Last year I decided to keep a record of the books I’d read cover-to-cover. It was a good exercise, in that it helped force me to prioritize reading books, to read books to the end, and to collect my thoughts about what I had read. At the same time, blogging about them has been fun. It led some of the authors to contact me, which was nice. One risk, though, is that readers of my jottings on these books might take what I’ve written as definitive. Please don’t read what I write about these books as anything more than initial, cursory, incomplete, and reactive. These are not book reviews! They’re just quick reflections. And if I don't say much or I say a lot, don't take it as a signal of the book's quality.
Posted December 25, 2018
The Cold War's Killing Fields, by Paul Thomas Chamberlin
This big book is impressive. Everyone should read it, though I do worry not many will. It is a history of the massive, extensive, and horrific violence that we absolutely must center in any history of the Cold War, which was hot, long, and unforgiving. Chamberlin shows how the United States, either intentionally or through callous disregard, was responsible for spurring a lot of the violence. And this violence bequeathed, by destroying Left alternatives, the contemporary moment of right-wing fundamentalisms at war with each other, he argues. Chamberlin accomplishes a few remarkable things: first, he synthesizes a brutal history of violence that everyone should know, and he does not resort to mawkishness or political romanticism (or partisan denunciation); second; he shows how what has typically been generically considered guerrilla warfare actually must be periodized, based on transformations in tactics, strategy, and goals; third, he explains the causes patiently and illustrates the transformations that actually allowed the persistence, rather than the end, of much of this violence, which over-eager Cold Warriors prematurely touted; and fourth he covers a vast sweep of time and space without ever leaving the reader feel bogged down or confused as to why any particular discussion matters. The brutality in the book is hard to take at points, but the prose is notably austere and free of any hints of purple sentimentality. I particularly appreciated two additional points. He transcends some of the stalemate in Cold War historiography through a sober and theoretically sound analysis of the transformations of geopolitics, revolutionary tactics, and political composition of US antagonists. And he covers in great depth a few moments that I was only dimly aware of, while, smartly, not overdoing the more familiar episodes. The chapters on Bangladesh and Lebanon are particularly incisive and heartbreaking.
Overall, this book must sit alongside the likes of Westad (and obviously it must replace Gaddis, to whom Chamberlin is quite generous even as he basically reveals his work to be hackery). I’m not sure it can be assigned to undergrads, but give it to your aunt and your grandpa. At the same time, specialists will surely find shortcomings at various points. On the other hand, the sweeping scope of the book compelled me to lament one aspect: Africa and Latin America are not included. Of course to include these giant regions with the attention to detail that Chamberlin mounts for Asia would be impossible (and he justifies his geographic choices fairly well). But the major problem with leaving them out is that their absence changes the story about the ultimate outcome of the Cold War. Yes, the story of Islamic fundamentalism's remains applicable to Africa in some cases. But Latin America’s Cold War was nearly as hot as Asia’s. Does the rise of various Christian fundamentalisms in Latin America track their war-catalyzed rise in Asia, as Chamberlin illustrates? And is Latin America’s Cold War over? Recent election results in Brazil suggest not.
Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, by Alondra Nelson
Alondra Nelson’s first book is a must-read. I knew that because I’d dipped into it previously, but I finally made time to read the whole thing this semester because I taught it in my class on Black social movements. It’s incredibly well-written and smart. It’s safe to say that it’s the most important single book on the Panthers to emerge in the past decade-plus of new scholarship on the party (though many essays in the numerous collections out there are also crucial). I’m not sure I can add to the widespread acclaim the book has received, except to say simply that the history of the Panthers’ efforts to secure better health for their communities is a history we must celebrate and also study closely and understand critically. Although the last chapter, on the UCLA Violence Center, may not seem like it’s directly connected to the overall threads of the argument, I think it’s really important. And in some ways I think it helps to draw new concrete connections between existing scholarship on the Panthers and literature on the carceral state. I know that Elizabeth Hinton is working on the Brandeis counterpart of the UCLA Violence Center, previewed in a short Boston Review article, and Rebecca Lemov, the historian of science, is working more directly on the UCLA Violence Center. The reason to pursue the study of these initiatives is that I think we still lack a sufficient historiography of the intellectual underpinnings of the carceral state, along with a study of, as Nelson begins to demonstrate, the interrelationship of social-movement protest against the carceral state and the intellectuals behind its efflorescence, whom Paul Takagi and Tony Platt characterized at the time as the “new realists.”
