January Reading List

When I published my year-end book list on January 1, our commenter Karen threw out the idea of a monthly book thread. I thought this was a pretty good idea myself, because then I could give a brief discussion of the books I’d finished in a given month. I’ve also seen some skepticism in the comments on the annual posts about how much I read and how I read and that I can’t actually be reading like this or something. And that annoyed me a lot. So here we go, both for discussion and documentation:

Professional Reading:

1. Corinna Zeltsman, Ink Under the Fingernails: Printing Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (University of California Press, 2021). I’ve been reading a lot of Mexican history because I spend so much time down here thanks to my wife’s work. I find it helps me understand what I am seeing. This is definitely a monograph so not the big sweeping history that you might want if you were just starting to engage in the field, but the relationship between printers/journalists and the state is one that says an awful lot about said state. It’s not the only book I’ve read on this topic, broadly defined, but most of what I knew before this was 20th century. Benjamin T. Smith, The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976 is a very good book on the more recent side of the story. Zeltsman’s book added a lot to my knowledge in the previous century. Very solid monograph.
2. Jennifer Mandel, The Coveted Westside: How the Black Homeowners Rights Movement Shaped Modern Los Angeles (University of Nevada Press, 2022). Mandel’s book explores the battles to desegregate wealthy Los Angeles neighborhoods and the creation of Ladera Heights and other areas of the city known as “Black Beverly Hills,” a term I first learned from Frank Ocean’s song “Sweet Life.” It’s hardly the first book to explore desegregation in LA or to take the neighborhood-based approach to urban desegregation (see Kevin Kruse’s White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism as a good example), but it’s a good book that does just what it needs to do. Solid addition to the historiography.
3. B. Brian Foster, I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Discussed this book on a Music Notes post earlier in January. Excellent look at the complexities of tourism in the blues capital of Clarksdale, where Black residents feel entirely alienated from the whole process and see none of the benefits.
4. Robert T. Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). This is a brilliant book that you should all read. I’ve been aware of Chase’s work for a long time, going back to a labor history post I wrote based on it a long time ago. I had heard the book was great and it is. This deep exploration of the Texas prison system and how it developed after World War II through the 1970s to serve agribusiness through a brutal regime is some fantastic history. Right there with Heather Thompson’s Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy and Garrett Felber, Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State as the best books on the carceral state that I’ve read.
5. J.J. Anselmi, Out Here on Our Own: An Oral History of an American Boomtown (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). Ah, Rock Springs, Wyoming, everyone’s favorite town. To say the least, it is a town with a sordid history. In the late 20th century, it became a coal boom town. That’s what Anselmi, whose grandfather was once accused by Dan Rather of having ties to organized crime in the town, seeks to document here. The whole book is made up of first-person accounts about the time. For me, that’s not the most effective way to document something–oral histories have their place but people also have convinced themselves that they were spat upon as soldiers returning from Vietnam, which we have no documentation of ever happening. Basically, I don’t trust oral history much, or more accurately, I trust it as much as any other source, which means I approach it with skepticism. Where this book is most effective though is the people who grew up in this energy boomtown and its aftermath of economic depression, drugs, booze, violence, and suicide. It’s the story of a lot of deindustrialized communities. And in truth, it’s not an oral history of a boomtown. It’s an oral history of the kids who grow up in the awful aftermath.
6. Holger Weiss. A Global Radical Waterfront: The International Propaganda Committee of Transport Workers and the International of Seamen and Harbour Workers, 1921-1937 (Brill, 2021). There’s a kind of leftist history that you never see published anymore except by European historians with European presses that sometimes is either in English or translated into it. This is the extremely long and detailed history into hopeless leftist movements that really never stood a chance to succeed but which a small group of very passionate scholars and activists really want to read. That’s Holger Weiss and A Global Radical Waterfront in a nutshell. He explores attempts by the Soviets to create strong Communist groups in among seaman and harbor workers. There’s actually quite a historiography on these issues and Peter Cole is a really great scholar on them. Weiss provides really impressive research that not only focuses on the European ports but attempts to deal with the colonial world as well. But still….are there more pages in this book than workers involved in these movements? The conclusion stars with “Was everything in vain?” Maybe? It’s leftist history after all.
