April Reading List

Here’s my list of books read in April. Last month list is here and you can follow other months back from there. This goes out to my book patron, known as PS, who sends me books that make up a good portion of the fiction list.

PROFESSIONAL READING:

1. Ryanne Pilgeram, Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West (University of Washington Press, 2021). A fantastic and deeply nuanced study of Dover, Idaho, a small town on Lake Pend Oreille and the ways resentment develops as the needs of capitalism change and the working class is left behind. Notably good for helping readers understand that this resentment isn’t primarily against environmentalists or even against “liberals” broadly defined, but really is about nostalgia for a world past without any real hope for a better one. Focusing on the politics around a lakefront housing development, Pilegram, who now works for the Wilderness Society, demonstrates why coalitions against newer and older residents are very hard to create. They are speaking different languages and coming to such questions with entirely different frames of references that are much about about whether they are resigned to the hopelessness of change rather than politics. I do have to say though–Pilegram goes into the stupidest convention in all of academia, which is how sociologists are required to change the names of who they talk to, or even at times, the name of the place. Pilegram notes that the people she interviewed wanted to be identified by name but she could not because of these conventions and her need to publish as an assistant professor (at the time). I mean, c’mon now sociologists, change your silly conventions. I’m glad Pilegram slightly skewered them.
2. Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Here’s an interesting question–why don’t we think of Canada more often as U.S. historians? Like, it just is kind of there. But Adjetey takes it very seriously, noting that you can’t have a discussion of Pan-African North America in the 20th century without centering Canada, which has always served as an object lesson of possibility for Black North Americans and Caribbeans. Very good book on this issue, I learned so much.
3. Marilyn J. Westerkamp, The Passion of Anne Hutchinson: An Extraordinary Woman, the Puritan Patriarchs, & The World They Made and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2021). I don’t read much in early colonial history, but I found this feminist discussion of Hutchinson and the complete jerks who ran Puritan Massachusetts and who loathed her so much and couldn’t stop talking about her long after she was dead to be really useful to gain better context on just why they hated her so much.
4. Bartow Elmore, Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Elmore is perhaps the top historian working right now connecting the history of capitalism and environmental hsitory, primarily working on southern-based companies. This short book summarizes much of his previous work and adds a bit more, thinking about how the ways in which southern companies such as Delta and Walmart rose to prominence make it particularly difficult for them to deal with their outsized environmental impact today.
5. Martin Melosi, Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City (Columbia University Press, 2020). I will say this–you will never need another book on the Fresh Kills landfill again. Melosi has long been a leading urban environmental historian. This book provides plenty of detail–and I mean an overwhelming about of detail–about Fresh Kills, Staten Island politics and resentment, and the difficulties of a city such as New York managing its waste. For a very particular kind of reader, this will be an invaluable resource. For other reasons, it’s going to be an awful lot. The book is however potentially useful if you need to crush someone’s skull with an enormously heavy object. Assuming you have the strength to wield it as such.
6. Patrick Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). Another extremely detailed and long book, this time on the politics around the creation of the Vietnam Memorial in DC, all the complications around that (Ross Perot was such a vile asshole), and then the creation of local memorials around the country. A good book, again, very useful for those really interested in this issue.
7. Andrew McKevitt, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Funny story here–I assigned this excellent book to my graduate seminar. Meanwhile, I was driving back from Montreal and the lines at immigration were long. So I pulled out this and started reading it. That led a Canadian official to bang on my car and ask if I had brought guns into his country. I said, “no, I’m just a teacher see and I assigned this book to my students, etc.” It did not help and I got the full car search. This is what happens when you read history books in public. Anyway. McKevitt’s book does a great job of exploring the connections between consumer culture and the rise of guns in America, tracing the real rise to the importation of super cheap guns after World War II. He also usefully notes that the myth that the NRA was really a moderate organization until the loathsome racist murderer Harlan Carter took it over in the 70s really wasn’t true. It was almost always a pretty bad org and the outlier was the moderation in the early 70s. Another really good exploration here was the ineptitude of gun control organizations to figure out what they were about as the gun lobby became more radicalized. Just a very solid book overall.
8. Jaime Pensado, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture during the Long Sixties (Stanford University Press, 2013). This important addition to not only Mexican history but the history of student movements internationally demonstrates that the movement leading up to the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968 was not always or even inherently political and in many ways began in the 50s as a kind of general and often playful rebellion around the stultifying rules of the state. It was really only after the Cuban Revolution and the rise of rock and roll (soon repressed by the PRI) that it became politicized and of course was the greatest challenge to the Mexican state since the end of the Revolution.
9. Willa Hammatt Brown, Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). I’m reviewing this for a real publication, so can’t say too much here right now, but in brief this is a very solid and quite well written work about the real life of the Great Lakes lumberjack versus the Paul Bunyan memory, which has largely served corporate interests to create a mythology to generate tourism and avoid any real reckoning with the violence and environmental degradation at the heart of timber capitalism.
10. Christopher Hayes, The Harlem Uprising: Segregation and Inequality in Postwar New York City (Columbia University Press, 2021). Everything you will ever need to know about the 1964 Harlem riots and the structural racism that created the conditions for such an event.