Algiers: Third World Capital, by Elaine Mokhtefi
I really enjoyed most of this book. Memoir is not a genre I usually like, but Mokhtefi’s life was singular and intersected with many key moments of post-1945 history. At times while reading the book, I found myself shaking my head, like “she was there too?” The book even ends with an interesting factoid about Immanuel Wallerstein that I had never heard. The most surprising part of the book is her celebration of Eldridge Cleaver and the international section of the Panthers. The vast majority of scholarship on the Panthers that has emerged in the past decade or more focuses on the other side, either the Newton/Seale/Brown Oakland branch or the ones that remained aligned with it. It was jarring to see some reverence for the side of the Panthers that a lot of the literature either would rather ignore or else subjects to deep critiques. Even Sean Malloy’s book, which I read earlier this year, is pretty critical of Cleaver, though it’s on internationalism among the Panthers. Mokhtefi does not give Cleaver a pass and does not shy away from discussing some of the really sordid aspects of the history (ie, homicide), but it’s clear that she remains conflicted about it all. It’s perhaps the only honest way to treat a complicated and difficult history. The book is not academic history, and it should be treated as such. But it’s also clear that Mokhtefi wants to address some mistaken assumptions and incorrect facts that circulate about the Algerian Revolution and especially the Panther experience in Algeria. I recommend reading Muriam Haleh Davis’s review of the book either before or after reading it.
Security and Capital: American Culture and the Long History of Colonial Modernity, by Eli Jelly-Schapiro
I wrote a review of this book for Times Higher Education. It’s a great book, and it helped clarify for me where I think the literature needs to go. Please make me a full professor with a whole lot of PhD students so I can get this process started.
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
This is another book that I’d read parts of but not completed until now, when I assigned the whole thing in my class on Black social movements. We read the first half at the beginning of the semester and the second half at the end. I think bookending the semester with the book worked well. Several key points or concepts that class developed were present in the book, and the discussions toward the end of it on contemporary movements, solidarity, etc. worked well to tie things together. It’s a brilliantly written book that probably should just go on any syllabus even remotely dealing with modern US history. Just fabulous.
Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD, by Max Felker-Kantor
Max Felker-Kantor and I have been running in the same circles for a while, as critical historians of policing. I’ve been really looking forward to his book, and it does not disappoint. Not only is this book a desperately needed, relatively complete history of the LAPD beginning with William Parker’s reign, but it represents two key innovations in the historiography. The first is that Felker-Kantor manages to bring together movement history with institutional history of the LAPD. To write the modern history of a police department, especially one as secretive and scandal-ridden as the LAPD, is a big challenge, due to the limitations posed by source availability. But not only does he overcome that challenge relatively seamlessly, he shows how the LAPD’s development responded directly to social movements and resistance to police violence, both by changing its tactics and policies and by directly repressing movements. In this sense, his chapter on the Public Disorder Intelligence Division, which I discuss briefly in my forthcoming book, is a true achievement. It’s excellent. The second innovation the book represents to my mind is to show how directly the LAPD became a political actor shaping politics in the city and beyond in the post-WWII period. I’m fascinated by how police have become self-interested political actors unto themselves, and aspects of this history come up in my own book and will probably be at the center of my second research project. I’m glad to know that such a deeply researched and serious book, like Policing Los Angeles, is on the same wave-length. I think several individual chapters of this book would work well in the classroom, but overall the whole thing is an essential read. I devoured it, and I encourage everyone to pick it up right away.
Posted August 25, 2018
Posted April 16, 2018
The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, by Julian Zelizer
This book is an excellent synthetic look at the political relationship between LBJ and Congress. The book is impressive for its economy, covering an eventful and complex history in a concise and clear way. Zelizer is determined to illustrate how much Congress matters, and how much the White House’s relationship to Congress matters. In the 1960s, this was true. Today, I’m not really convinced the same can be said. I would recommend this book to anyone who is writing on the Johnson administration as a way to make sure you have the overall picture right. It would also be very useful for classes on the 1960s.
I have two criticisms of the book. 1) Although it is about Congress, to which historians and political scientists don’t pay enough attention, it also underemphasizes, I think, the importance of social movements on one side and business on the other. Zelizer certainly doesn’t ignore these actors. And it’s true that the corporate lobbying of today didn’t exist in the 1960s. But as much as he is concerned to demonstrate that the broader ecosystem of politics matters, he also is talking about a period when it both mattered more, because of the vibrant movements, and less because of the particular characteristics of LBJ. Today, the president is basically superfluous, as are most actual congresspeople, because the bills all get written by high-paid lawyers working for powerful corporations. If you want a deep dive into LBJ’s relationship with the civil rights movement in the years after the Voting Rights Act, check David C. Carter’s The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement.
