Desire and Fate

No serious opposition is possible without a movement that disentangles left from woke. In strengthening such a movement, Rieff’s book will prove a valuable tool. – Susan Neiman * The New York Review of Books *
David Rieff’s Desire and Fate is the most important study of the woke mind I know. Subtle and profound, forensically analytical and sharply aphoristic, it is all the more devastating because it is not a mere polemic. With incisive wit and lightly worn erudition, Rieff shows how woke is not the oppositional movement it claims to be but an expression of the dominant forces in society and the economy. Ranging across the role of identity politics as the latest version of capitalist ideology, the commodification of dissent, the meaning of kitsch and the triumph of the idea of trauma, Desire and Fate illuminates the true sources of the intellectual disorder of our time. – John Gray, author of The New Leviathans
Praise for Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir:

An eloquent record of grief – New York Review of Books * Diane Johnson and John F. Murray *
Further praise for Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir

[Characterized by] unflinching honesty – Julia Neuberger * Jewish Chronicle *
Praise for In Praise of Forgetting:

Painfully relevant […] [a] rich book – New York Times * Gary K. Bass *
Further praise for In Praise of Forgetting:

Important and thought-provoking – Christopher Kissane * Irish Times *
A wide-ranging, unpredictable, intensely thought-provoking and mordantly witty indictment of our current tendencies towards cultural suicide and capitalism’s role in them. A must-read. – David A. Bell
A dazzling, ferocious, and funny attack on the prevailing conformism of the academic-cultural-philanthropic complex. – Michael Ignatieff
This book is a rare, breathtaking instance of an exquisite moral imagination in full flight. – Lee Siegel * The New Statesman *

David Rieff (Author)

David Rieff is a journalist, cultural critic, essayist, and policy analyst. Beginning in the 1990s, he has reported on wars and humanitarian crises from Bosnia through Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Israel-Palestine, and Iraq and Afghanistan, to Ukraine today. In books including Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, and The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice and Money in the 21st Century, Rieff anatomized the liberal pieties of our age: humanitarian action, the human rights movement, and the United Nations system. He has also written on international migration, contemporary Latin America, and, most recently, on the uses and abuses of historical memory in his book In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.