January Reading List

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

Professional Reading:

1. Sanford Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal (Princeton University Press, 1998). I miss labor histories like this, when historians engaged in serious histories of why union density stalled out in the U.S., without just repeating Labor Notes talking points about democratic unionism or shouting DEMZ!!!!! Rather, Jacoby engaged in a deep dive of how welfare capitalism that created company unionism before the war continued after the war, morphing into ways that, combined with the Taft-Hartley Act and really rather awful Eisenhower administration, created ways to forestall union advancements. It’s not a general readership kind of book, but it’s so smart and informative and useful and also non-ideological, helping all of those other adjectives.
2. Steve Phillips, How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good (The New Press, 2022). Phillips, a close advisor to Stacey Abrams, wrote this book with two main purposes. The first is to note that white supremacy has never really been defeated in America and the second is to demonstrate it can be at least defeated at the ballot box through the proper political organizing. Both points are important. The first is key–Trumpism is just the latest example of what goes back to the nation’s founding. When Phillips wrote a preface for the second edition of this book in 2024, he compared the forthcoming election to 1876. Yeah….that was accurate enough in that Americans chose to end any semblance of the Second Reconstruction (though to be fair, both parties were largely happy to end Reconstruction in 1876, so the comparison isn’t perfect). But the larger point is that white supremacists play a long political game. Liberals often don’t. He suggests how we do that, looking at organizing efforts in states such as Arizona and Georgia and expressing hope for Texas that I don’t really have, but we have to try anyway. A useful book because of its practical politics and its good historical analysis.
3. Jaclyn Ann Sumner, Indigenous Autocracy: Power, Race, and Resources in Porfirian Tlaxcala, Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2024). A small, but useful book, the kind of classic history that fills an important gap in the historiography. In this case, it makes an adjustment to the discussion of political repression of indigenous people under Porfirio Diaz by looking at the long-time governor of Tlaxcala, Mexico’s smallest state (“Si Existé” is the state slogan and Rhode Island should adopt this), who was from there and understood conditions on the ground better than other appointed governors. This study thus shows a different side of how rule could happen in that period of Mexican history, which wasn’t exactly pro-indigenous, but understood how to build a modernist project that brought in indigenous people rather than simply repressed them, particularly through water projects. That this was completely self-serving to the governor himself and his desire to be a little dictator in Tlaxcala is of course central to the point; it wasn’t just because he was some proto-indigenous rights activist, which he wasn’t. He wanted power and this was how to maintain it.
4. James Morton Turner and Andrew C. Isenberg, The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Harvard University Press, 2018). It’s interesting to read a book like this 8 years after its publication when everything has gotten so much worse. These two leading environmental historians set out to explain the interesting question of how Republicans moved from often supporting environmental legislation in the 70s to being almost violently opposed to it today. Much of the book is just a good primer on the rise of the right generally, framed around the environmental issue. So you have the rise of evangelicalism, right-wing think tanks, the Powell letter, all that stuff. It’s worthy. The more interesting part of the book is one I talk about in my classes–one problem environmentalism has had is its own success. A big reason Republicans supported this stuff in the 70s is that people could feel the pollution with all their senses. Now…well, if you are a person of color in a sacrifice zone, but otherwise, no and Republicans don’t care about the extreme poor, as we all know. So it’s hard to make these things seem immediate to people and that includes climate change. It’s been a cold January in New England. You think climate change is something motivating people there right now? So it’s tough. Incidentally, one point they make is an overwhelming rebuttal to the type of person who says “Nixon was the last true liberal because he signed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act unlike those neoliberal sellouts like Obama or Biden.” But in fact, not only were those laws passing almost unanimously in Congress, but Nixon was to the right of other Republicans on them. He urged congressional Republicans directly not to pass these laws and one of them (Clean Air I think, but I’d have to go back to look), he attempted to pocket veto but Congress stayed in session to force him to sign it.
5. Robert Bauman, Fighting to Preserve a Nation’s Soul: America’s Ecumenical War on Poverty (University of Georgia Press, 2019). A classic historiographical argument here–there’s a big literature on the War on Poverty but no one had really looked at it specifically from the role of religion. In fact, the liberal churches played a huge role in working on these issues. One interesting point here is how James Forman, in his Black Power phase, directly challenged the liberal churches, interrupting big church services by demands for reparations and how divisive that was in those churches. Good, solid book.
