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May Reading List

On June 1, 2025

At 8:06 am

In General

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Here’s my list of books read in April. Last month’s list is here. This goes out to my book patron, known as PS, who sends me books that make up a good portion of the fiction list. Your generosity is beyond appreciated.

PROFESSIONAL READING:

James Michael Buckley, City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry (University of Texas Press, 2024). Buckley is an architectural historian and geographer who gives a fairly familiar story an interesting spin, following the 19th and early 20th century redwood supply chains from the forests to San Francisco and examining how architectural forms on everything from worker housing to the docks and mills reflect the values of the society at that time.
Rebecca B. Galemba, Laboring for Justice: The Fight against Wage Theft in an American City (Stanford University Press, 2023). A highly valuable anthropological study of wage theft in the Denver construction industry, with lots of interviews of Mexican day laborers trying to survive when so often these contractors are sketchy characters with no intention of paying them. Places this issue in the context of the long-term exploitation of Mexican workers going back to the Bracero program.
Cristina Viviana Groeger, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston (Harvard University Press, 2021). A provocative history of education in Boston that comes down hard against the liberal myth that education leads to more equality and opportunity. Rather, Groeger shows that it leads to more gatekeeping through credentialism. I’d like to see this thesis tried out somewhere outside of New England, where the private school culture and the home of some of the world’s most elite educational institutions might lead to this to be more extreme. Is this true in the American West, for instance? Quite thought-provoking and worth considering its implications.
Julia Ornelas-Higdon, The Grapes of Conquest: Race, Labor, and Industrialization of California Wine, 1769-1920 (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). This is a good example of a standard historical monograph in the 2020s. Six chapters. Find a new angle on the biggest issues among historians. Write a book about it. In this case, Ornelas-Higdon uses the pre-Prohibition California wine industry as a way to discuss such as issues as Spanish colonization and control over Indians, the racial ideas of Americans as they took over California, fears over Chinese labor, modernization discourse, and discourses around health. It’s a perfectly fine history. For those of you who really care about the history of California wine, you might find it pretty interesting. For me, the most interesting part was actually the epilogue, where she calls out the bullshit fake historical depictions of the industry you see in today’s white owned wineries that makes it seem like they valued diversity in the past in just the way that a 21st century liberal does today.
Evan Osnos, Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021). This was one of those post-Trump books that attempted to explain the decline and anger of America. It does an OK job of this, focusing on hedge fund assholes in Connecticut, deindustrialized West Virignia, and Black Chicago. Osnos is a good reporter. But reading this four years later, it’s not that there’s anything really wrong with the book so much as there’s not enough right about it. It’s easy to talk about the problems of America, but he doesn’t really have much of a vision to fix it, focusing primarily on individuals trying to do good things, which alright, fine, but that’s not really the solution.
David Biggs, Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2018). An environmental historian of war, Biggs demonstrates usefully how, in a nation with long traditions of war, once you have a landscape transformed for military purposes, the same spaces become transformed again and again.
Lauren Benton, They Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024). This superb book looks at the corners of European empires from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, primarily, and demonstrates how skirmishes in faraway places such as the borderlands of Brazil/Paraguay or the South Pacific can led to monstrous wars because of the legal fictions the European powers used to create justifications for massive, horrifying violence imposed upon people they wanted to turn into subjects.
Janet Greenlees, When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries (Rutgers University Press, 2019). An older style of history, so it didn’t surprise me that this was written by an English historian. Very much a monograph, but a useful one, she compares issues of public health in textile towns both the UK and the US, showing that workplace health improvements are often best generated by engaged workers making demands rather than them being imposed from the top.
Omar Valerio-Jimenez, Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). This excellent work explores the historical memory of the Mexican War among Mexican-Americans dealing with displacement, violence, racism, and marginalization, with special attention given to Texas and New Mexico. You don’t need to idealize the US born Mexican American communities (and Valerio-Jimenez very much does not) to explore how different peoples used what tools they had at hand to make claims upon being Americans among a white population that really did not want to accept them.
Jenifer L. Barclay, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press, 2021). I’m not convinced the growing history of disability is going to transform the study of the past, but I do see it much like environmental history, which is that it will provide useful new angles to study old questions. As a trained environmental historian, at one point we all hoped it would do more, but to be honest, the rest of the historical field was never really convinced by some of the arguments and maybe I’m not either. The future remains on that issue for disability history. Either way, Barclay’s book is a really useful way to consider slavery. Not only were many slaves disabled from terrible health care or accidents in their terrible working conditions, but many owners would disable their own slaves for any number of cruel and awful reasons. Moreover, the discourse of disability and the discourse of defending slavery grew together in the first half of the nineteenth century and Barclay really demonstrates how they overlapped and why this matters. A quite worthy book. I’m glad I read this.
Stephen Aron, Peace and Friendship: An Alternative History of the American West (Oxford University Press, 2022). An interesting, useful, and provocative, if intentionally minor, retelling of some stories from the history of the West to push back ever so slightly on the narrative of unremitting violence that dominates the historiography of the region since the 1980s. Aron, one of the most respected Western historians working today, offers new takes on Daniel Boone, Lewis & Clark, and Dodge City to note that violence was not inevitable and different people came together. Of course, violence was often the result, but it is worth highlighting the moments when other forms of careful negotiation, patience, forgiving, and just being smart meant that people made other choices, if only for awhile.
Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (Harvard University Press, 2021). This is the one professional book I’d most recommend off this list. Well, it’s probably tied with the Benton book listed above and they go quite well together in fact. Harper writes this like the big adventure-based histories of World War II or something like that that are quite popular. But instead of talking about Hitler or Stalin, he’s telling the story of how anti-imperialism spread across Asia in the first three decades of the twentieth century. From India to Indonesia and Vietnam, there is more intrigue here that you could possibly think possible in real life. Other than the man who would become known as Ho Chi Minh, there aren’t too many people you’ve probably heard of (Mao and Gandhi do make appearances though), but this is a fantastic history told the way that can sell a lot of books. Check this out.

