Justin A. Frank MD: Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President

Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President – Justin A. Frank, MD – Avery – 304 pages – Hardcover – 9780735220324 – $26.00 – September 25, 2018 – ebook editions available at lower cost.

Inside the mind of this president is a scary place to be, as Dr. Justin Frank aptly tells us in this frightening and compelling book. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Dr. Frank said: “Yes, we should be scared,” Frank, a clinical professor of psychiatry at George Washington University, told the Guardian. “We have to accept that he is the president and we also have to accept that he’s never going to change because he can’t. Once we accept those things, we can then figure out what to do with our fears.”

Almost everyone I know has thought about the psychology of Donald Trump. So in some ways he might be the most analyzed person in the history of the world. Ironically, that appears to be exactly what he wants. Funny how whether one loves or despises Donald Trump, he wins, because his narcissistic, empty soul requires the full attention of the entire world and still cannot be satisfied.

In this book, like his two previous books on Obama and Bush, Dr. Frank has applied the principles of applied psychoanalysis, which allows him to at least somewhat clearly understand the mind of Donald Trump. While it is true that the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule prevents psychiatrists from offering diagnoses on public figures who are not their own patients, Frank has invoked the moral responsibility that compels him to speak out, something which all of us can understand and appreciate. So much is at stake and so much is in the hands of someone who is demonstrably unstable, and as Dr Frank shows in this book, someone who is riddled with pathologies, and quite evidently, deeply disturbed.

From his close study of Trump’s patterns of thought, action, and communication, and an analysis of his personal life story, Dr. Frank uncovers a personality deeply distorted by mental health problems. His work reveals many insights about Trump and his behavior, including some highly disturbing glimpses into his childhood, his family, his business dealings, and Trump’s unique way of literally inventing his own reality.

While most of us can see for ourselves that our president is wildly unhinged, Dr. Frank’s more clinical description and analysis of Trump’s narcissism, misogyny, racism, and untruthfulness are highly useful in helping us to understand more fully the reasons and causes behind Trump’s pathologically disturbed behavior. Whether it can help us prevent him from leading us into disaster is unclear. But this book should be required reading for anyone, supporters and opponents alike. It might also help us to better understand his appeal to those who do find him compelling. At least for me, it made me want to turn off the television and stop giving him the attention he craves. I wish the news media would do the same.

I very much enjoyed the opportunity to talk about this book with Dr. Frank, and to learn so much from a professional analyst.

Read more about the book at the author’s website.

“I’ve known Trump a long time and I have even tried my own hand at psychoanalyzing him on television. But, Dr. Frank has shown a more complete picture inside our 45th President’s mind than I ever dared to consider. Behind all Trump’s tough guy theatrics, his petty cruelties and bloated ego is a tangled knot of pathologies that should terrify us all. Trump on the Couch is a great first step to sizing up the President’s inner demons.”
—Donny Deutsch, Co-Host on MSNBC’s Morning Joe

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Gregory McNamee: Tortillas, Tiswin & T-Bones: A Food History of the Southwest

Tortillas, Tiswin & T-Bones: A Food History of the Southwest – Gregory McNamee – University of New Mexico Press – 256 pages – paperback – 9780826359049 – $24.95 – October 30, 2017 – ebook versions available.

According to the publisher, this book is an “entertaining history [of] the many ethnic and cultural traditions that have contributed to the food of the Southwest.” And while I do agree that the book’s style makes it a relatively compelling and easy book to read, I think its author, Greg McNamee, is trying to do much more than entertain. McNamee uses food and cooking as a lens to understanding culture, yes, but also to pinpointing the issues that face us in America as we try to grapple with climate change, to live reasonably and sustainably on the earth, and to work together with our fellow humans. There is no heavy handedness to his approach, but he never lets us forget the driving themes of his work, and his perspective.

McNamee starts off by going back to the earliest periods when humans arrived in the Americas, and takes us through the beginning of agriculture in Mesoamerica, and the ancient trade networks that evolved to connect peoples of the coasts, plains, and mountains. From there, he takes us through the various areas that comprise the loosely labelled southwestern region of America, up through the present day’s fusion of cultures and foodways from so many different areas that defines this cuisine now.

Covering just about everything edible in human cultures in what we consider to be the southwest region (which he defines a bit more broadly than most), from chili pepper and agave, to modern day cuisines that include Frito pie and other cross cultural inventions, McNamee traces a culinary journey through varieties of space and time, to get us where we are today and significantly, what the southwest and its food and people might look like in our emerging future.

Tortillas, Tiswin & T-Bones is indeed, a masterful work of accessible anthropology that was recognized as one of the 2017 Southwest Books of the Year. Since I love the southwest and its food, reading this book was a great pleasure for me.

Greg McNamee is a writer, journalist, editor, photographer, and publisher. He is the author or editor of forty books and more than five thousand periodical contributions. He operates Sonora Wordworks, an editorial and publishing service, and is also the publisher of Polytropos Press.

McNamee is a research associate at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, and a lecturer in U of A’s Economics Department of the Eller College of Management. Additionally, he teaches courses and gives talks on writing, publishing, journalism, media and technology, as well as cultural and environmental issues. He lives in southern Arizona. Learn more about him and his work at his website.

It was a pleasure for me to get to speak with Greg, who is a great storyteller and conversationalist, and a I only wish we had been able to speak in person, and for a much longer period of time. And I was very pleased to learn how to pronounce “tiswin” too.

This book feels like sitting down to a dinner with Diana Kennedy and Jim Harrison, tequila in hand and great conversation going long into the night. It’s alive, a love story, a timeless journey. I absolutely loved reading it and will treasure Gregory McNamee’s words for a long time to come.

— Tracey Ryder, cofounder of Edible Communities and coauthor of Edible: A Celebration of Local Foods

Tortillas, Tiswin, and T-Bones sends the reader on a riveting adventure, tracking the origins of Southwestern ingredients and culture to reveal American history through food. McNamee’s prose is deft and authoritative, and this is a highly original, timely book.

—Kate Christensen, author of Blue Plate Special and How to Cook a Moose

 

 

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Gordon Ball: East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg

East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg – Gordon Ball – Counterpoint Press – 416 pages – paperback – 9781619020177 – $18.95 – December 11, 2012 – ebook edition available at lower prices

It’s been a great pleasure for me to be able to interview  writer friends and editors about their work for the Writerscast and Publishing Talks podcasts. I first met writer, film-maker and now professor Gordon Ball soon after moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina at the very end of 1973. I knew almost no one in North Carolina, but in those still counter-cultural days of boomer history, it was relatively easy to make friends, especially within the fairly small community of like-minded poets and writers that laid-back college town oasis attracted.

Gordon Ball was in Chapel Hill for graduate school, after spending several years as the amanuensis and farm manager for Allen Ginsberg at his funky farm refuge in Cherry Valley, New York. How Gordon got to be there, and what happened during his time among the heroes of the Beat Generation and the hippie revolutionists who followed them is the subject of his excellent and enjoyable memoir, East Hill Farm.

Allen Ginsberg was unique, as a poet who became a cultural icon, a political and spiritual leader whose writing has influenced millions of readers. East Hill Farm was his attempt to build a refuge from city life – “a haven for comrades in distress,” especially friends whose lives were being ruined by hard drugs like iconic beat poets Herbert Huncke and Ray Bremser, who both spent time at the farm in the late sixties. Gordon recounts his first hand stories of the refugees who arrived there as well as the many local upstate characters who helped make the dilapidated farm into a livable home and a functioning farm of sorts. This story is emblematic of so many “back to the land” excursions from the sixties, when hippies from the cities and suburbs arrived uninvited in small town farm communities in places like Vermont, Maine, northern California, Oregon and of course, upstate New York.

