September 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, which was a really fascinating and provocative group of books this month:

1. Adam Kuper, The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions (Pantheon, 2023). An interesting examination of the colonial and imperial assumptions behind the development of the museum in the late 18th and 19th centuries, particularly ideas of race science (which by the standards of the day were absolutely considered gold standard science and post-hoc explanations by contemporary science fetishist liberals that this was actually “pseudo-science” because science is about TRUTH ring utterly hollow). Of course this book came out just before Trump became president again and he has demanded a return to the kind of racist and pro-colonial history that Kuper interrogates, demonstrating the importance of the book as battles over history and battles over the portrayals of people in the past are very much about the present. He’s no fan of cultural relativism either (good), but his point is that museums are never neutral spaces, nor can they be. They reflect the values of a given set of people at a given time and in the case of the Smithsonian or British Museum, of a nation.
2. Kimberly Jensen, Oregon’s Others: Gender, Civil Liberties, and the Surveillance State in the Early Twentieth Century (University of Washington Press, 2024). This is a good history of how Oregon Progressives went way overboard in attacking people they considered degenerate, whether sex workers or those who did not support American involvement in World War I or gender non-normative people. By its own parameters, it’s quite successful. The problem with a book like this–or at least this is what it made me think of–is the kind of extreme social libertarianism that this book pushes for really works quite well with the economic libertarianism that is ascendant on the far right. In other words, what role does the state have in regulating anything? Because the same people who were so awful on these issues were also using the same justification to begin control corporations, protecting workers, and passing democratic process reforms such as the referendum. In other words, we need a more holistic history of state interventions into people’s lives that deals seriously with both sides of this equation. This is a very solid history, but it leaves some key questions unasked.
3. Elizabeth Popp Berman, Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy (Princeton University Press, 2022). Oh did I love this book. Basically, it’s an antidote to the Abundance Agenda of people such as Ezra Klein, though it was written before they started talking about it. Berman demonstrates how mainstream economists–almost all liberals by political belief–began dominating conversations around government services by focusing on efficiency. This appealed tremendously to the Carter/Clinton/Obama presidencies (of course Neoliberal Jimmy would bring these people into the government) and its impact was to replace other principles such as justice or economic equity or political movements with appeals to economic rationality about providing more efficient services. In short, this is how you get a generation of liberals who don’t feel comfortable with economically populist politics and instead focuses on things such as deregulating industries or making slight changes to the Earned Income Tax Credit as a solution to economic inequalities. Then when the people don’t read these obscure planks in Democratic Party platforms, commenters can’t understand how the voters could be so dumb. In short, it’s a story of how the Democratic Party replaced politics with a milquetoast technocracy that left its flank open to a right-populist such as Donald Trump. The other point of course is the continued outrage that economists have access to the halls of power that other social sciences or humanities do not, even though they have no bloody idea what they are doing, or at least no more than historians or sociologists do.
4. Andrew Delbanco, et al, The Abolitionist Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2012). This is a fun book that I wish existed more often because it allows general readers to understand what historians do. In short, Delbanco wrote an essay exploring his take on abolitionists–one that is a very American Studies/literary approach and then four historians all responded to him, including Manisha Sinha, who some of you know for her new book on Reconstruction, as well as her other works. Delbanco is basically a centrist–he believes that the abolitionists were basically right but also their extremism drew the nation into a horrible Civil War. Three of the four respondents basically disagree with him and defend the abolitionists strongly, while the fourth is more or less on his page. Historians do debate key issues of our past and it can be fun for smart readers to access those debates. This is short and readable and a lot of LGM readers would like it. It’s not really priced to move though and Harvard University Press has become a total disaster in recent years…..
5. Michael Albertus, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (Basic Books, 2025). I found this to be an odd book. Albertus is of course correct that the control over land creates and replicates inequalities and shapes societies. The question is what you do about this and he gets pretty squishy about it. He correctly notes that a lot of leftist land reform programs end up being disasters, but he can’t quite get away from it. He knows that land needs to be used for the masses but he also tends to romanticize the land in ways that environmentalists do. Even when he gets pushed a bit in interviews to talk about policy, he’s way more comfortable saying broad things (governments can allocate land for good!) than he is providing any concrete path forward. A provocative book that I personally didn’t think hit the mark, but it’s a worthy attempt around a big question and others might find it more valuable than I did.
6. Sam Lebovic, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization (University of Chicago Press, 2022). This book examines the multilateral institutions created or at least considered in the years after World War II such as UNESCO to demonstrate how tenuous any American commitment to multilateral liberalism ever was and how tied into fears of the world America remained. There’s a very good chapter on passports and American policymakers’ fear of letting people travel abroad (yes, for leftists such as Paul Robeson or W.E.B. DuBois who had their passports taken away, but really for almost all Americans). In short, all of this was framed as the need to expand American power abroad and protect Americans at home from ideologies seen as dangerous such as race mixing. Simply put, American leaders said they wanted the free flow of information, but they did not. It goes a bit to explain why Americans are so ignorant of the rest of the world.
7. Shefali Luthra, Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America (Penguin, 2024). This is a very good book but I do wonder about its ultimate value. In short, Luthra goes to various states to discuss the impact of abortion restrictions on women (or “people,” she really leans into the “men can have babies too” part of trans activism, which is superb if you want to alienate potential allies in favor of rhetoric that make activists happy but which doesn’t pass the smell test for a lot of people who don’t spend time on university campuses) and doctors. It’s extremely well done. I read it, I am outraged by the horrors wrought by Republicans. You all would feel the same way if you read it. It’s completely successful as a book in this way. The problem is no one is going to pick this book who doesn’t fundamentally already know all of this. I’m not saying I know what to do about this, but it’s very much a book for the already strong pro-abortion rights activist. If there was a way to get those on the fence or who are just ignorant of the impacts of abortion restrictions, then it would be amazingly important. I just don’t know how you’d get them to pick it up.
8. Sophia Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton University Press, 2025. This is another provocative argument that I am quite down with. Rosenfeld explores how we got to the point of thinking of “choice” as freedom, whether in terms of women’s bodies or the secret ballot or consumer goods. But is endless choice the be-all and end-all of liberal democracy? How did we begin to articulate our bodies as consumer products as if we were choosing yogurt brands? She starts with this history with the development of the auction in late 18th century England, which proved tremendously successful. She weaves through fiction and philosophy, marriage and the market. She closes by noting how weak the idea of choice has actually proven to defend women’s bodies. Plus, if it’s “My Body, My Choice,” that can be just as easily applied to not wearing masks over Covid or getting other people sick by not vaccinating. Sure, the right-wingers who use that rhetoric are trolling abortion activists, but it’s effective trolling because there isn’t an ideologically consistent way to answer them except to say that, in fact, not everything about your body is your choice. In short, she takes the contradictions of individual autonomy more seriously than the Jensen book listed above. What role does the state have in regulating bodies and choices? Rosenfeld doesn’t answer this directly either, but she at least explores the sharp limitations of the bodily autonomy rhetoric that has dominated liberal spaces for the last half-century or more and is now being defeated at the same time that its purveyors double down on it. Naturally, these are not easy questions to answer, but they need to be taken seriously.
9. Clara Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Another book on how economists suck, in this case examining post-World War I Britain and Italy to note how strongly economists created the modern ideas of austerity that dominate our politics globally today and which at the time, had the lovely goal of rolling back working class activism and the nascent welfare state and which thus went far to create fascism in Italy, which the British economists strongly supported because it disciplined labor. Even if you take away the most notorious activities of economists in serving Augusto Pinochet, it’s increasingly hard for me to see how the field of economics has ever helped the world when it has moved outside the universities and into the halls of power. Unlike Berman (reviewed above) Mattei is herself an economist and is unsparing about her field’s history.

