COVID Reads. Da Books I Been Reading

I haven't been reading voraciously since the beginning of the pandemic the way some folks have, but I have kind of started reading again. I think I'm starting to kick into high gear after the past few books I read, though, and I'm looking forward to some good reading in the near future. Here's what I've read so far:

• Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World - Anand Giridharadas

• American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment - Shane Bauer 

• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It - Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

• Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World - Rutger Bregman

• A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah and Macmillan Audio

• How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence - Michael Pollan

Especially after reading the last book on the list (which I HIGHLY recommend), I remembered how much I love books written by journalists. I need to make a conscious effort to seek those books out from now on. Here's some things I learned/take aways from each.

Winners Take All

Tax evasion is killing social equality. Like I new it before, but like DAMN the situation is intense. In extreme cases, the sovereignty of small nations in the Carribean is almost on sale to businesses who just want a hub in a tax haven. The amount of taxes evaded by these businesses is STAGGERING and if the international community could somehow find a way to reign that in, maybe we could get a little more wealth redistribution. (That's right, redistribution. I said it.)

American Prison

Every time I hear about how deliberate the United States has been in its oppression of black people, brown people, indigenous people--I don't know why this stuff continues to surprise me. But it does. American prison does a great job of telling a coherent narrative of how for profit prisons rose directly from the legacy of slavery in order to maintain a supply of free or cheap labor to industries who profit from that (i.e.: agriculture, later railroad building, etc.). It's disguisting. It's capitalist. It's corporate. I knew the broad strokes about how the prison-industrial complex continues to systematically strip away the rights of black people and latinos especially, but learning more about the history of how they came to be definitely helped me gain a more complete picture of how the game works.

Never Split the Difference

This book wasn't the greatest. It was meh. I read it. Wasn't too long of a book. It does have a few useful tips about negotiating. I am and have always been a terrible negotiator, so it was good to learn a few specific items that I might be able to work on in order to not screw myself in the future.

Utopia for Realists

Honestly this book was mad forgettable, but I did get one thought out of it that I can never taken the time to consider before, which is this--we glorify some really B.S. jobs in our current social heirarchy. Nowadays you go to school to be a fancy wall street banker or a lawyer or consultant or some other job that doesn't actually add value to our economy. A lot of these jobs actually costing our economy money, kind of like a transaction cost for doing business. Jobs that actually do add value--from garbage collectors, food preparers to teachers and social workers--are grossly unappreciated and undercompensated. How did we come to have our priorities so messed up? This disconnect definitely contributes to the lopsided wealth distribution we have in our country as well.

Also I lied, one other thought the book gave me--regarding open borders. The book makes a strong argument that policing borders the way we do currently really is a form of discrimination and oppression. We have unprecedented freedom to move goods, conduct financial transactions, and generally conduct business across borders, but we don't allow people to move freely to find the best opportunities for social mobility and to support themselves and their families. It's ethically difficult to justify. It's easier if we demonize the "other" people who live in other countries and tell ourselves we close borders for security reasons--"those people" are dangerous!

A Long Way Gone

Whenever I complain about life--especially if we're talking setbacks in my childhood--I generally qualify the statement with "I mean, some people have it worse. I didn't grow up in a war zone or anything." As much as I like to complain, I also maintain an awareness of the privileges and opportunities I've had and continue to have, for which I am insanely thankful. THAT BEING SAID. . .the kid in this book had THE worse childhood imaginable, to severely understate the issue. (The book is a memoir of a Sierra Leonian activist who in his previous life was made to serve as a child soldier at the age of 12.) What could be worse than being a child without your family, literally running away from war and bullets and trying to find something to eat at the same time? Every. Single. Day. Even if you and your ragtag group of other lost children happen upon an otherwise friendly village, there's a great chance the village chief will run you off (or worse, kill you) under the mistaken impression that you are a child solider are a spy. At the age of 12, you and you friends are seen as an existential threat to the community! Honestly, at the moment the narrator joins the army, even as he starts accepting and embracing killing and and bloodshed as a part of his day, I actually felt a sense of relief that he would at least have a place to sleep and something to eat. The seeming inescapability of the civil war was impressed upon me through the entire book and it really seemed like an impossible situation. I knew broad strokes of civil war and child soldier issues, but this book painted a more vivid picture of the issue for me.

How to Change Your Mind

After reading this book, I'm going to read like every Michael Pollan book. I just started The Omnivore's Dilemma today. I'll talk about How to Change Your Mind book in another post. :)