Frantz Fanon
by James S. Williams
Reaktion Books, 2024[Publication date: January 1, 2024]
A biography of the revolutionary philosopher and psychiatrist.
Doctor, militant, essayist, ambassador, teacher, journalist,
pan-Africanist, Frantz Fanon sought to decolonize mid-twentieth-century
culture as he embodied a new kind of intellectual. Born in colonial
Martinique, he fought for France during World War II but later renounced
his citizenship and fought in the Algerian War of Independence. This
book emphasizes Fanon’s gift for self-invention and performance as it
follows his short but extraordinary life and explores how his pioneering
work in psychiatry influenced his revolutionary philosophy.
The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution
by Ryan Grim
Henry Holt and Co.
[Publication date: December 5, 2023]
Semafor's Best Political Book of 2023
A
riveting insider account of the progressive movement in Congress
centering A.O.C., Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Ayanna
Pressley, and Ilhan Omar―their rise, their efforts to set an ambitious
agenda for the country, and their struggle to find their footing within
the Democratic party.
The Squad is
the definitive, must-read book about the most exciting figures defining
our new era. The story is urgent, and the stakes are high―for the
country and the world―and Grim, an experienced political reporter who
covered the Squad before they were the Squad, is uniquely qualified to
tell it.
When Bernie Sanders, an obscure Vermont senator,
launched his quixotic 2016 presidential campaign, few could have seen
just how radically the Democratic Party would transform in just a few
short years―or that such a transformation could be led by a Bronx
bartender volunteering for Bernie in her spare time. The world as it was
when that campaign began is almost unrecognizable today, and the Squad
has both shaped and been shaped by the seismic social, cultural, and
political changes underway.
Referred to informally as the Squad, led by the
preternaturally politically savvy Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the group
laid down a marker for an aggressive left-wing agenda. Grim takes you
behind the scenes as that new energy makes impact with Washington, and
the Squad spends as much time fending off assaults from Donald Trump―who
regularly singled them out and led chants of “send them back” at
rallies―as they did battling their own party’s sclerotic leadership. As
they’ve grown in office, they’ve had to contend with the eternal
question that confronts outsiders who power their way into the inside:
Are they still radical organizers willing and able to lead a political
revolution?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ryan W. Grim is an American author and journalist. Grim was Washington, D.C. bureau chief for HuffPost and is the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for The Intercept. He is also a political commentator for Breaking Points and appears frequently on The Majority Report with Sam Seder,. His writings have appeared in several publications, including Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, and Politico. He is the author of This Is Your Country on Drugs and We've Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement
The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics
by Joshua Green
Penguin Press, 2024
[Publication date: January 9, 2024]
From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Devil’s Bargain
comes the revelatory inside story of the uprising within the Democratic
Party, of the economic populists led by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie
Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In his classic book Devil’s Bargain,
Joshua Green chronicled how the forces of economic populism on the
right, led by the likes of Steve Bannon, turned Donald Trump into their
flawed but powerful vessel. In The Rebels,
he gives an epic account of the long struggle that has played out in
parallel on the left, told through an intimate reckoning with the
careers of the three political figures who have led the charge most
prominently. Based on remarkable inside sourcing and razor-sharp
analysis, The Rebels
uses the grand narrative of a political party undergoing tumult and
transformation to tell an even larger story about the fate of America.
For
many years, as Green recounts, the Democrats made their bed with Wall
Street and big tech, relying on corporate money for electioneering and
embracing the worldview that technological and financial innovation and
globalization were a powerful net good, a rising tide lifting all boats.
Yes, there were howls of pain, but they were written off by most of the
elites as the moaning of sore losers mired in the past. There were
always some Democratic politicians representing the old labor base who
resisted the new dispensation, but these figures never made it very far
on a national level. For one thing, they didn’t have the money. But as
income inequality ballooned, widening the gulf between the wealthy elite
and everyone else, pressures began to build.
With the 2008
crisis, those forces finally erupted into plain sight, turning this
book’s protagonists into national icons. At its heart, The Rebels
tells the riveting human story of the rise and fight of Elizabeth
Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from the financial
crisis on, as outrage over the unfairness of the American system formed a
flood tide of political revolution. That same tide that would sweep
Trump into office was blunted on the left, as the Democratic party found
itself riven by culture war issues between its centrists and its
progressives. But the winds behind economic populism still howl at gale
force. Whether the Democrats can bridge their divisions and home in on a
vision that unites the party, and perhaps even the country, in the face
of the most violently deranged political landscape since the Civil War
will be the ultimate test of the legacies of all three characters.
A masterful account of one of the defining political stories of our age, The Rebels
cements Joshua Green’s stature at the first rank of American writers
explaining how we’ve arrived at this pass and what lies ahead.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joshua Green is author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, "Devil's
Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency"
(Penguin), a national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, and a
CNN political analyst. Previously, Green was an editor at the Atlantic
and the Washington Monthly, and a political columnist for the Boston
Globe. He's also written for the New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone,
Vanity Fair and other publications. Green regularly appears on CNN's
shows, HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, and PBS’s Washington Week and
Frontline.
