December Reading List

Here is my reading list for December. Here’s the link for November and you can follow it back from there.

Professional:

1. Barbara Winslow, Revolutionary Feminists: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Seattle (Duke University Press, 2023). This memoir/history by someone involved in the Seattle socialist feminist movement of the late 60s and early 70s suggests a fuller history of white feminists doing more solidarity work than is often recognized these days, at least if they were also revolutionary socialists. We are talking about 12 people here, but sure, I think there’s space for this. It’s an interesting read.
2. Anna Reid, A Nasty Little War: The Western Intervention into the Russian Civil War (Basic Books, 2024). If you ever wanted a great view of the gigantic endless clusterfuck that was the Allied support for the whites after World War I, this is your book. You don’t have to excuse anything the Soviets did to understand that the whites were equally horrible people, engaging in enormous outrages against local populations, stealing most of the aid, corrupt to the hilt, and totally hopeless in fighting, even with western help. Yikes.
3. Thomas Alter II, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press, 2022). This is a complicated one. Alter was outrageously fired by Texas State University over comments after the death of Charlie Kirk. It’s horrible. That’s far more important than this book, Yet, his book is kind of ridiculous. On the face of it, it’s an interesting look at one German-American family bringing socialism to Texas and getting involved in the fight for justice in that state. That’s just fine. But then there’s Alter’s own politics, which is openly that only through the creation of socialist parties can the working class be liberated. I mean, whatever I guess, but there’s no evidence for that in the American context. When Alter says “The Texas SP posed a serious threat to the capitalist nation-state,” uh, it’s really hard to take that seriously. I mean, no. No, the Texas Socialist Party did not pose a serious threat to the capitalist nation-state. It sort of posed a threat to the Texas Democratic Party for a short time. The wishcasting of leftist historians really frustrates me and this explains a lot about why I do not go to many labor history conferences anymore. Even the family that he focuses on totally made all kinds of compromises with white supremacy. Alter admits this of course, but seems to lack any ability to think through what this means in terms of contemporary politics. Take away his own nonsensical politics and the book is a pretty good look at 19th century rural socialism, but it’s really hard to get beyond the outlandish statements, such as what is quoted above.
4. Larissa Brewer-Garcia, Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Studies of race and religion in 17th century Latin America are way out of my wheelhouse, but I do like to read important, award-winning books and this certainly deserves those awards. It feels like a different world she describes to this 20th century U.S. historian, but basically, unlike with indigenous peoples, Spanish priests chose not to learn African languages to missionize African slaves. Instead, they used African mediators, which gave slaves some limited voice in their treatment and lives. It’s a fascinating exploration of the creation and ideas around blackness in colonial Latin America.
5. Josephine Ensign, Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). Ensign is a homelesssness activist in Seattle and not a trained historian, but this is a very solid history of the issue, going back to the very first person considered homeless in Seattle in the 1850s (she manages to follow the guy to and from his home in Massachusetts, an impressive job of historical sleuthing) up to the serious homelessness crisis in Seattle today. Usefully, she doesn’t use the ridiculous term “unhoused” and instead uses words that make sense to people. Good work.
6. Yanna Yannakakis, Since Time Immemorial: Native Custom and Law in Colonial Mexico (Duke University Press, 2023). A fascinating story of how indigenous people used the law in colonial Mexico to codify their own customs, noting that the losers in how indigenous people came under Spanish courts was really the Native elite, who found their ability to engage in polygyny and other practices stopped. Thinking about how legal custom can be used by the poor as a form of resistance really complicates a lot of narratives about domination and resistance. Though this is not my field, this is an issue that I know a bit about because there’s some overlap with my wife’s work, though she is a modernist. This is really a very good book. Smart people are smart.
7. Jeff Forret, The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War (The New Press, 2024). After the British abolished slavery in the 1830s, American slave ships sending slaves from Virginia to the new Southwestern frontier sometimes ran aground on British possessions, particularly the Bahamas. Were the slaves then free? The British tended to think so, though they mostly didn’t want to deal with this issue. The Americans very very much did not think so and would go to any lengths to reclaim their property or receive compensation from the British. Mostly, the latter would eventually happen after a lot of delay. Meanwhile, this all made the North increasingly exasperated with the Slave Power. A useful addition to the literature and accessible to general readers as well.
8. Jeff Schuhrke, Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (Verso, 2024). I hate it when terms like “untold story” are used in titles. That’s because it’s rarely true. Some of this might be untold, but most of it is fairly well known by labor historians. Schuhrke is writing about the AFL-CIO’s horrible history working with the CIA. And horrible it is, disgusting. He highlights a bunch of examples and it’s worth reading. It’s not a great book though; like many Verso books it’s more propaganda than history and he doesn’t really explore why these labor leaders were so horrified by communism and made the decisions they made. It just kind of flies by to get at the various examples of terribleness. Someday, someone will write a full history of this issue, I hope.
9. Dawn Greeley, Beyond Benevolence: The New York Charity Organization Society and the Transformation of American Social Welfare, 1882-1935 (Indiana University Press, 2022). This is a book that would have fit in the 90s, with its tremendous length and detail about Progressive Era reformers. It’s 100 pages too long (maybe 120), but if you want all the possible detail available about the New York Charity Organization Society and the complicated issue of poverty and charity in the Gilded Age city, this is most definitely your book.
10. Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2014). It’s odd to consider the era of postwar consensus America, where elites decided that moderate liberalism would be the way things went and the entire structure of the rich worked very had to make this happen. Cohen-Cole explores the social sciences’ role in this and you can basically imagine a bunch of white male Ivy Leaguers clubbing it up, sexually harassing their secretaries, and drinking way too many martinis while throwing ideas around. Academic collaboration around a moderate liberal capitalism was the order of the day and the psychologists especially worked very hard at this. You can be a bit nostalgic for this world compared to our own, but like the rest of nostalgia, you’d be cherrypicking the past because women, people of color and anyone to the left of FDR (or to the right of Thomas Dewey) was completely excluded from any of this. One of the things I picked up from this book is just why Noam Chomsky’s early linguistic work was so important, because it helped blow up the social science consensus around a lot of things.