6. Amy M. Hay, The Defoliation of America: Agent Orange Chemicals, Citizens, and Protests (University of Alabama Press, 2021). I know this literature pretty well because I dealt with the herbicides for 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, which combines to make Agent Orange, which was a huge driver in grassroots protests against industrial forestry in the Northwest in the 70s. Hay covers this and other issues, including the creation of these chemicals, protests over Agent Orange in Vietnam and the U.S., and the larger political implications of their uses. Useful.
7. Yann Beliard and Neville Kirk, eds., Workers of the Empire, Unite: Radical and Popular Challenges to British Imperialism, 1910s-1960s (Liverpool University Press, 2021). I don’t know a ton about these issues, but I found this a really helpful book of essays looking at how the working class or advocates in England to fight against imperialism. Unsurprisingly, these interactions didn’t always go super well, but people were doing the best they could. A lot here on India, some useful essays on Africa too.
8. Chelsea Schields, Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (University of California Press, 2023). A look at how oil transformed Aruba and Curacao and how that changed gender roles on those islands, with an emphasis on the importation of sex workers and the exoticization of those women. Offshore is a metaphor here for the economy and for sexuality.
9. Dylan Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023). I really thought this is a great book, the best I read all month for three reasons. First, it does an outstanding job reminding readers who somehow still think the civil rights movement started in the 40s and 50s that, in fact, it went back basically for the entirety of Black existence in the United States. Second, Penningroth demonstrates the many ways in which Black Americans used the law to protect themselves, even under slavery, when while they did not exactly have rights whites had to respect of course, nonetheless were considered to have legal rights over their own property and those cases would get to court sometimes. Third, Penningroth does an outstanding job making writing about legal cases compelling reading and that takes some serious writing skill. You all should buy this.
10. Rebecca Clarren, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance (Viking, 2023). This is the other book from this month I thought was super great. Clarren is a journalist and a Jew. Her family were among those who escaped anti-Semitism in eastern Europe. But whereas most Jewish migrants stayed in the cities, some started farms and that included her family. The farm? It was on land recently stolen from the Lakota in South Dakota. Later, Clarren became a reporter working in the West, including on Lakota land. So this is her attempt to bridge one of the paradoxes of America–how American land can mean freedom for one family and people not in spite of but precisely because that land was violently stolen from someone else. This is a sensitive and intelligent attempt to explore this core question of America.
11. William S. Kiser, Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). When the U.S, stole the northern half of Mexico to expand slavery, they inherited a lot of people with their own customs. Ever since the arrival of the Spanish and the rise of horse cultures in the aftermath of the Pueblo Revolt, the Southwest was a maelstrom of slavery and forced labor. How would the United States government deal with things such as detribalized Native slaves and long-term debt peonage? It took a long time for the U.S. to get its head around governing New Mexico and a long time to deal with these issues too.
12. Adam Romero, Economic Poisoning: Industrial Waste and the Chemicalization of American Agriculture (University of California Press, 2021). A solid enough book on this topic, which the title explains well enough. Notably, there was a lot of effort involved in spraying oil and other poisons all over our crops. It wasn’t some super rational and obvious decision. It was a corporate campaign and a very successful one.
13. Nadine Weidman, Killer Instinct: The Popular Science of Human Nature in Twentieth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2021). This isn’t a topic where I bring a lot to the table because I don’t read a lot of this popular science stuff. Weidman focuses on the rise of the supposed science of human nature that got popularized after the war–the precursor to evolutionary biology and all that stuff–and just how unscientific it all was, with these men (inevitably) just projecting their own desires about the supposedly inherent violence in humans as science and getting people to buy it. I’m struck how often we see this sort of thing in comments here (all societies seek violence and war so why criticize the U.S. for stealing half of Mexico to expand slavery, etc). This ends with E.O. Wilson and all the debates over his work. What this really shows me is–as per always–science and its findings are completely shaped by the political beliefs and life and times of the people engaging in it. Over and over, historians of science see how the findings of scientists and/or the implementation and interpretation of the findings by the scientists themselves–popular or not–are shaped by their views about the world.
14. Christopher P. Foss, Facing the World: Defense Spending and International Trade in the Pacific Northwest since World War II (Oregon State University Press, 2020). A useful if not groundbreaking monograph on how the Northwest moved from its logging and natural resources economic base into embracing both defense spending (though this was vastly more in Washington than Oregon) and foreign trade, particularly with Asia. Useful for my work, but might be a bit specific for the general reader.

