BOOK SUGGESTIONS

Hayes, C. (2025) The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.  Distraction, loss of focus, losing the boundary between public and private – sound familiar? Chris writes, “Sirens are designed to compel us and now they are going off in our bedrooms, kitchens at all hours . . .” We need to wrest back control of our lives, politics and our future.

Richardson, H. C. (2023) Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Heather Cox Richardson relates contemporary events to historical developments to examine the roots of racism in American history leading up to the backslide that many worry will bring an end to American democracy. 

Eugene M. Fishel (2022). The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies). Paperback. Eugene M. Fishel is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Security Policy Studies of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is a 30-year veteran of the Department of State, where he has focused on the post-Soviet region. He has also served as Director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council, as Special Advisor to the Vice President (National Security Affairs), and Assistant National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council.

Johnston, D. C. (2016). The Making of Donald Trump. Melville House. The investigative journalist who saw Trump as a fraud in the 1980s and spent 30 years chronicling Donald J. Trump for the New York Times.  From the Trump family fortune through gambling and real estate dealing to his election as President of the United States.  Deeply researched and shockingly full of details – reviewed as “a searing indictment” by Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times.

Mayer, J. (2016). Dark Money. The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right (First). Doubleday. https://go.exlibris.link/lsNn0lFD

Burgin, A. (2012). The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Great Depression Harvard University Press. The history of neoliberalism and how we got here. Tracing the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world.

Phillips-Fein, K. (2010). Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. W.W. Norton.  In the wake of the Great Depression high-powered individuals and titans, along with European thinkers joined together to fight the “nanny state”, encourage their peers to form a political force, and preserve their profit margins.  The “American Way” of doing business found a spokesman, Ronald Reagan.

Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. A detailed exploration of fascism after World War II that is chilling today. Beginning in the 1800’s with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe and continuing through the outbreak of World War I.  Hanna Arendt discusses the evolution of the classes, the role of propaganda and the use of terror as preconditions for total domination. She recognized Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia “two sides of the same coin.”