February Reading List

This month’s reading list and open thread about books. Here’s last month’s list.

SCHOLARLY READING:

1. Kathryn Olivarius, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, 2022). This remarkable prize-winning history deserves to be widely read. Imagine this–back in 2010, you start working on a dissertation that demonstrates how pre-Civil War New Orleans elites not only didn’t care if tons of people died of yellow fever but that the survivors actively benefitted from indifference to mass death and they build their slave-based cotton capitalism upon that fact? They blame the deaths on the poor’s lifestyle habits, claim they survived because they were better people, and assume that slaves are simply immune to the disease anyway so who really cares what happens to them. Then, as you are finishing it up in 2020, the Covid pandemic happens and the Trump administration doesn’t care if tons of people die and justify it based on some kind of lame survival of the fittest rhetoric and that just said it was old people dying anyway and who cares? Well, take a brilliant book, combine it with amazing timing, and you have yourself a must-read history.
2. Jesse Abrams, Forest Policy and Governance in the United States: An Introduction (Routledge, 2023). Reading new overviews of forest history and policy are not for everyone, but that is a field in which I keep up for obvious reasons. Written for the classroom (there are even discussion questions at the end of each chapter), it is a reasonably readable overview of the history and contemporary issues facing our forests. Also, I’m not going to apologize for getting a little thrill from seeing my book discussed in the text by other scholars and informing other books. It’s almost as if I am worth a damn.
3. Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, American Capitalism: New Histories (Columbia University Press, 2018). This might not be for everyone, but if you are interested in the rapid expansion of amazing work on the history of capitalism, this is a good entry point, so long as you don’t mind the essay format. Each essay is quite different, though more focus on slavery and the generation of capitalism than the 20th century. A quite valuable work for historians such as myself. Very much an academic work for general readers.
4. Sureshkumar Muthukumaran, The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2023). I never read ancient history because I mostly don’t care, but I do read environmental history, so this came to my attention. You’ve heard of the Columbian Exchange–the exchange of biology to and from the Americas after 1492. But of course species spread through the ancient world as well, especially between the Mediterranean and Asia. This book follows that process the best the record can show, using the massive archaeological findings as well as scientific data to put together about the best history of species spread we are probably going to get from this period. For a specific kind of reader, this book is going to be gold. Good scholarship for sure.
5. Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (Liverlight/Norton, 2024). I’ve long wanted a new overview of Reconstruction. It’s not that we need to replace Eric Foner’s classic 1988 tome so much as that there is 35 years of new scholarship out there, much of which takes the story from just the South and makes connections to the North and West as well. As I teach in my survey class, 1877 is not just a key year in American history because the North decided to stop caring about southern freedpeople. It’s also the year of the Great Railroad Strike and the defeat of the Lakota and Nez Perce. All of these things are deeply connected. Sinha comes closer than anyone yet to providing the needed interpretive framework for a new understanding of Reconstruction. That fact that she was Foner’s student at Columbia only gives her more credibility in her project. Perhaps most bold, she considers the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as really the last Reconstruction amendment, a remnant part of the longer fight to expand American democracy that was so rolled back after 1873. One way she does this is note that it wasn’t just that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were happy to racebait to help women’s suffrage; it’s that they were never real abolitionists or cared about racial equality in the first place. Rather, she puts the focus on women such as Lucy Stone and Black women suffragists as the real heroes in that story. I might nitpick a bit about some of the claims here around labor, but it’s a very fine book and written for a broad audience. You should read this.
6. James McCarthy, ed., Environmental Governance in a Populist/Authoritarian Era (Routledge, 2020). This is actually the book form of the essays from a special issue of Annals of the American Association of Geographers from 2019. The 32 short chapters all provide case studies or little thought pieces on a various part of this pretty big topic, all the more relevant now that Trump is back and power and environmental governance is going to be so grim. As these things go when there are so many essays and it is only adjacent to your field, the usefulness varied, but it’s a good resource for me to go back to and I’m glad this came upon my desk.
7. Quito J. Swan, Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020). An interesting biography of the Bermudian activist Pauulu Kamarakafego and the expansion of Black Power in the Global South, with stops everywhere from just about every Caribbean island to Kenya and Liberia to Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. The downside of a biography of someone who travels around all the time is that it all kind of ends of blending together, especially if you aren’t familiar with all the figures from all these disparate places and given the obscurity of some of these places, well, it can get a bit confusing at times. I’d also argue that the environmental justice side of the book is pretty underdeveloped. It’s there, but for a subtitle, it’s really just here and there in the story. But it’s still a valuable book that does just what such a book should do, which is build the connections between places and ideas needed to expand our knowledge about a moment in history.

