April Reading List

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

Professional Reading:

1. Jim Morris, The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers (Beacon Press, 2024). This deep dive into how a Goodyear chemical factory in Niagara Falls, New York poisoned its workers and led to a mass epidemic of bladder cancer due to PVC production is disturbing and well-written. The truth is that hardly anyone has really cared about mass death among the working class. The Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers did some brave work here to defend these workers and push the company, but even within the union, fears of job loss led to some not wanting to push too hard. Morris really gets into the lives of these workers. It’s a sad story and an important one.
2. Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). This is actually a famous book in the field of labor history but I although I had dipped into time and time again for this and that, I had never actually sat down and read the thing all the way through. As I knew, it is a fantastic book of an organizing campaign among black tobacco workers in North Carolina that laid the groundwork for the CIO’s Operation Dixie campaign after World War II, which itself failed in part because the CIO decided to appeal to impossible to get white workers instead of doubling down on the black workers who actually wanted to be union members. It’s a story of a campaign that could have done so much but which was hamstrung in the end by anticommunism. But what it is more than anything is a fascinating and brilliant bottom-up history of amazing forgotten people doing amazing things against all odds. If you are going to read any history book this month that I am reviewing, this is absolutely no question the one you should buy or get from your library.
3. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Haunted by Slavery: A Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle (Haymarket, 2021). I don’t often read the memoirs of historians because historians are boring people. But not Hall, who grew up Jewish in pre-World War II New Orleans, became a communist, married a Black man and proudly had interracial children, was harassed by the FBI and lost many jobs, became a PhD in History later in life, and created pioneering digital archives in black history. I’d say that’s an interesting person!
4. Matthew D. Morrison, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (University of California Press, 2024). Although unnecessarily theoretical in language, as if he wants to create barriers to learning about this topic for regular people, Morrison has a lot of important things to say about the central role of blackface in the creation of American popular culture. He uses insights from intellectual property law to discuss how whites made money stealing from black music all the way back to the 19th century in the sheet music era, since that was where the money was. This is basically known, but Morrison’s goal to explore further just what the contribution of black musicians were to the creation of popular American musical culture. And even when the music came from Scotch-Irish ballads, the performance style of early musicians was often borrowed from black musicians and dancers. The combination of cultural and legal analysis has a lot of value and he does an admirable job telling the stories of a few forgotten black artists who made a big difference in American cultural history.
5. Bernadette Cunningham, The Annals of the Four Masters: Irish History, Kingship and Society in the Early Seventeenth Century (Four Courts Press, 2010). A bit of a deep cut for me, but as I explore a bit of Irish history due to going there a decent amount, I don’t mind challenging myself. In this case, this is really a way to get at ideas of history were created in 17th century Ireland. This looks at the creation of the first histories of Ireland in the 1630s and the ideas behind them. This has become a touchstone in early Irish nationalism and so a look at what was really going on is useful, if pretty detailed for me.
6. Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (Harper Collins, 2025). I mentioned this book here. It’s a useful essay to get at the ridiculous claims of AI boosters and how doomers just reinforce those, though I am a bit less sympathetic on that front. Notably, it pushes the true idea that we can accept technology as we want, not just as the rich demand.
7. Michael T. Karp, Raising the Redwood Curtain: Labor Landscapes and Community Violence in a Pacific Littoral (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). Despite the unfortunate use of the word “littoral” in the title, which I had to look up, this is a very solid examination of three episodes of violence in northern California–anti-Native, anti-Chinese, and the Great Strike of 1935–that places them all within the labor regime created by settler colonialism and extreme extraction. Littoral turns out to mean “coastline.” Just call it a Pacific Community or something, really now.
8. Aaron J. Leonard, Meltdown Expected: Crisis, Disorder, and Upheaval at the End of the 1970s (Rutgers University Press, 2024). The late 70s were most certainly a crazy time in America. But this book doesn’t do much except to name them. There’s no real thesis here except “wow, the late 70s are really important.” It’s true enough that this is much shorter than Perlstein’s Reaganland, but you aren’t going to get much here so just read that instead. The best parts were on the far left and the FBI, which get less attention in some of the narratives of the period.
9. Debbie J. Goldman, Disconnected: Call Center Workers Fight for Good Jobs in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2024). Very solid labor history of call center workers and the fights led by the Communication Workers of America to defend these workers in the face of rampant corporate greed, outsourcing, and a changing industry that made this largely female dominated work less important to the economy. Our labor history, especially in the public mind, still remains far too male dominated. Historians such as Goldman are doing the hard work of providing a more complete understanding of core and understudied industries too often dismissed as women’s work.
10. Sue Consolo-Murphy, The Bears of Grand Teton: A Natural and Cultural History (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). Consolo-Murphy is a long-time natural resources manager at Grand Teton National Park and if you are interested in issues of bears and/or national parks, this is a well-written and informative study of the topic in the past and present.