But he also tells us about his own journey, his family, the loves and losses that he experienced in this heady era when millions of young people all around the world revolted against the constraints of post-War modern capitalism, all trying to find a different way to live. His experiences and those of his compatriots help us understand how that special moment in our history was lived, and perhaps also, why it could not last or lead to the kind of social change its participants believed in and hoped for.

But what a great experience it was. And so much of what happened there will not be lost or forgotten because of this book.

“I couldn’t stop reading East Hill Farm and learning so much of what really went down on that farm in that so crucial period in the lives of the Beats. I visited the farm just twice but wish I had had Ball’s innocent yet so perceptive eye.” —Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author of A Coney Island of Mind.

“In the late 1960s, poet Allen Ginsberg bought an isolated, broken-down farm in upstate New York as a retreat for himself and his worn-out, burned-out friends. Ginsberg hoped to create an Elysium where they could escape from the urban pressures and drug addictions that had laid Kerouac, Corso, Orlovsky, and Huncke so low. Only a masterful story-teller like Gordon Ball could turn a depressing tale of poets at rock bottom into a triumph of the human spirit.”—Bill Morgan, author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg

Gordon Ball photographed Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation for many years. As well as being exhibited at five conferences on Ginsberg and the Beat Generation, at one-man shows at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and other venues, Ball’s photos have appeared in many publications. Gordon is the author of 66 Frames: A Memoir and a volume of prose poems, Dark Music. He lives in Lexington, Virginia, taught at VMI and now is teaching at Washington and Lee University. Author website here.

East Hill Farm is a charming, warm memoir that will be a compelling read for anyone who wants to know what it was like to live through the sixties with a cast of some amazing characters, many of whom helped create the culture we still experience today. It was great fun for me to reconnect with Gordon after so many years, and to share his experiences and memories through this wonderful book.

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Steve Steinberg: Urban Shocker: Silent Hero of Baseball’s Golden Age

Urban Shocker: Silent Hero of Baseball’s Golden Age – Steve Steinberg – University of Nebraska Press – Hardcover – 9780803295995 – 352 pages – $32.95 – ebook versions available at lower prices – April 1, 2017

Even avid baseball fans may be forgiven for not knowing much about Urban Shocker, one of the best pitchers of major league baseball’s early modern era. It is no surprise that Shocker is not as famous as he could and should be. Shocker’s best years were spent in St. Louis, playing for the perennially mediocre Browns. And his time as a Yankee teammate of Babe Ruth was tragically cut short by ill health. Furthermore, he was a star player at a time when baseball was much more of a local sport – no television to memorialize his achievements – his face and skill as a pitcher is virtually invisible to us, now almost 100 years since his glory years.

Steve Steinberg is a talented baseball historian and writer. His work in uncovering the story of this undeservedly ignored pitcher is admirable. Baseball history can be a rich vein to mine, but it requires talented and dedicated individuals to do the incredibly time consuming work of research, and then to transform those details into a compelling narrative arc. Steinberg succeeds in both respects, and with this fine book, he brings Urban Shocker to life for contemporary readers.

Even if you are not a diehard baseball fan, Shocker’s life reveals a great deal about baseball and its players as part of the culture and daily life of America in the immediate post World War I (Roaring Twenties) era. Baseball players lived much more difficult lives than their modern descendants, it seems. And of course, the business of baseball was very different then – players were tied to their teams for life, and had very little control over their own destinies. While they were paid well compared to the average worker of the day, in relative terms, their paychecks were not usually life changing and most players had to work other jobs during the off seasons.

Little is known of Shocker’s early life, and he did not make it to the big leagues until he was in his early twenties. Like many players of the day, his path to success was not an easy one. And once he reached the majors, playing for the Yankees before their great success years, he was quickly traded away to the St. Louis Browns in 1918. It was not until 1925, after four straight seasons with at least twenty wins for the lowly Browns that Urban was finally traded back to the Yankees. He finally had the opportunity to play in  the World Series with the 1926 Yankees.