7. Andrew Stone Higgins, Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Solid overview of how Clark Kerr’s California Master Plan for Higher Education intended to discriminate against minority populations and how those populations fought back in the 60s to open up the state’s higher education institutions/
8. John Lindsay-Poland, Plan Colombia: U.S. Ally Atrocities and Community Activism (Duke University Press, 2018). A powerful book from someone involved in peace efforts in Colombia for a long time. This history of Plan Colombia and the aftermath is a great reminder of the enormous level of human rights disasters caused by American military aid to Latin America. One does not have to defend the FARC (and Lindsay-Poland definitely does not) to note that the Colombia military took this aid and used it to massacre anyone thought they might could be vaguely associated with the FARC, with total impunity at the time. Some of these monsters have been imprisoned since. But one key point here is not that the U.S. is evil in programs like this, but policymakers often really don’t understand conditions on the ground or even what they are doing with these kinds of programs. Very good book; pair it with Phil Klay’s superb novel Missionaries to really get at the complexity of these issues.
9. David Struthers, The World in a City: Multiethnic Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (University of Illinois Press, 2019). Openly pro-anarchist history leads to some raised eyebrows. It’s not that there’s not a point to be made about cultures of affinity of the early 20th century and the like. But how many books on the massively overrated Flores Magon brothers do we need? One of my biggest problems with labor history is historians reading their own politics back on the past and there’s plenty of that here. Plus when you are an anarchist, your history is all about losing, meaning you never have to deal with the implications of your ideas. They can remain in that sweet romantic spot and you can talk about “solidarity” and the like a lot.
10. Amy Kohout, Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). I certainly had some sense of how military officers in the West and then in the imperialist era also were important people in the history of American science, collecting specimens and describing strange places and like. But this superb history really expanded my knowledge of the issue, both in the American West and the Philippines. Nature collecting and American imperialism really were deeply intwined and you will learn a lot from this book, You might not think this is a topic that will interest you, but it is a book that will indeed interest you.
11. Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach, Dream Books & Gamblers: Black Women’s Work in Chicago’s Policy Game (University of Illinois Press, 2022). An interesting if kind of odd book. I don’t know much about policy games in the Black community except from gangster movies basically. So I learned a lot about this topic here. I still could have used a better explanation of exactly how they worked though. This book explores the women involved, some of whom were real queens of Black Chicago. It gets oddly celebratory at times though, which is kind of a weird for a book about illegal gambling operations. I mean, you gotta make it how you gotta make it, I get that, and I don’t see any reason to write about topics like this in a language of condemnation, but these also weren’t exactly heroic folks. So I found the tone a little offputting at times.
12. William J. Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530-1750 (Notre Dame University Press, 2006). I occasionally read Irish history because I occasionally go to Ireland for in-law stuff and that’s probably happening this summer. This is a very deep dive geographer’s look at the impact of English colonization. I love geography as a field, but they do tend to overwrite and overwhelm the reader with detail and this book is very much in that vein. It’s also a very very large book, like physically heavy to hold and turn the pages. But on the topic, it’s very very good. Not sure if it helps me interpret what I see in Ireland that much, but it doesn’t hurt to have the context, that’s for sure.
13. Sebastian Voigt, ed. Since the Boom: Continuity and Change in the Western Industrialized World after 1970 (University of Toronto Press, 2021). This is a book of essays by a bunch of scholars dealing with deindustrialization. There are some really useful essays in here and if you are a scholar on the issue, this is a book you should know. The general public might find it less useful, but again, if deindustrialization in the U.S. and Europe is up your alley, get this on ILL or whatever.

