In Way Down Deep..., Douglas Fetherling calls Toronto of the 1970s “the world’s most cosmopolitan and least sophisticated city” and unfortunately it still feels witheringly accurate today.
The Hammer and Offshore make for a bracing, though somewhat depressing, pairing. The decline of unionized labour and the rise of the (latest) plutocrat class are obviously linked in the abstract, but both of these books zoom in to the human-level dynamics — how people actually organize their workplaces now (or fail to), and how wealth managers actually conceal the tidal flows of capital that slosh around the globe from one tax haven to the next. They’re also both satisfyingly lean, cutting to the chase to make their arguments and not outstaying their welcome.
Brooke Harrington also makes a point about “New Colonialism” in Offshore that seems obvious once she points it out: it’s not a coincidence that so many of these tiny island tax havens around the world are former British colonies. While the UK’s formal colonial structure crumbled or withdrew from these far-flung holdings, many imperial institutions seamlessly continued their function of covertly channeling the world’s wealth, largely still to the benefit of London, but now in service of the City instead of the Crown.
The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman is a powerful mix of memoir and criticism, but the essay that’s really stuck with me is the one about Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.” Positioned mid-point in the book, it describes a moment of extreme emotional darkness that becomes the turning point toward something better, encapsulated by Bruce’s snarl into the mirror: “wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face.” I’d never really heard the depth of anguish packed into that line, or its corresponding potential for transformational change. Having read this book, I'll never hear that song the same way again (complimentary).