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Zesty Mordant posted:Debt: The First 5,000 years is pretty interesting so far. I didn't finish it last time so maybe now I will. Graeber's new book about bullshit jobs seems interesting too Debt was awesome at painstakingly showing how the language of debt and that of morality has been intertwined for centuries, leading to some weird contradictions about how we're brought up to think about debt. And it pretty well annihilates the barter stories you get in economics class. Every year or two, I read I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester and am going back through it now. It's a very detailed breakdown of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis written very much for the layperson. It was written just a couple years after the crisis, and I don't know if Lanchester has written updated editions, but there's galling stuff in there as-is. MeatwadIsGod has issued a correction as of 06:32 on Jul 3, 2018 |
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Jul 3, 2018 06:27
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Epic High Five posted:The Half Has Never Been Told....basically an actual primary source history of slavery as it relates to how it was the primary driver of both Capitalism and expansionism in the US I went to Wade Hampton High School and always knew he was a piece of poo poo but had never heard of Charles Ball or his memoirs before I read this book
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Jan 6, 2019 03:34
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I'm reading the T. Harry Williams biography of Huey Long. It's good, folks. Long apparently read Count of Monte Cristo every year from his boyhood until his time in the Senate because Edmond Dantes "knew how to hate, and until you learn how to hate you'll never get anywhere in this world."
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Jul 29, 2019 02:02
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Epic High Five posted:about 3/4 of the way through The Shadow of the Torturer and I'm definitely into it and understanding why Le Guin endorsed it so highly (which is why I gave it a shot) Book of the New Sun is a masterpiece. I read it (and Urth) last year and am so bummed I only found out about Gene Wolfe just before he passed away. It's criminal that he isn't mentioned alongside Melville, McCarthy, etc by everyone. He seems pretty unknown outside genre circles. But I guess when Le Guin said "he's our Melville" she also meant he would die in relative obscurity. MeatwadIsGod has issued a correction as of 07:43 on Jan 16, 2020 |
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Jan 16, 2020 07:40
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Epic High Five posted:I have been enjoying how much Wolfe loves dropping a new thing to throw your brain in reverse just when you were starting to think this or that was analogous to something in our world. It starting out with such a mundane setting and power structures and then shifting was good, The Revolutionary being the first such This doesn't stop happening until you've finished the entire series btw.
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Jan 16, 2020 19:00
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The Half Has Never Been Told is a pretty good starting point for learning about the Civil War because you get a good sense of the socio-political situation in America in the decades before the war. Some of the narrative history is pretty clunky but that's a minor quibble. Slavery's Capitalism would also be a good place to start. Books like these help all the more if you decide to tackle stuff like Shelby Foote's Civil War history (still required reading imo). While I wouldn't consider Foote a Lost Causer he does kinda flirt with it in some respects. Generally he gives you enough raw material to make your own judgment of all the major players of the war, with the glaring exception of Nathan Bedford Forrest. By far the most irresponsible thing Foote does is in his coverage of the Fort Pillow Massacre, when Forrest ordered his men to mow down hundreds of black troops who had surrendered when the fort was taken. Foote selectively quotes from one of Forrest's own sergeants who took part in the massacre but omits the part where he says Forrest ordered the black troops "shot down like dogs." Foote tries to absolve Forrest of any responsibility and it's really transparent and gross.
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Dec 29, 2020 16:09
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Definitely pick up Eric Hobsbawm's Age of _______ books. I've only read the first two (Age of Revolution and Age of Capital) but they're excellent.
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Jan 20, 2021 15:03
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To do full justice to Marx, he believed the labor theory of value to be important insofar as it's how value is determined in a capitalist mode of production. There are some instances in Capital when he talks about labor or cooperation abstracted from the capitalist mode of production and he's almost romantic about it, but I don't think there's enough there to infer that he thinks the labor theory of value should still be operative in socialist or communist societies.
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May 3, 2021 01:26
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