Summer book edition, part 1: Some books to read to open your mind

I decided to go through my shelves to highlight new and older books that are related to the things I write about. Have a great summer! Here's Part 1.

I have a hard time resisting the urge to recommend books to others. In some cases I have multiple copies so I can lend one out without missing the presence of the book on my shelves.

I pulled some books off my shelves to kick off the summer, today June 1. I know officially summer does not start until the 21st, but this morning it just felt like summer when Bubbles and I went out for our coffee.

I provide titles in the caption to the photo and then a short blurb about why the book came to mind with a link to where to buy it. (If you live near Philadelphia or Chicago, I can lend it to you!)

Part 2 coming next week!

 

From left to right, top row: The State of Working America, Poor Support, The Undeserving Poor, Murder the Truth, Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free, Elon Musk. From Left to right, second row: Regulating the Poor, Before Auschwitz, Origins of Totalitarianism, Blackdom, New Mexico, Number Go Up, The Caesars Palace Coup.

“The State of Working America, an ongoing analysis published since 1988 by EPI, includes a wide variety of data on family incomes, wages, jobs, unemployment, wealth, and poverty that allow for a clear, well-documented, and comprehensive understanding of the economy’s effect on the living standards of working Americans.” Find more info here.

The next book is one of several I read for a class called “The Politics of Welfare” at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy when I first started thinking about graduate degrees in the mid-90’s. (I finally got one from Univ. of Chicago in 2016.) From Kirkus Reviews:

POOR SUPPORT: Poverty in the American Family

by David T. Ellwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 1988

A sociological look, with policy implications, at the problem of welfare; by Ellwood (Public Policy/JFK School of Government, Harvard U.). In this incisive work, Ellwood admits the failures of the welfare state while looking to even more imaginative government panaceas to cure poverty in America. The crux of the problem, he insists, is that poverty is tied to our values and expectations. There is not one type of poor, but three: families in which adults are doing a good deal for themselves, those suffering temporary setbacks, and those who require long-term support. Currently, all three are treated basically the same by the welfare bureaucracy. Ellwood argues that support policies should mirror the tripartite breakdown, offering supplemental or transitional support, or ""jobs as a last resort.""

We are again hearing the term undeserving in reference to immigrants/asylum seekers, unhoused persons, and poor people who utilize Medicaid to pay for health care. This is not a new framing. Two more books we read in the class back in the mid-90’s at Harris School also explore that kind of policy and politics, The Undeserving Poor and Regulating the Poor.

The Undeserving Poor: America's Enduring Confrontation with Poverty: Fully Updated and Revised

Second Edition Michael B. Katz

First published in 1989, The Undeserving Poor was a critically acclaimed and enormously influential account of America's enduring debate about poverty. Taking stock of the last quarter century, Michael B. Katz's new edition of this classic is virtually a new book. As the first did, it will force all concerned Americans to reconsider the foundations of our policies toward the poor, especially in the wake of the Great Recession that began in 2008.

Katz highlights how throughout American history, the poor have been regarded as undeserving: people who do not deserve sympathy because they brought their poverty on themselves, either through laziness and immorality, or because they are culturally or mentally deficient. This long-dominant view sees poverty as a personal failure, serving to justify America's mean-spirited treatment of the poor. Katz reminds us, however, that there are other explanations of poverty besides personal failure. Poverty has been written about as a problem of place, of resources, of political economy, of power, and of market failure. Katz looks at each idea in turn, showing how they suggest more effective approaches to our struggle against poverty.

Here’s a paper that takes a look back at the Piven and Cloward book.

Seattle Journal for Social Justice Volume 10 Issue 2 Article 4 April 2012

Ritualizaed Degradation in the Twenty-First Centry: A Revisitation Ritualizaed Degradation in the Twenty-First Centry: A Revisitation of Piven and Cloward's Regulating the Poor

Avi Brisman

First published in 1971 with an updated edition in 1993, Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward’s Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, stands as a searing indictment of the welfare system in the United States and as a chilling account of socioeconomically oriented public policy preceding and following the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Society programs of the 1960s.1 (The 1971 book elaborates upon ideas regarding the functions of public welfare that the authors first presented in a series of articles published in The Nation; the 1993 edition adds two chapters to the original book that contemplate the period of the 1970s–1990s.) Today, Regulating the Poor serves as more of a historical account—in part because the categorical assistance program to which the authors devote significant attention, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), was replaced in 1996 with the non-entitlement Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program2—sometimes referred to as the “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families” program by recipients because of humiliating experiences with caseworkers.3

But given that the United States is currently mired in a recession and is headed towards a pivotal presidential reelection—two phenomena that affected relief giving in the past—it is worth revisiting this seminal text on the forty-first anniversary of its publication.4…

In the epilogue to the 1971 edition, Piven and Cloward reiterate their suspicion of work-enforcing arrangements, arguing that such measures simply perpetuate and trap the poor in a pattern of expansion and contraction of relief rolls depending on the extent of economic stability and threat of civil chaos. They call for reforms in economic policy that would lead to full employment at decent wages (although they are not particularly sanguine about fundamental reforms in economic policy). Piven and Cloward then make one of their boldest assertions—that “relief explosion”17 is true relief reform because a large number of unemployed and underemployed individuals obtain aid who might otherwise have been forced to subsist without jobs or income.18

Although the 1993 edition of Regulating the Poor omits the original epilogue, Piven and Cloward hold fast to the positions articulated in the 1971 edition. Chapter 11 of the newer version provides a lengthy account of the work-enforcing campaign that evolved in the aftermath of the welfare explosion of the 1960s (including welfare-to-work reforms, such as work incentive programs, workfare programs, job search programs, and education and training programs.)19 The authors explain this restrictive turn in relief policy and practices (while outlining the failures of workfare) and show how degraded welfare mothers took on the labor-regulating role once played by the old and infirm (discussed in chapter 1), entirely consistent with the historic uses of welfare to enforce market discipline.

