MixedBookforumThe most essential passage in Kids These Days, Malcolm Harris’s new book on the 'making of millennials,' does not appear until its 113th page and is not really about millennials at all ...a book about late capitalism, or at least capitalism, lately, about how the economic and political forces that have dominated the past thirty years of American life have conspired to produce a generation more managed, exploited, and uncertain than those that came before. It is a book about millennials, but for Harris millennials are only the symptom... In fewer than three hundred pages, he surveys the myriad hot takes on millennials...the story of this 'human capital,' and of millennials as the products of an economy designed to cultivate that capital at every stage of life ... All that feels left for us after Kids These Days is the dying world we kids are heir to, the empty struggle over the widening pit, each of us tending to our precious human capital until the end.
Yanis Varoufakis
MixedThe New RepublicThe problem, at bottom, is that having lost the material battle for the future of Greece, Varoufakis can only tell a story. For all his 'revelations' about the working of the IMF here, his book reveals very little that was not already known. Showing how a system fails people is not the same as acquiring the power to change that system and bring about a better world ... Adults in the Room is an essential book and it is vital that books like it be written about each one of the injustices inflicted on the vulnerable by the present masters of the world. But this effort, in particular, is clumsy and these efforts, in general, are a stopgap at best. In 500 pages, you don’t learn much from Varoufakis about what he might have done differently, or how the Greek people could have won. I suspect that’s because he doesn’t know. That’s why he’s left banging on the ramparts with an uneven book. But more than a better book, I’d like a better leader, one who wins.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
MixedPaste MagazineWhat Happened is a memoir by a now-retired politician named Hillary Clinton and it details, over the course of 500 pages, the most humiliating sequence of events I can imagine befalling a public figure ... This is a fundamentally tragic book, a memoir about defeat on a scale that I can scarcely comprehend ... Clinton writes persuasively and at length about the difficulty of being a woman in public life, mixing her own experience with new terms she tells us she’s been picking up, like 'mansplaining' and 'woke' ... There are moments in What Happened when you are made to question the reliability of its narrator. Beneath the account of a revolutionary campaign for the presidency, you catch glimpses of something else ... For all its artlessness, What Happened achieves a kind of art. Official history is a soft blanket and this one, for all its sorrow, is more comforting than most. But if we’re to avoid being transformed ourselves, we should be honest in our own history.
Joan Didion
PositiveThe New RepublicThis will disappoint those who anticipated a work on the level of The White Album or even Salvador, but if intended as a scholarly artifact, it is fair enough, as far as it goes. Didion is sufficiently remarkable that even her unpolished work makes for fascinating reading; even if it not always pleasurable, a half-finished draft and the insight it offers into a writer’s process can be immensely valuable to dedicated fans and imitators ... I do not raise all of this in order to call Didion’s fortune-telling project a failure. In order to fail at that, she would have shown an ambition to prophesy in the first place, and nothing in this book indicates that she actually did .. Knopf, evidently, does not really believe that South and West is valuable enough to move units solely as a literary curio. Yet that is precisely and exclusively where the value of this notebook lies. Didion’s greatest accomplishment, perhaps, is her capacity to appear entirely unvarnished in her published works, despite her obvious and often-celebrated stylistic mastery ... We’ve read nearly one hundred pages of interviews and observations and reporting tricks. We’ve seen, in short, Didion the actual writer.
