Summer Reading List Lyon Chapter

July, 2017

Below is a list of 40+ books from all across the political spectrum organized in groups: Left,
Right and Center. The majority of these books promote the Democratic and Progressive
agendas. Some however, are written by well-known figures on the right and targeted to the
conservative base. They are included in this list for those brave souls who would like to escape
the liberal echo chamber and know how the other side thinks. The books in the centrist list
cover American topics of general political and social interest. Have a good Resistance
Summer!!

Left
Al Franken: Giant of the Senate by Al Franken - story of an award-winning comedian who
decided to run for office and then discovered why award-winning comedians tend not to do
that.

Don't Think of An Elephant by George Lakoff - explains how conservatives think, and how to
counter their arguments. He outlines in detail the traditional American values that progressives
hold, but are often unable to articulate.

Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics by Jerome
Armstrong, Markos Moulitsas Ziga, Simon Rosenberg - political bloggers offer their views on
the current political landscape in America and provide an insightful look into the new
progressive movement, aided by advances in technology, that is changing the face of politics.

The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation by Drew Westen
- groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the
nation....The idea of the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the
evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume
voters dispassionately make decisions based on "the issues," they lose. That's why only one
Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Rooseveltand only one
Republican has failed in that quest.

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky

Hegemony or Survival: is a study of the "American Empire" written by the American linguist and
political activist Noam Chomsky, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The New Deal by Paul K. Conkin

