June Reading List

Here’s my list of books read in May. Last month’s list is here. You can follow previous months 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. Your generosity is beyond appreciated.

PROFESSIONAL READING:

1. Lorenzo Costaguta, Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism (University of Illinois Press, 2023). A detailed examination of how the Socialist Labor Party worked through racial questions in the late 19th century. Because socialism was seen as scientific at the time and because racism was seen as scientific at the tine, there were plenty of socialists who easily succumbed to racism by using their scientific principles. But Costaguta shows how the SLP evolved on the issue, though it’s not as much as in functional policy as he would like us to think.
2. Edward B. Foley, Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States Rev. ed. (Oxford University Press, 2024). This book is actually 10 years old or so in its original edition, but after January 6, Foley realized he needed to rewrite it and so he did. It’s a pretty good compendium on the topic and it really drives home just how poorly most of the country has handled disputed elections through its history, making what Trump did seem like less of an aberration and more of a surprise this hadn’t happened before. Interestingly, one of the elections that really comes under scrutiny by Foley is the 2004 Washington governor election, where Christine Gregoire defeated Dino Rossi by a thread and he does not think the state handled that one well. But really, these go back to the first elections at the state level in the republic. So it’s more than a bit sobering. Good resource if you have reason to occasionally need to explore the topic of disputed elections in American history.
3. Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (Knopf, 2023). I chuckled a bit when writing this because what I didn’t like this history how the CIA had Patrice Lumumba assassinated is exactly what many of you will like–it’s a strictly narrative history. The reason that doesn’t work for me because it’s hard to tell the significance of the book without spending entirely too much time with the book. But for you all? If you want to really dig into this story, this is the book for you. It usefully does not romanticize Lumumba, who many have read more into that was there. But for whatever problems he may have had, at least he wasn’t Mobutu….Note that surprised me: Eisenhower directly ordered the assassination, or at least the relevant people in the administration thought he did and acted upon it.
4. Anne Marie Todd, Valley of Heart’s Delight: Environment and Sense of Place in the Santa Clara Valley (University of California Press, 2023). A rather small, thin book, and not only in size. Todd is in the field of environmental communications and so when she writes a history, it is a really long introduction focusing on theories of place creation (reasonably interesting), but then is backed up with some relatively superficial historical research. A lot of examination of fruit industry propaganda, followed by some discussion of how mechanization impacted labor, and finally looking at the rise of Silicon Valley to replace the fruit and what that means for the idea of place developed over time. Interesting topic, but a historian could have done more with it.
5. Alison Fields, Discordant Memories: Atomic Age Narratives and Visual Culture (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020). Fields and I were in PhD programs at the University of New Mexico at the same time, myself in history and her in American Studies. But while I knew a few people over there, I didn’t know her. She’s in an art history department now and this is a study of nuclear legacy through visuals. There are a selection of nice color images in the book and some B&W ones to elucidate particular points. This is a pretty good book, looking at visual representatives of atomic horrors in Japan and the American Southwest. She examines photographs, manga, art installations, documentaries, novels, etc. Oddly, she doesn’t really analyze the fictional films made about this. Other than that omission, a solid book worth your time.
6. Theodore W. Cohen, Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Cohen makes a strong argument that blackness is much more central to Mexican culture than is usually accepted. It’s fair that people think it traditionally wasn’t included much, since it was indeed a big deal in 2015, when the nation actually counted Afro-Mexican people as a separate category in the census for the first time. But looking especially at cultural productions in the post-revolutionary nation, Cohen notes that blackness and Afro-Mexican culture was in fact a pretty important theme, if hardly dominant. He makes a good case, but it’s strictly in the intellectual and artistic classes, with no evidence that any of this really spread to the Mexican population at large. So the extent to which you think his case is strong depends in part on what you think is most valuable in understanding such historical questions. As a bottom-up history kind of guy, I was interested but not completely convinced.
7. Andrew Seaton, Our NHS: A History of Britain’s Best Loved Institution (Yale University Press, 2023). Since so many liberals lionize the public health care systems of Canada and western Europe, it’s probably a good idea to learn more about their histories. This is a really balanced account of the NHS’s strengths and weaknesses, with an emphasis on why and how it became so beloved in Britain. Very solid and important work.
