Category: Politics
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Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis
Rating: 5/5, excellent This book should be required reading—especially for white feminists! Angela Y. Davis’s Women, Race & Class is a classic feminist text. It came out in 1981 but it’s just as relevant today, and I think it will be evergreen because of its well-referenced discussion of black history. Women, Race & Class is…
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Free Women, Free Men by Camille Paglia
Rating: 3/5, average Trigger Warning: pedophilia, transphobia, sexual assault I must have been in a rebellious mood or something when I bought this. I’d been following Reason magazine online for a little while because my dad was a libertarian and I thought I’d come to understand his politics more by reading it. He never mentioned…
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The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Rating: 5/5, excellent Diverse Reading Challenge #3 I don’t know why I slept on this book so long. It came out February 8th, 2017 and it was a huge hit, with a movie adaptation that came out in 2018. I’ve heard so many great things about it, and it 100% lives up to the hype!…
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12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
Rating: 3/5, average I promised myself I wouldn’t read any male authors this year, but my dad said I should read this one shortly before he died so I made an exception (kind of, I found a loophole by listening to the audiobook instead of reading it with my eyes, haha). I think 12 Rules…
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Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
Rating: 4/5, good I was really excited to read this book. I’ve seen Annalee Newitz speak a bit in SF and I was a big fan of i09 while that was still running so I was really curious what they would write. They have a lot of experience in tech journalism and it comes to…
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Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente Rating: 4/5, good When this was published last year (2018), it took the Twitter world by storm. It seemed like everybody was posting about it, but I didn’t buy it when it first came out because the premise didn’t appeal to me. It’s a scifi novel about some Earthlings…
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Infomocracy by Malka Older (Centenal Cycle #1)
Rating: 4/5, good Infomocracy by Malka Older is a political science fiction thriller. It’s about a near-future world where 20 years ago, the peoples of the world split off from traditional countries into small local voting blocks of 100,000 people known as centenals. The people in these centenals vote to choose which global government to…
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Work: Capitalism, Economics, Resistance by Crimethinc
Rating: 3/5, average This is a decent, accessible primer to anti-capitalist thought (with lots of pictures!). It’s main failing, which is common to a lot of anti-capitalist stuff, is that it goes into detail about the evils of capitalism and gives very little attention to solutions, improvements, or alternatives to capitalism. It starts off with…
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Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality by William Wright
Rating: 4/5, good I picked this book up thinking it would be about the science of genes, behavior, and personality, but it’s really more about the history and politics of the field called behavioral genetics. It doesn’t answer the question, “How much are we controlled by genes, how much by environment, and how much by…