#Greg Grandin

[deadpresidents]

Tangentially presidential, but do you have recommendations for biographies of Clarence Thomas and/or Henry Kissinger?

I don't have any suggestions for books about Thomas, but I can recommend a bunch on Kissinger. I think it's especially important to read different books about Kissinger to get a more balanced viewpoint because many books about him tend to be slanted in one direction or the other -- more so than most historical figures, in my opinion. He just tends to inspire particularly strong opinions, so here are a few books on him that I've found interesting:

•The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World (BOOK | KINDLE) by Barry Gewen •Kissinger (BOOK | KINDLE) by Walter Isaacson •Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist (BOOK | KINDLE) by Niall Ferguson •Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy (BOOK | KINDLE) by Martin Indyk •Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman (BOOK | KINDLE) by Greg Grandin

There are also some really good dual biographies about Kissinger and Nixon and their foreign policy: •Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (BOOK | KINDLE) by Robert Dallek •The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (BOOK | KINDLE) by Gary J. Bass •The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (BOOK | KINDLE) by Seymour M. Hersh •Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross

And I want to also mention these two books, which are heavier reads but really important studies about the international impact of the Nixon/Kissinger foreign policy (and a helpful reminder about American complicity in the overthrow and death of democratically-elected Chilean President Salvador Allende) : •Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile (BOOK | KINDLE) by Lubna Z. Qureshi •Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (BOOK | KINDLE) by Roham Alvandi

#Books #Book Suggestions #Book Recommendations #History #Biography #Presidents #Books about Presidents #Politics #Foreign Policy #Diplomacy #Henry Kissinger #Richard Nixon #President Nixon #Nixon Administration #Barry Gewen #Robert Dallek #Walter Isaacson #Niall Ferguson #Martin Indyk #Greg Grandin #Gary J. Bass #Seymour Hersh #William Shawcross #Lubna Z. Qureshi #Roham Alvandi

[quotent-potables]

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that the lack of camels in the Koran proves its Middle Eastern provenance; only a native author, he explained, could have so taken the animal for granted as not to mention it.

— Empire's Workshop, by Greg Grandin

#quotes #greg grandin #empire's workshop #jorge luis borges

[folkdances]

In all seriousness, here are a few resources I think are helpful with regards to understanding just how thoroughly Henry Kissinger screwed the world over:

Kissinger by Behind the Bastards. This is a 6 part series done by the podcast Behind the Bastards, with the hosts of The Dollop on as guests. It's super funny and a very accessible foothold into understanding the scope of Kissinger's vast career.

Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Grandin. This book provides an in-depth analysis of Kissinger's tenure in the white house, covering both how he got into office, the changes he made in office, the policies he put forth, and their repercussions on the world.

ETAN's category on Kissinger. The East Timor and Indonesia action network has long been an outspoken critic of Kissinger's, and they've aggregated a lot of helpful articles here.

The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchins. While Grandin's book focuses less on the specificities of Kissinger's crimes, Hitchins has no such qualms and details each of them in depth.

I truly think understanding Kissinger, the way he thought, and the things that he did, are all indispensable when it comes to understanding the modern political climate and how foreign policy works in America and therefore, by necessity, in the world at large. The sheer amount of damage he was responsible for should never be underestimated.

#txt #someone added this: the btb episodes are not funny in that they joke about his crimes but rather they cover SO much that the levity is nice

[steveyockey]

Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose 4-year old McVeigh killed.

McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century.

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.

No infamy will find Kissinger on a day like today. Instead, in a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and — shamefully, since Kissinger had reporters like CBS’ Marvin Kalb and The New York Times’ Hendrick Smith wiretapped — newsrooms. Kissinger, a refugee from the Nazis who became a pedigreed member of the “Eastern Establishment” Nixon hated, was a practitioner of American greatness, and so the press lionized him as the cold-blooded genius who restored America’s prestige from the agony of Vietnam.

Not once in the half-century that followed Kissinger’s departure from power did the millions the United States killed matter for his reputation, except to confirm a ruthlessness that pundits occasionally find thrilling. America, like every empire, champions its state murderers. The only time I was ever in the same room as Henry Kissinger was at a 2015 national-security conference at West Point. He was surrounded by fawning Army officers and ex-officials basking in the presence of a statesman.

