100 Books Like Let Them Eat Tweets

Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett provide an analysis of the past 125 years of American history that makes a significant contribution to the growing movement to reform American Society. They carefully analyze trends in American life in a way that delineates the tangle of problems we are currently experiencing while at the same time offering hope that we can overcome them. The essence of their analysis is that across a wide variety of societal indicators, the past century and a quarter has involved an upswing in prosocial or communitarian norms and practices, beginning in the progressive era of the early twentieth century. That was followed by a reversal toward less communitarian and more individualistic and self-centered norms and practices.

Its central thesis is that the deficiencies and environmental harm of major efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are being ignored, so that the privileged and elite can continue to live in comfort and affluence. The authors present evidence that advocates for alternative energy such as wind and solar greatly overestimate the potential of these sources to replace fossil fuel energy. At the same time, the development of wind and solar power has harmful environmental impacts, including the mining necessary to obtain rare earth minerals, the decimation of wilderness both in the process of obtaining minerals, and widely implementing wind and solar installations. The undue optimism associated with these activities makes it unnecessary for those who are already privileged to consider adopting a much less consumptive lifestyle.

Whoa! There has been a lot of crazy controversy over this title, so I thought the book would be wild and confrontational. However, it turned out to be kinder and more careful in its claims than its opponents made it out to be. The whole thing began as a multi-media project for the New York Times to commemorate the first arrival of enslaved Africans to North America, and then it took off as a symbol of often manufactured culture wars.

I wanted to check it out for myself and found that this book is full of surprises. Ok: I expected to see essays about our strange American origin story and how race and power were entwined from our nation’s earliest days. But I was enthralled by the short essays (illustrated with gorgeous images and featuring brief works of poetry and fiction) that took on topics like Traffic, Healthcare, Fear, and… show more.

I worry that people don’t hear enough about solutions to the climate crisis, but, thankfully, Paul Hawken and his collaborators lay many of them out in this book.

They focus not on the flashy technologies that often grab headlines—and not just on the reduction of fossil fuels—but on the power of a healthy, living Earth to heal itself. Of course, we need to be partners in this healing, and Hawken illuminates the people, organizations, and approaches that are doing just that.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1990s saw the model of democratic capitalism prevail. Thirty years later, democracy is being questioned, and capitalism has been threatened by growing inequality.

Martin Wolf’s book provides a deep study of the underlying causes of this worrying development, something I very much appreciate. For all its flaws, Wolf argues that democratic capitalism remains the most promising economic model to provide individual freedom and shared prosperity, but it will require a revisiting of the concept of citizenship to foster a shared belief in the common good.

Cultural Backlash is aimed at sorting out the roots of the recent rise of what the authors call authoritarian populism, which is much the same thing as plutocratic populism.

They locate its origins in a backlash against the social consequences and policies that grew from socio-economic shifts that began in the 1960s and 1970s.

These include, obviously enough, the sexual revolution and changing gender norms, the civil rights movement and the increasingly multi-racial and multi-cultural character of modern societies, and the turn toward values that Inglehart, decades ago, termed post-materialist.

The book is distinguished by the vast amount of quantitative data it presents and deploys to illustrate its central argument.  

I think that this book is an excellent introduction to the history of the past four decades as it shows why we ended up with a billionaire authoritarian as the leader of the nation.

It begins with Reaganomics and argues that twelve years of Republican Administration generated sufficient momentum for its pro-market ideology that Democrat Bill Clinton was reluctant to reverse course. He went all in on globalization and continued to deregulate the financial sector that ultimately steered the economy into the financial crisis of 2008. Obama failed to seize the opportunity to end the dominance of the financial oligarchy and maintained the power structure as he found it.

The election of 2016 showed the revolt of the “deplorables” keen on draining the swamp in Washington responsible for their fate.

Ikenberry is the leading scholar writing about the origins, the evolution, and the working of the liberal international order.

He sees deep connections between liberal internationalism, liberal democracy, and democratic capitalism.

Ikenberry charts the transformations that have occurred in the liberal order, from its successful creation after the Second World War to its consolidation and expansion after the end of the Cold War to the challenges it currently faces.

He is acutely aware of liberal order’s faults and limitations, but insists that it remains the world’s best hope.

Sometimes, a book brings such a perceptive view that it elicits in me a response of gratitude and respect for the author. It surfaces ideas I long suspected were there but were just beyond grasp.

This is such a book. It shines a bright light on false meritocracy and what that means. I found this book profoundly moving and reaffirming about the important principles inherent in a just society. 

I am a huge fan of people who can translate vast amounts of research findings in a way that’s engaging, accessible, and accurate. I’m also a fan of people who don’t waste our time by shying away from hard truths, like the fact that America’s polarization problem is largely about race or that our polarized politics get baked back into our institutions and make everything worse. Klein is a master at all of this.

When I read his book, I was deep in the academic literature about the psychology of misinformation beliefs. But his book made me zoom out to consider factors way upstream of misinformation beliefs (namely social identity), to start unpacking how these upstream factors are themselves shaped by our political and media institutions.