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<div class="goodreads-book" data-title="The American Spring" data-author="Amelia Stein">
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<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1677808452l/19955318._SY500_.jpg" alt="The American Spring" class="goodreads-cover-img">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19955318" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The American Spring</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Amelia Stein</p>
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<span class="goodreads-year">Published: 2012</span>
<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: </span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">There were 236,883 American households in 2009 making over $1 million a year. But they paid less tax than the rest of us. While the middle class faces tax rates of up to 36 percent, the billionaires and millionaires of America pay around 15 percent and sometimes less. Sometimes they pay no taxes at all. Fair? Nobody ever said the American Dream was fair. Our public infrastructure is decaying. The middle class is sliding towards poverty. Unemployment is rampant. America needs help—not new wars, bank bailouts, and foreclosures. Where will the money to fix our country come from? The federal government gets 80 percent of its revenue from private income tax and payroll taxes. We need to hit Americans where it won’t hurt—we need to tax the rich.be loaded.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-book" data-title="Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens" data-author="David Mitchell">
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<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1683348009l/150038752._SY500_.jpg" alt="Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens" class="goodreads-cover-img">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/150038752" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">David Mitchell</p>
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<span class="goodreads-year">Published: 2023</span>
<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: Sat, 28 Fe</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">Think you know your kings and queens? Think again.
In Unruly, David Mitchell explores how England's monarchs, while acting as feared rulers firmly guiding their subjects' destinies, were in reality a bunch of lucky sods who were mostly as silly and weird in real life as they appear today in their portraits.
Taking us right back to King Arthur (he didn't exist), David tells the founding story of post-Roman England right up to the reign of Elizabeth I (she dies). It's a tale of narcissists, inadequate self-control, excessive beheadings, middle-management insurrection, uncivil wars, and at least one total Cnut, as the population evolved from having their crops nicked by the thug with the largest armed gang to bowing and paying taxes to a divinely anointed king.
How this happened, who it happened to and why it matters in modern Britain are all questions David answers with brilliance, wit and the full erudition of a man who once studied history - and won't let it off the hook for the mess it's made.
A funny book about a serious subject, Unruly is for anyone who has ever wondered how we got here - and who is to blame.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-book" data-title="The Story of Antigone" data-author="Ali Smith">
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<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1377803591l/18397226.jpg" alt="The Story of Antigone" class="goodreads-cover-img">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18397226" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Story of Antigone</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Ali Smith</p>
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<span class="goodreads-year">Published: 2011</span>
<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: Sun, 22 Fe</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">Ali Smith’s retelling of Sophocles’ tragedy, about a young Theban princess, who decides to bury her dishonoured brother Polynices, against King Creon’s express orders — with heart-breaking consequences.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-book" data-title="Against Progress (Žižek's Essays)" data-author="Slavoj Žižek">
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<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1722188919l/216933725._SY500_.jpg" alt="Against Progress (Žižek's Essays)" class="goodreads-cover-img">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216933725" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Against Progress (Žižek's Essays)</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Slavoj Žižek</p>
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<span class="goodreads-year">Published: 2025</span>
<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: Fri, 20 Fe</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">To define 'progress' is to lay claim to the future. Seminal thinker Slavoj Žižek turns essayist to interrogate the competing visions which form the horizons of human possibility and Can things, which have never seemed worse, get better? What would a better world be? And how, when we are constantly besieged by doomers, degrowthers and disorienting relativisms can we make any headway at all in the face of unprecedented ecological, social and political crises?
In thirteen iconoclastic essays, Slavoj Žižek disrupts the death-grip that neoliberalists, Trumpian populists, toxic self-improvement industries and accelerationists alike have established on the idea of progress. Anatomising what is lost when opponents of the future are allowed to define it, Žižek ruthlessly exposes what different visions of progress exclude or sacrifice and the dynamics of desire, denial and disavowal at work in Hollywood blockbusters, Buddhist economics, decolonization movements and other engines of vision. In a whirlwind tour that takes in everything from gentrification to the theory of relativity, Lacan to Lenin, Putin to Mary Poppins and Marine Le Pen to the end of the world, these essays never stop asking hard questions of imagined futures.
Nor does Žižek shrink from the hardest question of How do we free ourselves from the hypocritical, guilt-ridden dreaming in which we're enmeshed, and begin to build a better world?</div>
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<div class="goodreads-book" data-title="Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books" data-author="Christine Woodside">
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<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1516352667l/34145299.jpg" alt="Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books" class="goodreads-cover-img">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34145299" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Christine Woodside</p>
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<span class="goodreads-year">Published: 2016</span>
<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: Wed, 18 Fe</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">.Generations of children have fallen in love with the pioneer saga of the Ingalls family, of Pa and Ma, Laura and her sisters, and their loyal dog, Jack. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books have taught millions of Americans about frontier life, giving inspiration to many and in the process becoming icons of our national identity. Yet few realize that this cherished bestselling series wandered far from the actual history of the Ingalls family and from what Laura herself understood to be central truths about pioneer life.
