Packrat was getting seriously worried that my “to read” stack was going to fall and crush us both, so she got me a new bookcase this year. I’m afraid the book pile filled it up, and is once again towering high above the night table — and then I got another stack in with my Christmas presents. I’m working on it; this year I read 75 books and plays. (76, if I’m quick to finish Occupying Spirituality by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox).
Here’s this year’s nonfiction with some recommendations, including links to my longer reviews of some of the most interesting books. I’ll get into the fiction in my next diary.
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Politics/Current Events:
Medea Benjamin & Jodie Evans, eds., Stop the Next War Now
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First & Last Days of the War on Drugs. Review here.
Naomi Klein, Fences & Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate
Bernard Lefkowitz: Our Guys
David Niewert, And Hell Followed With Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border
Jenny Nordberg, The Underground Girls of Kabul. Review here.
Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies, & Revolution
Hanna Rosin, God’s Harvard
Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
Linda Tirado, Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America. Review here.
Jessica Valenti & Jaclyn Friedman, eds., Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power & a World Without Rape
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
The Coates book is every bit as good as you’ve heard. He pulls no punches and sugarcoats nothing; he doesn’t believe that the arc of history bends toward justice, but still feels the urgency of trying to push it in that direction.
Rebecca Solnit’s book includes the essay that inspired the term “mansplaining,” and a lot of thoughts on other topics, from marriage equality to the rape charge against Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Laurie Penny’s Unspeakable Things dares us to imagine that the choices offered to us by corporate-owned government and media are not our only options. Similarly, Yes Means Yes contains many different takes on positive, consensual sexuality where women’s voices and experiences are taken seriously.
Two of the books were true-crime narratives set in a larger context. And Hell Followed With Her was about a murder committed by an anti-immigration vigilante — but also about the movement to demonize undocumented immigrants, and the “build a wall” fixation. Our Guys disturbingly parallels the Steubenville gang-rape story, both in the crime itself and the aftermath — a couple of decades earlier.
Going Clear, an expose of Scientology, is as weird and disturbing as you’d expect. Hope the author is well lawyered up.
Best way to explain Linda Tirado’s Hand to Mouth: You’ll like it if you liked Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. In fact, Ehrenreich wrote the intro.
Chasing the Scream is an evidence-based argument for ending the War on Drugs. It’s argued passionately, but also honestly: legalization or decriminalization will still leave us with all the problems of addiction, but will free up the resources to deal with the problems in ways that have had some success. And we can stop making violent drug cartels more powerful.
The most interesting current-events book was The Underground Girls of Kabul, about a phenomenon in Afghanistan where families with no sons will dress a daughter in boy’s clothes and give “him” the freedoms that are forbidden to women. There is a surprising amount of acceptance for this, at least until they reach puberty, and sometimes longer.
Poetry:
Scott Gibson, ed., Blood & Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard
Susan Griffin, Bending Home
Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death, & the Changing of the Seasons (reread)
Ishmael Reed, ed., From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900-2002.
My general rules for poetry: I like it to be comprehensible, and to be about something, so I gravitate toward political and and romantic poetry. I’ve liked some pieces by Susan Griffin, but Bending Home didn’t do much for me.
Some of the poems in Blood & Tears were intensely moving; there were others that were so obscurely written that I’d never have connected them with the Matthew Shepard murder if they hadn’t been in this anthology.
From Totems to Hip-Hop was a good collection, where the editor consciously tried to make different picks than the poems that frequently show up in anthologies marked multicultural. It’s loosely divided into topics (nature, politics, relationships, etc), and also includes a section of “manifestos” from poetic movements.
Marilyn Hacker’s book is a poetic tour de force: a novel written in sonnets, interspersed with the occasional villainelle or sestina. Hacker makes every word pull its weight; it never feels like she threw in an unnecessary line just to make the rhyme work.
Misc Nonfiction:
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery & the Making of American Capitalism
Mary Daly, Amazon Grace
Bill Hennemen, Rotten Reviews Redux
Azar Nafisi, The Republic of Imagination: A Life in Books
Taitetsu Unno, River of Fire, River of Water
Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time consists of two essays which examine the state of race relations in 1863, a century past emancipation. A half-century later, they’re still all too relevant.
I would only recommend Amazon Grace if you’re already very familiar with Mary Daly’s work. Otherwise it’s like being dropped in the middle of a conversation where you don’t know half the vocabulary.
Azar Nafisi’s The Republic of Imagination wasn’t bad, but her earlier book Reading Lolita in Tehran was better. The latter gave an insider’s view of the revolution in Iran, as she opposed the Shah’s corrupt regime only to see it replaced by a government of religious fanatics who snatched away any rights that women had. In both books, she uses literature as a springboard to discuss a variety of topics.
River of Fire, River of Water is an introduction to Pure Land Buddhism. While some forms of Buddhism teach disengagement from the material world, Utto’s approach is to engage more fully.
Edward Baptist’s book is of course famous for the review in The Economist, which complained that he didn’t show the “positive” aspects of slavery. No indeed. He makes the reader try to picture what it would really be like to walk hundreds of miles chained in a line of slaves, or being a young woman stripped naked on the auction block. He gives the history, but also looks underneath to see what those facts and figures mean on the human level. One of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
On to Top Comments!
From northleft:
Hi: Had Enough Right Wing BS had a really astute observation about the conservative ass-clown who decided to stop and have a white-boy aggression fit with some fracking protesters. We see these entitled idiots all over the place today, and Had Enough Right Wing BS may have invented a new term for them.
It’s like “open carry hate speech,” in a way, isn’t it?
From your humble (if antisocial) diarist:
Hunter’s diary Trump on Muslims: “Wonderful people, but there’s something going on there” gave us a decidedly “bottom comment” by Trump. Then aarrgghh made a couple of word-choice changes to repurpose it:
"And we have Vulture Capitalists, Inside Traders, the One Percent—they're producers, we have productive people. But there's something going on there. They have to turn in, like for instance, these people on Wall Street, people knew they had bad mortgages all over the country, people knew it, why didn't they turn them in? You got to turn'em in. Because it's their culture, they're around each other, they know each other, they know what's ... you gotta turn'em in."
In the same diary, zoebear offered a great description of Trump:
Remember when good ole ‘W’ was the most politically embarrassing thing America had to offer the world? Seems almost quaint next to Andrew Dice Trump.
*sigh* I miss Jon Stewart.
In Jen Hayden’s diary Arrest warrant issued for Bill Cosby in sexual assault case, there were the inevitable, exasperating derails that come up in every discussion of rape: “I’m not blaming the victim, but why did she do x or not do y?” NancyK responded with a heartbreaking personal story that cuts through all the bullshit. Trigger warnings apply.
Top mojo, courtesy of mik:
Picture quilt, courtesy of jotter: