2023: My Year in Books

A grid, 10 wide and 7 tall, composed of the covers of the 70 books I read this year. The titles are listed below.

Time for my annual book post chronicling my reading and celebrating the ever-increasing availability of books to blind readers worldwide!

2023 felt like five years squished into one. We just did a lot of living this year, on every level, and surprisingly this didn’t cut into my reading at all. I read seventy books (not counting stuff directly related to research).

In previous years, I’ve gone a little overboard doing reviews for my favorites, but this year I’m not feeling the inspiration. It’s been such a diverse and interesting year of reading that I would scarcely know how to pick winners anyhow. There are only maybe two or three that I wouldn’t recommend to someone sometime in some frame of mind. So if you see something interesting in the list below assume I don’t think it’s terrible—and feel free to ask about it!

The List

  • The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
  • Distinction: A Social Critique of the judgment of taste by Pierre Bourdieu
  • The Power by Naomi Alderman
  • Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
  • How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World by Deb Chachra
  • Hello, Beautiful! by Anne Napolitano
  • Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
  • Manifesto: Three Classic Essays on How to Change the World by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxembourg, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara
  • Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet by Taylor Lorenz
  • Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
  • Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
  • Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto by Aaron Bastani
  • Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
  • Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement by Ashley Shew
  • Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence by Kelly Carter Jackson
  • Radicalized by Cory Doctorow
  • Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
  • Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
  • A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Monk and Robot #2) by Becky Chambers
  • Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author by Sophus Helle
  • The Lunar Chronicles (Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter) by Marissa Meyer
  • To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
  • The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland
  • Work WOn’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe
  • This Changes Everything: Capitalism and the Climate by Naomi Klein
  • The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience by Toby Hemingway
  • Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture by Gabe Brown
  • The Vegetable Gardener’s Guide to Permaculture: Creating an Edible Ecosystem by Christopher Shein
  • Building a Better World in Your Backyard (Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys) by Paul Wheaton (re-read)
  • Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments can Teach Us about the Good Life by Kristen R. Ghodsee
  • The Making of the Bible: From the First Fragments to Sacred Scripture by Konrad Schmid
  • The Closed Book: How the Rabbis Taught the Jews (Not) to Read the Bible by Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg
  • The Grace of Kings (The Dandelion Dynasty #1) by Ken Liu
  • Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson
  • Fidelity: Five Stories by Wendell Berry
  • This is How YOu Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
  • The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty
  • Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft
  • The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education by John K. Wilson
  • The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy by John Shelton
  • Wilding by Isabella Tree
  • How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
  • Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke
  • In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives by J. Jack Halberstam
  • Babel, Or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang
  • The House in the Cerulean Sea by T. J. Klune
  • Undoing Gender by Judith Butler
  • Middlemarch by George Eliot
  • A Place to Hang the Moon by kate Albus
  • The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed-Race Belonging by Samira Maida
  • The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University by Adrianna Kezar
  • Inheritance Trilogy (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, and The Kingdom of Gods) by N. K. Jemisin
  • The Overstory by Richard Powers
  • American War by Omar El Akkad
  • Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley
  • Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake
  • The Amorites in the Bronze Age near East: The Making of a Regional Identity by Aaron Burke
  • No More Police: A Case for Abolition by Mariame Kaba
  • The River of Silver by S. A. Chakraborty
  • The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks
  • The Reindeer Chronicles, and Other Inspiring Stories of Working with nature to Heal the Earth by Judith D. Schwartz
  • Circe by Madeline Miller
  • Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by J. Jack Halberstam
  • Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks

Book Review: The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland

UntitledImage

I just finished The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland, and recommend it highly!

I’m always a bit leery of blindness memoirs, but this one joins M. Leona Godin’s Their Plant Eyes (2021) as a truly excellent recent entry in the genre.

This one hit closer for me, since Leland’s experience has so many striking parallels with my own. Like me, he has one of the many genetic disorders that get lumped together into the junk diagnosis retinitis pigmentosa, though his vision is shrinking from the outside in while mine is fading from the center out. We both had visual impairments as children, but only had to confront the transition to blindness in our thirties, in the context of career, marriage, and life with young kids.