In this groundbreaking narrative of literary detection, Christine Woodside reveals for the first time the full extent of the collaboration between Laura and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Rose hated farming and fled the family homestead as an adolescent, eventually becoming a nationally prominent magazine writer, biographer of Herbert Hoover, and successful novelist, who shared the political values of Ayn Rand and became a mentor to Roger Lea MacBride, the second Libertarian presidential candidate. Drawing on original manuscripts and letters, Woodside shows how Rose reshaped her mother's story into a series of heroic tales that rebutted the policies of the New Deal. Their secret collaboration would lead in time to their estrangement. A fascinating look at the relationship between two strong-willed women, Libertarians on the Prairie is also the deconstruction of an American myth.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-book" data-title="Tell Me Again" data-author="Amy Thunig">
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<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1667280742l/63184375._SY500_.jpg" alt="Tell Me Again" class="goodreads-cover-img">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63184375" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Tell Me Again</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Amy Thunig</p>
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<span class="goodreads-year">Published: 2022</span>
<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: Sun, 15 Fe</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">For years, Amy Thunig thought she knew all the details about the day she was born, often demanding that the story of her birth be retold. Years later, heavily pregnant with her own first child, she learns what really happened that day.
It' s a tale that exemplifies many of the events of her early life, where circumstances sometimes dictated that things be slightly different from how they might seem – including what is meant by her dad being away for ‘ work' and why her legal last name differs from her family' s. In this remarkable memoir, Amy narrates her journey through childhood and adolescence, growing up with parents who struggled with addiction and incarceration. She reveals the importance of extended family and community networks when your immediate loved ones are dealing with endemic poverty and intergenerational trauma.
In recounting her experiences, she shows how the stories we tell about ourselves can help to shape and sustain us. Tell Me Again will captivate, move and inspire readers with its candour and insight.
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<div class="goodreads-book" data-title="Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants" data-author="Robin Wall Kimmerer">
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<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1366775928l/17465709.jpg" alt="Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants" class="goodreads-cover-img">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17465709" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Robin Wall Kimmerer</p>
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<span class="goodreads-year">Published: 2013</span>
<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: Fri, 13 Fe</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-book" data-title="Ecologica (The French List)" data-author="André Gorz">
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<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1521338541l/39105823.jpg" alt="Ecologica (The French List)" class="goodreads-cover-img">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39105823" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ecologica (The French List)</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">André Gorz</p>
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<span class="goodreads-year">Published: 2009</span>
<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: Mon, 9 Feb</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">Writing in 2007, French social philosopher André Gorz was remarkably prophetic, foretelling the international economic meltdown of 2008: “The real economy is becoming an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance industry—until that inevitable point when the bubbles burst, leading to serial bank crashes and threatening the global system of credit with collapse and the real economy with a severe, prolonged depression.” This prescient article is collected in Ecologica alongside many of Gorz’s final writings and interviews, which together offer practical and often path-breaking set of solutions to our current economic and political problems.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-book" data-title="Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)" data-author="Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò">
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<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1673718090l/71494026.jpg" alt="Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)" class="goodreads-cover-img">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71494026" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò</p>
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<span class="goodreads-year">Published: 2022</span>
<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: Sat, 7 Feb</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">A powerful indictment of the ways elites have co-opted radical critiques of racial capitalism to serve their own ends.“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective.
While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself.
Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.
Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.</div>
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<div class="goodreads-book" data-title="Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future" data-author="Dan Wang">
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<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1765233885l/223736214._SY500_.jpg" alt="Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future" class="goodreads-cover-img">
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<h3 class="goodreads-title">
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223736214" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future</a>
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<p class="goodreads-author">Dan Wang</p>
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<span class="goodreads-year">Published: 2025</span>
<span class="goodreads-date">Finished: Fri, 30 Ja</span>
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<div class="goodreads-description-text">Technology analyst Dan Wang—“an indispensable voice on China” (Evan Osnos) for close to a decade—has been living through the country’s astonishing, messy progress. In this time, building big has fueled China’s economic ascent. But social engineering has led to unbearable costs, including the traumas of zero-COVID and the cruel legacies of the one-child policy. In Breakneck, Wang traverses dazzling metropolises and factory complexes, blending political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal how the Communist Party’s darkening ambitions have shaken its people.
Wang unveils a new framework for understanding China, one that sheds new light on its competition with America. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the US has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad. As Breakneck reveals, only by understanding the remarkable strengths and the appalling weaknesses of the engineering state can America reignite its sense of restless ambition.</div>
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