2) You will not be surprised to hear me say that Zelizer pays too little attention to law and order politics, even arguing at one point that basically before 1966 it was not even on the GOP’s radar, or it was pushed off it by Goldwater’s defeat. I’m not convinced. And, more importantly, Zelizer dramatically ignores anti-crime legislation. He’s extremely careful about the ins and outs of well-liked Great Society legislation, but he spends only a paragraph on the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. In that paragraph, he makes it seem like it came out of nowhere. In fact, that actual bill had been debated for over a year, with multiple revisions offered along the way. And Zelizer completely ignores the 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which paved the way. It was concomitant with many of the more well-loved Great Society legislation he heralds, also passed by the 98th Congress, the book’s true (collective) hero. I believe that the historical literature on the War on Crime and the emergence of the carceral state pays too little attention to Congress; this book tries to remedy the deficit of scholarly attention on Congress—and succeeds generally—but it falls short on this count.
Carceral Capitalism, by Jackie Wang
I’ve been fortunate to get to know Jackie Wang over the past few years. Her writing brings a do-it-yourself punk sensibility to grave political issues. You want a book about the carceral state and financialization? Just write it! I also appreciate that she is unwilling to be restrained or constrained by what in earlier times might have been disciplinary and sectarian divides. You want to read a critique of the carceral state that brings together marxian value theory, Afro-pessimism, a primer on collateralized debt obligations, Rosa Luxemburg on primitive accumulation, memoir, and poetry? Just write it! This book conveys the urgency of the present, as well as the volatility of the contemporary political moment, in its restless search for explanations. The old ones clearly will not work, and new ones cannot rely on old codifications—even as they must not toss out previously hard-won knowledge. This is a book that can and will be informative for social movements, even as it also draws on the type of deep learning a PhD student must undertake while preparing for comprehensive exams or writing a dissertation prospectus (tasks I know Wang had to deal with while also composing and finalizing this book).
One thread I appreciated in the book is the analysis of how risk assessment in finance, and now in realms far beyond what we used to think of as the delimited realm of finance, structures the “continuum” of “expropriation and exploitation.” Wang pushes us, drawing on the recent debates between Michael Dawson and Nancy Fraser, to think anew about how there is no non-racial or race-neutral backdrop of risk assessment and financial practice that has now been corrupted by racist thinking and racialized exclusions. This critique is necessary for understanding penal practice because it is becoming increasingly algorithmically dependent on risk calculations. Wang writes that when critics of the financial chicanery leading to the 2008 crisis lament that highly qualified Black borrowers received higher risk scores than their white counterparts (and thus experienced greater financialized expropriation), the moral economy of debt becomes reinscribed, splitting the individualized borrower from the racialized pool. This criticism then naturalizes the sorting process that creates the high-risk pool out of which some may escape, highlighting what I would consider the inseparability of race and risk, or the fundamental unthinkability of race outside risk. Today, with financialization a primary mode of accumulation that conditions every aspect of our social and economic lives, we find less an entry into a post-racial society of economistic fantasy than a society in which race no longer has much salience outside risk assessment. Or, put another way, there is no social life unaffected by risk assessment and no risk assessment unaffected by histories of racialization. The financialization of daily life, as Randy Martin called it, is also the insinuation of risk assessment into every interaction with institutions, from corporations to cops. To follow Wang’s line of critique, what this means is that it will not be enough to, as some have demanded, remove racial proxies from algorithms. Rather, it will mean demolishing risk assessment itself, because race is not simply a variable in an equation but is the grammar of the equation.
Also, one more point: the interlude “Ripples in Time" in the middle of the book, when Wang discusses in a highly personal narrative her brother’s re-sentencing hearing, is one of the most devastating and intense things I’ve read lately. On its own it could win any number of writing awards.
The Doomsday Machine, by Daniel Ellsberg
This book is part memoir, part cri de coeur, about the insanity of nuclear weapons. Before becoming famous as the leaker of the Pentagon Papers (after helping produce them), Ellsberg specialized in analysis of nuclear weapons for RAND. Although an outside specialist, he learned some of the deepest secrets of the system in the 1950s. And it horrified him. Much of what he reveals in this book is now relatively common knowledge among people who study nuclear weapons, but I am not one of those people. I found it all a bit horrifying, and that is his purpose. Basically, he skewers many commonly held notions about the security and protections against their accidental or intentional use (and argues that they have been “used” consistently in the same way that a gun put to a person’s head but not fired has been “used”).
