March Reading List

Here’s my reading list for March. This is last month’s list and you can follow it back from there.

Professional:

1. Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millenium in North America (Random House, 2024). This important and prize-winning book perhaps isn’t perfect–no book covering this amount of territory actually can be. But if you haven’t read this, you should because it centers Native Americans at the heart of American history, not as a reaction to whites, not as a sidelight, not as a suffering people to be wiped away in a broader history, but as a variety of peoples with a variety of cultures trying to make their lives the best they can in the circumstances they face, as we all do. DuVal certainly doesn’t cover all tribes or all parts of the nation either, but the point wouldn’t change much if she tried to and to do that would make the book less successful anyway.
2. Peter Andreas, Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs (Oxford University Press, 2020). Andreas isn’t just writing about the war on drugs or wars about drugs, which are topics we know, but also how drugs made wars, such as the use of booze in the American Revolution, various forms of speed and meth by German soldiers in World War II, tobacco by American soldiers in the same war, etc. It’s a fun and accessible way to get at the relationship between military and society. As a purveyor of the “History of X in Y” theme myself, it’s a total gimmick, but one that is effective and that people like. This is a good, solid history.
3. Frank Uekotter, The Vortex: An Environmental History of the Modern World (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Writing an environmental history of the world is really hard. There’s so much going on and it’s so complicated. Uekotter bravely takes this on and does an OK job with it. He sees it as a vortex, where everything meets and gets spun around and the book is kind of organized this way, with references in chapters to other chapters, before and after. Maybe there’s no other way to do it, I don’t know. I can follow along easily enough because I know most of the secondary literature this is drawn from, but if you don’t, it could get confusing.
4. Aimee Loiselle, Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Loiselle notes that Crystal Lee Sutton, i.e., Norma Rae, was hardly the only woman taking huge risks by fighting for textile unionism. But she also notes–and this will likely be more interesting for the general reader–that Sutton was pretty damn pissed off at the movie. See, Martin Ritt had previously directed The Molly Maguires, and after that failure, did not think he needed another union movie. He wanted a woman’s picture. Sutton saw all the people left out of the film, the oversexualization of her life, and a lot else and was pretty displeased by the film. As for the book, despite the title, it’s pretty lopsided on the Sutton story but does provide some quality analysis of the film.
5. Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu, Emma Goldman, Mother Earth, and the Anarchist Awakening (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021). I wasn’t necessarily looking forward to reading this because I find Goldman to be such an overrated figure and so many scholars are prone to romanticize her. Plus, anarchist scholars take themselves very, very seriously, to the point of self-parody. But you know what? This is one of the best books on radicalism in America I’ve read in years. The reason is that Hsu really does the work to place Goldman’s ideas in context of both American and international radicalism, talks about her discomfort with much of the labor movement, discusses her pretty extreme individualism that would later put her at odds with the socialist left, and just generally paints this accurate and detailed intellectual world around her. Great analysis, super book.
6. Ali Humayun Akhtar, 1368: China and the Making of the Modern World (Stanford University Press, 2022). Akhtar has written a very solid book that should have a good readership among a certain kind of general public who really likes global history about powers meeting each other. He not only places Chinese power in the proper context, but when the Europeans arrive, he does a great job of thinking about how they had to deal with the equality and even superiority of Chinese culture and the controversies admitting such a thing engendered back in Europe. But most importantly, he places China as the center pivot of international trade long before it retook that position in the present.
7. Sara Mayeux, Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). This is a topic about which I really knew nothing before reading Mayeux’s book. It’s real focus is on the legal profession itself, how elite lawyers responded to the need for public defenders, and the limitations of the entire idea. Of course the whole idea was shaped by the currents of the time, with the rise of the public defender in the 50s and 60s as a Cold War imperative about the rights of everyone in a liberal democracy. I still claim no real knowledge on the details of such issues, but I know a lot more than I did before.

FICTION/LITERARY NON-FICTION–a frustratingly light month for reading, though it’s not as bad as it looks because I’m finishing up a couple of long novels that just aren’t quite done yet and will be for April’s list.

1. Javier Marias, A Heart So White. For a relatively slow reading novelist, I find myself routinely compelled to keep coming back to Marias. This was his 1992 novel about a man with family secrets over a suicide of his father’s former wife, which was also his aunt. It sounds like a compelling mystery around dark secrets, but that’s not really what Marias does her, just like his Your Face Tomorrow series was nominally about a spy but shared effectively nothing in common with the spy genre. Rather, it’s a book about what we can and can’t know and what we can and can’t share in our relationships. In the end, we kind of watch life go past for the most part, don’t we?
2. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go. Other than maybe Remains of the Day, this is Ishiguro’s best novel. That he could take a sci-fi concept about drones bred for organ replacement and make it about relationships and loss in a world that is never going to accept you but that you also don’t actually consider revolting against and make it such a moving and powerful piece of fiction, well, let’s just say he earned that Nobel. Even as there’s no big cliffhanger here and whatever does exist as one you already know the second time you read the book, I still find the ending deeply moving.
3. Virgil Suárez, Spared Angola: Memories from a Cuban-American Childhood. I found this on a used bookstore shelf and it reminded me once again what treasures used bookstores are. Suárez is a Cuban-American writer who, after this 1997 memoir that is partly in poetry, just started writing poetry full time, which is why though he was getting reasonably well known as a novelist today, is largely forgotten about now, except in the tiny poetry world that makes the world of free jazz look like rock and roll. Well, that’s certainly not his fault. I didn’t absolutely love this book, but I did find it a pretty good look at the issues of immigration, family, and belonging that are so common within the deep well of American literature from immigrants. I appreciated the mix of short essays and poetry as well, which mostly works well.

As always, this is your monthly book thread.