There were so many sparks of recognition as I read, an eery number of shared experiences. I also sat in those rolling chairs at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary for a visual fields test, wore the Clockwork Orange electrodes on my eyeballs for an electroretinograph, and encountered their strange reticence to inform patients that they had crossed the line to “legally blind.” I received braille training from the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, though my teacher was more knowledgeable than his (and stricter about technique).

As Leland described his first experience at the annual convention of the national Federation of the Blind, I was thinking back to my first (and, to this point, only) experience there. Then he mentioned the topic of the presidential address, I realized that he was talking about the same year I had attended. In fact, I show up briefly in the book, unnamed, as one of the scholarship recipients he ignored to focus on a much more interesting conversation with a 10 year old at his table (a decision I do not begrudge!).

But the recognition went far beyond the surface parallels. Many of the questions Leland asks and themes he explores are the same kinds of things I have thought about as I entered into blindness. What will blindness mean for my own identity? For the ways others identify me? I, too, wondered where the point was on this gradual journey where I could legitimately adopt the label “blind.” I struggled with using my white cane in public and the shifts in perception it provoked. I wondered about the changes that screen readers and braille would make to my writing and scholarship. I felt the frustration of reading children’s books more slowly than a first grader.

Questions of blindness and disability in society also gained sudden urgency, and I too left my vaguely benevolent obliviousness to explore evolving frameworks of disability rights, disability justice, and intersectional cross-disability solidarity. I became aware of the care and ingenuity of disabled communities and the creativity and innovation that they apply to the misfits between their bodies and the built environment.

All of these things Leland examines with curiosity and nuance. He can only do so much in a memoir of readable length, but he leaves plenty of breadcrumbs for readers who want more, pointing toward works in disability theory, history, and literature that can provide more depth and detail.

When I was first coming to grips with my own transition to blindness, I made everyone I know read John M. Hull’s memoir, Touching the Rock. It is a movingly written and insightful account of his loss of sight, but the longer I live as a blind person the more I think it gave the wrong impression. Hull emphasizes the negative and the tragic in a way that reinforces the pervasive assumption that blindness is to be feared and pitied.

Leland, on the other hand, presents blindness simultaneously as loss and gain—as a disability that obscures visual knowledge but also brings revelations about self, society, and human possibility. This is much closer to blindness as I have experienced it. Without eliding the difficulty of losing vision and learning new ways of being and living, he makes it clear that blindness is not all loss and not a tragedy.

At this point in my life, I’ve mostly left the liminal state Leland inhabits in the book behind. Blindness is solidly a part of my life, and though practical accommodations and adaptations will continue as the rest of my sight fades, the fundamental shift of identity no longer feels as intense or urgent. Although I have blog posts (and abandoned drafts) aplenty on many of the topics Leland covers, I don’t think a long form treatment of becoming blind is in my future. Now I’m just glad I have The Country of the Blind to recommend to anyone who is curious, and I wish I’d had it years ago!

2022: My Year in Books

A grid pattern with the covers of all 48 books I read in 2022
Hooray! It’s time for my annual book post. It’s always fun for me to look back at the reading I’ve done in a year and think about which books have stuck with me the most.

I got to 48 books this year. Most of them were really good,  but I’m not going to go overboard reviewing the standouts like I did last year. Instead, I’m going to recommend two thematic groups that could be read as loose trilogies on topics I find important. I hope you enjoy them!

And before you leave, let me know what you read this past year and what I should put on my 2023 list!

Trilogy One: Family Values

American society has a skewed approach to family values.

Too often, we mandate one acceptable path for everyone and punish those who deviate from it, rather than supporting and empowering people to make the best of where they find themselves.

We withhold tools for avoiding difficulty and then penalize people for encountering it.

We build slippery ramps into poverty and then punish people for being poor. 

We create impossible hurdles and then punish people for non-compliance.

