July Reading List

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

Professional Reading:

1. Thomas G. Smith, A Conservative Environmentalist: The Life and Career of Frank Masland Jr. (Penn State University Press, 2024). This isn’t really well known in the broader public, but avowed conservatives played a big role in the American environmentalism of the 50s through the 70s. Many were legislators who sponosored key laws. Masland was a far-right carpet manufacturer who fell in love with the American outdoors on a Grand Canyon boating trip in middle age and spent the rest of his life passionately fighting to save American nature while also supporting the John Birch Society, Barry Goldwater, and every other nutcase cause. So the book is worthy. It also demonstrates the sharp limits of biography as a genre. Masland just isn’t that interesting and most of this could be a good article. That’s to say nothing negative about the book per se. But individual people don’t for the most part actually do that much and the details you need to fill out a full biography don’t add much to the overall understanding of the individual. Useful book though, to be clear.
2. Casey A. Huegel, Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory: Grassroots Activism and Nuclear Waste in the Midwest (University of Washington Press, 2024). This solid example of movement-based environmental history looks at the grassroots efforts to clean up the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center, a nuclear production facility outside of Cincinnati. The book does a good job noting that these were not far-left activists, but local people whose NIMBYism overtly stated that no one should have nuclear facilities in the backyard. It goes into relationships between these groups and the unions in the plant, centers the political actions of John Glenn, and shows how working together in a grassroots manner can build local networks of solidarity that can maintain change over the long haul without the fear of outsider groups coming in and taking our jobs and the like.
3. Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late Nineteenth Century South (University of Georgia Press, 2007). One of my goals for the rest of the year is to review some of the literature of the post-Reconstruction South and I started with Hild’s solid book from 20 years ago that explores the intersection between all the different southern political reform movements in the late 19th century. Now, probably they tend to get a bit too much attention from historians because they could talk a game about interracial cooperation and that appeals to folks. They struggled to actually do it and when they did, it tended not to last very long. Moreover, urban and rural activists didn’t trust each other and really held serious suspicions against the other even outside the context of these movements. All that said, Hild does just what you want to see here and it reminded me why this is a such a good book–he sorts out of the complicated interconnections between these constantly beginning/changing/peaking/collapsing movements and all the people who float through them and the different state contexts and he leaves the reader with a good sense of the panoply of thought that went into the vast number of southerners dissatisfied with what capitalism had brought them.
4. Kenneth Scambray, Italian Immigration in the American West, 1870-1940 (University of Nevada Press, 2021). If you want a state-by-state accounting of Italian immigration to the West during these years, this is definitely the book for you. The problem with the approach is that the chapters are repetitive. Will likely be a useful source for historians going deeper into these questions in the future.
5. Amy Johnson Frykholm, Rapture Culture: Left Behind in America (Oxford University Press, 2007). Frykholm has become one of our most well-known religious scholars since publishing Rapture Culture, her first book. In it, she engaged in participant interviews with people who read the horrific Left Behind series of right-wing Christian apocalypticism. These were people more than happy to talk to someone about it. They weren’t all complete whackos either. Some were of course, but people read and engaged this stuff for many reasons and this is a valuable contribution to understanding a world of reading and understanding that most liberals find utterly impossible to comprehend, mostly including me.
6. Laura Helton, Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia University Press, 2024). Maybe the creation of the archive isn’t interesting to you as a general reader, but what if it should be? What if the creation of archives for people erased from the record are critical points of struggle for building the intellectual world to fight for rights, to create understanding of usable pasts, to force the nation to reckon with their existence? Helton’s work looks at the creation of black archival spaces, from the famous Schomburg Library in New York to little libraries in places like Roanoke, Virginia, which might not have had world class collections by contemporary standards but were pretty challenging to white supremacy for even existing.
7. Colin G. Calloway, Hard Neighbors: The Scotch-Irish Invasion of Native America and the Making of an American Identity (Oxford University Press, 2024). Calloway is one of our leading early American historians and here he turns his eye to the Scotch-Irish as the front line of genocidal Indian killers because they were brought in from Europe to provide that kind of buffer zone and to clear space for settlement. Sure, they were squatters and lawbreakers and a major pain and a lot of people didn’t like them, but no one really complained too much about the whole genocide stuff, since that’s what they wanted anyway. And today, the Scotch-Irish folk in rural America are about the biggest Trumpers that exist, if you want to draw connections between the 18th century and the present. His point is that they were buffer people from the time the British sent them to Northern Ireland to serve as the vanguard of Protestant colonization and the violence at the heart of that process became the violence at the core of American history. Our problems today have deep, deep roots.
8. Paul Emory Putz, The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports (Oxford University Press, 2024). This is a history of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and other attempts to connect mostly evangelical Christianity up to major sports, which anyone who watches sports has to suffer through me. Turns out God is always on the side of the winners, at least if you listen to how the winners talk about how the Lord works for a reason and whatnot. I guess God has a rooting interest in every sporting event. Maybe He’s on Fanduel. Anyway, these efforts didn’t necessarily start as evangelical, as Putz points out in this solid monograph. It came out of the Muscular Christianity movement of the late 19th century and then was connected up to people such as Amos Alonzo Stagg and even John Wooden in the 1960s and 70s. It could build support for black athletes and integration. But by the time I came along in the 80s and went to Oregon exhibition basketball games where Athletes in Action, an evangelical team of ex-college players who barnstormed and preached at halftime, was something I suffered through. Fun times.