Fiction/Literary Non-Fiction:

1. Nelson George, Blackface: Reflections on African-Americans and the Movies. If nothing else, me reading this book shows why excellent used bookstores are wonderful things and why algorithms are totally worthless if you care about anything but being fed the same shit on repeat. I was in Smith Family Bookstore in Eugene last month and perusing the film books and saw this book. Published in 1994, I figured it would be an interesting discussion of Black film at a time when it was just going into the mainstream studios (outside of the Blaxploitation flicks of the 70s, which were a different thing). It was that, but I got much more. George had made it pretty big writing about music and then invested a bunch of money into Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It and then took that money and started doing other Hollywood things. So he was a producer and co-creator of CB4, the hip-hop parody film that is largely forgettable but was part of Chris Rock’s rise (they worked together to create it). How often do you read about the making a forgettable film from a producer’s point of view? Not often! And it’s interesting, because it’s all in the context of trying to make a Black film for Black audience in a Hollywood that simply understands none of it. The film isn’t that bad anyway. There are plenty of other digressions here, including timelines of Black film that remind one of a lot of forgotten films today that were reasonably important then, with plenty of commentary from George. I’m really glad I read this book and I’m really glad that a few people in this terrible world actually still go to used bookstores.
2. Tessa Hadley, Free Love. This is my first introduction to Hadley and I loved it. She sets this book in 1967. A 40 year old housewife who is a pretty sensual person but is stuck in a dead marriage with a couple teenage kids kisses the hippie-leftist son of friends who comes to have dinner with then one night. They start a torrid affair, she walks out on her family, and moves in with him. That’s interesting enough for a good book, but Hadley does a few things I love here. First, she doesn’t signpost every major event to be Peak 60s like so many books and TV shows about the era. The 60s are well portrayed but more how they were experienced by a certain set of people, not so that current readers can Remember the 60s. Second, our protagonist is hardly a hero and isn’t portrayed this way, even as she totally embraces the sexuality and politics of the new London. Third, in the second half of the novel, her daughter finds here and her story is way more interesting as she becomes the most important character in the second half of the novel. A very finely drawn work. Great stuff.
3. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station. I enjoy reading Wilson’s classic 1940 history of the left every couple of years. He covers up to Lenin returning to Russia in 1917. The European critique of this book is that it is a typically American look more at the personalities than the ideas. That’s true, and also I am very American and like not getting so wound up in the arcane details of Marxist ideas that the book becomes unreadable, a great love of the Europeans. I always get a lot out it, especially thinking about how Marx is, in the end, a huge romantic that ultimately requires someone like Lenin to get the theory out of the ridiculous naturally occurring dictatorship of the proletariat to something like reality. The portraits of Engles and Trotsky are always interesting, as is the early framing of the post-French Revolution French intellectuals and their pullback away from radicalism toward defense of the bourgeoisie.
4. Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends. If I hadn’t already Rooney’s astounding Normal People, I’d have loved this book more, because she builds on it for her more powerful second book. But really, what a debut this was back in 2017. The story of a pretty plain young woman who surrounds herself with a beautiful but obnoxious best friend/former sexual partner and the somewhat older actor she starts having an affair with, this is a great book about self-loathing and trying to make it in a mixed up world. Rooney Discourse is fucked up in a lot of different ways (oooh…she’s a “millennial” author because some of the exchanges are written as emails, the politics often seem half-baked as if this is not normal in people, the sex is so explicit and is that OK, I mean c’mon people), when in reality, what we should be focusing on is that this is one of the best writers about relationships in the English language in my lifetime. She’s also one of the best writers about sex I’ve ever read because the sex and in particular the specific sexual acts actually serve the plot and character development in a way that no one ever pulls off. Even Philip Roth, who was supposed to write so effectively about sex, doesn’t do it this well at all, not to mention he’s the king of the male gaze and often writes it off as a joke. Rooney is such a generational talent. Her protagonist may be twee and may need better friends, but that describes a lot of us, at least the latter.
5. David Cantwell, Merle Haggard; The Running Kind. I had first read Cantwell’s critical treatment of Haggard about five years ago and it was time to revisit it, with five more years of the Hag in my life. It’s a really fantastic book that gets at not only his incredible artistry but his incoherent politics. He’s most known for the Okie from Muskogee (maybe parody) and Walking on the Fighting Side of Me (a garbage right-wing piece of trash) but also defended The Dixie Chicks during the Bush years attack on them, wrote a song urging Hillary to run for president in 2007, and had many songs through his career about interracial relationships when the rest of the country music establishment wouldn’t touch it. Politics aren’t really the most important thing about Haggard, but because of those two songs, it’s what people talk about. What people should be talking about is the jaw-dropping number of amazing records, rivaling any American recording artist to ever live. Cantwell will help you do this. Read with Spotify ready to go. Good lord, what a songwriter and singer.

This is your monthly book thread.