August Reading List

Here’s my list of books read in August. You can see last month’s list here and you can follow that back month by month from there if you care. to.

Professional Reading:

1. David Silkenat, Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Oxford University Press, 2022). This book doesn’t really open my eyes; as someone trained in environmental history, I already knew a lot of this. But for those of you who are not familiar with what environmental history offers as a field, this would be an excellent introduction that takes a topic most educated people do know a lot about and adds the insights of environmental history to it. Other historians have not always been convinced that environmental history really transforms the overall study of the past, and certainly the claims of environmental historians twenty years ago that it would have not proven out. But it still adds interesting insights and this, again, is a good example of why and how. In short, dominating people and dominating nature went hand in hand and planters justified both in similar ways.
2. Max Krochmal and J. Todd Moye, eds., Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas (University of Texas Press, 2021). Last month, I discussed Krochmal’s superb book  Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era. This is the edited volume he and Todd Moye did that includes scholars of Black and Brown Texas that takes us around the state, city by city in many cases, using oral histories to document the building of coalitions to challenge the white supremacist power structure that operated in ways ranging from school discrimination and political disfranchisement to police violence and environmental injustice. The book won a big award from the Oral History Association and includes transcripts of several oral histories. The stories might be a bit specific for general readers, but the use of oral history here is outstanding and the book is a serious contribution to larger conversations about justice movements in the late 20th century.
3. Sarah Deutsch, Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898-1940 (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). Forget about the clunkiest subtitle in the history of historical writing. Overall, this is an alright overview of the West in the pre-World War II period. But it does something that sometimes happens–maybe this project was put aside for several years–which is that it basically cites almost nothing past 2014. I started wonder when there was no reference to a bunch of issues that I knew about and I checked the notes and then the bibliography and at some point, she stopped reading the new historiography, which is kind of a problem when you are doing a textbook-like overview. The other problem is that the through line tying it all together isn’t super clear. It does provide a good overarching look at many of the major issues of the early 20th century West, but isn’t the strongest book I’ve read.
4. Nelson Lichtenstein & Samir Sonti, eds., Labor’s Partisans: Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to Today (The New Press, 2025). I think in the original titling of this book, or at least this is represented on the title page in the galley copy I got for review at a professional journal, the subtitle reads Essential Writings from Dissent…. That’s more accurate as this is a collection of labor writing from that journal. In any case, it’s remarkable how so much of the writing from the 50s through the 70s is still relevant to the labor issues of today–automation, the meaning of work, unions not doing enough organizing. The book also chooses newer pieces. We’ll see how they age; some seem hopelessly out of date already in the Trump era, but it’s hard to judge the historical value of an argument a few years after its initial publication.
5. Robert Wyss, Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal (University of California Press, 2025). I’m reviewing this for a larger publication, so I should keep this brief, but this new book by a journalist tells an episodic story about Americans’ relationship to coal, which both freed and enslaved the nation, often at the same time. The style has its limitations, but as a quick intro into the nation’s coal history, it has value.
6. Paul Gillingham, Unrevolutionary Mexico: The Birth of a Strange Dictatorship (Yale University Press, 2021). Given that anything revolutionary about the Mexican Revolution stopped by the 1940s, why did the PRI not become an outright dictatorship? Gillingham explores the nuances of this quasi-dictatorship through deep dives into the states of Guerrero and Veracruz, looking at the how the state managed to co-opt enough challenges to its power to maintain control, while also slowly becoming the only acceptable agent of violence. It’s a very deep dive and not for the casual reader, but for the Mexicanist, it’s a critically important monograph.
7. Lowell Dyson, Red Harvest: The Communist Party and the American Farmer (University of Nebraska Press, 1982). I don’t often read really old books and it was interesting to revisit a leftist book from this era, largely because it was still very much focused on the leftist institutions from Moscow to small town Iowa trying to bring communism to the American farmer and with a little more success than you’d think if you only consider farmers and their almost uniformly horrific politics today.
8. Helen Anne Curry, Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction (University of California Press, 2022). This intelligent book explores how global efforts to conserve indigenous maize breeds built on ideas of the extinction of indigenous peoples. It’s a history of the agencies and scientists involved in corn breed protection but not just a history of what they did but their own intellectual history about race and nations.

