Simon & Schuster Audio

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

Filed Under: Books Read

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

by Jeffery Toobin
Published by Simon & Schuster Audio on May 2, 2023
Format: audiobook
Genres: Nonfiction, 20th Century U.S. History, Politics & Social Sciences, Domestic Politics, Nationalism, True Crime


Synopsis

Timothy McVeigh wanted to start a movement.

Speaking to his lawyers days after the Oklahoma City bombing, the Gulf War veteran expressed no regrets: killing 168 people was his patriotic duty. He cited the Declaration of Independence from memory: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” He had obsessively followed the siege of Waco and seethed at the imposition of President Bill Clinton’s assault weapons ban. A self-proclaimed white separatist, he abhorred immigration and wanted women to return to traditional roles. As he watched the industrial decline of his native Buffalo, McVeigh longed for when America was great.

New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin traces the dramatic history and profound legacy of Timothy McVeigh, who once declared, “I believe there is an army out there, ready to rise up, even though I never found it.” But that doesn’t mean his army wasn’t there. With news-breaking reportage, Toobin details how McVeigh’s principles and tactics have flourished in the decades since his death in 2001, reaching an apotheosis on January 6 when hundreds of rioters stormed the Capitol. Based on nearly a million previously unreleased tapes, photographs, and documents, including detailed communications between McVeigh and his lawyers, as well as interviews with such key figures as Bill Clinton, Homegrown reveals how the story of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing is not only a powerful retelling of one of the great outrages of our time, but a warning for our future.

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America

Filed Under: Books Read

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America by Christopher Leonard
Published by Simon & Schuster Audio on August 13, 2019
Format: audiobook
Genres: corporate oligarchs, Journalism, Nonfiction
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

Shortlisted for the 2019 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award

“Superb…Among the best books ever written about an American corporation.” —Bryan Burrough, The New York Times Book Review

Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.

The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and US Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch brothers have wanted it that way.

For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He’s a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates.

But there’s another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book.

Seven years in the making, Kochland “is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections, and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard’s work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time” (Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Private Empire).

I would have never sat down and read this book. It is definitely something that you listen to while doing something else. That said.

I am of the firm conviction that you do not become wealthy by being an honest person. Kochland proves this through and through. Koch, modern-day robber baron, has little or no regard for society other than to have it function to his advantage. I was mainly put off by the Koch handling of the drivers in the Georgia Pacific warehouse; I found that inhuman.
I thought the author fairly even-handed in the portrayal of the Koch’s. I do not understand the mentality that people like Koch have, such an overbearing need to force their particular view upon the world. I am convinced that Koch Industries, like Mobil/Exxon, are evil.

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

Filed Under: Books Read

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks
Published by Simon & Schuster Audio on August 9th 2016
Format: audiobook
See it @ Goodreads


Synopsis

The first serious book to examine what happens when the ancient boundary between war and peace is erased.

Once, war was a temporary state of affairs—a violent but brief interlude between times of peace. Today, America’s wars are everywhere and forever: our enemies change constantly and rarely wear uniforms, and virtually anything can become a weapon. As war expands, so does the role of the US military. Today, military personnel don’t just “kill people and break stuff.” Instead, they analyze computer code, train Afghan judges, build Ebola isolation wards, eavesdrop on electronic communications, develop soap operas, and patrol for pirates. You name it, the military does it.

Rosa Brooks traces this seismic shift in how America wages war from an unconventional perspective—that of a former top Pentagon official who is the daughter of two anti-war protesters and a human rights activist married to an Army Green Beret. Her experiences lead her to an urgent warning: When the boundaries around war disappear, we risk destroying America’s founding values and the laws and institutions we’ve built—and undermining the international rules and organizations that keep our world from sliding towards chaos. If Russia and China have recently grown bolder in their foreign adventures, it’s no accident; US precedents have paved the way for the increasingly unconstrained use of military power by states around the globe. Meanwhile, we continue to pile new tasks onto the military, making it increasingly ill-prepared for the threats America will face in the years to come.

By turns a memoir, a work of journalism, a scholarly exploration into history, anthropology and law, and a rallying cry, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything transforms the familiar into the alien, showing us that the culture we inhabit is reshaping us in ways we may suspect, but don’t really understand. It’s the kind of book that will leave you moved, astonished, and profoundly disturbed, for the world around us is quietly changing beyond recognition—and time is running out to make things right.

I found Rosa Brooks via David Rothkopf’s Deep State Podcast. As a neophyte to foreign policy, listening to the podcast has been a learning experience. I downloaded the book from Audible as I thought it might be easier to digest it by listening (and it was, at least for me it was).

Rosa Brooks is the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and, a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine. From April 2009 to July 2011, Brooks served as counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for policy, Michele Flournoy. She is the mother of two girls and married to an Army Special Forces officer.

Her book basically talks about how the military has taken over many of the responsibilities (by which I believe she means both government and private institutions) that deal with solving global problems. I first saw this in Afghanistan when the military started building projects and assisting tribal leaders in getting money from the local government for these projects.

Her time in the Pentagon has given her insights that are amazing, she displays a level of honesty that is very compelling making this book a very thought-provoking read.