Some of the details revealed in the book are worth studying, including what the actual weapons capabilities are and how they work. His emphasis on people like Curtis LeMay is important. I couldn’t help but feel like LeMay is someone whose words we should be teaching in intro-level undergraduate US history courses, rather than, say, Kennan’s (though they’re both nuts in different ways). Among the details are the actual way that the “doomsday machine” would work: in the USSR, it meant that nuclear missiles once launched would send signals to other nuclear missiles to launch, independent from human control. Another detail was that US bombers would create “corridors” to ensure that they could reach Moscow, for instance, which meant dropping nuclear bombs along the way on radar installations and other key infrastructure, even far outside the Soviet Union. The book suggests that all nuclear-armed countries are complicit in the depravity of creating a system that could destroy all life on the planet, but it also demonstrates that the depravity has been led, deepened, and extended by the United States first and foremost.
Overall, the book is lively and clear, if a bit repetitive and overly long (mainly I think because Ellsberg is trying to avoid being too technical). It’s a bit of a harangue at points, with good reason. I do wonder if anyone who doesn’t already think Ellsberg is a nut, or a traitor, would read this book. And if they did, what would their reaction be? Perhaps what it might do is sensitize young people who grew up after the Cold War to the continuing danger of nuclear weapons. Oddly, I came away from it thinking that Trump represents less of an increased threat than I may have thought, simply because the threat of total destruction has long been extreme. As Ellsberg shows, the command of the POTUS is not really necessary to cause a nuclear holocaust, despite thick layers of mythology to the contrary. A "rogue" officer could probably have started a nuclear war long ago. A rogue POTUS is, well, just a POTUS.
I spend most of my time thinking about counterinsurgency, but the 1960s fad for counterinsurgency doesn’t really make much sense outside the context of nuclear stalemate and the possibility of life’s destruction. So this book was a good reminder for me not to bend the stick too far toward a focus only on “small wars.” Pairs well with: Discharge and Chaos UK.
The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, by Max Boot
Speaking of counterinsurgency, I hope to publish a review of this book soon. If it doesn't work out, I'll put it on this site. I have much to say, but I'll save it for now.
A Threat of the First Magnitude: FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration from the Communist Party to the Revolutionary Union 1962-1974, by Aaron J. Leonard & Conor A. Gallagher
There is a popular meme circulating of a young boy playing a trumpet right next to the head of a young girl who is covering her ears and trying to escape. For the past week as I’ve read A Threat of the First Magnitude, I’ve been the boy and coming out of the trumpet have been factoids from the book. Everyone around me has been the girl. #sorrynotsorry
This book is about FBI informants and the New Left/new communist movement. It is fascinating. It should be required reading for anyone even vaguely interested in the history of the radical US Left in the 1960s/1970s. The historiography on the New Left has inadequately addressed how pernicious and consequential informants were for the trajectory of movements. Everyone condemns Cointelpro, but we still, in my view, don’t really know the full mechanics of Cointelpro or the extent of what it achieved (let alone what local red squads did and how the FBI and other agencies interacted with them). The book makes the case that without reckoning with the deep damage informants have done to movements, the Left will continue to suffer such damage in the future. I’m convinced.
Based on extensive research using newly FOIA-ed documents, this book shows conclusively in my view that the FBI hastened and encouraged the destruction of SDS and the persistent factionalism within the new communist movement, particularly around race questions. The authors clearly support some aims of the movement, particularly the Revolutionary Union (RU), while also offering a sober assessment of concrete political limitations, organizational challenges, and delusions of grandeur that marked the period. What becomes clear is that whatever RU may have achieved was consistently tempered or thwarted by FBI infiltration. (This history was covered to some degree in Leonard and Gallagher’s previous book Heavy Radicals, and that book might be a better choice for a more general overview, whereas this one focuses more directly on informants and has newly available documentary proof to support its claims.)