I wrote my thesis for my masters degree at University of Chicago in 2016 on the parallels between the Nazi approach to rendering Jews stateless, as described in Hannah Arendt’s book Origins of Totalitarianism, and what happened to the refugees from the Mariel boatlift and the men detained after 9/11 at Guantanamo.

So, in addition to Arendt, I read a lot of books about the lead-up to the Nazi “final solution.” Before Auschwitz, as you can see in this photo, was read closely and lots of notes taken. This book can be read in conjunction with Arendt’s and also journalist Andrea Pitzer’s One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.

Here are some comments from Harvard University Press about Kim Wünschmann’s book.

Before Auschwitz

Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps

Kim Wünschmann

Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research

Auschwitz—the largest and most notorious of Hitler’s concentration camps—was founded in 1940, but the Nazis had been detaining Jews in camps ever since they came to power in 1933. Before Auschwitz unearths the little-known origins of the concentration camp system in the years before World War II and reveals the instrumental role of these extralegal detention sites in the development of Nazi policies toward Jews and in plans to create a racially pure Third Reich.

David Enrich at the New York Times is on a roll! I have all of his books and wrote quite a bit about Dark Towers.

Enrich’s latest, Murder the Truth, is fantastic.

I like to watch films and my dog Bubbles and I love all kinds. I often don’t see new hot films right away. I am too addicted to British crime dramas and Criterion Collection Channel old films! So, I weave in new films as the reviews and awards come in and I have a chance to really think about whether I will like the film or whether it’s just that everyone is supposed to like them.

That’s what happened with Barbie and Oppenheimer.

I watched Barbie a few weeks ago. I did not like it, despite having a fondness for Greta Gerwig as an actress and director.

I watched Oppenheimer last night.

Oppenheimer, the film, is based on the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Alfred A. Knopf). The theme in the film about Oppenheimer’s love for New Mexico reminded me of this book.

Blackdom, New Mexico

The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900–1930

by Timothy E. Nelson

Foreword by Herbert G. Ruffin II

Published by: Texas Tech University Press

Series: Grover E. Murray Studies in the American Southwest

Imprint: Texas Tech University Press

Blackdom, New Mexico, was a township that lasted about thirty years. In this book, Timothy E. Nelson situates the township’s story where it belongs: along the continuum of settlement in Mexico’s Northern Frontier. Dr. Nelson illuminates the set of conscious efforts that helped Black pioneers develop Blackdom Township into a frontier boomtown.

“Blackdom” started as an inherited idea of a nineteenth-century Afrotopia. The idea of creating a Blackdom was refined within Black institutions as part of the perpetual movement of Black Colonization. In 1903, thirteen Black men, encouraged by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, formed the Blackdom Townsite Company and set out to make Blackdom a real place in New Mexico, where they were outside the reach of Jim Crow laws.

Many believed that Blackdom was simply abandoned. However, new evidence shows that the scheme to build generational wealth continued to exist throughout the twentieth century in other forms. During Blackdom’s boomtimes, in December 1919, Blackdom Oil Company shifted town business from a regenerative agricultural community to a more extractive model. Nelson has uncovered new primary source materials that suggest for Blackdom a newly discovered third decade. This story has never been fully told or contextualized until now.

The book by Judge Jed Rakoff, Why The Innocent Plead Guilty and Why the Guilty Go Free, is great. He is an amazing guy, a public intellectual who also writes regularly for The New York Review of Books.

I have written about Judge Rakoff and his decisions many times and have the pleasure of his acquaintance.

McKenna does podcasts

Eyes on the SEC: Retaliations, a crypto caveat emptor, and revolving doors

Everyone recommends Number Go Up by Zeke Faux for a rollicking primer on crypto. I consider him a friend and had the pleasure of interviewing him in person early in his book tour. The book is evergreen, so if you haven’t read it yet, you must!

One of my brothers gave me the Walter Isaacson book on Musk, so I did not have to spend money on it. Maybe I will read it as prep later this summer for writing about when his number is finally up.

Finally, I was reminded of this great book, The Caesars Palace Coup, about what happened at Caesar’s Palace, written by Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap, when they shared their reminiscences of Brad Karp. Karp is a lawyer who has been in the news for leading one of the law firms that capitulated to the Trump administration.

Here’s a gift pdf of that Vanity Fair article by another favorite journalist, Bill Cohan.

“the Truth Turns Out To Be Ugly” How Paul, Weiss Tried To Thwart Reporting On The Caesars Palace Collapse Vanity Fair

4.66MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

I’ve also written about some shocking to me things Brad Karp said, before the news of his firm’s deal with Trump, at a conference after Trump’s inauguration..

© Francine McKenna, The Digging Company LLC, 2025