In the almost mythological 1927 season, often considered to be among best in baseball history, Shocker pitched brilliantly to compile 18 wins against only 6 losses, this at a time when his skills were clearly in decline. Shocker was suffering from a then incurable heart disease that would kill him less than a year later. He kept his illness to himself, and managed to excel as a pitcher using his years of experience to substitute for physical dominance before he finally had to quit the game altogether, surprising the baseball world at the time.

Steinberg has given us a deftly written, detailed and sensitive portrait of a complicated man, whose brilliant baseball career was cut all too short. I enjoyed reading this compelling biography immensely – it brought me back to a period of baseball history I have long been interested in – and I had a great time speaking with author Steinberg about this book and his work in baseball history.

Steve Steinberg is known as a baseball historian of the early 20th century. He was fortunate to have sold a family business, allowing him to explore a new career as a baseball writer. He focuses his work on portraying long-forgotten players, bringing them to the attention of contemporary baseball fans and readers. He is the author or co-author of several books and many articles, including with Lyle Spatz, 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York. Steve’s web site is a wealth of baseball history. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Colleen.

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Phillip Lopate: A Mother’s Tale

A Mother’s Tale – Phillip Lopate – Mad River Books (Ohio State University Press) – Hardcover – 9780814213315 – 196 pages – $24.95 – ebook versions available at slightly lower prices – January 12, 2017

It might be said that a good memoir is a hard thing to find. It takes a special touch from a writer. The best memoirs have humor and self awareness – one must be selective in choosing what is important to share and what must be omitted, valuable to one’s self but not so much for the reader.

Philip Lopate is a skilled and experienced writer who inherently understands the necessities of writing about self and family. His mother was a complicated person, his family life unusual and full of strange twists and turns that made him and his brother who they are as adults.

In 1984, Lopate convinced his mother, Frances, to allow him to interview her and record the story of her life. Frances was a powerful and strong willed figure. She was orphaned in childhood, married young, and had to make a life for herself without a support system, as a mother. She worked in a number of fields and late in life became an actress and singer. She appeared in television commercials and performed in plays in New York.

She told Philip all her many criticisms of her husband (his father), recounted the details of her affairs and sexual encounters, told him about her experiences with therapy and continuously complained about how the world had mistreated and misunderstood her. Locate set the tapes aside and never listened to them until thirty years later, when his mother had passed away. At that point Lopate was drawn back to the recordings, perhaps wanting to better understand his mother and himself through her confessions.

A Mother’s Tale is essentially then a three-way conversation between Lopate today, his mother, and the younger self he hears talking to her on the tapes.

Lopate seeks to better understand and appreciate his mother and the husband she ostensibly despised, but could never leave. He cannot share her self-pity or the harping on blame assessed to everyone but herself. But through it all, he comes to see her anew, now as a grown man, recognizing more clearly the survivor, her powerful appetite for love and for life, and the ways he finally found to express his love for her.

It’s a brave thing to expose oneself and one’s family in such a personal piece of writing. Lopate has succeeded with this short memoir, giving us much to savor, appreciate, and ponder about ourselves and our own family histories. This is a terrific book.

“With his signature insight an candor, Lopate reveals his mother for the complicated and troubled character she was, and himself–her darling, her confessor, her victim, her judge–as the child behind the writer he was to become. I could not put it down.” — Lynn Freed

Philip Lopate is the author of a number of well respected memoirs and personal essays, as well as two novellas, and is also the editor of several important anthologies. He has won a variety of awards for his writing, as well as for his work as a teacher. He is currently a professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he teaches nonfiction writing.

Philip Lopate is a wonderful conversationalist and an easy person to interview. It was a tremendous pleasure for me to speak with him about this book and his intriguing mother.

Author website here. Author photo by Sally Gall.

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Christopher Benfey: Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay

Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival – Christopher Benfey – Penguin – paperback – 9780143122852 – 304 pages – $16.00 – ebook versions available at lower prices – February 26, 2013

I found this lovely and compelling book by complete happenstance while visiting North Carolina earlier this year. The redoubtable Regulator Bookshop in Durham had a copy out on its “local interest” shelf, and the cover grabbed my attention immediately.