These points were drilled into me by several books I read this year, two of which I already summarized in my final post on abortion. Gabrielle Blair’s Ejaculate Responsibly shows how we erroneously and unrealistically place the full responsibility for avoiding unwanted pregnancy on women, while providing them too few resources to either prevent them or support the children that result. That point is made even more strongly by Diana Greene Foster in The Turnaway Study, which shows that women denied an abortion are overwhelmingly worse off as a result than women who received one at the same gestational age. Anyone who makes any decisions about abortion policy at all—from writing laws or deciding Supreme Court cases to simply voting—should read both of them.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking book I read this year was Dorothy Roberts’s Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. It is a searing indictment of the child welfare system as a fundamentally racist and classist institution that subjects poor and non-white parents—and mothers especially—to intense government surveillance, control, and punishment.

Families can attract the attention of CPS on the smallest of pretexts, and from there can be separated for anything from real abuse to non-compliance with unrealistic court requirements. And family separation does not reliably improve children’s lives. There are many wonderful foster parents—I know quite  a few—but many separated children find themselves in situations as harmful or more than the ones they left. Group homes especially are associated with higher levels of incarceration, institutionalization, and sex trafficking.

Critics argue that Roberts underemphasizes the seriousness of child abuse and neglect. To be clear, she doesn’t deny the problem or pretend it isn’t important. She does think, however, that the current child welfare system does more to exacerbate the problem than to lessen it. Earlier in her career, Roberts urged reform to the system, but in this book she argues for its complete demolition and a whole new approach to family welfare.

This is the thread that ties these three books together. They advocate for reversing our approach to family and the law. Instead of issuing punishments after things go wrong, why not use those resources to prevent problems in the first place? Upstream support and care can make a far more profound difference than downstream consequences.

Robust sex education, contraception, and trust in young people’s reproductive agency reduces unexpected pregnancy rates and prevents the psychological, social, educational, and economic struggles associated with parenting unwanted children. Supporting parents who have children in difficult circumstances with child care, health care, nutritional support, etc., reduces rates of neglect (and, by lowering parental stress, probably abuse as well).

To me, family values means valuing and supporting actual families, not using the state to mandate  a rigid archetype of the ideal family. 

Trilogy Two: Climate and Cultivation

It took me almost a year to wend my way through Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. I listened to her read it in her own voice and, unlike most of my reading, I listened to it at normal speed. The book and her reading of it were calm and meditative, and I dipped in to it from time to time when I was in the right head space rather than plowing straight through. I won’t lie: I have some low-key climate anxiety that needs somewhere to go, and this book helped push it in a productive direction. Kimmerer is both an accomplished academic ecologist and a student of indigenous American land stewardship practices. She combines these two aspects of her life in this book, a sprawling mix of memoir, ecology, history, and philosophy. It’s a beautiful book, and I am grateful for the ways it expanded my imagination regarding the climate crisis and its potential solutions.

In the chapter titled “The Sacred and the Superfund,” for example, she ruminates on the shortcomings of mainstream environmentalism:

We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it. It is no surprise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings. Our natural inclination to do right by the world is stifled, breeding despair when it should be inspiring action…

“If people only knew that snow leopards are going extinct,” “If people only knew that rivers are dying.” If people only knew … then they would, what? Stop? I honor their faith in people, but so far the if-then formula isn’t working. People do know the consequences of our collective damage, they do know the wages of an extractive economy, but they don’t stop. They get very sad, they get very quiet… [The]  toxic waste dumps, the melting glaciers, the litany of doomsday projections—they move anyone who is still listening only to despair.

Kimmerer pushes past this despair, igniting an imagination that recognizes thrilling potential for mutually beneficial relationships between humans and the “more-than-human world,” as she calls it. We can hope for more than mere mitigation when it comes to our environment—more than just curbing our harmful effect on global and local ecosystems. Yes, we do need to cut extraction and pollution, but human activity can be a net benefit to the world of plants and animals if it is properly conceived and organized.

This leads nicely into my other mini-obsession: permaculture. I’m interested in restorative agriculture more broadly, but since I’m not likely to be in charge of any large-scale restoration projects any time soon, I’ve been learning about things i can do in my own yard.

