Three books about one thing

Since moving to Brighton in September, my commute has changed drastically.  I live on the B-Line and work in Downtown Crossing.  Therefore,  my ride into the city is one long straight shot.  This has also drastically changed my reading habits.  Before I would take a bus to Davis and grab a Metro before catching the train.  Riding a speedy Red Line train to Park Street, I only had time for the quick paper.  But now, I have forty minutes on one vehicle.  So now, having moved and placed my books on a shelf, I can tilt one back, stuff it in my bag and ride through pages on my ride to work.

Having started right away, I've read three books so far, and am reading a forth--when I'm not reading news on my phone.  They were: Chinese in America: A Narrative History, Eating Animals, Obamanomics: How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics, and currently Future Shock.

What struck me with all three of these books (more on the fourth later), was that, despite their ostensibly disparate topics, they're all books about capitalism and its relationship with cynicism.  By this I mean not just the cynicism of the corporations or governments in power, but the cynicism of the presumed powerless.  They're are so presumed, again not just by the powerful, but by much more damagingly, by themselves.  These books attempt to rectify that by shedding light on they ways the public can affect social change in large and small ways.  These books mean to empower the reader.

Let me get more specific.

( Specificity... )