FICTION/LITERARY NON-FICTION

1. Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain. Gao won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000 basically just for this book. He had a few plays and such but this was a huge phenomenon when it was published in 1989, just at the time it looked China might open up. It’s a dual travel narrative taking places in the 80s, as China and its people recover from the Cultural Revolution. One focuses on a man and a woman he picks up along the way where you have a lot of storytelling and sex and tensions between men and women. The second is about a man who was falsely diagnosed with cancer and is traveling into the mountains to see what is left of the wildness of China as he contemplates his own life after receiving a death sentence that was revoked. It so happened to receive its English translation just as he won the Nobel. It immediately became one of my favorite books, not so much for the political background as the focus on freedom by someone who didn’t have it and now does. I hadn’t read it in 6 or 7 years and I’m not sure it quite holds up that amazing, especially the man/woman side. But the traveling through China contemplating side definitely does.
2. Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase. Although I’ve read the sequel, Dance Dance Dance a few times, I had not read anything from Murakami’s Rat Trilogy. This is the third of those three, which shows how seriously I take reading things in order. I don’t think it really matters much. In any case, what I love about Murakami is what I always love about it–the reality the life is pretty pointless and you sort of float through it until something happens and then you sort of don’t float through it. In Murakamiland, that means some kind of magical realism scenario, probably sex with a girl who doesn’t stick around too long, and some political overtones that are hard for the narrator to understand since the evil of the powerful seems distant until it isn’t. It’s a good way to get into him as well since it is a lot simpler a narrative than, say, 1Q84 or Dance Dance Dance. I find it interesting that there are Murakami haters out there, but then there are haters of everyone.
3. Al Pacino, Sonny Boy. Al’s memoir is a pretty fair read. What you take from it is that his life really could have gone a different way. He grew up very poor in the South Bronx and almost all of his school friends died of overdoses. But he was a weird kid and got out thanks to acting. He’s a true actor in the sense that has no other skills and cares about nothing else. This also makes him comically idiotic when it comes to money, which is why he continues to work. He’s the easiest mark in history and so everyone has ripped him off, forcing him to work constantly. He also claims, and I believe him, to have never done cocaine. He talks pretty openly about his drinking and drugs but stopped in the 70s before things got too bad. What he does not reveal is any real insight into how he moved from an incredibly subtle actor in the 70s to ridiculously over the top by the 90s. But hey, by the standards of artist memoirs, not the greatest of literary traditions, you could do worse for an easy read.
4. Elmore Leonard, Out of Sight. Not only is this one of my favorite books, but Soderbergh made it one of the best movie adaptations of a book ever, improving on it where it needed it and keeping 90% of the plot because it was so well-done. For those of you who live sad enough lives to not have seen the film or read the book, it’s about a bank robber who breaks out of prison and the federal marshal (Leonard loved him some federal marshals) who finds him deeply attractive but will also shoot him if need be. Great written characters abound, comedy is everywhere, the plot is fantastic. As fun as fun can be.
5. Richard Stark, The Score. This is part of the Library of America Crime Novels of the 60s series. I’d say it’s more a really good procedural than a great novel. It follows a robber who gets recruited to do a big job run by an amateur who wants to steal everything from a small North Dakota town, but won’t say why. It goes well, until it doesn’t go well. The book moves incredibly quickly, with limited digressions and plot expansion, but as a taut little book it works plenty well. Certainly better than the average crime novel and a good beach read.
6. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. In my view, if there is a Great American Novel, it is this one. It’s interesting that when Philip Roth played with this whole debate in his novel of that name, he thought only about the 19th century foundational novels, all written by white guys of course. That was amusing enough, but really, if there is a Great American Novel, it almost has to be written by someone from a minority population simply because the demand to understand the complexity of what America really is at its heart is something that whites, even perceptive whites, don’t really have the ability to articulate because they don’t have to. And even when whites try to do so–as they do in Invisible Man, as Ellison shows in his amazing skewering of the Communist Party’s blindness and hypocrisy that dominates the second half of the books–they don’t listen well enough to do it right. What covers more ground the Ellison’s story that goes a million miles in its 568 pages (in my edition) from the young boy and true believer in uplift at the HBCU to the New York of the 30s and the street battles and racial complexities of that time and place? It’s a coming of age story too–coming of age to a great cynicism about what this nation really is and how for someone like the narrator, and arguably for any black American, there truly is no place for the individual.
7. Marguerite Yourchenar, Memoirs of Hadrian. I’m not an Ancient Rome Guy, so I don’t have much background on the history, but this 1951 novel, widely seen as Yourchenar’s masterpiece, is definitely worth reading. Hadrian is dying and writing his memoirs to his adopted son Marcus Aurelius, who will be second in line for the throne. It’s advice and mediations on building a society and on life and loving and dying. It’s also designed to be somewhat replicating postwar France because Hadrian no longer has any belief in the gods but it’s pre-Christianity and he has no tolerance for Jewish or Christian fanatics. So it’s a book about rule in a kind of pantheist but really atheist world where fanaticism is a threat.

As always, this is your monthly thread on books.