The best book I read in this vein this year was Toby Hemingway’s Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. Hemingway adapts the principles and findings of permaculture to the real challenges of small spaces, ranging from a few acres on the large side to apartments in urban spaces on the smaller end.

What is permaculture? It is an approach to gardening/farming that minimizes the need for human labor and interference by designing communities of plants that work together in harmony with their landscapes. It moves away from homogenous plots with tidy rows of single plant varieties, which require inordinate amounts of fertilizer, water, weed killer, and insect repellant, and toward mixed plantings of varieties that support and protect each other.

Plant some crops that deplete the soil of nitrogen alongside ones that add it to the soil, along with low vines that prevent weeds and repel insects. Add some flowers that attract pollinators and repel pests, and you have a nice, low-maintenance plot that will produce better yields than single-variety plantings!

At least, that is how it works in theory. I’m starting small with some experimental hugelkultur beds this year, and I’ll let you all know how it goes.

Climate activists are quick to point out that individual solutions are too small to counteract the systemic and industrial degradation of our environments. Honestly, they are right. My backyard hugelkultur beds are not going to slow climate change. 

I still think it’s worth it, though. To build habits of nurturing the Earth, rather than just taking from it. To learn to use our little parts of it to produce food and build ecological resilience. And of course, it doesn’t preclude support for climate policies that have more systemic impact. In fact, the work of permaculture and restorative agriculture can point the way out of our current extractive and destructive practices.

But let’s be honest. Chances are good that we are facing some rough years ahead. The climate is already changing and its effects will get more pronounced as they ripple across the globe. If you are worried about the societal implications of climate change, I recommend Chris Begley’s The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival.

Begley is an archaeology professor and wilderness survival instructor who has lived and worked in Kentucky, Honduras, and the Mediterranean. In recent years he has seen increased  interest in his survival courses, motivated by fear of the looming climate crisis. In his opinion, though, people will not need the skills they think they need if climate change causes societal collapse.

In this book, he surveys the archaeology of collapsed societies to show that the process looks nothing like we imagine them in our apocalyptic film and fiction. And since civilizational collapse doesn’t look like our fiction, the best candidates for survival don’t look like our post-apocalyptic heroes. Prolonged survival in a period of collapse probably won’t depend on combat skills or fortifications, but on collaboration and mutual aid. It is not the rugged individual who will make it through, but the interdependent community that values unique skills and contributions, knows how to select prudent leaders, and makes wise corporate choices. 

Two More on Education

I love Elizabeth Berkshire and Jack Schneider’s podcast, “Have You Heard?” so I was excited to read their book on the school privatization movement, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. It’s a great look at the problems underlying charter schools, voucher programs, and their deleterious effects on American public education.

Will Bunch’s After the Ivory Tower Falls is a helpful look at the cultural fracas surrounding higher education. Is college the pathway to opportunity and economic mobility? An indoctrination machine and the root of all cultural ills? Or something else entirely? Bunch looks at what college is, what it has been, and what it has become in diverging popular imaginations, and makes some excellent suggestions regarding how it can function as part of a healthy and thriving democracy.

