PanThe NationWhat’s so telling about this narrative is not only the fact that the golden age of competition that Stoller wishes to restore is the very same period in which great, vertically integrated oligopolies ruled the economy in coordination with one another, labor unions, and the state; it is also that his expansive view of economic power still can’t find a place for class conflict—which, although invisible to Stoller, was often the engine of downward redistribution in the midcentury boom. Because he does not grasp how the fundamental antagonism between labor and capital underlies other forms of economic rivalry, Stoller misunderstands the nature of the New Deal and the legacy it leaves us. As a result, his book offers us a useful guide to some of the ills of concentrated market power today but does not ultimately come to terms with their real origin or present any viable political response ... If the problem lies with capitalism as a system and not specific malicious capitalists, then we’ve got to embark on an adventure of a different kind, one that leads us not back to the comforts of midcentury America but somewhere wild and new. Goliath will not help us find the way.
Emily Guendelsberger
PositiveThe New RepublicWe work and work and barely get by, while wealth pools up in obscene quantities out of view. Pile more pig iron, but don’t imagine you’re high-priced. What ... is this colossal insult doing to our heads? No wonder, Guendelsberger observes, the country is collectively \'freaking the fuck out\' ... Seen from Guendelsberger’s point of view, America’s working class is quivering in stress and fear, hurting from torn-up feet, and all covered in honey mustard. The economic miseries inflicted on working-class people are bad enough, but here Guendelsberger has identified something deeper and arguably worse: \'Chronic stress drains people’s empathy, patience, and tolerance for new things.\' We’ve been brutalized, bullied, and baited into being trained work-animals and not even afforded a corresponding pay bump. No wonder our society fell apart.
Richard Evans
MixedJewish CurrentsAn arrogant intellectual, a rootless cosmopolitan, and a Jewish Bolshevik, [Hobsbawn] appears as the target for whom the triple parentheses was created, the personality type whose perceived inadequacies inspired the invention of the tough Sabra. Evans seems to miss much of this. When Hobsbawm’s Jewishness announces itself explicitly, the biographer often seems off-balance, apparently seeing it as a quaint background for which the historian retained a nostalgic fondness, but not as a real structuring force in his life ... If Evans recognizes the deeper, subtler Jewish resonances in the narrative, he is generally too squeamish to say so. Where his delicacy on the Jewish question helps Evans assimilate Hobsbawm ethnically, his relationship to Hobsbawm’s ideology recuperates the generally unrepentant Marxist into something more politically palatable ... On the other hand, the biography is a delight. Evans is extremely thorough, and his main character is great company. Reading the book is like lingering at a party with someone who can’t stop talking, but knows everything.
Barbara Ehrenreich
PositiveThe New RepublicAt first glance, her new book, Natural Causes, is a polemic against wellness culture and the institutions that sustain it. What makes the argument unusual is its embrace of that great humbler, the end of life ... Barbara Ehrenreich doesn’t meditate. She doesn’t believe in the integral self, coherent consciousness, or the mastery of spirit over matter. She thinks everything is dissolving and reforming, all the time. But she’s not in flux—quite the opposite. She’s never changed her mind, lost her way, or, as far as I can tell, even gotten worn out. There’s the tacit lesson of Natural Causes, conveyed by the author’s biography as much as the book’s content: To sustain political commitment and to manifest social solidarity—fundamentally humble and collective ways of being in the world—is the best self-care.
Malcolm Harris
RaveN+1 MagazineThis is why Malcolm Harris’s new book, Kids These Days, is a landmark. Remarkably for an author of a trade book on such an on-trend topic, Harris makes a politically radical argument, undergirded by a coherent and powerful Marxist analysis ... In Harris’s view, we are, down to our innermost being, the children of neoliberalism ... Harris works through this argument by following the millennial through the stages of life — as far as we’ve yet gotten ...Harris is a peerless observer of the harrowing economic costs of 'meritocracy,' and his chapter on college abounds in withering apercus ...convincing that there’s more to this phenomenon than an artifact of measurement ... The summation Kids These Days gives us is harrowing: here is a generation hurrying to give in to the unremitting, unforgiving commodification of the self.
