I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

More of these to come when I find the time to write up my notes.

Gregory Nobles, John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman: Biography of the artist, focusing on the extent to which he was always hustling business to get the resources to make more pictures of birds. I wish there had been more about how he fit, or didn’t, into the art world of the time—although he saw himself as a man of science, I’d have liked more about contemporaneous art critics/theories.
 
Rory Cormac, How to Stage a Coup: And Ten Other Lessons From the World of Secret Statecraft: Overview of different types of covert action and how they blur into one another; they work best when working on real cracks in the target society and against nations with an apathetic or distrusting population (gulp). They’re often only notionally secret: deniability rather than believability is the key. Open interference/invasion is far more likely to work, but much costlier; as Kermit Roosevelt said, “If you don’t want something that the [indigenous] people and the army want, … don’t give it to clandestine operations, give it to the marines.” (And even “working” is debatable: “half of all leaders installed by CIA-backed covert regime changes ended up being violently removed themselves afterwards.” And lots of covert aid finds its way to people who are very hostile to the aider, as Americans have reason to know. On the other hand, keeping the enemy entangled in internal struggles can also count as a victory.)
 
Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: Moderately interesting business memoir with some hints of a stranger, more right-wing persona underneath, like the constant references to laws trying to maintain milk prices/liquor sales restrictions as semi-fascist or sometimes just fascist. I probably agree that most of these laws are dumb, but dumb and fascist are very different things. Still, employee ownership and high pay as a way to avoid unionization are probably the very best ways to fend off unionization.
 
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution:This 1938 book is a fascinating look at how history used to be done: James is both passionately committed to the justice of the revolution’s cause (and a Marxist view of historical inevitability/class conflict) and basically willing to take the existing documentation, written almost entirely by whites, at face value. That means the book reverses racist moral judgments but generally presumes their account of events was factually accurate, which I don’t think a modern historian would do.
 
Adrienne Mayor, Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: Essays on ancient cryptozoology and related topics (e.g., tattooing in the ancient world). Fine if you are really interested in what now-extinct animals might have inspired legends.
 
Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain: History of a period/place I knew little about. The tolerance was reasonably patchy and more of the form “we mostly went to war against coreligionists/alliances were not divided on religious lines,” but it was still interesting.
 
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: An understandably angry (and therefore somewhat repetitive) history of the US from indigenous viewpoints, focusing on the genocides and settler colonialism that were core to the founding and never stopped. Among other things, Dunbar-Ortiz highlights that Sherman’s March was merely the application of tactics used against indigenous people against white Southerners, and that the military term “in-country” is actually shortened from “Indian Country,” highlighting the extent to which the US military remains organized around the founding concept of going to other people’s lands and telling them what to do. The actors here are indigenous fighters/activists and settler oppressors; when laws change in favor of indigenous communities they are just passive-voice changed, and it would have been a stronger book if it explained why settler legal systems would ever do this (similar to Derrick Bell’s theory of interest group convergence, which explains why some whites support some anti-white supremacy initiatives).
 
Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure as heck rhymes. Hochschild chronicles the history of often violent anti-labor, anti-immigrant, anti-radical, misogynist, anti-Black initiatives by ruling white men in the years surrounding the First World War. He notes the use of torture on radicals at home by men who’d learned waterboarding in the Philippines, and who, before the rise of “white” as a category covering Italians, Russians, and many Jews, saw them as racial inferiors. Suppressing speech was an integral part of this campaign against kinds of people, as it is today.
 
Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires:Probably you only need to read his essay about this, https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1, to get the key point: Today’s billionaires are using the fantasy of escape to explain why they should be continuing doing the things that will destroy the world for most of us and require an escape in the first place. But they can’t outrun climate change (or solve worries about keeping their security forces in line, perhaps with control collars or control over the food, or both), so we should probably use their fantasies as further reasons to stop allowing them to make things worse.
 
Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Who Makes and Who Takes from the Real Economy: Interesting exploration of the hidden choices that make neoliberal economics seem inevitable. Is changing a diaper productive? Only if a paid worker does it—but that’s a choice, and so is treating government as merely an expense and not a source of productivity. Mazzucato explains in detail how mainstream economics as a discipline socializes risk and cost, attributing them to government, while privatizing gain, attributing it to corporations.
 
David Levering Lewis, The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order: Hyperbolic (as the title indicates) and a bit repetitive—party bosses recruited Willkie to combat isolationists in their own party. They didn’t quite succeed, but Lewis argues that Willkie’s prominence at least allowed for a bit of bipartisanship against Nazis before Pearl Harbor.
 
Nancy L. Mace & Peter V. Rabins, The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People Who Have Alzheimer Disease, Related Dementias, and Memory Loss: Useful for walking through the realities of caring for someone with dementia. Hard to read.


Kaitlyn Tiffany, Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It: As with any fan, Tiffany maybe overattributes causation to her own fandom (One Direction) and I know I’m prone to it too so I can’t say too much. But she sets out how everything is fannish and fandom now, in ways both good and bad, commercialized (often exploitatively so) and not (a lot of online vitriol, from Qanon to fans of specific singers).

Marc McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon: Essays centering around the idea of Amazon and its effects on our consciousness, specifically literary consciousness and readerly consciousness (the reader as consumer). I found it too dense for my taste/interested in things I’m not interested in (e.g. the modern realist novel), but interesting to see someone unite a kind of survey of ordinary works in general fiction with reflections on the economic conditions producing them.

"You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World, ed. Torie Bosch: Short essays on code, good and bad, buggy and intentional, from the origins of code in weaving and music to the Volkswagen defeat device to the “like” button to the first police profiling algorithm (in 1968!) and more. Ethan Zuckerman, who coded the first pop-up ad, writes: “Sometime around 1997, I wrote a line of JavaScript code that made the world a measurably worse place.” “Brand safety” was the motivation: “The pop-up specifically came about after an auto company complained about their ad appearing on a personal homepage about anal sex. My boss asked me to find a way to sell ads while ensuring brand managers wouldn’t send us screen shots of their precious brands juxtaposed with offensive content. My slapdash solution? Put the ad in a different window than the content. Presto! Plausible deniability!”

Joi Lisi Rankin is one author exploring the ways race and gender affected code: “Among the high schools connected to the Dartmouth network as part of the [1960s] NSF Secondary Schools Project, the coed public schools—all predominantly White—had only 40 hours of network time each week. By contrast, the private schools—which were all male, wealthy, and almost exclusively White—had 72 hours of network time each week.” And access was only for students in math/science classes, from which girls were often excluded. BASIC, developed at Dartmouth to be taught in a standard math class, was therefore a way of transitioning computing from women’s work to work from which women were excluded. From Meredith Broussard: “When same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, … [t]he database redesign process was informally called Y2gay.”