The Whole List

  • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
  • Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West
  • Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk
  • The Next Apocalypse: The Art and science of survival by Chris Begley
  • The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy by Anand Giridharadas
  • Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin
  • Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to think About Abortion by Gabrielle Blair
  • The World We Make (Great Cities, #2) by N. K. JemisinΩ
  • Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West by John M. Riddle
  • Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America by Christian Williams
  • The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin (re-read)
    • The Fifth Season
    • The Obelisk Gate 
    • The Stone Sky
  • After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up our Politics, and How to Fix It by Will Bunch
  • On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care by Victor Ray
  • The performance of Doom: Ritual in Deuteronomy by Melissa Ramos
  • Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families, and How Abolition can Build a Safer World by Dorothy Roberts
  • The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, A Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion by Diana Greene Foster
  • Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe by Hugo Mercier
  • Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities by Rogers Brubaker
  • East of Eden by John Steinbeck (re-read)
  • Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy by Derek W. Black
  • The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids who are Grounded, Generous, and Smart about Money by Ron Lieber
  • A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire
  • The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. LeGuin
    • A Wizard of Earthsea
    • The Tombs of Atuan
    • The Farthest Shore
    • Tehanu
    • Tales from Earthsea
    • The Other Wind
  • White Evangelical racism by Anthea Butler
  • Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman
  • You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and our Polluted Media Landscape by Whitney Phillips and Ryan Millner (re-read)
  • Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemingway
  • Building a Better World in your Back Yard, Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys by Paul Wheaton
  • Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal
  • The Golem and the Jinni (Golem and the Jinni, #1) by Helene Wecker
  • Complaint by Sarah Ahmed
  • A Master of Djinn (Dead Djinn Universe, #1) by P. DjÈlÍe Clark
  • Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant
  • God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou
  • Abolition for the People by Colin Kaepernick
  • Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design by Bess Williamson
  • Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel Perry
  • Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions by Megan P. Goodwin
  • The 1619 Project by Nicole Hannah Jones
  • A Song for the Wild-Built (Monk and Robot, #1) by Becky Chambers

Best Books of 2021: The Mess We’re In

It’s no secret that we’re in a mess right now, politically, economically, and societally. In this third batch of favorite reads from 2021 (see 1, 2, and my full reading list), I’m sharing a few books that have helped me think through the present moment and how we get somewhere better together.

Front cover to Ill Fares the Land

Ill Fares the land, by Tony Judt

In this book, Judt tells the story of how the United States developed a faith in social democracy in the mid-20th century, then lost it in favor of a fetish for privatization and a devotion to free market solutions. The result is what he calls the ”eviscerated society,” characterized by private wealth and public squalor. Inequality has reached unsustainable and destructive levels through the consistent workings of unregulated capital markets (or more accurately, capital markets whose regulations are set by the most powerful interested players). His analysis is based on a life’s work as a historian of the post-war period, and his argumentation is lucid and eminently quotable. That said, it is not a perfect book—Judt is more statist than I am always comfortable with, and he falters on topics of race and identity as determinants of American economics and politics (see the forward to the 2020 edition by Ta-Nehisi Coates). On these, the next two books (and especially Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us) do much better.

Front cover of the 9.9 Percent

The 9.9%: The New Aristocracy that is Entrenching Inequality and Warping our Culture, by Matthew Stewart

This is another entry on the theme of inequality. However, Stewart takes a broader approach, examining a wide array of socio-cultural phenomena in addition to economics and politics. He argues that it is not only the 1% or the .1% of America’s wealthiest who are hoarding undue wealth and unraveling the fabric of society, but the 9.9%—the top decile in terms of net worth excluding the ultra-rich of the .1%. 

As inequality has grown, the upper decile has observed the shrinking chances of upward mobility and the increasing precarity of remaining in their place in the hierarchy. Stewart makes the case that this has led to a pervasive and corrosive anxiety that is spreading throughout every part of our lives and our institutions. To ensure their continued position near the top, 9.9 percenters (and those who wish to become 9.9 percenters) have imported ultra-competitive and anti-social logics into their child-rearing, education, marriages, living situations, health and fitness practices, etc., etc.

The tone can be a bit glib and some evidence and analysis could be disputed (his interpretation of ancient texts and archaeology made this scholar of the ancient Near East’s eyes twitch a little, for example), but Stewart’s overall case is strong. I learned a lot from this book, and it gave me a lot more to think about. Definitely worth a read.

For further reading in this vein, see Richard V. Reeves’ excellent Dream Hoarders (which was one of my top picks in 2017) and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s The Sum of Small things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class.

Front cover to The Sum of Us

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can prosper Together, by Heather McGhee

In this book, Heather McGhee gives not only a clear and convincing analysis of how racism has and continues to increase and entrench inequality in the United States, but also a compelling path forward.

She shows that the only way to an economy that does not tilt entirely in the ultra-wealthy’s favor is by building multiracial coalitions that work on behalf of everyone. She also provides communication strategies for getting past places where conversations on race in the US tend to stall or backfire.