Fiction/Literary Non-Fiction

1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings. I had never really engaged with Gilman before. It was about time. The writing is so broad, like a lot of early feminists, but also tremendously accessible and I could easily see assigning some of her work in the right class, not that students would read it. Plus she has a poem about the Pawtuxet River, which I see everyday when I am home in Rhode Island. Herland would be tremendously appealing to a lot of people, the kind of early science fiction that imagines alternative utopian societies in politically acceptable ways. Of course, Gilman was also a big time eugenicist, but then who wasn’t.
2. John O’Hara, Stories. I love this Library of America collection of O’Hara’s short stories so much, so I decided to read it all again. He wrote so many that approaching it as a curated collection is probably the best way to go. O’Hara had major success as a novelist in the 30s with books such as Appointment in Samarra, but then went kind of fallow in the 40s and 50s. But in the 60s, the last decade of his life, he wrote some of the most astounding stories out there, from his many stories about the sordid social lives of the elites he always wish he was to stories about aging Hollywood stars. It’s basically Mad Men on the page. O’Hara was by all accounts an awful person, someone who openly lobbied for a Nobel Prize no one really thought he deserved. His reputation declined after his death, but has had something of a revival in the last decade. These stories are well worth reading in part because of this; the desperation for acceptance from his social elites pours off the page from his characters.
3. George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin. I’ve read quite a bit of colonial/postcolonial fiction in recent years. Sometimes it feels like homework, both in terms of subject matter and readability, but then what is the point of reading if not to enmesh yourself in the stories and experiences of others? Well, I suppose there is escapism, but I never understood that. Anyway, Lamming was a writer from Barbados and he published this book in 1953, getting huge praise and a forward for the American edition by none other than Richard Wright. Like a lot of these works, it’s about childhood and identity growing up and being educated in a colonial system. Like a lot of midcentury work, it can be pretty dense and include a fair bit of dialect, which I get from an intellectual perspective, but isn’t always easy to get through. It’s unquestionably an important book, just not a super fun one.
4. Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson. I’ve read this before, but it’d been several years and while there are highlights, it is clearly the weakest of the original Zuckerman series. Roth is at his best not when he is talking about sex, but when he is talking about Jewish and Jewish-American identity. That’s in here of course, but the main plot of the book is Zuckerman undergoing psychosomatic illness due to the success of Carnovsky and the impact on his family. But is there anything more dated about the 60s and 70s than the emphasis on psychology? And whining about all your success? It just doesn’t age that well to me.
5. Tomas Eloy Martinez, The Peron Novel. I’ve long loved Martinez’s Santa Evita, a wonderful examination of the most mysterious figure in Argentine history and the obsession by Juan Peron’s enemies to hide the body after her death. Martinez followed up with a similarly structured novel based around Peron’s return to Argentina in 1973 and the massacre of left-wing Peronists by right-wing Peronists the day he landed. A lot of this is about the rise of Peron and who this enigmatic man was. The problem though is that Juan Peron is simply not an interesting book, so this one struggles to grip the reader, or at least this one.
6. Roberto Bolaño, Cowboy Graves. Minor Bolaño is still good Bolaño. This is a recent publication of three unpublished novellas all thrown together. No, it’s not The Savage Detectives or The Third Reich, but if you are a fan, these are most definitely worth reading. Also, the book is short enough that if you aren’t familiar with Bolaño and you want a quick taste, it’s a totally worthy entrypoint.
7. Juan Gabriel Vazquez, Lovers on All Saints’ Day Vazquez is a Colombian river who lived in exile in Europe for a long time due to the political situation in his home country. I understand he usually writes about Colombia, but my introduction to him was this set of short stories set in France and Belgium. They do vary somewhat in quality, with one kind of a clunker, but mostly they range between quite good and outstanding around the core question of human existence–relationships and their failures.
8. Haurki Murakami, After Dark. Kind of minor Murakami, but still a solid short novel that explores his core issues of human connection and the general awkwardness of people trying to make it. I do find the hostility from some people toward Murakami curious, which I’ve seen in comment threads here sometimes.

So this is a monthly open thread on books, have at it.