Not knowing anything about author Benfey, I was surprised and pleased to learn about his background through this complex and rewarding memoir. It’s a book that combines so many different areas of his interest – and mine – built around a complex interweaving of his family’s story and his desire to learn about and understand the people in his life story.

Benfey was raised in Richmond, Indiana, where his father was a chemistry professor at Earlham College. His father’s side of the family were German Jews who escaped Hitler, including aunt and uncle Josef and Anni Albers, who were both central figures at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina (and central also to modern arts and crafts in 20th century America). North Carolina is a nexus, as Benfey’s mother grew up in the longstanding folk pottery region of the state as well.

So Benfey’s story starts as a family history, but moves assuredly through art, geography, cultural history and his own personal journey of discovery as a writer and thinker; as the title itself suggests, “names the three paths, each mapping the experience of relatives or ancestors of mine trying — by art, by travel, or by sheer survival — to find a foothold in the American South.”

There are many well-told stories here, and North Carolina is at the core of it all. Even if you have never explored the cultural and geographical riches of that state, this book will capture your imagination and bring you there. Benfey builds his story much as a brick layer does, carefully assembling the pattern from materials at hand to create a fully formed story all the while.

This is a book I am happy to recommend to almost any reader.

Chris Benfey is a professor at My. Holyoke College, where he is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English. He was educated at the Putney School, Earlham College, Guilford College, and Harvard (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature). Benfey is also a journalist, having served as the art critic for Slate, and also is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic, among many others. Chris is a renowned Emily Dickinson scholar, and author of four highly regarded books about the American Gilded Age. His edition of essays on the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff appeared as War and the Iliad in 2005.

Benfey’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and Ploughshares.

This book is among my favorites and I hope you enjoy the conversation I had with the interesting and well-spoken Christopher Benfey as much as I did.

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Thomas McNamee: The Inner Life of Cats

The Inner Life of Cats: The Science and Secrets of Our Mysterious Feline Companions – Thomas McNamee – Hachette Books – Hardcover – 9780316262873 – 288 pages – $27.00 – ebook versions available at lower prices – March 28, 2017

What a fun read! Thomas McNamee’s story begins with the story of finding his own cat, Augusta, and that story becomes the framework for a comprehensive understanding of how cats develop both physiologically and psychologically, and of course how their owners do as well.

McNamee recounts the evolution of cats and much more as he tells the story of his own cat’s adventures. He talks to all kinds of experts, animals behaviorists, activists and researchers to help his readers understand these strange and different animals who have lived with and among humans for so long. His book is well grounded in every way.

The author has strong opinions about these animals. He is clearly someone who loves cats and wants to improve the way other cat lovers live with and treat their pets. He aims for them to have happier and better relationships with them, and I suspect that reading this book will in fact help make that happen for them.

While I am decidedly not a cat person, Tom McNamee is such a fine writer and storyteller, I found this book impossible to put down. I am guessing true cat loving humans will as well.

McNamee is the author of several successful books, including The Grizzly Bear; Nature First: Keeping Our Wild Places and Wild Creatures Wild; a novel, A Story of Deep Delight; The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone; Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution; The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance; and most recently, The Killing of the Wolf Number Ten.

McNamee also  wrote the PBS documentary Alexander Calder, which won a Peabody Award and an Emmy. In 2016, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on The Inner Life of Cats.

​He was a board member and chairman of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He has also served as a board member of Rare Conservation and the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture. After two decades in New York City, he then lived on a cattle ranch in Montana for eight years. He now lives and writes in San Francisco.

Thomas McNamee’s website is here.

“The Inner Life of Cats is filled with shining prose, moments of sheer cat joy–and intimate, careful scientific observation. Thomas McNamee’s naturalist’s eye, combined with his humor and heart, bring the always wild, yet domesticated cat into delightful, insightful focus.”
―Cat Warren, New York Times bestselling author of What the Dog Knows

Talking with Tom about this book was a true pleasure. Full disclosure: I published his excellent book, The Killing of Wolf Number Ten (a great book – it is the story of the return of wolves to Yellowstone National Park).