FICTION/LITERARY NON-FICTION

1. Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts. I really liked this book about the solitudes, failures, and rediscoveries of middle age. I’ve enjoyed all of Lahiri’s fiction and I really appreciate her branching out here. It’s so hard for the immigrant writer in American fiction–a huge theme in our best fiction going back a long time now–to break out of that and do something completely different, something that has nothing to do with exotic locals or people between two cultures. So her way to break out was to write a novel in Italian about a middle aged professor who is alone and mostly is OK with that, but isn’t really OK with it and is just trying to deal with her melancholy. Not much happens, but then something–very small–happens and her perspective shifts ever so slightly and she takes a bit of a risk to change up her life. We don’t know how that will result. We just know she makes it. It’s a subtle piece of fiction and a lovely one, though I don’t imagine someone in their 20s would appreciate it much.
2. Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz. People really loved this book. I was not one of them. Only some of it is because it is in the “alternative history” genre, though some of it related to that genre’s frequent shortcomings. As a historian, I don’t really have a major problem with people thinking, well, what if this other thing happened and what would America look like if that was the case. In this case, it’s that the civilization around Cahokia had survived and become a dominant power that the U.S. had to integrate, however, tentatively, as its own state. The trick is that Spufford assumes a different and less virulent strain of smallpox comes to the Americas; the problem is that the Cahokia had declined before 1492, probably due to overusing its natural resources. Well, whatever. Let’s assume that makes sense. He sets the book in the 1920s, where the KKK and their allies (led by Arthur Vandenberg for reasons somewhat unclear to me). You have a brutal murder and a couple of World War I veteran cops. One is a white, the other Native. The book is about the Native cop and how he comes to solve the crime and save the Cahokia civilization from white attack. Oh, also he’s an amazing jazz pianist for some reason. That last bit sums up the problem I had with the book and so many alternative histories–too much throwing the kitchen sink of the era but always in the most cliched ways. Of course it’s a jazzy history, even though this part of the story is totally unexplained. And in the end, the plot mostly doesn’t hold together too well. Oh, and he falls in love with a literal princess. It’s clever, I grant you. But it struggles to get beyond clever. I was glad to be done with it.
3. Javier Zamora, Solito. This powerful memoir should be read by everyone. It follows Zamora’s trip north, alone, as a 9 year old from El Salvador to meet his parents who had already migrated to the United States. It’s a quite a scary horrible journey for anyone, never mind a kid who was really too young to do this. He survived, but just barely. It took three times to get across safely. Zamora gave a talk at my school in the fall and he was great, with excellent political messaging. But even outside of that, why the fuck are we militarizing the border to stop 9 year old kids or their parents from coming to the United States? Why have we forced so many people who just want a better life to die lost in the Sonoran Desert? I am so disgusted with this country’s racism and reading Zamora’s memoir was sometimes tough, but very worthwhile.
4. Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Brotherhood. Sarr is such a powerful, wonderful writer. I really liked his last book, The Most Secret History of Men, which I read last year. His first novel, translated into English a couple of years ago under the title Brotherhood is a very different work. This tells the story of a few people living under radical Islamist control in an unnamed Sahel country and their decision to stand up and fight back against all odds by publishing a journal denouncing the brutality of their lives. If you think you are living in some kind of oppressive state and feel hopeless about fighting back, Sarr’s novel will remind of two things–first, the U.S. really is not an oppressive state by global standards at this point and second, you can always fight back. You might die doing so, but death is better than succumbing. And yet, Sarr most certainly does not romanticize the resistance. In fact, one of the short chapters (they are all short) explores one character realizing that just surviving life under this regime is an act of resistance in itself. Powerful little novel from a huge and still quite young talent.
5. Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty. I assume everyone has read this already. I’ve read it before. The film adaptation is both super great and really faithful to the book. Leonard at his absolute peak, so many laughs. What I haven’t read is the sequel, Be Cool. I need to do that.

Let’s talk books today!