Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing America

Abstract

ascriptive groups’’ (p. 143). This insight is, however, dismissed alongside the significance of the racial wealth gap to U.S.-style capitalism. Chapter Three does acknowledge the deep-seated role of world systems and global corporations in reproducing abject poverty. However, perhaps due to its focus on breadth over depth, it presents such ongoing global struggles over systems of political economy and power dynamics as somewhat flattened rather than complex, racialized, deeply contested, and historically rooted. Moreover, it does not thoroughly examine how transformations in the United States toward this system might occur. Perhaps these are merely tasks for another book. Yet it would have been pertinent, in the conclusion at the very least, to consider how global and local political and economic conditions shape the challenges and opportunities faced by democratic socialist (or even democratic socialist capitalist) movements and political projects, particularly outside of this small region of Europe. These issues aside, the book is vital for public and scholarly debate about systems of political economy and support for advocates of socioeconomic progress and equality. It provides essential empirical data and argumentation that establish the benefits of a general move toward social democracy and presents policy insights to help ameliorate the multiplied crises of our current quasi-oligarchic political systems and the immiseration brought on by extreme neoliberal capitalism. Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing America, by Stephen L. Klineberg. New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020. 336 pp. $28.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781501177910.