The key is dismantling the myth of zero-sum racial progress. There is a common perception (particularly among white Americans) that any improvement in the economic wellbeing of black and brown people must be accompanied by a corresponding decrease for whites. This, as McGhee shows with much data and many examples, is entirely false. It is in those very places where legal and cultural oppression of black and brown Americans was most severe that we find also the poorest conditions for working class white people. In effect, capitalists and business owners exacerbated and exploited the social divisions and resentments between racial groups to preempt solidarity and thus, to keep wages low and benefits minimal. In places where racial division has been intentionally overcome in the creation of multi-racial labor and political organization, Mcghee identifies what she calls a “solidarity dividend”—economic benefit to the communities of color involved, certainly, but also to the white population and to the region as a whole. As one organizer she quotes put it:  “as long as we’re divided, we’re conquered. The only way we succeed is together.”

This book would pair well with Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness.

Front cover of Becoming Abolitionists

Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom, by Derecka Purnell

Uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s murder last summer brought police abolition and PIC abolition (i.e., abolition of the prison-industrial complex) into the public conversation in a way it had never been before. I have spent a lot of time reading and learning about what abolition means in theory and practice over the past year, and I have come to resonate with it as an ideal and a horizon toward which our society and our politics should always be oriented. I also understand that it can seem opaque, unclear, foolhardy, or destructive. Questions about public safety and protection are valid and deserve answers. In many cases, though, conversations and publications on abolition were being conducted by small groups of like-minded scholars and activists who shared common presumptions and language, and they were hard for curious newcomers to break into.

 Luckily, this year has seen the publication of several books that aim to make abolition more accessible and understandable to people who are curious but perhaps skeptical or uncertain about whether it can work in reality. I particularly like this book by Derecka Purnell, which conveys abolition theory through her own personal journey. Purnell is honest about the reservations she had toward abolition as her experience and consciousness have shifted over time and makes a compelling case for the insufficiency of reform and the need for an entirely new paradigm. I also enjoyed Mariame Kaba’s essay collection We Do This ’Til We Free Us and highly recommend Angela Y. Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?

Front cover of You are Here

You Are here: A Field guide for navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and our Polluted Media Landscape, by Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner.

When we talk about this mess we’re in, the role of the internet in getting us here inevitably makes its way into the conversation. Many problems with the internet and social media cannot be solved by individuals making individual choices, but each of us who lives some part of our life online needs to know how it works, how it goes wrong, and how it can lead us astray. Phillips and Milner have written a short, clear, and very illuminating guide for internet users who want to consume, share, and publish information responsibly and productively. This is going to be required reading in my spring course on “The Bible, Politics, and the Internet,” so it’s fair to say I think it has something worthwhile to say!

 

And now some runners up in the education department:

Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch

Public schools are wonderful. Charter schools are vicious parasites that suck public dollars into wasteful, undemocratic, and often corrupt private ventures, impoverishing us all in the process. Read this book, support your local teachers’ union, and vote to fund public education.

Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America from my Daughter’s School, by Courtney Martin 

A mom’s journey to make good educational choices for her daughter in Oakland, CA, where good means good for society too, not just for her own family. Good for anyone feeling squeamish about sending their kids to “bad” or “low performing” public schools.

Best Books of 2021: Disability and Embodiment

In today’s installment of Eric’s Favorite Books of 2021, we move into nonfiction. Stop 1: readings on disability and the body. Check out yesterday’s fiction picks and the full list if you haven’t already!

Front cover of Extraordinary Bodies by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

 

Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

It is no understatement to say that this book transformed my thinking on disability and embodiment. Garland-Thomson brilliantly disentangles, names, and examines physical, biopolitical, and socio-cultural aspects of living with a body in societies that do not view all bodies as equal.

For Garland-Thomson, the discourse of disability has little to do with the physical parameters of our bodies per se, and everything to do with “cultural rules about what bodies should be and do” (p. 6). Human bodies come in a dizzying diversity of forms, differing in myriad ways across a  variety of spectra. This alone cannot explain the concept of disability or its function in the differential allocation of status, power, and material resources in society. The discourse of disability, rather, does the work of collapsing that manifold diversity into manageable binaries—bodies that are essentially “normal” in contrast to those that are not. In short, it is “the attribution of corporeal deviance” (p. 6).

