Books As Therapy

A guide to the enchanting, the enriching, and the inspiring. Books as a cure for:

[booksastherapy]

What’s The Matter With Kansas? — Thomas Frank

“For decades, Americans have experienced a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting.... The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistibly against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. They are laughing at the dainty affectations of the Leawoof toffs. They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. 'We are here,' they scream, 'to cut your taxes.”

[booksastherapy]

The Autobiography of Malcolm X — Malcolm X

“I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.”

[booksastherapy]

Eichmann in Jeruaslem: A Report on the Banality of Evil — Hannah Arendt

“For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.” 

[booksastherapy]

Between The World And Me — Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of ‘personal responsibility’ in a country authored and sustained by a criminal responsibility. The point of this language of ‘intention’ and ‘personal responsibility’ is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”

[booksastherapy]

Manufacturing Consent — Noam Chomsky

“The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.”

[booksastherapy]

The Making of Donald Trump — David Cay Johnston

“Trump spent two years suing author Tim O’Brien and his publisher for writing that his net worth was probably not in the billions, but rather the hundreds of millions. After a court dismissed the case, Trump made it clear that he merely wanted to harass O’Brien, not necessarily win damages. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about,” Trump bragged. It was a comment that fit cozily within his philosophy of revenge.”

[booksastherapy]

The Reactionary Mind — Corey Robin

“As Karl Mannheim argued, what distinguishes conservatism from traditionalism—the universal “vegetative” tendency to remain attached to things as they are, which is manifested in nonpolitical behaviors such as a refusal to buy a new pair of pants until the current pair is shredded beyond repair—is that conservatism is a deliberate, conscious effort to preserve or recall those forms of experience which can no longer be had in an authentic way. Conservatism becomes conscious and reflective when other ways of life and thought appear on the scene, against which it is compelled to take up arms in the ideological struggle.” 

[booksastherapy]

The Muslims Are Coming! — Arun Kundan

“Totalitarian rule thrives on its subjects’ ignorance of the extent to which the surveillance system is monitoring their lives. The possibility, rather than the fact, of surveillance is enough to generate fear, anxiety, and informal pressures to conform, to downplay dissenting opinions, to declare one’s absolute loyalty. Thus an enforced culture of self-censorship emerges in communities that used to express their political opinions freely.”

[booksastherapy]

Evicted — Matthew Desmond

“Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.” Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.”

[booksastherapy]

The New Jim Crow — Michelle Alexander

“The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.”

[booksastherapy]

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle — Angela Y. Davis

“But there’s a message there for everyone and it is that people can unite, that democracy from below can challenge oligarchy, that imprisoned migrants can be freed, that fascism can be overcome, and that equality is emancipatory.”

[booksastherapy]

Rules for Radicals — Saul D. Alinasky

“Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.”

[booksastherapy]

Necessary Trouble — Sarah Jaffe

“Most importantly, today's activists have discovered the power of making trouble, of causing disruptions. Disrupting things is the best way for regular people to exercise some power. It isn't about winning everyone over to one's side; it is, instead, about finding a way to disrupt the day-to-day existence of those who do have power, to make them feel the crisis that they have inflected on millions of people. Disruption, whether it be blocking a street, going on strike, or occupying a space, is a way to ensure that the message - that something has got to give - gets across.”

[booksastherapy]

The Disposessed — Ursula K. Le Guin 

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.” 

[booksastherapy]

The Grapes of Wrath  — John Steinbeck  

“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history.”

[booksastherapy]

Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.” 

[booksastherapy]

Native Son — Richard Wright

“Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.”