The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein
This is an excellent book: I cannot recommend it too strongly. Thoroughly-researched, persuasively-presented and well-written, it is, however, dense, grueling to read and demoralizing.
As my paraphrase of Big Eagle in the title of this post might suggest, I would compare it to Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, insofar as it tells essentially the same terrible story of deceit and disenfranchisement over and over, depicting a different region or period in each chapter, except that the First Nations of Dee Brown's history would be Argentina, Chile, Poland, South Africa, Russia, much of the Pacific Rim, Iraq and the United States government in Klein's, and the forces of manifest desitny -- settlers, squatters, generals and congressmen -- of Brown's would be the Chicago School economic doctrines, their demagogues, tyrants and the institutions that implement them, in Klein's book.
Klein's thesis is
a challenge to the central and most cherished claim . . . that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies. The history of the contemporary free market -- better understood as the rise of corporatism -- was written in shocks.It took me a long time to read, and, as I read it as a pdf on a handheld device, I did not track choice verbiage as effectively as I might have reading hardcopy (I had to go back looking for the foregoing quote, pulled from the introduction, but know it is not as great as language in some solidly compelling paragraphs there among the chapters that I'd have underlined if I could have . . . and perhaps I'll learn to better track such things anon).
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman
Did you have an opportunity to pick some wasted meat from the corpse of that national chain of book retailers that famously went out of business a few months ago, Dear Reader? I did, and it was surprisingly bittersweet. All sentiment aside, I felt I might have got there too late: With about a week left, the prices were drastically low, but there wasn't much left I wanted. None of the books on my list were in stock and the categorization had faltered, so I was reduced to wandering more or less randomly hoping to find a gem.
Among those serendipitous few I did find, was this one. I'd read the Dark Materials fantasy trilogy some years ago, in time for that disappointing movie. (I know: "which disappointing movie?"; in this case, the relevant one based on the first book of that trilogy). And I hadn't hated the writing at the time.
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ tells the story, with most of which you are probably already familiar, Dear Reader, in pleasant simple language that reminded me a little of some Khalil Gibran, but more for its simplicity than its beauty, except that, in this story there are twins and any supernatural influence is somewhat more ambiguous. I enjoyed it for its depiction of some childhood tales only featured in apocryphal gospels, its clever telling of a plausible and ambiguous story, and the author's thoughtful reflections on his relation, as a famous atheist, with that set of stories.
Quicksilver & The Confusion, Neal Stephenson
I have mentioned these before, but have recently acquired my own editions (two I bought on whims when checking the Stephenson and Stross shelf in the science fiction aisle at the surviving book retailer for new items . . . because they were there; the third through the xmas scrip at online merchant as part of a lode I shall have to describe in a subsequent post) to read at leisure and have at hand (I have historically had a hard time holding on to Stephenson books, pushing them at others about as fast as I can read them; this seems to be developing with Stross too). I have read the first two, named above, and, with the aforementioned lode, have embarked on the third.
Two excerpts from Quicksilver:
She is old enough, and foreign enough, and intelligent enough, to understand that Fashion (which lesser women view as if it were Gravity) was merely an invention , a device. It was devised by Colbert as a way to neutralize those Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who, because of their wealth and independence, posed the greatest threat to the King.
and
Of late, reductions in the cost of window-glass, and improvements in the science of architecture, had made it possible to build whole blocks of shops with large windows facing the street, so that fine goods could be set out in view of passers-by. Shrewd builders . . . had built neighborhoods where courtiers went to do just that. The noun "shop" had been verbed; people went "shopping" now.
Anyway, Neal Stephenson has written something new: Reamde!
Reamde seems to be a lot less technical than many of his foregoing works, offering instead a rollicking techno-thrilling romp across the more-or-less present-day globe and metaverse, from an online game-space built on a backbone of secure and real-world redeemable financial systems through Chinese hacking gangs, Russian gangsters, British jihadist bomb-makers and spies, and good ol' down home American survivalism, to kidnapping and terrorist plots intersecting along a remote smuggling route between Canada and Idaho. Ok, so it does sound complicated. But after a little bit of a slow start (see, for contrast, the first pages of Snowcrash), it just takes off explosively and keeps on at about that pace for the next seven hundred pages. After Anathem it is candy, but delightful Stephensonian candy nevertheless. Enjoy!