8. Antoine Acker, Volkswagen in the Amazon: The Tragedy of Global Development in Modern Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2017). In the 1960s, the Brazilian dictatorship invited Volkswagen, who had much of the Brazilian car market, to help it destroy the Amazon forest for its modernization program. VW said OK and it then developed an enormous cattle ranch. Not surprisingly, VW then engaged in forced labor and all sorts of other horrors while engaging in massive deforestation. It was always a weird investment for the company and so it did not manage it well. This is an interesting book on the transformation of narratives about the Amazon forest, how it was reflected in Brazilian politics, and how an international corporation blundered its way through it all.
9. Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2023). This is pretty far outside of my knowledge base, but it’s important to me to be aware of major new books in other subfields of history and this study of métis, or mixed-race, people in colonial West Africa is a well-regarded book. Of course the French were and remain massive hypocrites when it comes to race and their colonial legacy, claiming that everyone from their colonies was actually French while being sure to discriminate and dominate, including against the children of French colonists left behind in Africa. Unsurprisingly, some of these children became leaders for independence, as they still did have some opportunities other Africans did not and this was based in no small part on their demands upon the French for recognition of their Frenchness. All of this created ideas of race and rights in colonial French Africa and informed the larger global understandings of blackness and anti-colonialism.
10. Caroline Grego, Hurricane Jim Crow: How the Great Sea Island Storm of 1893 Shaped the Lowcountry South (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). One thing environmental historians have explored in some detail over the last couple of decades is the ways that natural disasters take whatever inequalities already exist in society and exacerbate them. That’s what Grego does here, showing how the 1893 hurricane hugely benefitted the white supremacist project of Pitchfork Ben Tillman in undermining Black political power and economic independence in the South Carolina lowcountry, where huge Black majorities meant they were still electing their own people to Congress and avoiding plantation labor. Of course, today this project has finally succeeded thanks to golf courses, retirees, and white developers turning it into a Florida North.
11. James Brooks, Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre (Norton, 2016). In 1700, under what are still somewhat unclear circumstances, groups of Hopi engaged in a mass slaughter of the pueblo at Awat’ovi, also a Hopi people. It had to do with religious change, probably because of some receptiveness to Catholicism among these people that infuriated the rest of the Hopi. It’s very little known. Brooks is one of our top historians of the borderlands and the violent mess created after the Spanish arrival. So he takes on this event with his typical incisiveness, reconstructing it the best he can through Hopi stories, Spanish documents from the era, and American archaeological investigations. But this event is still quite divisive in Hopi nation today and so remains little discussed. A fascinating discussion of an obscure but tremendously violent moment in American history.
12. Taína Caragol and Kate Clarke Lemay, eds., 1898: Visual Culture and U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific (Princeton University Press, 2023). A few years back, the National Portrait Gallery had a pretty cool exhibit on imperialism that I happened to see. This is the book that came out of it, combining many of the visuals with historians’ discussion. I do not have the background to evaluate the effectiveness of it all as a professional in museum exhibits, but as a historian, the book does a great job centering the pictorial evidence of imperialism and its aftermath, starting with the genocide in American West and spreading across the Caribbean and Pacific. I don’t know that it tells me anything that grand about imperialism that I didn’t already know, but then I’m not exactly the audience and that’s besides the point anyway. Plus, I did learn some useful details about the anti-imperial struggle in Puerto Rico and Guam, which I know less of than Cuba or the Philippines.
13. Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s & 1940s (Oxford University Press, 2020). This is a problematic book written by an older political scientist who somehow manages to make the claim that he is doing history right through “rigor” and “objective analysis” while also openly using counterfactual histories to support his claim that the CIO failed and thus America failed because it did not empower the far left to organize the South. I suppose he could theoretically be right, but who knows? He claims to, but he doesn’t in fact know. Then in the chapter on the timber industry, he goes deep into the left-right civil war in the International Woodworkers of America, a Northwest based union that I know basically everything about. And while the “rightists” won (good New Deal liberals basically but not communists), I’d like to see some hard evidence that this is why the IWA didn’t organize the South really. I’d also note here that while I don’t really care that my work on this topic wasn’t cited and it should have been, he also cites basically no literature from the last 25 years, which is a much greater problem. Goldfield is still fighting the same labor history battles he fought decades ago and this book really reflects that. I’d be less annoyed if he didn’t frame the whole damn thing around his objectivity.
14. Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History (Norton, 2013). A clever environmental history that does a good job of helping readers figure out just what this field is for anyway. So the eucalyptus becomes a way to understand California’s larger immigration history and the connections between rhetoric around non-native species and human “invaders” from around the world that drives a lot of poisonous politics and the palm becomes a way to understand the mythologies California tell about themselves, etc.