Perhaps the most shocking revelation is that a Maoist “group”—really a secretive publisher of inflammatory pamphlets—that formed in 1962 was an FBI creation. This was a highly sophisticated effort. Named the Ad Hoc Committee for A Scientific Socialist Line at first, then Ad Hoc Committee for a Marxist-Leninist Party, this group fostered rivalries in the immediate wake of the Sino-Soviet split, both advocating support for a pro-China line and labeling the Soviet Union revisionist. (Maybe someday I’ll spin out my theory that the concept of revisionism itself caught on thanks to the CIA.) It can be hard to imagine today that 60s Marxists would have believed the US and the USSR were collaborating to enhance imperialism, and Maoism was the answer. But that was the line the Ad Hoc Committee promoted. Now, it would be an error to suggest that Maoism would not have gained adherents in the United States without the work of the Ad Hoc Committee. But the intensity with which dogmatic recriminations flew around the Left precisely on questions of purity/revisionism/etc. only helped to dismantle the Left. And we now know that the FBI fostered such divisiveness.
In particular, the part of the book that just blew me away was learning that at a crucial juncture when elusive inter-racial unity among new communist groups seemed within reach, the FBI intervened to insist that white leftists should be in white groups, Black leftists in Black groups, and so on. That was already to a large degree the case, but it might have been overcome in this moment, according to the authors, if the FBI hadn’t prodded events in the direction of continued segregation. (To see how the Ad Hoc Committee did this nefarious work, check this document, discussed in greater depth in the book.) Today, many parts of the Left remain mired in the same sort of issues that challenged the new communist movement. There are no easy answers, but to think that the FBI blocked a pathway out of them, and we are still suffering today from that blockage, is truly alarming.
All in all, the book is concise and clear, but it will not be an effortless read if you don’t have some background knowledge. It wouldn’t hurt to read the interview in Viewpoint with Aaron Leonard first. But I’d say anyone interested in the Left and in policing, which is probably nearly everyone reading my blog, should sit down with this short book. As a great resource, it includes reprints of a good number of key declassified documents that the authors have uncovered. The book raised many questions for me and demands deeper research into how various groups were affected by informants.
Posted January 16, 2018
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
This was a great book to begin 2018 with. Of course the Combahee River Collective’s statement is something I already knew well and had taught, but now there is no question that any time I teach it again I will assign this entire text. The interviews with the participants, particularly with Beverly Smith and Demita Frazier, are fascinating and insightful. When this document, the original Combahee statement, is discussed today, its historical context is at risk of being lost. This book could remedy that. It is a key contribution to the intellectual history not only of Black feminism but also of the radical Left more broadly in the United States during the 1970s. The context does really matter. I won’t spoil it for you, but the brief discussion of Fred Hampton by Frazier stopped me in my tracks. More generally, what this book contributes is an understanding of the possibility of “identity politics” as a collective and plural project, not a singular and individual one as it has too often been reframed. Further, the comparison between the politics and experiences of the original collective members and Alicia Garza, also interviewed here, is particularly notable, and it could serve as the basis for some new historical analyses. Taylor has done really important work here, and like everything she publishes, it's super-smart and politically astute.
Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire & the Globalization of the New South, by Andrew Zimmerman
This book has been heralded as a sterling example of what transnational history can do, and after finally reading it I can only agree emphatically. Zimmerman has done incredible, deeply researched work here in terms of recasting the New South, German empire, US social science, and race in transnational and imperial terms. As a few other scholars have shown, race is made through comparison and analogy across borders, and Zimmerman demonstrates that the adequate, methodologically reflexive way to grasp this process is to undertake relational transnational analysis and avoid traditional comparisons based on fixed units.
I found the discussion of Du Bois, Weber, and the Chicago School in the final chapter to be utterly essential and illuminating. It should be widely read alongside Aldon Morris’s rethinking of Du Bois and sociology or Robert Vitalis’s discussion of race and IR. I should also mention that Zimmerman’s marxism comes through in subtle but crucial and inspiring ways in this text, and the centrality of a gender analysis throughout, though understated, was welcome.
Finally, Zimmerman got me rethinking one problem with higher education today in the United States, among many: the increasingly common notion that elite students can be afforded the luxury of grappling with big ideas and wrestling with complex social problems or cultural products while students at lower-tier schools must necessarily get vocational and practical educations that will enable them to get a job and a paycheck, which liberal arts degrees will not. This is a profound error that is part of the system of elite reproduction and growing inequalities, but it also has a long history, as this book shows, going back in some ways to debates about race and labor in which Du Bois and Washington participated over a century ago. Here the neoliberalization of education may not be a good explanation.
I could quote a thousand passages from this book, but a few insights that I feel I must highlight:
© 2024 Stuart Schrader