Occupy the Shelf

It has been a year and a half since the Occupy movement first emerged, adding the concepts of “the 99 percent” and “the one percent” to the public consciousness and getting large segments of the North American population talking and thinking about economic inequality for the first time in decades. Nor is Occupy dead. Since the eviction of the encampments, for example, Occupy Sandy has done commendable relief work in response to the super storm that rattled the Atlantic coast, and an Occupy offshoot called “Rolling Jubilee” is buying distressed debt from financial institutions for pennies on the dollar and then cancelling that debt.

Given that Occupy is in a period of permutation and experimentation, the release of a shelf’s worth of books on the movement is welcome. This list includes Judy Rebick’s Occupy This and Kalle Lasn’s Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics but also many others: The Occupy Handbook, a...