The New Deal is still the best succinct and coherent description of a chaotic period. It is an
account of the major domestic policies adopted during the Roosevelt administration. It is also a
rich portrait of Roosevelt the man and consummate politician, and the satellite figures around
him. This highly interpretive text, with its spirited and often subtle assessments of New Deal
personalities and programs, will continue to bring the period to life for new generations of
students. Includes extensive photo essay.
The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman studies the past eighty years of American history, from the reforms that tamed
the harsh inequality of the Gilded Age to the unraveling of that achievement and the
reemergence of immense economic and political inequality since the 1970s. Seeking to
understand both what happened to middle-class America and what it will take to achieve a
"new New Deal," Krugman has created his finest book to date, a work that weaves together a
nuanced account of three generations of history with sharp political, social, and economic
analysis.
Witches Midwives & Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich & Deirdre English
Women have always been healers, and medicine has always been an arena of struggle between
female practitioners and male professionals. This pamphlet explores two important phases in
the male takeover of health care: the suppression of witches in medieval Europe and the rise of
the male medical profession in the United States. The authors conclude that despite efforts to
exclude them, the resurgence of women as healers should be a long-range goal of the womens
movement.
A Prayer for America by Dennis Kucinich
When Congressman Dennis Kucinich delivered his speech, A Prayer for America, to the
Southern California chapter of Americans for Democratic Action, it electrified the whole
country. In his speech, Kucinicha 2004 presidential candidatewarned against an America
that had discarded the constitutional liberties integral to its identity: Let us pray that our
nation will remember that the unfolding of the promise of democracy in our nation paralleled
the striving for civil rights. That is why we must challenge the rationale of the Patriot Act. We
must ask why should America put aside guarantees of constitutional justice? A Prayer for
America collects Kucinichs essays and speeches. It represents his holistic worldview and carries
with it a passionate commitment to public service, peace, human rights, workers rights, and
the environment. His advocacy of a Department of Peace seeks not only to make nonviolence
an organizing principle in our society, but to make war a thing of the past. A Prayer for America
includes an introductory essay from Kucinich that reflects on his political journey from his
election as the youngest mayor of a major American city to his role as a dynamic, visionary
leader of the Progressive Caucus of the Congressional Democrats.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
In a series of essays, written as a letter to his son, Coates confronts the notion of race in
America and how it has shaped American history, many times at the cost of black bodies and
lives.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
This is an 1845 memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and former slave
Frederick Douglass. It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written
by former slaves during the same period. In factual detail, the text describes the events of his
life and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the
abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States.
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
"My history... describes the inspiring struggle of those who have fought slavery and racism
(Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses), of the labor
organizers who have led strikes for the rights of working people (Big Bill Haywood, Mother
Jones, Csar Chvez), of the socialists and others who have protested war and militarism
(Eugene V. Debs, Helen Keller, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, Cindy Sheehan). I want young people to
understand that ours is a beautiful country, but it has been taken over by men who have no
respect for human rights or constitutional liberties. Our people are basically decent and caring,
and our highest ideals are expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which says that all of
us have an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The history of our country,
I point out in my book, is a striving, against corporate robber barons and war makers, to make
those ideals a reality and all of us, of whatever age, can find immense satisfaction in
becoming part of that." HZ
The Culture of Fear, Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things by Barry Glassner
In the age of 9/11, the Iraq War, financial collapse, and Amber Alerts, our society is defined by
fear. So it's not surprising that three out of four Americans say they feel more fearful today
then they did twenty years ago. But are we living in exceptionally dangerous times? Sociologist
Barry Glassner demonstrates that it is our perception of danger that has increased, not the
actual level of risk. Glassner exposes the people and organizations that manipulate our
perceptions and profit from our fears, including advocacy groups that raise money by
exaggerating the prevalence of particular diseases and politicians who win elections by
heightening concerns about crime, drug use, and terrorism.
Collected Essays by James Baldwin
James Baldwin was a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. His brilliant and provocative
essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with
powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter
movement or in the words of Raoul Peck's documentary "I Am Not Your Negro." Edited by
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of America's Collected Essays is the most
comprehensive gathering of Baldwin's nonfiction ever published.
Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara
Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare
reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does
anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took
the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving
from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman,
a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling
residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the
lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one
job is not enough; you need at least two if you want to live indoors.
The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi
In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life
where our two most troubling trendsgrowing wealth inequality and mass incarceration
come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now
determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by
the hyper-wealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crimebut its
impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side. In The Divide, Matt
Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice
the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. He
uncovers the startling looting that preceded the financial collapse; a wild conspiracy of
billionaire hedge fund managers to destroy a company through dirty tricks; and the story of a
whistleblower who gets in the way of the largest banks in America, only to find herself in the
crosshairs. On the other side of the Divide, Taibbi takes us to the front lines of the immigrant
dragnet; into the newly punitive welfare system which treats its beneficiaries as thieves; and
deep inside the stop-and-frisk world, where standing in front of your own home has become an
arrestable offense. As he narrates these incredible stories, he draws out and analyzes their
common source: a perverse new standard of justice, based on a radical, disturbing new vision
of civil rights.
The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy by Murray
Bookchin
From Athens to New York, recent mass movements around the world have challenged austerity
and authoritarianism with expressions of real democracy. For more than forty years, Murray
Bookchin developed these democratic aspirations into a new left politics based on popular
assemblies, influencing a wide range of political thinkers and social movements. With a
foreword by the best-selling author of The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin, The Next Revolution
brings together Bookchins essays on freedom and direct democracy for the first time, offering
a bold political vision that can move us from protest to social transformation.
$2.00 a Day : Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Schaefer
After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something
she hadnt seen since the mid-1990s households surviving on virtually no income. Edin
teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on calculating incomes of the poor, to discover that the
number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million
American households, including about 3 million children. Where do these families live? How did
they get so desperately poor? Edin has turned sociology upside down (Mother Jones) with
her procurement of rich and truthful interviews. Through the books any compelling
profiles, moving and startling answers emerge. The authors illuminate a troubling trend: a low-
wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden
landscape of survival strategies among Americas extreme poor. More than a powerful expos,
$2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Though the conventional point of view holds that racial discrimination has mostly ended with
the civil rights movement reforms of the 1960s, Alexander posits that the U.S. criminal justice
system uses the War on Drugs as a primary tool for enforcing traditional, as well as new, modes
of discrimination and repression. These new modes of racism have led to not only the highest
rate of incarceration in the world, but also an even greater imprisonment of African American
men. Were present trends to continue, Alexander writes, the United States will imprison one-
third of its African American population. When combined with the fact that whites are more
likely to commit drug crimes than people of color, the issue becomes clear for Alexander: "The
primary targets of [the penal system's] control can be defined largely by race." This, ultimately,
leads Alexander to believe that mass incarceration is "a stunningly comprehensive and well-
disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim
Crow". The culmination of this social control is what Alexander calls a "racial caste system", a
type of stratification wherein people of color are kept in an inferior position. Its emergence, she
believes, is a direct response to the Civil Rights Movement.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our
broken system of justicefrom one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time
Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal
practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly
condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice
system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to
die for a notorious murder he insisted he didnt commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of
conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanshipand transformed his understanding
of mercy and justice forever. Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic,
gifted young lawyers coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended,
and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.
No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi
Klein
"Trump is extreme but he's not a Martian. He is the logical conclusion of many of the most
dangerous trends of the past half-century. He is the personification of the merger of humans
and corporations--a one-man megabrand, with wife and children as spin-off brands. This book
is to help understand how we arrived at this surreal political moment, how to keep it from
getting a lot worse, and how, if we keep our heads, we can flip the script and seize the
opportunity to make things a whole lot better in a time of urgent need. A tool-kit for shock-
resistance." -from the introduction.
Right

Recovering Americanism by Mark Levin - From New York Times best seller list. Author is radio
host. Plea for a return to Americas most sacred values.

Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos - The liberal media machine did everything they could to keep
this book out of your hands. Now, finally, DANGEROUS, the most controversial book of the
decade, is tearing down safe spaces everywhere.

UNDERSTANDING TRUMP by Newt Gingrich - The former House speaker explains the
presidents philosophy and political agenda.

THE SWAMP by Eric Bolling - The Fox News host suggests how Donald Trump can fight
corruption and cronyism in Washington.

Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey by David Horowitz - the story of his startling political
odyssey from Sixties radical to Nineties conservative.

The Reagan Revolution by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak

An Inside Look at the Transformation of the U. S. Government from a conservative perspective.
Center

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance - From a former Marine and Yale Law School Graduate, a poignant
account of growing up in a poor Appalachian town, that offers a broader, probing look at the
struggles of Americas white working class. Part memoir, part historical and social analysis, J. D.
Vances Hillbilly Elegy is a fascinating consideration of class, culture, and the American dream.

The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis - account of a childhood in rural French poverty which has
been compared to Hillbilly Elegy above (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/books/review-
end-of-eddy-edouard-louis.html?mcubz=2)

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty - Questions about the long-term
evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie
at the heart of political economy...the French author Piketty analyzes a unique collection of
data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key
economic and social patterns.

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

Published during the rise of fascism in Europe, the novel describes the rise of Berzelius "Buzz"
Windrip, a politician who defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and is elected President of
the United States, after fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms
while promoting a return to patriotism and "traditional" values.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Themes are breakage and separation, effects of white beauty standards, media and culture,
religion, shame.

US(a.) by Saul Williams

After four years abroad (France), Williams returned to the United States and found his head
twirling with thoughts on race, class, gender, finance, freedom, guns, cooking shows, dog
shows, superheroes, not-so-super politicianseverything that makes up our country. US(a.) is a
collection of poems that embodies the spirit of a culture that questions sentiments and
realities, embracing a cross-section of pop culture, hip-hop, and the greater world politic of the
moment.

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

The essays in Bad Feminist address a wide variety of topics, both cultural and personal. The
collection of essays is broken into five sections: Me; Gender & Sexuality; Race & Entertainment;
Politics, Gender & Race; and Back to Me. In a 2014 interview with Time, Gay explained her role
as a feminist and how it has influenced her writing: "In each of these essays, Im very much
trying to show how feminism influences my life for better or worse. It just shows what its like
to move through the world as a woman. Its not even about feminism per se, its about
humanity and empathy."
Malcom X: The Autobiography as told to Alex Haley
The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published in 1965, the result of a collaboration between
human rights activist Malcolm X and journalist Alex Haley. Haley co-authored the
autobiography based on a series of in-depth interviews he conducted between 1963 and
Malcolm X's 1965 assassination. The Autobiography is a spiritual conversion narrative that
outlines Malcolm X's philosophies. After the leader was killed, Haley wrote the book's epilogue.
He described their collaborative process and the events at the end of Malcolm X's life.