FICTION/LITERARY NON FICTON–a bit light this month because I am in the middle of a few very long books

1. Tom Adelman, The Long Ball: The Summer of ’75—Spaceman, Catfish, Charlie Hustle, and the Greatest World Series Ever Played. Why not start the baseball season with one of the greatest baseball books ever written? It mostly holds up to its reputation too. The 75 season is of course a famous one, with the epic Reds-Red Sox world series that was the first title for the Big Red Machine and another symbol of the Sox just never getting it done. Adelman is a fantastic writer and he really lays out the characters, with plenty of describing things that happened that are obviously imagined in terms of feelings and emotions that make for a great book. Given the number of books on baseball in the 70s and these two teams specifically, he didn’t have to make too much up though. I guess some of the nods to later players who were watching baseball in 75 might be a bit stretched–sure, Dwight Gooden was watching the series, but he was probably watching in 74 and 76 too. Whatever. Rose, Morgan, Fisk, Yaz, Bill Lee, Tiant, Sparky Anderson, these guys are total gold. Two favorite bits. One is Bowie Kuhn bemoaning the potential of player free agency by comparing it to end of slavery–two things he thought were very bad! The second is Lee taking the heat of one of the guys for screwing up in a game by launching into a postgame tirade about how racist Boston was, figuring he could handle the hate where others guys couldn’t. The recreation of Anderson’s inner monologues were also great. Fun book. Better than my fantasy teams at least.
2. Esther Kinsky, Rombo. In 1976, two big earthquakes crushed northeastern Italy, near the Yugoslavian border. Kinsky, who is German but also works as a translator, imagines a group of young people in one town that is heavily affected but not destroyed. No one dies from the quake. But Rombo, which is an Italian term for the rumble that comes before the shaking, combines narratives of survivors, geology, and folklore to help readers understand that an earthquake is not just a fracturing of the Earth, but a fracturing of lives, of memories, and of cultures. An interesting and worthy novel, if not exactly a beach read.
3. Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You. Rooney’s Normal People affected me in a way few novels do. I was genuinely moved by its discussions of self-hatred and how one attempts to forge a life and relationship in a world so fucked up as this one. Rooney’s follow-up is slightly less successful for me, which means it’s merely a quite good novel rather than completely life changing. This follows four people in their early to mid 30s–none of whom are happy with their lives. Two are long-time friends, two are romantic interests of these two friends, one a slightly older man who is a bit of a playboy who the woman has known since she was a kid and the other a local guy. The book, whose title represents its thesis quite well, is about being in your early 30s, realizing you aren’t going to change the world, the world fucking sucks, disaster is all around us, we want to believe that politics can change it, but we have no idea how to do that in a meaningful way. Plus the lack of love and happiness and all your neuroses defining your life as much as when you were 18. If there’s a problem here, it’s that one of the characters is the very successful Rooney, minus the fact that the real life Rooney been with the same guy for a long time and has what is evidently a totally stable home life. What this means is that one of the women complaining about life is a millionaire author called the voice of a generation and also someone lots of people hate for that success. It’s not that this is not a legitimate position, but it makes it kind of hard to care about the character, even as Rooney creates her (whether this reflects herself I have no idea, nor does it matter) as difficult and very hard for people to relate to, whether men or women, and probably a terrible friend. This also opens up room to talk about The State of the 21st Century Novel, which is a subject that never plays well in fiction. But look, it’s still a pretty compelling book by a generational talent who I love very much and I will totally re-read this book.
4. Elisa Shua Dusapin, Winter in Sokcho. This weird but wonderful little book is about a half-Korean, half-French woman (as is the author) living in the small town of Sokcho, on the coast near the North Korean border. This young woman has a lot of problems, beginning with eating disorders and a lot of self-hatred. Yet she is also fiercely independent. Then a French comic artist comes to town looking for inspiration and she takes him around a bit. In worse hands, this would turn into some kind of trite love story, but that’s not what happens here, or not really. Evidently, there’s a French film adaptation of this, which I want to see primarily to see how they pulled it off, because this seems like an unfilmable novel unless they play with the ending to make it that love story that I hope it does not do. The actually ending is exceptionally ambiguous and has at least in part to do with eating the notoriously dangerous blowfish, which our character has never actually prepared before, though her mother is the one person in town with a license to do so. Odd, compelling, read it in 2 hours on the couch.
5. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Key. I’ve read this classic novel of Japanese perversion published in 1956, which must have led to quite a scandal, a few times over the years. Of course Tanizaki was a legend of Japanese literature before this, so he could handle it. The story is of two diaries, one from a husband and one from a wife. They have disastrous sexual relationship, even though they both really like sex. So through various manipulations that let’s say would not survive in the MeToo era, they both open up, sort of, through a third party, who happens to be their daughter’s boyfriend. This became a big international hit at a moment when western culture was also coming out of its repressed shell. I still think the ending of the novel is kind of disastrous, as it more or less is the woman just repeating the novel’s themes again in case anyone didn’t understand them. But I certainly appreciate what this book is doing in this time and place.
6. Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars. I was curious, and perhaps a bit skeptical, about Orange following his fantastic debut There There by taking one family of the characters and tracing both their ancestors and then the aftermath of one of them getting shot. Reading interviews, it sounds like Orange himself was skeptical, thinking people would see it as a lazy gimmick. Well, it’s not. Among other things, this is the best novel on addiction I’ve ever read. The appeals of addiction are real and whether Orange speaks from experience or just research, he really nailed what drugs do for people. I probably do hope he moves on from these stories for his next novel, but I have full confidence that I will read what’s next, no matter the subject matter.