My year in reading, 2022

The Reader (La Liseuse), Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Hello! As my inbox tells me, I have many more subscribers today than I did a year ago, despite writing one post in the interim. My understanding is that this is due to Substack’s new recommendation features. That they recommend a largely dormant newsletter either means something is screwy on their end or that the good people at the Substack corporation know something I don’t. That being said, I am here to tell you what I read.

Some preamble: I read fewer books in 2022 than I have in any year since I started keeping records. The portion of these books that are fiction was miniscule, another record. I could blame the state of contemporary fiction, but I think the fault lies within.

Many men as they age seem to find themselves in the groves of either genre fiction or books about wars. I haven’t quite gone full Lee Child in my fiction choices yet, and the nonfiction retirement community where I am spending my dotage is more of an economics and Hollywood one, not a World War II one. Over here at Matthew Zeitlin’s Substack, we take a kind of a 1930s Marxist approach to the world, not necessarily in our conclusions, but in thinking that base (economics) are very important as is the tippy top of the suprestructure (the popular arts). Politics? Surely just something between those two. I think Gramsci said something similiar, but surely one of you my dear readers knows that topic much better than I do.

Anyway, here are the books I completed this year, with asterisks for ones I think were especially noteworthy or good.

Before the whole list, I wanted to call out one in particular: Public Citizens by Paul Sabin

Sabin’s book tells the story of the public interest law movement, the collection of lawyers, nonprofits, and activists who raised money from foundations in order to sue the government and intervene in the regulatory process. The key figure here is, of course, Ralph Nader, whose influence over American law and public policy has perhaps been overshadowed by his direct involvement in electoral politics.

What’s remarkable about this book is that Sabin shows just how novel this approach to political activism was. It required a set of concerns — largely, but not entirely, environmental — and a set of political mechanisms (activist, liberal courts that would grant standing to citizens concerned about environmental aesthetics; the Administrative Procedure Act, The National Environmental Policy Act) that are still relatively novelties in the long arc of American history but are just the playing field on which contemporary policymaking occurs to this day. Anytime you hear about a regulation or project failing to go into effect because of a federal court ruling, these are the fruits of the public interest legal movement.

And despite their claims of representing “the public,” the public interest law movement is unmistakably an elite project. Not just in its origins — namely, dollars provided by the Ford Foundations and organizations founded by the Princeton and Harvard educated Ralph Nader — but also in its conception of politics.

Heroic lawyers would represent the public but not be accountable to them, either in mass membership organizations or electorally. They would instead work within the regulatory and judicial systems to achieve their ends, seeing themselves as a kind of shadow government, criticizing and correcting the work done by elected official and appointees.

One program officer said that the role of the public interst law firms was “to bring suits against government agencies, to oversee the performance of government agencies and take other legal actions to provide the agencies with a broader view of social interests than they normally get.” One founder of a public interest law firm said “we operate entirely within the sociolegal structure. We don’t block traffic. We don’t sit in. We don’t riot.”

And when you look at who was staffing and funding these groups, the elite and intellectual outlook is not surprising. The head of the Ford Foundation at the time it started funding public interest law groups was McGeorge Bundy (google him), a third of Harvard Law School’s graduating class of 1970 applied to work for Nader. Many of the early leaders and funders of these organizations were Rockefeller Republicans, perfectly interested in progressive policy and reform, but completely disinterested — and sometime even opposed — to broad or disruptive social movements.

They were also intellectuals, often inspired by Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Yale Law School professor and author of The Greening of America Charles Reich. This meant extreme skepticism, if not outright opposition to, the New Deal state. “We were, by nature, skeptical of all of the big Roosevelt-era public works projects. We didn’t like big dams, we didn’t like big power plants, we didn’t like big transmission lines,” Sabin quotes one environmental lawyer as saying.

One of the movement’s earliest victories was in the Hudson River Valley, where it managed to use the judicial process to gum up and ultimately stop the local utility from building a pumped hyrdo dam on Storm King mountain.

Today, of course, the environmental movement and its political allies are conflicted over precisely these types of projects, big infrastructure necessary to create a low carbon energy system across the country.

The Storm King dam, had it been built, would have been a source of dispatchable, carbon-free power for lower New York State, which today relies largely on gas (a situation that’s been exacerbated by another victory of environmental activists in the Hudson River Valley, shutting down the Indian Point nuclear power plant).

An effort to reform the permitting process for energy projects (and waive through some fossil fuel projects), got some support from Democratic lawmakers and the White House, but was firmly opposed by many of the brand name environmental groups and their closest allies in Congress. If you ask any nearly environmental leader or activist today about whether it’s important to build new energy infrastructure, they will say yes, but the movement itself is built to say no. Sabin’s book tells us why.

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Here’s everything else I completed this year.

Happy New Year and thank you for reading.

The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James*
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton*
The Free World, Louis Menand*
The Collaborator, Alice Kaplan*
Portrait of a Novel, Michael Gorra
Disorder, Helen Thompson
The Governesses, Anne Serre
Fuccboi, Sean Thor Conroe
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino*
The Player, Michael Tolkin
Black Wings Has My Angel, Elliott Chaze*
Major Labels, Kalefa Sanneh*
Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer
Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die, Thomas Gallagher
The Palace Papers, Tina Brown*
House of Gucci, Sara Gay Forden
Anna, Amy Odell
The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
The Six, Laura Thompson
The Last Mughal, William Dalrymple
Contested Will, James Shapiro*
The Bet, Paul Sabin*
The Assasination of New York, Robert Fitch
Last Resort, Andrew Lipstein*
Beautiful Animals, Lawrence Osborne*
The Next Shift, Gabriel Winant*
Rap Capital, Joe Coscarelli*
Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis*
The Devil’s Candy, Julie Salamon*
Heat 2, Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner*