bookshelf

THE MONSTER ENTERS

Name: THE MONSTER ENTERS
Author: Mike Davis
ISBN: 978-1-68219-303-7

COVID-19, THE AVIAN FLU, AND THE PLAGUES OF CAPITALISM

by Mike Davis ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2020

Provocative and controversial, as always, and a worthy addition to the literature of plague and pestilence.

bookshelf

Marxist historian and activist Davis mounts a timely critique of capitalism while recounting the paths of recent pandemics. In 2005, Davis published The Monster at Our Door, about the avian flu, an epidemic that could have been far worse than it was—but was plenty devastating. “Today,” he writes, having revised the book extensively to take into account COVID-19, “as was the case when I wrote Monster fifteen years ago, multinational capital has been the driver of disease evolution.” Globalism has destroyed ecosystems, displaced animals that spawn zoogenic diseases, and built a system of surplus labor marked by “the explosive growth of slums and concomitantly of ‘informal employment’ ”—to say nothing of a global pharmaceutical regime that develops only the most profitable drugs, not inexpensive antivirals and vaccines. We have yet to see the pharmaceutical response to COVID, and even if firms and research labs across the globe are rushing to develop a vaccine, that doesn’t blunt the force of the author’s fiery argument. What is certain is that the officials in the current government who took seriously the possibility of pandemic disease—including Rex Tillerson and John F. Kelly—have since departed, leading Davis to conclude, memorably, “the Trump administration is its own fifth column.” Readers versed in Marxist history will understand the reference. It takes no special background to appreciate Davis’ charge that the administration wasted time dithering, failing to develop test kits and preventive gear and choosing to “rely on the President’s rapport with corporate leaders rather than nationalize production as in wartime.” As always, then, follow the money. One need not subscribe to Davis’ politics to appreciate his title’s harkening to the science fiction movies of the 1950s, with an alien monster lurking outside to beg a pressing question: “will we wake up in time?” Provocative and controversial, as always, and a worthy addition to the literature of plague and pestilence.

Pub Date: May 5, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-68219-303-7

Page Count: 240

Publisher: OR Books

Review Posted Online: May 10, 2020

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HEALTH & FITNESS | PUBLIC POLICY | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | ECONOMICS

- BOOK REVIEW
DRUNK TALK
by Mike Davis T.L. Banks

- BOOK REVIEW
SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE
by Mike Davis & Jon Wiener

- BOOK REVIEW
DEAD CITIES
by Mike Davis

- IN THE NEWS
Author Mike Davis Dies at 76

bookshelf

ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

bookshelf

Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

bookshelf

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

bookshelf

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.