By beginning her analysis with the deviant, Garland-Thomson silhouettes the phantom majority against which this deviance is defined. She coins the concept of the “normate” body, one that bears no marked or stigmatizing characteristics within a given cultural frame. The normate presents itself as the universal subject, the unqualified and definitive human being. In reality, the normate creates the normalcy it claims to reflect, as only a small minority of people in any given society actually inhabit such bodies.

The first third of the book lays out her theory: disability and the normate identity, its connection with stigma and social limitation, and its interactions with gender and race. The remainder then explores the theory in relation to American culture (e.g., the phenomenon of freak shows) and literature (the writings of Harriet beecher Stowe and Audrey Lord). This should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to write about or just understand disability better.

Front Covers of the two Disability Visibility anthologies—one for adults and a second adapted for younger readers

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories for the 21st Century, edited by Alice Wong

This remarkable collection is composed entirely of first-person narratives describing the experience of living as a disabled person in the early 21st century. Alice Wong, a powerful advocate and activist for disability justice and the volume’s editor, has done an extraordinary job ensuring representation of contributors with many diverse identities, living  in a broad variety of situations with many different disabilities. The essays cover many topics, including personal experiences of joy and struggle, discrimination and institutionalization, and disability activism and mutual aid. Struggle runs throughout, but it is often combine with strength, defiance, connection, and collective action—Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s “wild dreams of disability justice at the end of the world.” Read it yourself and buy it for all of your friends!

Front Cover of Their Plant Eyes

 

Their Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness, by M. Leona Godin

This fits broadly within the genre of “blind memoir,” as Godin tells the story of her progressive vision loss and life with blindness, but she interweaves it with stories and biographies of blind people at different points in history to very enjoyable effect. Come for the salacious story of how Athenian Tyreseus was blinded and given prophecy by the gods; stay for Helen Keller’s often-glossed-over Vaudeville years, and meet a host of fascinating blind people in between. My one small critique? Like everyone, she starts her history of blindness with the Greeks, those late-comers to history who somehow get first credit for everything. Guess I’d better get working on that book on blindness in the ancient Middle East!

Front cover of Down, Girl!

Down, Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, by Kate manne

I wasn’t quite sure which category to put this book into, but since it deals broadly with the ways we police people based on the bodies they inhabit, I thought it might as well go here. I first heard of this book in connection with its coinage “himpathy,” which denotes the excessive sympathy given to men who are accused or convicted of gendered or sexual violence against women. The term struck me as a little too cute and didn’t motivate me to read the book right away, but I’m glad I did.

Now I use Manne’s model of misogyny all the time. It is so clear and powerfully explanatory that once you have read it you see the pattern at work everywhere. Misogyny and its manifestations in gendered violence are not illogical, incomprehensible, or inexplicable, as news outlets tend to conclude when gendered atrocities take place. Rather, misogyny in its various forms serves, in Manne’s words, as “the enforcement wing of patriarchy.” Misogyny is not the same thing as patriarchy, then, and it must also be differentiated from sexism. Patriarchy specifically describes any system in which roles and possibilities are determined by gender, with greater authority and autonomy going to men and submission and subservience allotted to women. Patriarchal systems are justified by sexism—that is, beliefs regarding the different natures of men and women and their relative social positions and value. Within a patriarchal system, gender roles are policed on both sides for deviance. Improper manhood and womanhood can both be stigmatized and sanctioned. Here, Manne focuses primarily on misogyny—acts of aggression and violence intended to control women who venture outside the prescribed boundaries of their gender’s assigned role(s). As such, it appears most predictably when women seek to resist or escape the control of men. With detailed argumentation and plentiful examples, Manne develops the intricacies of this broad thesis and its manifestations in different areas of life. As a work of academic philosophy it can get pretty dense, but the payoff is 100% worth it.