FICTION/LITERARY NON-FICTION

1. Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. The ultimate “meat is murder” book, in this case pretty literally. Tokarczuk won the Nobel a few years back, the first writer with extremely questionable white person dreadlocks to win the prize. The book follows an old lady, a militant vegetarian who lives her life through astrology and trying to translate Blake into Polish with a friend of hers, as she deals with the death of her dogs by mysterious causes. That’s not the only death here, there’s a lot of them, starting not with the dogs but of her poacher neighbor, who dies after choking on a bone from a deer he poached. Soon, the town’s other big hunters start dying. Our hero suggests the animals could be taking revenge. Tokarczuk is herself a pretty militant vegetarian. The thing about the Meat is Murder people is that they are of course absolutely correct, and I say this as a meat eater. If the animals ever do organize and rise up, I deserve to be the first who dies, but most us deserve it too. So yeah, this remarkable book does take the reader places in their head.
2. Rayya Elias, Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk from the Middle East to the Lower East Side. I randomly picked this up in a used bookstore based on the title. Then I started reading it. Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love fame/infamy wrote the intro. Then I was like…holy shit, this is the woman that Gilbert wrote that book about last year that was absolutely trashed, her memoir of her and Elias becoming lovers after Elias was diagnosed with terminal cancer and Gilbert started buying cocaine and heroin for her and then wrote about how it was all so wonderful for her to experience, the most self-centered of memoirs ever. Well, that was quite an intro into this book. The book itself is not bad for what it is. Elias was a wild child for sure. A Syrian immigrant who was bullied when she came to the U.S., she found an outlet in drugs very early on and despite some tremendous talents as a hair stylist and (at least by her own claims) as a budding musician in the New Wave scene in New York in the 80s, completely blew up her life through serious addiction, all while dealing with her own sexuality and having to hide that from her family. The problem with reading about addiction though is that addiction is really boring to read about and so predictable. I wish there was more on the music scene but the book title kind of frames the book as something other than addiction. So it’s good on an outsider dealing with life as an immigrant, which has a lot of value. It’s good on being a lesbian in the 80s and what that meant. It’s a good look at New York and Detroit in the 80s. I can give or take the addiction stuff. I won’t read it again, but I don’t really regret reading it. By the time she published this in 2013, she had been clean for over 15 years. That would not last much longer as the cancer diagnosis came only a couple years later and evidently, she said, Warren Zevon style, fuck it, I’m going out high, leading to Gilbert’s ridiculousness, etc.
3. Charles Williams, Dead Calm. This is from the Library of America’s Classic Crime Novels of the 60s series. This 1963 novel is the what the word “taut” was created to describe. It’s the story of a sailor and his wife honeymooning by sailing the Pacific. They run across a sinking ship. A man comes to their ship. He is not what he seems, to say the least. When the sailor goes to check out the other ship, the visitor punches his wife and takes off. The people on board the other ship are, uh, problematic. Will she be able to get control of the ship from the lunatic and find her way back before the other ship sinks? Will he be able to control the idiots on board the other ship to see if his wife can make it back? It keeps you on the edge of your seat!
4. Dan J. Marlowe, The Name of the Game is Death. Another from the LOA Crime Novels series, this is fucking great. The title is perfect. It’s the story of a complete psychopath in the aftermath of a bank robbery, entirely in the first person. The title is absolutely perfect and it has one of the best final paragraphs I’ve ever read. Evidently, Marlowe was a right-wing piece of shit as a person, so I guess he could write about being a psychopath with fluidity.
5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler. I’ve been working through Dostoyevsky in the last 18 months or so. I’d read The Gambler maybe 20 years ago or so. It remains a great, accessible way into Dostoyevsky and his essential thesis that the Russians are all overwrought insane people with tendencies to massive degenerate addictions. By which he was describing himself.
6. Louisa Hall, Trinity. This is a beloved novel by many and I enjoyed it well enough, but I don’t get why people think of it as one of the best books of the century. It’s clever enough–Hall creates fictional stories of people revolving around Robert Oppenheimer, with a lot of emphasis on the attacks on the Manhattan Project chief’s loyalty. It’s an interesting approach and a good read, but again, I’m not sure that it’s that amazing.
7. Iraj Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon. The iconic Iranian novel, written in 1973, follows a family headed by a former Army officer who is a complete tyrant, thinks he personally defeated English forces, and models himself after Napoleon. He’s a ridiculous figure and this comic novel is a good light skewing of Iranian society. It does get pretty repetitive in parts, but one can see why this would be popular. Highlight: the use of the phrase “going to San Francisco” to mean sex and, even better, “Los Angeles” for anal sex. I have no idea why these cities would be referred to this way, but it works for this American.
8. Frederic Brown, The Murderers. A third book from the LOA 60s Crime Novel series, it’s less impressive than the previous two. It’s a story about two men who both want someone murdered, so they do each other’s guy in, to the kind of bad results that won’t surprise you. The appeal of this book is that the narrator is an actor who is also on the edges of the Beat scene so you get some real time Beat influence into other forms of literature. That’s kind of interesting, but compared to the other books in this series, this is a bit rote.

This is your monthly book thread.