FICTION/LITERARY NONFICTION:

Gregor von Rezzori, The Orient Express. Late twentieth century literature was sure filled with aging men raging about their declining sex lives, their identity, and the impact of World War II changing everything they once loved. Von Rezzori was a German writer and this story is about an aging half-Armenian, half-English man who sort of loves his wife, sort of loves his mistress, sort of hates himself, really hates what the world has become, and who looks for sex as a way to feel something, but at the age of 65 this is becoming harder. He’s a rich businessman in New York who decides to travel around the world as a way to get through this crisis. We meet him in Venice, where he hates everything Europe has become. He used to ride the Orient Express as a child going from England to Romania and back and now we meet him in Venice where he going to ride a revived Orient Express back to London as a way to relive his past. Of course, it’s a simulacrum of what it once was, or maybe he’s just not what he once was. So there’s sex, and there’s almost sex, and it’s all just kind of tiresome. At least Philip Roth was funny. I picked this up somewhat randomly at a used book store and I guess it’s interesting from a formal perspective, but I can’t say I enjoyed it.
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star. Lispector may have been a rich woman born in Ukraine, but her ability to tell a story of a poor Brazilian woman who barely exists in the world. It’s a story about poverty, about sexism, about the near zero opportunities for a poor girl from the northeastern part of the nation when she moves to Rio or Sao Paulo. That it’s told strictly from a male narrator’s point of view makes it even more fascinating and her unusual grammar and punctuation choices add to the oddness of the whole thing. In fact, there’s an afterword by the translator about how everyone always tries to correct the grammar, including from excerpts in biographies of her! It’s a very short book and while not exactly beach reading, you can get through it in a couple of hours if you want to engage in this kind of story. I was glad I read it.
Jean-Patrick Manchette, Nada. Probably my favorite Manchette because it is just so damn bleak. This follows a bunch of anarchists and such who decide to kidnap the American ambassador. Earlier, this might have been some brave story of leftists or something. But my friends–this is now the 70s and everything is shit. That includes the idiots who do the kidnapping, as well as the sadistic cop who will stop at nothing to eliminate everyone involved, with maximum prejudice. There is nothing even close to a good guy here. And it’s a glorious shot at a post-68 left that romanticizes violence while Manchette also never lets up on the gas to point out that the cops are evil.
Stenio Gardel, The Words That Remain. A powerful short novel from Brazil about a poor, illiterate gay man who had a childhood affair with a friend before his father found out and beat him within an inch of his life, leading him to leave home. His friend/lover left him a letter that he could never read. Over 20 years later and now living with a transgender woman who he himself once beat nearly to death before he realized that he was so wrong and scared himself of being outed, he learns to read so he can finally read that letter. This is a compelling narrative about poverty, queerness, and identity in modern Brazil. Well worth your time.
Albert Murray, Train Whistle Guitar. I read Murray’s 1975 novel years ago and enjoyed it. Decided to read it again and I really loved it this time. In the meantime, I’ve read a bunch of Murray’s nonfiction work such as South to a Very Old Place and The Omni-Americans, so I have a much better sense of what Murray is about than when I first read this. This novel is basically about the blues. The narrator is a young boy from a small town outside of Mobile (i.e., Albert Murray) and his adventures idolizing the bad men musicians around him while also being a super smart young kid who everyone has a lot of hopes in. He learns from both sides of his life and the discussion of his early attempts at sex as a young teenager are pretty amusing on their own. But what Murray is really doing here is trying to capture the rhythms and music of Black life in the 20s, between the sacred and the profane and what the blues and jazz sounded like and the borders between outlaws and the righteous. It’s a fantastically successful novel and really, Murray deserves more readers today, both for his fiction and nonfiction. The latter can be a bit difficult because he’s so angry at the racist social science of the 60s and 70s (an anger toward bad scholarship that I myself share) so you might not get all the references. Some of them even I had to look up. But the fiction? That’s quite approachable.
Yu Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station. When I had my speaking tour in Tokyo in 2022, one thing that stood out to me was that there was a sizable homeless population, but like everything else in Japan, their appearance was strictly ordered. They set up in Shinjuku Station every night and were gone every morning. Most were older men. I wondered what this was about. Well, Miri’s incredibly sad novel follows one homeless man who just has never had anything good happen in his life. He could work–he had to from the time he was small–but the advancements of Japan left him behind he had so many family deaths and eventually, he just wandered away from everything to the homeless encampments of Tokyo. The story is told from the afterlife, which itself is a fascinating examination of existential melancholy, but the short novel eventually gets to the moment of his death. This packs a powerful emotional punch.

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