Posts tagged books make you think

I have recently finished two books that made me feel better about whatever the fuck is happening to our country, not to mention how insane everyone is, especially because it seems like everyone gets crazier by the day. So I would like to recommend them to you.

If you are the sort of person who frets about abstinence-only pledges, and endless infidelity scandals and the gross way the media slobbers all over them, and/or whether you will ever experience true love and if you did, would you even recognize it, and even then, could it last forever, because you try to be pragmatic but have read too many romance novels for your own good, then I recommend Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, which just came out in paperback. Also, if you are the sort of person who has always been super annoyed by evolutionary psychology and would like to watch somebody punch it in the mouth, I recommend the same.

If, on the other hand, you have been having actual nightmares about national default, and are still annoyed about the taxpayer-funded bailout of irresponsible financial institutions, and are SURE that Adam Smith was wrong but can’t explain why in arguments because the whole thing makes you SO ANGRY, I recommend Debt: The First Five Thousand Years by David Graeber. It’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking book that goes far beyond the average economic discussion (thankfully) and uses anthropology and a truly global outlook to think critically about our relationship to money and credit. Well, I just made it sound really boring. It’s not boring, I promise. I was lugging that big red hardcover all over town.

Read in tandem, these books restored my respect for the thousands of years of humans who came before me and reminded me that even though they did not have LOLcats, they had a lot of shit figured out that still makes modern Americans bumble around and drool on ourselves. It is also always soothing to be reminded of one’s larger place in history, which is to say, that you and I and everyone one we know are not really that important and that life will go on.

What, you don’t find that soothing?

In that case, friends, I recommend Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi. I have nothing coherent to say about it, except that I have read some reviewers claim that they think Taibbi’s writing is a little too over-the-top and loose with the cursewords to be taken seriously, and would just like to observe that I think anybody who actually understands the shit that’s going down at the highest levels of government and business and who is NOT using the phrase “motherfucking cocksuckers” from time to time is probably not taking it seriously enough.

If, on the other hand, you would like to read about the darkly humorous side of the financial world, in a (somehow) more innocent time, I recommend one of my favorite novels of all time, Bombardiers by Po Bronson.

Why hasn’t the fair-trade marketing juggernaut rolled over the sale of illegal drugs yet? The copy writes itself. Attached by twine, printed on paper handmade from recycled newspapers:

“Don’t just get high—get elevated! Try our elevated-altitude marijuana, guaranteed to take you to peaks you haven’t yet scaled. This marijuana is 100% CARTEL-FREE and grown at a LIVING WAGE by a women’s cooperative in southern Mexico. The CannibUS Collective is committed to providing marijuana that has been grown with a minimum of pesticides, a minimum of police and federal bribery, and NO CHILD LABOR. 10% of our profits are donated to organizations working within the community to improve education.”

This thought brought to you by a very-late-night two-hour bus ride spent reading Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields by Charles Bowden (Nation Books, out now). Around 1am, about 150 pages in, I found that these nonsense ad campaigns for sustainable organic cocaine were rolling around my head fully-formed without me having noticed their nascency. (I also found myself imagining the inevitable NYT trend piece.) I suspect it was a guerrilla campaign by my frontal lobe to keep me from sinking into depression from the hopelessness and relentless, thoughtless carnage about which Bowden writes.

I feel about this book the way that I did about Methland: it’s a great book, but it’s hard to call a book “great” when it’s about a seemingly-unstoppable destruction of communities and the human beings who compose them. I look forward to finishing the book on my two-hour bus ride tomorrow in the way that one looks forward to a dislocated shoulder being popped back into its socket.