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Jonathan Lerner: Swords in the Hands of Children

Swords in the Hands of Children: Reflections of an American Revolutionary – Jonathan Lerner – OR Books – Hardcover – 9781944869472 – $22 – 224 pages – December 5, 2017. Ebook versions available at a lower price. Order direct from the publisher, OR Books.

As Writerscast listeners doubtless know, I am interested in books about the sixties, a period in our history that shaped so much of what is now our current worldview and world situation, for better and for worse. This was a period in American history marked by social and political conflict, sparked principally by the Vietnam War. For many young people, it was the time in their lives when political and social idealism flourished, yet for some, directions taken and decisions made, acts committed, that would later appear misguided and wrong.

In the early sixties, Jonathan Lerner was a student at Antioch College, who almost accidentally became a full-time staff member of Students for a Democratic Society, the most powerful organization of the New Left (among its founders, the recently deceased Tom Hayden). In this book, Jonathan recounts the story of his life during the most fraught years of the political upheavals of this era.

Jonathan Lerner was at the center of many of the most important political events of that time. He became a founding member of the Weatherman faction of SDS, which ended up taking over the organization in 1969, and was the editor of its newspaper Fire! and an “above ground” representative of the Weather Underground organization, that was responsible for much of the far left spawned violence of the era.

The Weather Underground ultimately carried out a campaign of bombings across America. Some of its members died, many stayed underground for years, and some went to jail. Lerner tells some compelling stories about this time in particular and the people he worked and lived with. Overall, he seems to have been almost an accidental radical, who like many in the sixties, “went with the flow” of events and people around him, trying to find his place in a complicated environment.

Jonathan tells his story with brutal honesty, questioning much of what he once took for granted, as an insecure gay man existing in an environment that was not supportive in any way. This memoir has much to offer to those of us still seeking to understand the politics and culture of our youth, as well as for those too young to have experienced the sixties directly.

Lerner is the author of the novels Caught in a Still Place and Alex Underground, and is today a journalist focusing on architectural, urbanist and environmental issues. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York state with his husband.

We had a great conversation in our wide ranging conversation. Visit Jonathan’s website here.

“Imagine if your favorite uncle, a brutally honest, worldly, self-reflective gay raconteur, had been, as a twenty year-old, a lieutenant in an underground guerrilla army dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government of the United States. Jonathan Lerner is that favorite uncle you never had, telling unbelievable true stories―no bullshit―from the ‘revolution’ fifty years ago. This is the closest you’ll ever get to being there.” ―Mark Rudd, national secretary of SDS, founding member of the Weather Underground and author of Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen

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Nancy MacLean: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America – Nancy MacLean – Viking – Hardcover – 9781101980965 – $28.00 – 368 pages – June 13, 2017

I will say this clearly and forthrightly: whatever your political opinions or positions, you must read this book. It shines an important light on the history of what has now become the most potent force in modern American politics. This book reveals in detail how the Koch brothers and other shadowy billionaires’ political philosophy has been weaponized in an ongoing war against democratic beliefs and institutions.

Professor MacLean came across this historical record more or less by accident, while she was researching the Nobel Prize-winning political economist, James McGill Buchanan, the principal architect of the ideas and institutions  the Koch brothers and their allies have harnessed to radically alter the American political landscape in their distorted image of “economic libertarianism.” This philosophy fully recognizes that anti-democratic efforts are necessary to secure the wealth of the few against the “predations” of the democratic majority, and all their work for the last forty years or more has been aimed toward controlling and weakening democratic institutions. They have been remarkably successful in their efforts.

There is so much to learn in this book, yet still so much more for us to uncover, and ultimately then, so much that needs to be done by those who feel the need to defend democratic liberalism and American institutions. It is remarkable to learn that this effort is essentially part of a longstanding effort to reach far back into our history to undo FDR’s democratic reforms, as well as those of JFK, LBJ, and the civil rights movement. And that Charles Koch is so ironically a follower of the principles of that old Bolshevik, V.I. Lenin.