Fiction/Literary Nonfiction

1. John Feinstein Next Man Up: A Year Behind the Lines in Today’s NFL. With the NFL season approaching, time to get ready by reading a football book. Feinstein was one of the great writing journalists in sports history. Here, he follows the 2004 Baltimore Ravens. It’s not a great book because that season’s Ravens were not a compelling team, but that’s not really Feinstein’s fault. This was the era of the team after they won the Super Bowl and they were still figuring out a QB, since they barely had one when they won. Before the 2003 draft, they traded to draft Kyle Boller and….ouch. For context, it Boller being terrible (as well as the struggles of NFL QBs out of Oregon when he was offensive coordinator there such as Joey Harrington and Akili Smith) that led Aaron Rodgers to fall so far in the draft because the league was convinced Jeff Tedford couldn’t develop an NFL QB. This is the stupidest draft groupthink in NFL history and unless Shedeur Sanders is actually good, which I am skeptical of, will remain so possibly forever. But Boller was indeed terrible and to make it worse, Brian Billick was determined to stick with Matt Cavanaugh as his offensive coordinator, which, uh, did not help. So this was once again a team with a great defense (in fact, this was the year that Ed Reed really became a superstar) with a gigantic anchor of an offense around its neck. Billick would eventually be fired after 2007 and replaced with John Harbaugh and things have gone quite well for Baltimore ever since. But what the book does very well is take you through the ups and downs and brutalities of an NFL season on an average team and that means a lot of compelling storylines. Players improving or falling apart, amazing stories of guys coming out of nowhere to play in the NFL and super talented guys totally blowing their chances. Feinstein also deals with how the case against Jamal Lewis for setting up a cocaine deal and being sent to prison for it was not exactly total bullshit, but was absolutely the kind of case that normally would not have led to prison time but it was a chance for a prosecutor to make a nice big name for himself by sending a famous guy away. Lewis is framed as a guy who grew up very hard and made a few mistakes but had worked very hard to improve his life and was basically set up. Evidently though, Lewis has had a lot of post-playing concussion problems, which is really sad. Finally the league is taking concussions seriously and in fact the numbers are way, way down. Not that this helps all the generations of previous players, though relatively few regret their decisions to play in the NFL.
2. Tiyambe Zeleza, Smouldering Charcoal. Zeleza is from Malawi and is mostly a historian and now college administrator at Howard. But this 1992 novel addresses life and resistance in Hastings Banda’s dictatorship there. It focuses on two couples–a working class man who drinks away his life and is horrible to his family but whose coworkers as the bakery are risking everything by going on strike and a principled journalist and his university student fiance who risks it all for his principles. They meet in prison; one dies of torture and the other becomes a freedom fighter. It’s a short novel and so doesn’t really have the time to explore the psychological world of the revolutionary, but whereas a lot of revolutionary novels are about fighting the colonist, this one importantly explores the fight against the post-colonial dictators who killed and imprisoned anyone seen as resisting their regime. Given that university administrators are the modern day version of dictators, it would be interesting to have a conversation with Zeleza about this……
3. Miguel Ángel Asturias, Men of Maize. This 1949 novel by the Nobel Prize winning Guatemalan novelist (1967) is pretty difficult. Penguin Classics has a new edition out and my wife got a copy as a Latin American scholar but I can’t imagine how you could possibly use this in the classroom, especially in the era where the most anyone under 22 has ever read is the titles on a TikTok. Asturias was a brave man, someone who spent his life writing to damn the dictatorships of Guatemala. He was sympathetic with the Maya. Here he creates his own Mayan myths about the battles of the indigenous people against the Ladino maize growing planters and it is filled with people turning into coyotes and the like. But the story is so dense with description that it becomes really hard to follow and the myths don’t necessarily make that much sense. It’s problematic I guess in that it’s something an outsider made up about the indigenous people, but it’s 1949 and what do you expect. I’m glad I read it. I doubt I will ever pick it up again.
4. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov. What to say about one of the all time great novels ever written in any language. Two things. First, every character in this novel is batshit insane, on the verge of a breakdown every second. Every single one. Does this say something about the Russian character today? Not sure. Second, I’ve always found Dostoevsky surprisingly easy to read for modern audiences. Sure there are some digressions, but really he’s not actually a hard author. Hell of a lot easier than that Asturias novel.
5. Kapka Kassabova, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe. I absolutely adored this travel narrative about the border space where Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria meet. Kassabova is Bulgarian, but lives in Scotland and comes to the region–basically, Thrace in the ancient world–to consider the people torn apart by borders and the 20th century–Ataturk, the Cold War, the Greek civil war. This is where people fled for freedom and were shot and where they flee for freedom today (heading through toward western Europe) where they also often die. Powerful and emotional as well, as this isn’t some dry narrative but one where Kassabova is central to the story and her hopes and sometimes her fears and her deep sadness at times too. My favorite book of the month.

This is your monthly book thread.