use more impassioned language and visuals to make the liberal case to the American public. (Daily Kos review here).
Dave Finkel's The Good Soldiers (2009) is the best book yet published about the Iraq War. Finkel embedded with a group of soldiers during the surge, in one of the most deadly parts of Baghdad, and brought back personal narratives and stories of the mundane, the tragic, the dead, the living and the wounded. A beautifully written, wrenching book that deserves all the attention it can get. (Daily Kos review here).
Applebee's America, by Ron Fournier, Douglas B. Sosnik, and Matthew J. Dowd, is book that examines use of microtrend data-gathering in politics and the emerging thirst for niche communities in America. Despite an authorship that at first glance looks compromised, it's a solid, apolitical look at how campaigns can connect powerfully with the grassroots. Indeed, many of the suggestions in the 2006 book appear to have been adopted wholesale by the amazing 2008 Obama campaign. (Daily Kos review here).
Jeremy Scahill's explosive 2007 Blackwater blew the lid off the secretive, unsupervised contractor in an incredible, in-depth piece of investigative journalism. Besides bringing attention to the shadowy world of mercenaries, Blackwater stood out as a model of how book-length reportage could influence policy and the political debate. (Daily Kos review here).
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Jake McIntyre:
The Shock Doctrine wins the prize for Most Important.
Interesting to see that no one has mentioned [Al Gore's] The Assault on Reason, which was pretty big at the time, and which I thought cogently described the New Stupid in a more elegant way than The Republican War on Science.
Special booby prize for [Thomas Friedman's] The World is Flat.
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Ah, well, Jake--if we get into booby prizes for the worst books of the decade, that's a whole other post....