Best Books of 2021: Fiction

Yesterday I shared the full list of books I read in 2021. Today I’m going to start sharing some favorites, beginning with the best from the fiction category.

Front Cover of the novel Piranesi

Piranesi, by Susanna Clark

Reading this book is an otherworldly experience—not only for the prosaic reason that it takes place in another world, but also because the writing creates a dreamlike atmosphere that is at once tantalizing and elusive. It takes the form of a detailed field journal kept by a man called Piranesi. He is mostly alone, navigating and charting a massive complex he calls the House. The House contains many halls, filled with thousands upon thousands of stone statues—some human, some animal, some creatures of story and myth. Through cracked roofs he sees an unending sky, and the floor below is flooded by an ocean of violent and interacting tides. Piranesi keeps meticulous notes, mapping the complex but always returning to the beginning lest he lose himself in the unending series of halls. Occasionally he is joined by a man he calls the Other, who is eager to hear the results of Piranesi’s exploration though he himself never ventures far into the House. This is a book I recommend highly, but mainly for the experience of reading it. The plot itself I found mildly disappointing, and the ending perhaps more so. I say perhaps because I haven’t been able to decide whether it ruined the book for me, and so perhaps this is also a testament to the novel’s magnificent indeterminacy.

Front Cover of the Dictionary of Lost Words

The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams

A book that hits the sweet spot for all you lovers of both historical fiction and lexicography. Williams tells the story of Esme, the daughter of a lexicographer working under Dr. Charles Murray to create the Oxford English Dictionary at the turn of the twentieth century. Esme’s father is a young widower, and She spends her early days playing at his feet under the large table in the Scriptorium while he works. Occasionally, she finds slips of paper with words and definitions written on them, sent in by the dictionary’s many volunteer contributors. As she grows and learns more, she begins working on the dictionary herself and notices that some words—particularly to do with the lives and experiences of women—are conspicuously left out or defined in ways that do not satisfy her. She begins a secret project of her own, collecting and defining women’s words that do not rise to the standards of masculine “importance” demanded by the intellectual giants of the dictionary. The novel is beautifully and gently written, yet uncompromising in its lament for the lost stories and language of women.

Front Cover to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the first book of the Wayfarers Series

 The Wayfarers Series by Becky Chambers

 This is a delightful science fiction series set in a vibrantly imagined and beautifully constructed universe. Each book is tenuously related to the last, usually picking up on and developing the story of a minor character from a previous book. Though events of extraordinary interplanetary significance are going on around her characters (and indeed they sometimes find themselves in the middle of such events), Chambers keeps the focus tightly on the characters themselves, navigating adventures they often did not choose and do not want within a complicated web of alien cultures and political agendas. It is exactly this quotidian bent and narrow focus that make the Wayfarers books so enjoyable to read—indeed, the final book covers a lot of ground even though it takes place during what amounts to a prolonged travel delay. If you want high-quality, character-centered sci-fi that explores issues of gender, intersectionality, colonialism and its aftermath, and a whole host of other big topics in little ways, give these a read!

Bambi: A Life in the Woods, by Felix Salten

Honestly, I’d never had any desire to read this book. Never, that is, until I learned it was banned by the Nazis because they (rightly( identified it as n allegory for the persecution of European Jews in an era of accelerating anti-Semitism and fascism. Bambi was first published in 1923 to immediate success, but it was banned in 1935 lest it create sympathy for Germany’s Jews. The novel is a different animal entirely from the 1942 Walt Disney adaptation (pun intended)—an unflinching account of lives of forest animals born into a hostile, dangerous world and the price they pay to survive within it. Even its moments of joy and exuberance are muted by the tense undercurrents of threat that run through every page. The creatures of the forest fear death in every shadow and across every sunlit meadow, and even the leaves on the trees debate the mystery of death. Above all other predators is “He,” the human who brings death with his gun, who seeks only to kill and makes fools or traitors of all animals who serve him. In the end, Bambi learns not of love and the bliss of family life (as Disney would have us believe), but of life conditioned by constant wariness and the solitary sorrow of survival. It’s a masterful book, but I’ll probably wait a few years before I read it to my kids.