FICTION/PROFESSIONAL NONFICTION

1. Len Deighton, Mexico Set. This is the first Deighton I’ve read and I guess I should have started with the first book in this series instead of the second book, but I didn’t know and didn’t pay that much attention. Plus I like anything Mexico. In any case, Deighton was a contemporary of John LeCarré, writing largely about a later time, the late 70s and 80s when the spy game was still strong but no one really believed in much of anything on either side anymore. This is a pretty snappy and exceedingly British book, where the class system dominates MI6 in a way that the CIA could never replicate with Harvard and Yale boys, no matter how he it tried. The plot is this–the protagonist’s wife is also a spy who defected to the KGB (the subject of the first book). His superiors suspect he was in on it. He is not and he has to prove them wrong by bringing a top KGB spy over to his side. Much of the action takes place in Mexico. It’s fascinating to me to read a Brit writing about Mexico City in the summer. Deighton talks about the heat and humidity of Mexico City. That city in the summer is perhaps in the low 70s and there are some days that it doesn’t even get that high. He talks about people eating whole chile peppers. I have never seen that in Mexico in my entire life except by North Americans. But then he accurately describes surtido tacos. In any case, it’s not quite as great as, say, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but it’s well worth your time and I will be reading more of Deighton’s books soon.
2. Javier Marías, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me. Last month, I wrote about how much I disliked certain types of authors (I was discussing Leone Ross’ Popisho, but also people such as Richard Powers and Francis Spufford) for a lack of subtlety in their writing and a throwing of the kitchen sink into their books that ensures that no idea is really that deeply considered. Marías is the exact opposite of this, which is probably why I come back to him over and over again. Very little happens in a Marías book, even his Your Face Tomorrow spy trilogy. In this case, a man is about to have sex with a married woman whose husband is out of the country. She dies of some sudden attack. What does he do? He leaves a bunch of food out for her small child and leaves. But he can’t let it go. Not only does he need to make sure the kid is OK, but he wants to understand this woman, her widow, and his own secrets about this. So he finds a way to ingratiate himself into these people. Any Marías book is really about the space between our thoughts and our actions, the misunderstandings between two humans, the translation of words, which verb tense one uses and what that means (in Spanish, tu or usted). And the paragraphs are often 4 or 5 pages long. If this sounds boring to you, well, I’m sorry. It does take a bit of work. The payoff makes you think a lot about your own positionality in the world. And in this case, the ending is incredible.
3. Juan Gabriel Vazquez, The Informers. I wouldn’t call this 2004 book great, but it is very much worth your time. Vazquez writes of the German community in Colombian during World War II from the perspective of the 1990s. The protagonist writes a book about his father’s German-Jewish friend, the kind of remembrance of the war and escaping the Nazis that was common everywhere in those years. His father, a professor, is furious and writes a negative review of the book in a journal. No one knows why, including our writer. But then secrets come out about the roundup of Nazi-sympathetic German-Colombians after the U.S. joins the war and his father’s involvement in that. But this book also takes place in the context of the horrible violence Colombians experienced in the 80s and 90s and the connections between the two eras are made clear, as are issues of memory and forgetting.
4. LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America. I finally got around to reading Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and his 1963 book, one of the most important in the history of writing about blues and jazz. This was the great era of trained black writers and scholars taking the history of black music as the center of their subjects, a group that included Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. In terms of musical analysis, Blues People is probably the single most important of these works. It’s not just that he made the compelling case that black music was a critically important development in American history, which of course is true. And it’s not just his perceptive insight into the history of slavery, which is a bit dated six decades later but holds up pretty well. It’s also his understanding of the jazz going on at that very moment and what Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Charles Mingus were about, takes that really do hold up. It’s his dismissal of a lot of white jazz, not as bad music, but as just something fundamentally different than black jazz. It’s also his contempt for the respectability politics of the black middle class, which he was well on the way toward rejecting. Still very much worth reading.
5. Jose Saramago, Cain. I love late era Saramago. His very best novels are really his early ones, where he delved deep into Portugese history with a dose of magical realism that was so rooted in the story that it never got ridiculous enough to be a problem (Baltasar and Blimunda, The History of the Siege of Lisbon). Then came his conspiratorial period, where the books were about state or other shady conspiracies (Blindness, most famously). But in his late period, he became the amusing old storytelling town atheist, thumbing his nose at death, piety, and the inconsistencies of the Bible. That last topic is the theme of his last book, which is the story of Cain. See, the Old Testament God is a huge dick. Since he promises Cain a future where he can’t be killed by man, Cain wanders through the Old Testament wondering what the fuck is wrong with this God asshole. He is condemned for killing his brother Abel but God slaughters left and right without thinking about it. I mean, did everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah need killing? And what he put Job through is just unconscionable. So since Cain is moving back and forth in time, the story ends with him and Noah and the Ark and Cain has some hilarious revenge. Not a bad place to start with Saramago actually, because it’s not a tough read, despite the very long paragraphs.
6. Ann Petry, The Street. My favorite structuralist novel in American literature deserved another reading. This 1946 novel is about a young black woman whose husband left her and her attempt to be a single mother in a tiny, awful New York apartment on an awful, overcrowded ghetto Harlem street. Every character is so deeply hemmed in by their surroundings, sympathetic or not. What can they do under a system of racial capitalism that destroys them? The Man is against them and fight as they might, they fail. But this is also not some book of leftist hackdom, which would doom it had it been. There’s no romanticizing the working class here. Most of these people are so damaged that they are just awful to each other and don’t know how not to be. The book is also social realism in a very easy to read package. There’s really no reason you couldn’t assign this to college or even high school students, if they ever read a book, which they don’t. But then neither do too many LGM readers. Why read a book when you can doomscroll? What a fun world.
7. Peter Taylor, Collected Stories, 1938-1959. I’d read this first half of the Library of America volume of Taylor before and I am glad I revisited it. Taylor was the bard of the southern suburban middle class of mid and postwar America. Lots of stories set in Nashville and its suburbs among people with pretty questionable opinions about blacks, with different attitudes about change in the South, with family issues and odd relations and locally colorful folk that had to be understood or dealt with. I don’t suppose this stuff is particularly fashionable since who really wants to read the perspective of midcentury white southerners in 2026, but Taylor was a fine, if not always consistent, storyteller and he basically discovered that these people were worthy of inclusion into the American literary canon.

This is your monthly book thread.