February Reading List

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

Professional Reading:

1. Jacqueline Jones, No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era (Basic Books, 2025). This excellent Pulitzer Prize winning history demonstrates how, despite the words of white abolitionists, equality for Black workers in Boston did not exist at all. Many did not care about the state of the working class at all and saw Black workers as good for brute labor and domestics, but that’s it. But Black workers struggled for their labor rights as well as civil rights and in fact, you can’t separate labor rights from civil rights in most of Black history. A compelling story of the Black freedom struggle and white liberal hypocrisy.
2. Jonathan Kozol, An End to Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America (The New Press, 2024). Kozol has written on education inequality forever. Here, he revisits some earlier ideas that he now questions and notes how awful the discipline-forward education of Black children is in American schools. The idea that you have to force the joy out of life to get Black kids to study is part and parcel of the larger, deeper set of opinions that contributes to the segregated system of education in this country and these days is shared by plenty of Black educators too. But it just reinforces difference.
3. Jefferson Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (Basic Books, 2024). Another Pulitzer Prize winning history and another deserved one. Cowie is known for his labor and working class history. Here, he takes on a very different topic. What does “freedom” mean in Barbour County, Alabama? This is an absolutely critical subject as you see people today talk about “freedom” to mean the freedom to discriminate, to carry high-powered rifles, to not get vaccines. What freedom has meant in Alabama is the freedom of white men to dominate however they desire. He goes back to the genocide of clearing Native Americans off the land, moves through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the rise of Barbour County’s hero, George Wallace. Freedom may be an abstract concept, but to many in American history, it quite literally means the freedom of white men to oppress and you can’t dismiss that, even as you and I obviously hold different definitions of the word. What Cowie gets at is that concepts of freedom have always meant racism and violence for many, many Americans and is core to what it means to be an American. Sobering, but if we are serious about fixing this country, not telling ourselves lies seems to be a good idea.
4. Anne Kim, Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich off America’s Poor (The New Press, 2024). Kim writes powerfully about the many industries created in our neoliberal society as mediators between the government and the poor, always for a large profit that squeezes the poor even more. Payday lenders, bail bonds, sure, but also the companies involved in the government’s supposed antipoverty efforts that just keep people chained down through fees and taking huge amounts of the money instead of distributing it–education organizations, job training, all sorts of things. We have a lot to fix in this country.
5. Jessica Gigot, A Little Bit of Land (Oregon State University Press, 2022). The story of a woman who just wants some land to have an organic farm isn’t normally my thing, but as a scholar of the Northwest and especially the rural Northwest, I have to keep up on these things. Gigot is a pretty good writer and that brings this book off, but I have to admit that I don’t much care about Wisconsin hippies seeing the Northwest as their place to revive themselves and give their lives meaning by being in touch with the land. They could do that in Wisconsin, and for a lot cheaper. But of course it’s never really about the land, it’s about the culture. I get that of course, it’s a huge part of Northwest history since 1970. But I’m not really cheering for the protagonist here. I just don’t care that much about her and her project, it’s her positionality that interests me.
6. Colin Davis, Contested and Dangerous Seas: North Atlantic Fisherman, Their Wives, Unions, and the Politics of Exclusion (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019). A good labor history at some underexamined questions. First is deep sea fishing labor, which is hard and brutal and dangerous, and their unions. But as Davis points out, since these are mostly white men, contemporary scholars haven’t cared much (and this is true enough, some right-wing critiques about the contemporary academy aren’t completely without merit). Moreover, women’s organizations aren’t often examined in this way. These weren’t feminists. They were women fighting for their men. Then there are the politics of the late 20th century oceans, in which the expansion of Soviet trawling into the oceans and very real anger between Iceland and the UK led to serious foreign policy issues around fishing that could help or hurt fishing boat workers and their unions depending on where they were. I learned a lot here.
7. Corrie Grosse, Working across Lines: Resisting Extreme Energy Extraction (University of California Press, 2022). I didn’t love this sociological look at building coalitions to defeat dirty energy extraction in California and Idaho, largely because Grosse puts herself so much in the story. It’s the story of the scholar-activist-scholar, in which the activism comes from the scholarship and also influences the scholarship. That’s a lot of people, sure, but usually there’s at least some remove and here it’s more like “I was talking to people in Idaho about how much I love Bernie Sanders and they didn’t like that but we worked together on this thing.” But you know, that actually has value since it gets into how do we build political coalitions with people who don’t trust us but where we agree on an issue. So it’s a useful addition to the literature on environmental coalition building, if a bit eye-rolling at times.
8. Brooke Harrington, Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism (Norton, 2025). Harrington is a scholar of one of the great evils of the contemporary world, the creation of off-shore wealth havens for the super rich. This is a short book that intends to put these questions in front of readers in a way they can handle. She has crazy stories to tell, including fearing for her life. The powerful in the Bahamas, Panama, Mauritius, Malta, and other nations that have decided to allow the global rich to stash their wealth there really really do not want this information out there. Good book.
9. Emily E. LB. Twarog, Politics of the Pantry: Food and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2017). Twarog writes of meat protests in the twentieth century, from the 30s to the 70s, talking of a leftist domestic politics that often worked with the labor movement but was definitely not just some adjunct of it. A useful addition to both women’s history and leftist history, with potential lessons for today.
10. Natasha Zaretsky, Radiation Nation: Three Mile Island and the Political Transformation of the 1970s (Columbia University Press, 2018). This super smart book looks at the politics around Three Mile Island, which happened in a conservative part of Pennsylvania. So how did these Republicans get involved in anti-nuclear politics? Zaretsky talks of “patriotic body politics” as the key here. A mistrust of government and liberalism and technology all revolved around fears of what outside forces were doing to our bodies, in this case, reproductive politics. So women got involved in this who totally rejected any kind of political feminism. The book is a bit too early to really address the MAHA women, but she points to the rise of those politics and it can really inform us on how to conceptualize this movement.
11. Paul David Blanc, Fake Silk: The Lethal History of Viscose Rayon (Yale University Press, 2016). I love a book about the horrors of industrial production. Rayon is some nasty, awful stuff and is used in so much more than you think (cellophane is one example). Of course, as workers got poisoned, went crazy, and died, no one in power cared for the most part. That was especially true in the United States, whose employers see themselves as a lordly class with no social responsibilities. Glad that’s changed….