FICTION/LITERARY NONFICTION

1. Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. Discussed this book in Music Notes here.
2. Mahir Guven, Older Brother. This fantastic novel is about two brothers, Syrian-French men who grew up in Paris. The older drives for Uber and smokes a lot of weed and tries to keep it together. The younger is a dreamer who trains as a nurse but then goes back to Syria, at least theoretically as a nurse but really for Jihad. Told from the perspective of both of them, but mostly the older brother, this is a superb novel about identity in a France who will never accept Syrians in the post-Charlie Hebdo world. Unfortunately, no one has translated Guven’s other books. Someone should do that.
3. Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker. I first read Lee’s debut novel sometime in the late 90s, not too long after its release and I have read it periodically over the years since. Reading it now, I find myself getting a bit impatience with the ham-handedness of the plot. It’s not just that the protagonist is the son of Korean immigrants, but he also works as a shady corporate spy for a sketchy outfit that allows him to completely disappear into character, just like an immigrant child. Get it? And then he is placed in a job spying on a rising Korean-American politician in New York with designs to be mayor, as if his identity issues weren’t big enough. He also has a white wife who he’s going through a tough time with, largely because of their dead son, who may or may not have been killed by other children dogpiling him and calling him anti-Asian names. I don’t want to be too harsh here–it is an excellent novel in the immigrant genre, a favorite of mine. Lee has gone on to have a really good career too. He doesn’t publish a ton, but the books are good and well-respected. But this lays it all on pretty thick. Also, in the 90s, you really had to explain to readers what Korean food was. Understandable, but times do change on this.
4. Assia Djebar, Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War. Djebar wrote this novel about women in Algeria during the war against France in 1962, as it was all going on. It’s a really fascinating examination of these people undergoing tremendous hardships, from their men being gone to war and not knowing what to do to torture. This is hardly a feminist society but the Feminist Press published this translation and wants readers to understand that this is not the time and place to think about women being freed from these men, but to respect their lives and decisions as characters and to respect the lives and decisions of real Algerian women. After all, western feminism can just be another form of colonialism. This includes over the veil, which Djebar explores in all its complexities. Like a lot of revolutionary literature, the book itself was too optimistic over what a successful revolution could accomplish, but let’s not take away from a book written at the moment of revolution for that. Djebar herself eventually broke with the Algerian government in the mid 90s.
5. Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing. My favorite McCarthy. The reason is the tremendous sadness at the heart of this story. Like All the Pretty Horses, it’s a novel about boys and horses and Mexico, but unlike the romantic first book in this trilogy, The Crossing is about a kid who is a bit different and who goes to Mexico a few different times, all to disastrous results that can leave the reader reeling as well, just feeling such sympathy for this character. I’ve never had this kind of emotional response to any other McCarthy character and it’s for this reason that I maintain it is his best book.
6. Tyina Steptoe, ed., Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle, Part 1, 1876-1919. Is a book of writing from Jim Crow America really literature? OK, sure, maybe DuBois or Henry McNeal Turner. But what about a 50 page speech from Pitchfork Ben Tillman on the superiority of the white race? Or John Marshall Harlan’s long dissents against the racist decisions of the Court? I don’t know the answer to the question I guess, but reading this Library of America volume as such did open me up to a lot of material I had never read before. I may be a historian, but why would I actually read most of these documents when they have nothing to do with my research? So Steptoe does a great job here with a difficult but super important project.
7. Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World. I loved this 2021 novel, the first by this Chilean writer to be translated into English. It got a big boost because Barack Obama was a big fan and included it on his reading lists. I can see why. It’s beyond fantastic. It takes some of the 20th century’s greatest mathematicians and physicists and reshapes their own lives to demonstrate their own madness juxtaposed with the madness of the 20th century that they had some responsibility in creating. As the novel continues, there’s more fiction, but the first chapters aren’t really fiction at all, but rather very good narrative biography. Even the fictional parts, where the scientists have visions and such, really just reinforce the fact that these were bunch of quite disturbed lunatics. Science is madness and can lead to horrifying actions by governments taking advantage of that science and rather than just lauding science as a fetish–so common in our society–Labatut warns us of hubris and madness. Maybe a perfect topic for a 21st century writer to approach.

This is your monthly book-based thread.