Two or Three Things I Know For Sure by Dorothy Allison

Dorothy Allison takes a probing look at her family's history to give us a lyrical, complex memoir
that explores how the gossip of one generation can become legends for the next. Illustrated
with photographs from the author's personal collection, she tells the story of the Gibson
women -- sisters, cousins, daughters, and aunts -- and the men who loved them, often abused
them, and, nonetheless, shared their destinies. With luminous clarity, Allison explores how
desire surprises and what power feels like to a young girl as she confronts abuse. As always,
Dorothy Allison is provocative, confrontational, and brutally honest. Two or Three Things I
Know for Sure, steeped in the hard-won wisdom of experience, expresses the strength of her
unique vision with beauty and eloquence.
American Nations by Colin Woodard
According to award-winning journalist and historian Colin Woodard, North America is made up
of eleven distinct nations, each with its own unique historical roots. In American Nations he
takes readers on a journey through the history of our fractured continent, offering a
revolutionary and revelatory take on American identity, and how the conflicts between them
have shaped our past and continue to mold our future. From the Deep South to the Far West,
to Yankeedom to El Norte, Woodard (author of American Character: A History of the Epic
Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good) reveals how each region continues
to uphold its distinguishing ideals and identities today, with results that can be seen in the
composition of the U.S. Congress or on the county-by-county election maps of this year's Trump
versus Clinton presidential election.
The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction,
investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most
predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of
probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for
more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of
uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the prediction paradox: The
more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in
planning for the future.
All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love by showing its interconnectedness in
our private and public lives. Hooks explains how our everyday notions of what it means to give
and receive love often fail us, and how these ideals are established in early childhood. She
offers a rethinking of self-love that will bring peace and compassion to our personal and
professional lives, and asserts the place of love to end struggles between individuals, in
communities, and among societies. Moving from the cultural to the intimate, hooks notes the
ties between love and loss and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is the most
important love of all. Visionary and original, hooks shows how love heals the wounds we bear
as individuals and as a nation, for it is the cornerstone of compassion and forgiveness and holds
the power to overcome shame.
Democracy In America by Alexis de Tocqueville
In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and ambitious civil servant, set out
from post-revolutionary France on a journey across America that would take him 9 months and
cover 7,000 miles. This is the result: a subtle and prescient analysis of the life and institutions of
19th-century America. Tocqueville looked to the flourishing democratic system in America as a
possible model for post-revolutionary France, believing that the egalitarian ideals it enshrined
reflected the spirit of the age and even divine will. His study of the strengths and weaknesses of
an evolving democratic society has been quoted by every American president since Eisenhower,
and remains a key point of reference for any discussion of the American nation or the
democratic system. English translation.
Bayou Farewell by Mike Tidwell
The Cajun coast of Louisiana is home to a way of life as unique, complex, and beautiful as the
terrain itself. As award-winning travel writer Mike Tidwell journeys through the bayou, he
introduces us to the food and the language, the shrimp fisherman, the Houma Indians, and the
rich cultural history that makes it unlike any other place in the world. But seeing the skeletons
of oak trees killed by the salinity of the groundwater, and whole cemeteries sinking into
swampland and out of sight, Tidwell also explains why each introduction may be a farewellas
the storied Louisiana coast steadily erodes into the Gulf of Mexico.
The Lincoln Brigade, A Picture History by William Loren Katz and Marc Crawford
The day after Christmas, 1936, a group of 96 Americans sailed from New York to help Spain
defend its democratic government against fascism. Ultimately, 2800 United States volunteers
reached Spain to become the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild
In private life, we try to induce or suppress love, envy, and anger through deep acting or
"emotion work," just as we manage our outer expressions of feeling through surface acting. In
trying to bridge a gap between what we feel and what we "ought" to feel, we take guidance
from "feeling rules" about what is owing to others in a given situation. Based on our private
mutual understandings of feeling rules, we make a "gift exchange" of acts of emotion
management. We bow to each other not simply from the waist, but from the heart. But what
occurs when emotion work, feeling rules, and the gift of exchange are introduced into the
public world of work? In search of the answer, Arlie Hochschild closely examines two groups of
public-contact workers: flight attendants and bill collectors. The flight attendant's job is to
deliver a service and create further demand for it, to enhance the status of the customer and
be "nicer than natural." The bill collector's job is to collect on the service, and if necessary, to
deflate the status of the customer by being "nastier than natural." Between these extremes,
roughly one-third of American men and one-half of American women hold jobs that call for
substantial emotional labor. In many of these jobs, they are trained to accept feeling rules and
techniques of emotion management that serve the company's commercial purpose. Just as we
have seldom recognized or understood emotional labor, we have not appreciated it cost to
those who do it for a living. Like a physical laborer who becomes estranged from what he or she
makes, an emotional laborer, such as a flight attendant, can become estranged not only from
her own expressions of feeling (her smile is not "her" smile), but also from what she actually
feels (her managed friendliness). This estrangement, though a valuable defense against stress,
is also an important occupational hazard, because it is through our feelings that we are
connected with those around us.
Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State by Ralph
Nader
Nader shows how Left-Right coalitions can prevail over the corporate state and crony
capitalism. He draws on his extensive experience working with grassroots organizations in
Washington and reveals the many surprising victories by united progressive and conservative
forces. As a participator in, and keen observer of, these budding alliances, he breaks new
ground in showing how such coalitions can overcome specific obstacles that divide them, and
how they can expand their power on Capitol Hill, in the in the courts, and in the decisive arena
of public opinion. Americans can reclaim their right to consume safe foods and drugs, live in
healthy environments, receive fair rewards for their work, resist empire, regain control of
taxpayer assets, strengthen investor rights, and make bureaucrats more efficient and
accountable. Nader argues it is in the interest of citizens of different political labels to join in
the struggle against the corporate state that will, if left unchecked, ruin the Republic, override
our constitution, and shred the basic rights of the American people.