Fiction/Literary Non-Fiction:

1. Fuschia Dunlop, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food. I actually finished this at the end of January, but forgot to put it on last month’s list, so I’ll mention it here. Dunlop is probably the premier mediator between the complexities of Chinese food and western audiences. She has published many cookbooks, including one on Sichuan cooking that I own. This book is perhaps a bit long, but is a really valuable set of essays about what Chinese cooks value in food, techniques, history, the changing role of food in Chinese culture, increasingly lost arts in a rapidly modernizing nation, and other interesting topics. She is also really committed to dismantling the endless stereotypes about Chinese food. I learned a ton. here.
2. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. So I had never read Woolf before. Decided I’d start with one of the real classics. I’d read so much about this book that I have to admit the formal innovations did not blow me away reading it a century after its publication. That’s fair, what was revolutionary about literature in the 1920s is not necessarily going to be the case in the 2020s. So to me, it was an interesting look at the rich of Britain at a certain time and place, with the powerful story of the soldier with PTSD who kills himself as a moral center. Since so many magazines have essays on Woolf, it will be interesting to read them now that I have finally started exploring her catalog.
3. Javier Mariás, Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell. The last of Mariás’ Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, this book takes the protagonist Javier and helps him find out just what violence is for. But that’s not the point. This long trilogy about a center of the British spy agency is both the most and least spy series ever. It’s the least in that nothing ever happens. It’s the most in that the real work of these people is of observation and concluding what people are actually about. Javier is a Spaniard valued for his ability to read people’s motivations so what work he does do is almost all observation. But it’s not about that work either. Mariás was also a translator and so his work revolves around the meaning between words, the difficulties of understanding anyone in any language and especially when people are between languages. Not an easy read, but a valuable one.
4. Dorothy B. Hughes, The Expendable Man. I read this as part of the superb Library of America Crime Novels of the 60s series and I’m so glad I did. Hughes was already a well known writer when this story came out. It starts out as a medical intern is driving from Los Angeles to Phoenix for a family wedding. He comes from a wealthy family and everyone is trying to get him hooked up with another wealthy beautiful person. But on the way, he picks up a hitchhiker. He regrets it immediately. She ends up dying in Phoenix. He knows it’s going to be traced to him, though we as readers know he had nothing to do with it. See, she died after an abortion and he may still only be an intern, but we know that he has the ability to give abortions. But there’s one very very big plot point that isn’t even mentioned until you are about a quarter of the way through the book–he’s black and the girl is white. He figures, it’s fine, I’m in Arizona, not Alabama. But this came out in 1963 and Hughes, for a white author, does a great job of helping us understand the appeal of Barry Goldwater in Arizona without ever mentioning him by name. Even though you fundamentally know this is going to work out OK in the end, it’s a lot of fun to get there, but also a lot of tension because America is so fucked up on race. Very worth your time.
5. Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger. One of the last two books McCarthy released, it’s a story about a brother and sister. They fell in love and not in the good way, though it’s unclear if it was ever consummated (sure, McCarthy was creepy and also he was very rooted in Appalachia despite his western period). But she was depressive and committed suicide in 1970. Most of this story takes place in the early 80s, where this son of a Manhattan Project physicist whose life is destroyed by his lost sister-love works as a deep sea diver, where he and his fellow divers run across a plane that has crashed in the ocean with some weird mysteries. Then people start looking for him. He travels around. There are various adventures. It’s like a shaggy dog version of Suttree, in a sense, though not nearly as good. The rest of the book are transcripts of his sister’s imaginary characters during her psychosis, which really does not work at all (she’s the subject of the second end McCarthy book, which I did not think was good). There are moments here, including several situations where I laughed pretty hard. It’s alright. It’s about on par with No Country for Old Men, which was a great movie but not a great book. But whereas that felt like a movie script, this is more discursive than that. For McCarthy completists only.

This is your monthly book thread.