#THANK YOU ACKERMAN VERY COOL #worth reading the whole thing obviously

[txttletale]

niceys positive anon!! i don't agree with you on everything but you are so clearly like well read and well rounded that you've helped me think through a lot of my own inconsistencies and hypocrises in my own political and social thought, even if i do have slightly different conclusions at times then u (mainly because i believe there's more of a place for idealism and 'mind politics' than u do). anyway this is a preamble to ask if you have recommended reading in the past and if not if you had any recommended reading? there's some obvious like Read Marx but beyond that im always a little lost wading through theory and given you seem well read and i always admire your takes, i wondered about your recs

it's been a while since i've done a big reading list post so--bearing in mind that my specific areas of 'expertise' (i say that in huge quotation marks obvsies i'm just a girlblogger) are imperialism and media studies, here are some books and essays/pamphlets i recommend. the bolded ones are ones that i consider foundational to my politics

BASICS OF MARXISM

friedrich engels, principles of commmunism

friedrich engels, socialism: utopian & scientific

karl marx, the german ideology

karl marx, wage labour & capital

mao zedong, on contradiction

nikolai bukharin, anarchy and scientific communism

rosa luxemburg, reform or revolution?

v.i lenin, left-wing communism: an infantile disorder

v.i. lenin, the state & revolution

v.i. lenin, what is to be done?

IMPERIALISM

aijaz ahmed, iraq, afghanistan, and the imperialism of our time

albert memmi, the colonizer and the colonized

che guevara, on socialism and internationalism (ed. aijaz ahmad)

eduardo galeano, the open veins of latin america

edward said, orientalism

fernando cardoso, dependency and development in latin america

frantz fanon, black skin, white masks

frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth

greg grandin, empire's workshop

kwame nkrumah, neocolonialism, the last stage of imperialism

michael parenti, against empire

naomi klein, the shock doctrine

ruy mauro marini, the dialectics of dependency

v.i. lenin, imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism

vijay prashad, red star over the third world

vincent bevins, the jakarta method

walter rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa

william blum, killing hope

zak cope, divided world divided class

zak cope, the wealth of (some) nations

MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES

antonio gramsci, the prison notebooks

ed. mick gidley, representing others: white views of indigenous peoples

ed. stuart hall, representation: cultural representations and signifying pratices

gilles deleuze & felix guattari, capitalism & schizophrenia

jacques derrida, margins of philosophy

jacques derrida, speech and phenomena

michael parenti, inventing reality

michel foucault, disicipline and punish

michel foucault, the archeology of knowledge

natasha schull, addiction by design

nick snricek, platform capitalism

noam chomsky and edward herman, manufacturing consent

regis tove stella, imagining the other

richard sennett and jonathan cobb, the hidden injuries of class

safiya umoja noble, algoriths of oppression

stuart hall, cultural studies 1983: a theoretical history

theodor adorno and max horkheimer, the culture industry

walter benjamin, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

OTHER

angela davis, women, race, and class

anna louise strong, cash and violence in laos and vietnam

anna louise strong, the soviets expected it

anna louise strong, when serfs stood up in tibet

carrie hamilton, sexual revolutions in cuba

chris chitty, sexual hegemony

christian fuchs, theorizing and analysing digital labor

eds. jules joanne gleeson and elle o'rourke, transgender marxism

elaine scarry, the body in pain

jules joanne gleeson, this infamous proposal

michael parenti, blackshirts & reds

paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed

peter drucker, warped: gay normality and queer anticapitalism

rosemary hennessy, profit and pleasure

sophie lewis, abolish the family

suzy kim, everyday life in the north korean revolution

walter rodney, the russian revolution: a view from the third world

#ask #avowed inframaterialist reading group #i obviously do not 100% agree with all the points made by and conclusions reached by these works #but i think they are valuable and useful to read

[burins]

it's time for my big books of the year roundup! gonna do a separate post for graphic novels/comics bc there were simply soooo many of those this year. bolded are my particular favorites

JANUARY

The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability: For All of Us Who Live with Disabilities, Chronic Pain, and Illness by Cory Silverberg, Fran Odette, Miriam Kaufman (reread)

The World We Make by NK Jemisin

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (audio)