Fiction/Literary Non-Fiction:

Been a short month of enjoyable reading because it’s just been extremely busy for me as I organize my labor teach-in event. But I did finish three books, which I regret to say is the fewest since April 2024 and that at least had the excuse of the last month of the semester. Let’s hope for more next month.

1. John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel. It’s been 5 years since I read Dos Passos’ USA trilogy so I thought it was time to start it again. What I took away from this re-read of The 42nd Parallel is that while Dos Passos’ heart might be with Mac, the working stiff who becomes an IWW and ends up in Mexico during the Revoluton, his brain was with all the rest of his characters, who are social climbers like he was. It’s interesting that for a book so intended to be a lefty literary discussion of early 20th century America, almost all the main characters are upwardly mobile whites who are pretty damn comfortable with that fact. Becomes less hazy why Dos Passos moved from his young leftism into his hard-right conservatism after the late 30s. He’s a himself a character Mary McCarthy would have loved to skewer and I am sure she has choice things to say about him somewhere in her voluminous writings.
2. George R. Stewart, Storm. This 1941 novel has a claim to be the first eco-novel. Stewart follows a storm brewing in the Pacific and its eventual landing in California during a droughty winter where the snows and rains are super delayed. He describes the power of storms wonderfully and then creates all sorts of characters who the storm impacts in some ways–workers for the National Weather Service (the descriptions of weather forecasting at this time are interesting to the modern reader), road workers, people who handle power supplies, the retired military officer in charge of deciding when it’s time to flood fields to save Sacramento, people caught in the storm, the idiot drivers who go out in storms and sometimes die, the pilots flying the low-flying planes of the time, etc. Took me a minute to get into it, but then I really enjoyed it.
3. Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them. I’ve read this 1948 novel about an English nunnery through the 14th century before and I still think it is the one of the best novels about a community of people I’ve ever read. Starting with the arrival of the Black Death and a man who lies about being a priest to get shelter and going through about 1390, it paints all these women (and a few men such as our fake priest) with tremendous sympathy, even as they all are quite flawed. Most of these characters come from a well-off background–you needed a dowry to be placed in a nunnery after all–and show it. They are a mix of competent and totally incompetent, often changing as they age, and with all the health problems you can imagine in the 14th century. It’s just a very good novel.

This is your monthly book thread.