Understanding Power - Noam Chomsky

My book group's most recent selection (at my suggestion) was Chomsky's "Understanding Power." My friend Dan had urged me to read this book many times and I kept putting it off, thinking it would be boring and difficult. Nothing could be farther from the truth! This gripping book, although shocking and disturbing at times, was extremely interesting and readable. It is an edited transcript of Chomsky's various talks, and his style is clear and persuasive. I found this book to be profoundly eye-opening and unsettling regarding American politics and media censorship, and while I felt very disillusioned, it was important for me to have a better understanding of power and oppression in our nation. A must-read for everyone, I think!

Footnotes to the text are available here.

David Harvey - Spaces of Hope

This is one of the books I am reading for my thesis. In it, Harvey presents a convincing case for and way of adapting Marx's ideas to the conditions of capitalism in postmodernity, particularly in the context of globalization and the death of the Modernist utopian project in the aftermath of WWII.

Particularly interesting is Harvey's application of his "historical-geographical materialism" in his case study of Baltimore in the second half of the twentieth century, as he examines the ways that capital manipulates the construction of urban space in order to maintain its exploitative control over the working class.

In this book Harvey brilliantly addresses the worries of postmodernity and the various postmodernisms while maintaining a commitment to the utopian dream and political praxis, offering both a framework to understand the mutual interactions of geography and capital and to offer resistance to the bourgeois myth that "there is no alternative" to consumer capitalism, democracy, and the tyranny of the free market.

I read two chapters of this book for a class in my sophomore year, and it has been highly influential in the development of my own political sympathies. Harvey's writing is clear and accessible (for the most part, although some background in literary theory and intellectual history of the twentieth century is useful) and completely devoid of the obscurantism that plagues a lot of academic writing. Fascinating and highly enjoyable.