The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

A Restless Truth by Freya Marske

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

FEBRUARY

The Librarian's Guide to Homelessness: An Empathy-Driven Approach to Solving Problems, Preventing Conflict, and Serving Everyone by Ryan Dowd

Libraries and Homelessness: An Action Guide by Julie Ann Winkelstein

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane (audio)

MARCH

Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo (audio)

The Stars Undying by Emery Robin (audio)

APRIL

Babel: An Arcane History by RF Kuang (audio)

Get Inside: Responsible Jail and Prison Library Service by Nicholas Higgins

MAY

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K LeGuin (audio)

The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin (audio)

How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler

Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America by Mayukh Sen (audio)

The Betrayals by Bridget Collins (audio)

Paper Bead Jewelry: Step-by-Step Instructions for 40+ Designs by Keiko Sakamoto

JUNE

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (audio)

Translation State by Ann Leckie

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Happy Place by Emily Henry

An Island Princess Starts a Scandal by Adriana Herrera

JULY

Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life by Alice Wong (audio)

SEPTEMBER

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson 

The Sundial by Shirley Jackson (audio)

He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan (audio)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

NOVEMBER

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (audio)

Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh (audio)

Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine by Raja Shehadeh (audio)

DECEMBER

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane (audio)

Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman by Greg Grandin (audio)

Golda Slept Here by Suad Amiry

The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens

A Power Unbound by Freya Marske

below the cut, some writeups for my faves:

Wolf Hall - it's not news but Hilary Mantel is among the best to ever do characterization in just a few sentences

The Future Is Disabled - emerging from the rage & fear of being disabled during COVID lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha never lets us forget the joys of disabled community

Libraries and Homelessness - this is partly a spite pick bc i HATED ryan dowd’s book so much. this is an empathetic and practical guide to providing services to unhoused patrons that encourages community partnership, is full of examples, and isn’t miserably condescending!

Underland - i liked this so much i wrote a cave scene in timkon road trip fic. The texture of the prose is delicious!

The Stars Undying - i don’t actually know the story of antony and cleopatra very well but this was a very tasty space opera with messy messy characters

The Lathe of Heaven - still thinking about this 7 months later! Every year I read a LeGuin and it knocks me on my ass for the rest of the year. The opening scene is one of the best things I’ve ever read. (I liked The Dispossessed very very much but I loved Lathe.)

Mimicking of Known Successes - delightful noir-flavored scifi, great worldbuilding and equally great exes.

Some Desperate Glory - do you ever leave a cult against your will, and also you’re the worst girl in the world! This one is for all the clementine kesh fans. Breakneck.

The Haunting of Hill House - this was a great year for me to read books written 50+ years ago. I tweeted about it when i read it but ooghhghhgh this book is devastating. What if you got everything you ever wanted and finally felt at home and everyone called it evil.

Where the Line is Drawn - this was my second book by Shehadeh and it never shies away from the thorniness and hurt inherent in human relationships formed amidst occupation. Really, really excellent.

Kissinger’s Shadow - concisely unravels the ways Kissinger’s legacy shapes every part of US foreign policy you’ve ever heard of. Also really gets at the paranoid ouroboros of Kissinger’s personal philosophy.

Golda Slept Here - the legacy of several Palestinian houses, told through an eclectic mix of personal narratives, photographs, and occasional poetry. Funny and angry and heartbreaking.

#i didn't include the books i dnfed on here but there were a few #library haint #book roundup #personal

[msmargaretmurry]

For the book meme, 21 & 45 please!

21. The book(s) on your school reading list you actually enjoyed. 

I'm so sorry to be a nerd but I enjoyed so many things I read for class. We didn't read many novels in K-12 (lots of short stories, plays, and poems) but I enjoyed the classics like to kill a mockingbird and the great gatsby. (i did NOT enjoy a farewell to arms.) more recently i have been reading so many books for grad school so here are some that i would genuinely recommend to non-academic audiences:

floating coast by bathsheba demuth

our gigantic zoo by thomas lekan

fordlandia by greg grandin

empire of cotton by sven beckert

the nutmeg's curse by amitav ghosh

45. What book(s) would you sell your soul to get a TV or movie adaptation of?

i gotta be honest i am still a little sad that the raven cycle adaptation got squashed. i would have ate that shit up with a spoon. but truly when it comes down to it my dream tv adaptation would have to be robin hobb's farseer trilogy. but only if they did it right. only if they made burrich hot enough.

