Inventory day at The Fingers Reading Room

An incredibly detailed and remarkably readable history of one of the worst motherfuckers in American politics. In what you will notice as a theme of this edition of the boozeletter, this 2008 tome contains many lessons and parallels to the thick malaise that’s currently suffocating the American experiment.

As I wrote in an August 2025 Boozeletter Book Review, this 2025 book “lays out, in painful detail, how even before Trump’s reelection, American unions’ leaders had failed to organize new members with the urgency that their collective decline demands […] Nolan is of the labor movement, but you don’t have to be to appreciate The Hammer’s thesis these days. All you have to do is read the news.”

One of the most successful business books of all time is also one of the most astonishing feats of business reporting of all time—quite a rarity. Published in 1989 by a pair of reporters from The Wall Street Journal, it’s an astonishing window into corporate excess, financial engineering, and human greed.

An approachable, illuminating history of the original Luddite movement of 19th-century England, about which you have almost certainly been misled. Released in 2025, it’s depressingly relevant in this American moment of unprecedented wealth inequality and generative artificial intelligence “innovation.” Workers have been fighting against the use of technology to redistribute wealth upward for centuries, and still very much are.

An engrossing 2019 biography of a quintessentially American hustler who hailed from the city of my birth (Bridgeport, Connecticut stand UP!) Barnum’s showmanship is legendary, but I hadn’t previously realized how much it flowed from his generational talent for media manipulation. He became one of most globally known people of his age by constantly lying about himself in the newspapers. Glad they learned their lesson and stopped letting rich people do that!

As I wrote in a Boozeletter Book Review in November 2025, this 1992 title is “a detailed, juicy, not-totally unsympathetic look at the how the sausage got made in a simpler (albeit still pretty complicated and cynical) era in the nation’s swamp. The Capitol-steps influence-peddling of three decades past pales in comparison to the hustling in/around the utterly craven and captured Congress of today, of course. But if you want to understand how we got here, you’d do well to start there.”

As I wrote in a Boozeletter Book Review in April 2025, this 2019 book “is strongest when matching moments of mainstream American progress up with the advances they triggered in the fast-food industry—the development of food safety protocols, interstate highways, television advertising, and so forth [but] wants for deeper scrutiny on the human costs of running these highly atomized caloric assembly lines.”

This is not a book for casual beer enthusiasts; hell, it was barely a book for me as a journeyman beer journalist. The business tract, published in 1948, is not written to be read so much as referenced, but it’s enormously detailed on the 19th/early 20th-century rise of Milwaukee’s beloved Blue Ribbon brewery, and helps substantiate the many myths of “Captain Frederick,” one of America’s greatest and most colorful beer barons.

As I wrote to introduce a November 2025 interview with the author on The Fingers Podcast, this rigorously researched 2024 release lays out how the beverage-alcohol indnustry’s “post-Repeal redemption was a hard-fought battle that took many years of work and many, many marketing dollars, all focused on convincing policymakers, public-health officials, and the American drinking public itself that drinking […] could, and would, be done ‘in moderation.’”