‘Capitalism: A Global History’ by Sven Beckert and ‘American Canto’ by Olivia Nuzzi

‘Capitalism: A Global History’ by Sven Beckert

“Any book about capitalism that begins almost 900 years ago in the port city of Aden, in what is now Yemen, promises a new story,” said Marcus Rediker in The New York Times. Harvard historian Sven Beckert’s “vivid” new 1,300- page survey “delivers on that promise,” challenging earlier histories that have treated the singularly omnivorous and fecund economic system as primarily a European invention. Beckert gives the definition of capitalism as “a process in which economic life is fundamentally driven by the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital,” and his global view of the phenomenon “reveals its protean character.” Not everyone will accept his analysis, but for decades to come, “readers will study this monumental work of history, agreeing and arguing with it, all the while affirming its generational importance.”

Although Capitalism “occasionally lapses into a textbook tone,” said Hamilton Cain in The Boston Globe, “each chapter offers an abundance of characters and arguments.” Beckert presents 12th-century Aden as a hot spot of trade that was one of many in a network that for centuries supported a kind of proto-capitalism spread thinly around the globe. In those years, Asia and the Islamic caliphate dominated, but Europe embraced capitalism when the continent’s feudal system collapsed, and capitalism supported by the muscle of the state soon showed its appetite for exploiting the labor and resources of distant lands. By the 18th century, the British had turned Barbados into a model of the economy capitalists aspired to build, at least according to Beckert’s dark view. Because markets had become the sole arbiter of human affairs, tens of thousands of African slaves worked the island’s plantations, funneling profits to just 74 landowners.

Because Beckert’s definition of capitalism is so elastic, said Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker, “the suspicion grows that we’ve been sold a story without a subject.” Or worse, he’s made capitalism synonymous with humans’ acquisitive instinct, a definition broad enough for him to blame capitalism for all the world’s evils, from racism and sexism to insomnia and frustrating dating apps. The idea that capitalism’s advance is driven by wealthy actors’ desire to increase their capital also doesn’t jibe with the reality we all see, said John Kay in the Financial Times. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos made their fortunes by innovating, not by exploiting wealth they already held. But Beckert doesn’t have to be 100% right to have performed a valuable service. “Read this book and you will learn innumerable things you did not previously know,” and while some readers may complain that Capitalism spreads too wide a net, “others, including me, will be genuinely grateful for exposure to this breadth of scholarship.

‘American Canto’ by Olivia Nuzzi

Olivia Nuzzi’s new memoir could have launched a career comeback, said Scaachi Koul in Slate. Instead, “historians will study how bad this book is.” It’s “illegible in ways you can’t imagine.” Nuzzi, 32, was a star political reporter until last year, when allegations arose that she’d had an affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after profiling the then 69-year-old politician during his campaign for president. But her much-hyped book turns out to be 300 pages of rambling that offer no insight on herself or Kennedy, who’s now the nation’s vaccine-killing secretary of health and human services. While Nuzzi does declare that an affair of a sort did occur, despite Kennedy’s denial, details are scant. In fact, American Canto is “mostly about how compelling Nuzzi thinks it is to be a blond white woman in journalism.”

The book isn’t uniformly terrible, said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. While at New York magazine, Nuzzi became a star because she wrote with flair, and about a third of her stream-of-consciousness account consists of “piquantly observed” political vignettes, including many about President Trump. But large swaths of American Canto are “aggressively awful,” featuring “ostentatiously mannered” prose that reads like a poor Joan Didion imitation. Gratingly, she refers to Kennedy only as “the Politician.” And while she devotes plenty of space to musings about the California wildfires she witnessed after New York cut ties with her, “the gossip that is ostensibly this book’s chief selling point is scarcely in evidence.”

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“At its best, American Canto is about a crack-up,” said Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. Trump, Kennedy, and other MAGA luminaries regularly abuse the truth, and any of us forced to spend as much time with them as Nuzzi has, “might end up severed from reality.” I briefly felt for Nuzzi’s ex-fiancé, fellow journalist Ryan Lizza, when he alleged in a recent series of Substack posts that Nuzzi had cheated on him earlier with Mark Sanford, another failed presidential candidate. Still, none of Nuzzi’s own bids for sympathy can disguise “the central problem with American Canto: It contains “no real, believable regret,” even when Nuzzi admits that Kennedy badly used her.