#ask #reading meme

[nearmidnightannex]

Rolling Stone goes IN on Kissinger

Their coverage is strikingly different from almost all of the rest of the US and most western media.

Whoever wrote the Daily Mail eulogy linked in the second Rolling Stone article is on the shiny shiny drugs. Also, the recommended tags that popped up for this were ... amusing, let's say.

Presented without further comment.

GOOD RIDDANCE Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies (rollingstone.com) The infamy of Nixon's foreign-policy architect sits, eternally, beside that of history's worst mass murderers. A deeper shame attaches to the country that celebrates him BY SPENCER ACKERMAN NOVEMBER 29, 2023

Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100.

Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. [...]

McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century.

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds....

ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY Media, Conservatives Team Up to Lionize War Criminal Henry Kissinger The notorious U.S. diplomat responsible for millions of deaths died on Wednesday at the age of 100 BY CHARISMA MADARANG NOVEMBER 30, 2023

Henry Kissinger, a national security adviser and former secretary of state under two presidents, has evaded accountability, even after death. On Wednesday, the notorious war criminal responsible for the deaths of millions, died at the age of 100.

During his lifetime, Kissinger prolonged the Vietnam war and expanded it to Cambodia and Laos; green-lit Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor, Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh, and supported military coups in Chile and Argentina. According to Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, the estimated death toll for foreign policy policies tied to Kissinger is between 3 million and 4 million.

Yet the headlines following his death have been astonishingly void of accountability, but not surprising. Publications from both the left and right lionized the war criminal. The Wall Street Journal credited Kissinger as the man who “Helped Forge U.S. Foreign Policy During Vietnam and Cold Wars,” while BBC called him the “Divisive diplomat who towered over world affairs.” In a loaded headline, Daily Mail lauded the him as a “Nobel Prize winner who stared down the Soviets,” while also labeling Kissinger as a “VERY unlikely sex symbol.” [...]

#kissinger #henry kissinger #kissinger is dead

[protoslacker]

Kissinger is, of course, not singularly responsible for the evolution of the US national security state into the perpetual motion machine that it today has become. That history, starting with the 1947 National Security Act and running through the Cold War and now the War on Terror, comprises many different episodes and is populated by many different individuals. But Kissinger’s career courses through the decades like a bright red line, shedding spectral light on the road that has brought us to where we are now, from the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia to the sands of the Persian Gulf to deadlock in Ukraine to moral bankruptcy in Gaza.

Greg Grandin in The Nation. A People’s Obituary of Henry Kissinger

For decades, Kissinger kept the great wheel of American militarism spinning ever forward.

I am a nobody, but at 68 years old now Grandin's "bright red line" in re Kissinger rings so true. Since the time I began noticing , i have understood that I bear some guilt for American militarism and the misery it's wreaked.

Bernie Sanders in a debate with Hillary Clinton said, "“I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend.” 

Amen to that.

#henry kissinger #american militarism #american foreign policy

[sushigrade]

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.  “The Cubans say there is no evil that lasts a hundred years, and Kissinger is making a run to prove them wrong,” Grandin told Rolling Stone not long before Kissinger died. “There is no doubt he’ll be hailed as a geopolitical grand strategist, even though he bungled most crises, leading to escalation. He’ll get credit for opening China, but that was De Gaulle’s original idea and initiative. He’ll be praised for detente, and that was a success, but he undermined his own legacy by aligning with the neocons. And of course, he’ll get off scot free from Watergate, even though his obsession with Daniel Ellsberg really drove the crime.”

#rest in pissinger

[senlinyu]

Hiii Sen! Been a huge fan for a bit more than 3 years now and your writing has literally changed my life (honestly). You write so beautifully and your plots are so well developed, you’re extremely talented and I just thank you for sharing your passion with us! I was just curious about your all time favorite books? I’m having trouble finding good plots nowadays, especially with booktok hyping up lots of (what I’d consider) mid books like CoHo stuff. What are books that had you hooked or you couldn’t put down that you would recommend? Thanks again for sharing your fanfics with us, you’re truly amazing!! 💖

Haha. Well, I have a book rec’s tag of books I’ve recc’d in the past, but I had a while where I was really struggling with reading and would just get completely distracted whenever I tried to read anything. But I’ve gotten back on the horse this year, although I’m by no means consuming literature at booktok speed, I’ve found a few books that I quite liked this year.

Five star reads this year, as in books I loved and I’ll reread:

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemison

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Circe by Madeline Miller

The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Four star reads, as in books I thoroughly enjoyed but probably won’t reread, bold is 4.5 stars)

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (a surprise because I nearly threw The Goldfinch across the room)

The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K Le Guin

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

The Fifth Season by NK Jemison

The Cruel Prince trilogy by Holly Black

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

The Daevabad Trilogy by SA Chakraborty

The Girls I’ve Been by Tess Sharpe

The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

Cultish by Amanda Montell

Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson

#book recs

[azspot]

And thinking about him as a war criminal kind of dumbs us down. It doesn’t allow us to think with Kissinger’s — use Kissinger’s life to think with, to think about how the United States — for example, Kissinger started off as a Rockefeller Republican, you know, a liberal Republican, an adviser to Nelson Rockefeller who thought Nixon was far out of the mainstream and a dangerous sociopath, I think, as he put it. And yet, when Nixon won — and he actually helped him win by scuttling a peace deal with North Vietnam — he made his peace with Nixon, and then went on, you know, into public office. And he thought Reagan was too extreme, and yet he made his peace with Reagan. Then he thought the neocons were too extreme, and he made his peace with the neocons. Then he even made his peace with Donald Trump. He called Donald — he celebrated Donald Trump almost as a kind of embodiment of his theory of a great statesman and being able to craft reality as they want to through their will. So, you see Kissinger — as the country moves right, you see Kissinger moving with it. So, just that trajectory is very useful to think with.

Greg Grandin

#henrykissinger

[txttletale]

@lessthanthreelalli

vladimir lenin, imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism

eduardo galeano, the open veins of latin america

william blum, killing hope

kwame nkrumah, neocolonialism: the last stage of imperialism

walter rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa

zak cope, divided world divided class

zak cope, the wealth of (some) nations

ed. aijaz ahmad, che on socialism and internationalism

frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth

greg grandin, empire's workshop

ruy mauro marini, dialectics of dependency

regis tove, imagining the other: the representation of the papua new guinean subject

#tattletxt #the latter is more concerned with the cultural reprensetaitons and discourses of imperialism but i think thats precisely why its good

[gideonthefirst]

January Books

bolded is favorites, [x] is least favorites

fiction

Caribou Island by David Vann

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories by Leonard Cohen

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

Harrow by Joy Williams

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

nonfiction

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Megan O'Rourke

Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman by Greg Grandin

I Embrace You With All My Revolutionary Fervor: Letters 1947-1967 by Ernesto Che Guevara

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel [x]

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse

Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975 by Richard Thompson

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba & Then Lost it to the Revolution by T.J. English [x]

Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy [x]

other

Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie by Maya Angelou

The Crown Ain't Worth Much by Hanif Abdurraqib

#2024 books #pretty bleak month for me bookwise. not a lot of great stuff here #the che letters book was really really really awesome though. so that's nice #personal

[underthewingsofthblackeagle]

Kissinger at 100: New War Crimes Revealed in Secret Cambodia Bombing That Set Stage for Forever Wars

         A bombshell new investigation from The Intercept reveals that former U.S. national security adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was responsible for even more civilian deaths during the U.S. war in Cambodia than was previously known. The revelations add to a violent résumé that ranges from Latin America to Southeast Asia, where Kissinger presided over brutal U.S. military interventions to put down communist revolt and to develop U.S. influence around the world. While survivors and family members of these deadly campaigns continue to grieve, Kissinger celebrates his 100th birthday this week. “This adds to the list of killings and crimes that Henry Kissinger should, even at this very late date in his life, be asked to answer for,” says The Intercept’s Nick Turse, author of the new investigation, “Kissinger’s Killing Fields.” We also speak with Yale University’s Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. Transcript: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/5/2...

#Kissinger #The Intercepot #Democracy Now