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Welcome goonlings to the Awful Book of the Month! In this thread, we choose one work of Resources: Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org - A database of over 17000 books available online. If you can suggest books from here, that'd be the best. SparkNotes - http://www.sparknotes.com/ - A very helpful Cliffnotes-esque site, but much better, in my opinion. If you happen to come in late and need to catch-up, you can get great character/chapter/plot summaries here.  For recommendations on future material, suggestions on how to improve the club, or just a general rant, feel free to PM the moderation team. Past Books of the Month [for BOTM before 2018, refer to archives] 2018 January: Njal's Saga [Author Unknown] February: The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle March: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders April: Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio de Maria May: Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov June: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe July: Warlock by Oakley Hall August: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriott September: The Magus by John Fowles October: I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara November: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard December: Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens 2019: January: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky February: BEAR by Marian Engel March: V. by Thomas Pynchon April: The Doorbell Rang by Rex Stout May: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman June: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann July: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach August: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay September: Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay October: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado November: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett December: Moby Dick by Herman Melville 2020: January: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair February: WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin March: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini April: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio May: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Dame Rebecca West June: The African Queen by C. S. Forester  Current: The book is available at 70% off ( $3.00) here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing About the book quote:How the police endanger us and why we need to find an alternative quote:The End of Policing combines the best in academic research with rhetorical urgency to explain why the ordinary array of police reforms will be ineffective in reducing abusive policing. Alex Vitale shows that we must move beyond conceptualizing public safety as interdiction, exclusion, and arrest if we hope to achieve racial and economic justice.” About the Author quote:Alex S. Vitale Interview with the author here: quote:So it seems like a good moment to talk to Alex S. Vitale. He's the author of the 2017 book The End of Policing. In it, he argues that rather than focus on police reform or officer retraining, the country needs to reconsider fundamentally what it is the police should be doing at all. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/06/03/457251670/how-much-do-we-need-the-police Pacing Read as thou wilt is the whole of the law. Please post after you read! Please bookmark the thread to encourage discussion. References and Further Materials Suggestions for Future Months These threads aren't just for discussing the current BOTM; If you have a suggestion for next month's book, please feel free to post it in the thread below also. Generally what we're looking for in a BotM are works that have 1) accessibility -- either easy to read or easy to download a free copy of, ideally both 2) novelty -- something a significant fraction of the forum hasn't already read 3) discussability -- intellectual merit, controversiality, insight -- a book people will be able to talk about. Final Note: Thanks, and we hope everyone enjoys the book! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jul 3, 2020 |
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Jul 3, 2020 19:31
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Only just getting into this but already feel that the New Jim Crow is very much an essential companion piece.
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Jul 8, 2020 15:36
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I just read the first chapter, and the Robert Evans mini Behind the Bastards, Behind the Police references the book a lot. Especially some of the incidents in this first chapter. If I hadn’t listened to that already I’d be a lot angrier right now.
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Jul 9, 2020 01:28
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I thought this was being given away online...
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Jul 9, 2020 02:02
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Safety Biscuits posted:I thought this was being given away online... It was, at Verso books. Looks like it's 70% off for the ebook right now, so still $3.
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Jul 10, 2020 02:27
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I'll be reading this this weekend. Hoping to have some thoughts Monday or Tuesday evening. I made a left lit thread here in TBB, and I'm looking for more pieces to put in the 'intro to x' first post, if anyone's interested. The North Tower fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Jul 16, 2020 |
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Jul 16, 2020 21:28
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My physical copy came in a couple days ago and I just finished chapter 3 and didn’t realize how ignorant I was to even just the original of cops Also great timing for https://twitter.com/breaking911/status/1286027939948175363?s=21
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Jul 23, 2020 00:03
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I hope people are all reading but are just reacting with "welp, yeah, that figures" so aren't posting :P Like sixty people voted for this in discord! Unless something changes my mind, I'm planning something special for next month, here's a hint: 
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Jul 23, 2020 03:33
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I dunno I’m pretty amazed at the book so far. I’m in Canada so it’s comparatively light here but I had no idea about the institution of police as a whole being made so overtly as a suppressive force to public movements and then being expanded to fail at every step The chapter in school cops is surreal and I shouldn’t have decided to look up some of the vids mentioned
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Jul 23, 2020 12:26
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Yeah, mostly just surprised about the origins of police and how they are who they are because of this. Their continued culture of going after homeless people and alleged sex workers and inability to address actual issues (because their masters don't want them to--it's a way to take care of the fat that capitalism trims) doesn't seem surprising at all.
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Jul 23, 2020 17:42
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It has been slow going for me because the book just makes me so angry that I can only read a bit at a time. It's a very informative book and is great at arguing its point, enough that I might have to gift some copies to a few relatives who are fence-sitters on the whole "defund the police" thing (assuming I can convince them to read it, that is). It's a lot of stuff I'm aware of on the surface level but getting a historical context as well as more detailed points has been very helpful. Anyways, gently caress the police.
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Jul 24, 2020 00:13
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Srice posted:It has been slow going for me because the book just makes me so angry that I can only read a bit at a time. It's a very informative book and is great at arguing its point, enough that I might have to gift some copies to a few relatives who are fence-sitters on the whole "defund the police" thing (assuming I can convince them to read it, that is). It's a lot of stuff I'm aware of on the surface level but getting a historical context as well as more detailed points has been very helpful. This is pretty much where I am. I haven't seen anything that was a shocking revelation, but all the connections and context really ground it. It's wild that there is one degree of separation between The Bell Curve and the paper that served as the foundation of broken windows policing. Wild, but it makes a lot of sense. As another example, I knew about high stakes testing and that it was bad. I knew about the school to prison pipeline and that it was monstrous. But the book is very clarifying in its exploration of how these two things feed into each other and are really part of the same lovely system. gently caress the police.
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Jul 24, 2020 00:26
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Whew, just finished, great book
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Jul 24, 2020 21:04
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I feel like it was very ‘Verso’s introduction to ____’-ey, which is the pattern for a lot of their books. I think I’ve read all of their collaborations with Jacobin and they feel like they’re good 3 to 5-part lectures about any given topic. On one hand this makes for a good intro to a topic, but I’d like to know where to go for a deeper dive. I’m not entirely sure what that would be or look like, though. Verso does re/print a lot of critical theory, though, so I love them for that.
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Jul 24, 2020 22:25
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Finished this yesterday. It wasn't exactly shocking, given, well [waves hands around vaguely at the protests that are still going on] but Vitale argues his points very clearly and I'm going to use them in other conversations. It's all the detail that can't be fit in the slogan "Defund the Police/Abolish the Police/gently caress the Police", and that's very important when you're talking about the big meaningful changes that one hopes for.
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Jul 28, 2020 12:28
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Oh yeah I forgot to come back upon finishing this book a couple days ago. Echoing most people, there is a lot of confirmation in the middle but I thought the chapters near the end on border and political policing kinda picked back up. I think the author always recognizes that the problem extends beyond the police to the institutions that fund them and they try to suddenly let all that bigger rhetoric spill out in the end in the conclusion which was meh, in my opinion.
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Jul 28, 2020 12:33
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| # ? May 8, 2024 22:55 |
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Next month will be:  (free download, high-res version here: https://archive.org/details/merryadventureso00pylerich )
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Jul 30, 2020 21:46
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