A Reading List for the American Election

Spending too many years around academics has left me with the habit of constructing spur of the moment reading lists.  My daughter Andrée was often a victim of these spontaneous lists.  Of course, she usually politely ignored them.  At any rate, here is a short reading list for the impending U. S. election:

Robert Kuttner, The Squandering of America, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007. The one book every American should read.  Kuttner touches all the bases in this one.

Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, America: What Went Wrong?,  Andrews and McMeel, Kansas City, 1992. This book, taken from a series of Philadelphia Inquirer articles, is still pertinent.

Louis Uchitelle, The Disposable American, Vintage Books, New York, 2007. The author examines the effects of layoffs in all sectors of the economy.

Ulrich Beck, The Brave New World of Work, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000. The translations of Beck’s works are not smooth reading. One suspects that the German is also a little stylistically challenged. But Beck is one of the best at attacking questions of the global economy. This is definitely worth reading.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2005. I have to add a more philosophically oriented book to the list.  There are other titles from Bauman that I could cite, but this is definitely one of his better efforts.