We learn here that Koch and his cronies have built a secret cadre of true believers who want to do what their hero Buchanan did in Pinochet’s Chile, which was to use the institutions of government to control and contain democracy. They have come a long way toward succeeding in our own country, as most citizens are completely unaware of what they are doing, especially with their takeover of the judiciary. And in Trump’s America, they are free to have their way with us.

One way you can tell Nancy MacLean has made an impact with her research is the level and sheer ferocity of mostly personal attacks from the right against her. Those who post in opposition seem to have neither read the book, nor care to think about the author’s actual work. One of the tools used by the Koch-financed opponents of democracy is the personal attack and what they call the “increased transaction cost” for anyone who opposes their views. Since they usually cannot win intellectual or even political arguments, they prefer to disparage and attack those who dare stand against them on other grounds than reason.

I urge listeners to read this book, think about what MacLean has uncovered, and then, if you agree with what she says, use what you learn from this book to stand up for freedom and democracy against oligarchy.

“This sixty-year campaign to make libertarianism mainstream and eventually take the government itself is at the heart of Democracy in Chains. . . . [MacLean] takes the time to meticulously trace how we got here. . . . If you’re worried about what all this means for America’s future, you should be. . . . And if someone you know isn’t convinced, you have just the book to hand them.”
—NPR

“It’s the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century. To read Nancy MacLean’s new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, is to see what was previously invisible.”
—George Monbiot, The Guardian

“[A] riveting, unsettling account of ‘Tennessee country boy’ James McGill Buchanan, key architect of today’s radical right.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

Nancy MacLean is also the author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry (a New York Times “noteworthy” book of the year) and Freedom is Not Enough. She is currently the William Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and lives in Durham, North Carolina.

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Jeremy Brecher: Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual

Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual – Jeremy Brecher – PM Press – Paperback – 978-1-62963-385-5 – $12.95 – 128 pages – April 2017 – ebook versions available at lower prices.

For years leading up to the 2016 election, when Americans alarmingly voted (somehow) for a president who maintains the bizarre fiction that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese, we have been heavily propagandized and brainwashed by inaccurate and misleading information about climate science supplied by corporate financed sources. Only half of us believe that climate change is caused by human activities, something that scientists overwhelmingly recognize is true, based on actual data.

Still, millions of our fellow citizens do understand the danger to human life and our natural environment by human caused climate change. So many of us are searching for ways to make a real impact on the future through concrete actions. The scale and scope of what we face, and the impediments we face daily to rational thought and action are daunting and sometimes overwhelming.

We need tools – both to understand what is happening in our world, and to help us act positively to make change and to oppose those who seek to diminish and undermine our efforts.

Jeremy Brecher is a long time organizer and thinker about social change. He has been involved in environmental issues for almost thirty years. He puts much of what he has learned into Against Doom, this short but powerful book that I can recommend to any and all of us who want to join the global movement for change. What he calls “climate insurgency” is a strategy for using people power to realize our common interest in protecting the climate. It uses mass, global, nonviolent action to challenge the legitimacy of public and corporate officials who are perpetrating climate destruction. This may be our best hope for saving the planet and human civilization, while at the same time helping change that civilization for the better.

Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual provides guidance in how we can put this strategy into action and succeed. It’s an essential read now. Listen to my optimistic conversation with Jeremy and go buy this book!

Jeremy Brecher is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Save the Humans? Common Preservation in Action and the now-classic labor history Strike!, recently published in a revised fortieth anniversary edition by PM Press. He has been writing about climate protection since 1988, most recently in his book Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival (2015). Jeremy is a cofounder of the Labor Network for Sustainability and lives in rural northwest Connecticut. Jeremy was arrested in the early White House sit-ins against the Keystone XL pipeline.

There are many organizations and websites working on climate change insurgency efforts. Visit Jeremy’s own site for a good introduction or go here for a list of reputable climate change nonprofit organizations you can work with.

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