The Ezra Klein Show

I've been rereading a book called No More Nice Girls, which is essays that were written in the 80s in another time of kind of feminist disappointment and retrenchment.

It's by W. David Marks, and it's called Status and Culture, How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. It's one of those books that I kept reading and thinking is mindblowing.

There's a book by a sociologist named Ziad Monson called The Making of ProLife Activists, How Social Movement Mobilization Works.

His 2004 book, The People Themselves, Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review, is this wild and really interesting interpretation of our constitutional history that has the unusual accolade of being beloved by both Newt Gingrich and Ralph Nader.

The argument he makes there, and that he made to me here, is that around the rise of the Warren court, liberals embraced the doctrine of judicial supremacy and saw the Constitution as the purview of judges.

There's a new book out by Joey Fishkin and Willie Forbath called the AntiOligarchy Constitution which really goes back across American history and picks up that strand that was pronounced and has been lost recently.

It's about creating an antioligarchic republic, breaking down concentrations of power in government and the economy to provide opportunities for people.

The Second Creation... is great because what it shows you is how in the years after the Constitution the founders realized everything was wrong and began the process of recreating the Constitution.

It's a really nice illustration of what we should be doing today.

The third book, I'd say, is a more recent book by Mary Ann Frank called The Cult of the Constitution, which emphasizes ways in which we tend to fetishize certain kinds of constitutional rights instead of stepping back and thinking more purposively about what the Constitution is really for.

And then the third is just this Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. ... it goes like this, to be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places, and there are so many, where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

So I am reading, what I'm reading right now is three books. I'm rereading Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men, which is Eric Foner's book on the history of the Republican Party and the development of Republican Party ideology in the 1840s and 1850s.

The thing, these are all very interesting books. They're great. They're very readable. I highly recommend them.

I'm also reading kind of related to that book, which features, that book features a whole chapter on the figure of Salman P. Chase, who was Lincoln's secretary of the Treasury and later Supreme Court justice appointed by Lincoln. And I'm reading a recent biography of Salman P. Chase, whose name I cannot recall at the moment, that kind of goes through his life and his emergence as one of the leading figures of political antislavery in the 1840s.

The next one in a similar vein is Every Deep Drawn Breath by Dr. Wes Ely. Dr. Ely is a leading researcher in delirium, in the complications of critical illness, in postintensive care syndrome, and now has been a huge advocate for people with long COVID. In this book, he talks about his whole personal journey and the journey of research in the field. I recommend this book to patients and families of patients who were in the ICU or people who have long COVID.

Again, this is actually the topic of my next book, Homecoming.

I think everyone should read Michael Harrington... I recommend you read his last book that he wrote when he had cancer, Socialism Past and Future.

Eric Hoppe's The Age of Extremes, but his whole set of four books on modern history, I would highly recommend.

Adolph Reed's recent political memoir... it's called The South. It just came out from Verso Books, and I just finished reading it.

His book detailing the way capitalism rewards wealth over work, detailing why those trends actually happen, Capital in the 21st Century, was a huge international bestseller, which was a real rarity for a book like it.

there's an excellent book on the French Revolution written by Ralph Blouffard, called The Great Demarcation, which I really recommend. I think it's a great book about the invention of the modern property system during the French Revolution and how, you know, complex the discussion was at the time.

a book by Rosenbaum, which is about the history of globalization, which is The Emergence of Globalism, you know, visions of world order and Britain in the United States, 1939, 1950. It also talks about Europe. I think it's very interesting because it talks about this moment just before World War II and just after World War II, where people realize that we are shifting to a new world system.

David E. Bernstein has a book coming out in July called Classified, the untold story of racial classification in America that I highly recommend.

It's just really a neat treatment of all of the ironies and weirdnesses of how it is we seek to categorize people by race and ethnicity.

For book number three, I just want to shout out one of my favorite books of all time, published in 1998 called Sir Vidia's Shadow by Paul Theroux.

It's about his decadeslong friendship with the novelist, essayist, memoirist V.S.Naipaul and it's just a really weird, strange, incredibly beautiful book.