Since Nov. 9, 2016, I have been torn between the burning desire to know what the hell happened to bring the Donald down upon our heads and an even deeper desire to escape reality completely, to pull the blankets over my head and find some place where my own personal stakes aren’t as great, where I will face no serious future harm. In other words, I needed a good book.
Figuring that I am not alone in these conflicting desires, here are a few books from 2016 that might provide respite, or understanding. Or both.
For escape, there are few better novels out right now than Mary Doria Russell’s work on the Old West. Begin with Doc, the first of two novels covering Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp.
Doc is all about the Doc Holliday you never knew. Through 40 films and hundreds of books about Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, and the O.K. Corral, the story behind the gambler/gun fighter has never been told with the grace, compassion, and humor of Doc. Set mostly in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1878, the notorious gunfight at the O.K. Corral is still in the future.
In a letter to Book Clubs, Russell writes:
The Doc Holliday of legend is a gambler and gunman who appears out of nowhere in 1881, arriving in Tombstone with a bad reputation and a hooker named Big Nose Kate. But I have written the story of Alice Holliday’s son: a scared, sick, lonely boy, born for the life of a minor aristocrat in a world that ceased to exist at the end of the Civil War, trying to stay alive on the rawest edge of the American frontier.
If you enjoyed Val Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc Holliday in Tombstone, you will love the man that Russell gives life to in Doc.
Epitaph follows Holliday and the Earp brothers to Tombstone and beyond, dealing with the political landscape as part of the background to the notorious 30-second gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
A deeply divided nation. Vicious politics. A shamelessly partisan media. A president scorned by half the populace. Smuggling and gang warfare along the Mexican border. Armed citizens willing to stand their ground and take law into their own hands. . . . That was America in 1881.
[...]
Mary Doria Russell has unearthed the Homeric tragedy buried beneath 130 years of mythology, misrepresentation, and sheer indifference to fact. Epic and intimate, Epitaph gives voice to the real men and women whose lives were changed forever by those fatal thirty seconds. And at its heart is the woman behind the myth: Josephine Sarah Marcus, who loved Wyatt Earp for almost half a century and who carefully chipped away at the truth until she had crafted the heroic legend that would become the epitaph she believed her husband deserved.
I am not a fan of westerns, particularly, but these books are more than westerns. They are more than historical fiction—or perhaps they are just very good historical westerns as the author brings to life men and women who were only legends in the past and illuminates a nation in an uneasy peace—not terribly different from where we are today.
When it is time to poke your head out of bed, there are some more serious nonfiction books that I enjoyed last year and can recommend like Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi.
Perhaps the most significant book of 2016, this National Book Award winner is a lucid, highly readable look at the origins of racist ideas in the United States. Kendi writes:
My definition of a racist idea is a simple one: it is any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.
Using the lives of Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Angela Davis, he traces the origin and growth of the ideas that have supported racial discrimination. Only one-third of the way through this 592-page book, I am enjoying it immensely and was struck by these passages in particular, which condense so much of American history:
Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.
[...]
From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals. In all of the fifty suspected or actual slave revolts reported in newspapers during the American colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.
Another good read of 2016 is Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape by Peggy Orenstein. As I wrote last May, this revealing look at young women and how they are dealing with their sexuality is a thought-provoker that asks as many questions as it answers.
Today’s girls are growing up in a hypersexualized world. Pop divas, the internet, and social media have changed the way young girls see themselves. Their lives appear to need to be recorded, liked, and shared on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram before they become real to them. Pop stars like Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and Miley Cyrus—are they expressing or exploiting their sexuality? But even more important is the question of:
“... why the choices for women remain so narrow, why the fastest route to the top as a woman in a sexist entertainment world is to package your sexuality, preferably in the most extreme, attention-getting way as possible.”
As an accompaniment, Rebecca Traister’s work All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation should be included on your reading list if you want to understand the millennial generation of women. As I wrote in April:
Reimagining marriage is what gives this book its uplifting sense of optimism. And what she proposes, on a political level, gives it a sense of urgency: Equal pay, a higher federal minimum wage, national healthcare with special emphasis on reproductive health, repeal of the Hyde Amendment, more housing for single people, paid family leave, and federally subsidized or fully funded day care. And while Hillary Clinton has been fighting for these things for a lifetime, she has been, so far, unable to reach these young single women who have flocked to the progressive message of Bernie Sanders. As Rebecca Traister writes in The Cut:
“To some feminists, there is bitter irony in the fact that Sanders, a 74-year-old white man from Vermont who has committed himself for decades to fighting economic inequality but who has not put himself at the center of fights for things like paid sick days or family leave, has become the symbol of a move toward a social-democratic model of government that would better serve America’s independent women. That unmarried women are not rallying around Clinton, who not so long ago was one of the most visible symbols of threateningly powerful womanhood in America and who has devoted a significant chunk of her career to issues of early-childhood education and health-care reform, is somewhat baffling. But remember, this is not a symbolically motivated movement. Single women may not be looking for a feminist hero; they may just want their affordable college, higher wages, and paid sick days.”
Two books on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World and Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg should be read by anyone who is concerned about the direction the Court may take once this liberal lioness leaves the bench. Full reviews can be found here and here.
If you haven’t already read Jane Mayer’s work Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, why not? As I wrote early last year:
Regardless of whether you support Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, Dark Money is a must read for every Democratic activist. Fortunately, it is a page turner, as Mayer combines the hard cold numbers with the stories of the people involved—and not just the Kochs and their ilk, but the people they have killed with leukemia and with exploding butane gas. There are also the prosecutors they have spied on and the journalists they have attempted to intimidate with false accusations of plagiarism. It seems as though they have no boundaries in what they consider allowable in their pursuit of profit. The purchase of the American government is only another step in that pursuit. They do not want to govern America: They just want to own it.
Finally, for an intimate, personal look at rape and where it can take a woman, please check out I Will Find You: A Reporter Investigates the Life of the Man Who Raped Her, by Joanna Connors.
In 1975, Susan Brownmiller wrote the best-seller Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape that influenced many women of my generation, including Joanna Connors. I have always considered it to be the fundamental study of the societal impact of rape and it no doubt still is. I Will Find You belongs on the same bookshelf. With honesty, compassion, and a reporter’s objective eye, Connors has taken the reality of rape one step further. She has shown us not just the damage that it does to the victim, but how that damage extends to the entire family of the victim. She exposes the emotional trauma that can last for a lifetime. She makes it personal.
In exploring the life of her assailant and learning from his sisters and others what their childhood was like and what they experienced, she reveals how a child born into abuse and nurtured by violence can be shaped into a monster.
And she does it so well that the book is compelling reading. You would think that a book about rape and its aftermath would be depressing and hard to get through (and parts of it are), but overall her writing is so pitch perfect and her storytelling so engrossing that I Will Find You is mesmerizing. I could not put this book down, and read it from the first page to the last in a single sitting. It may be early in the year, but it’s unlikely that another will come along to knock this book out of its place as my favorite book of 2016.
So, what have you been reading? Any particular favorites that you would like to share with the rest of us as we work our way through this brave new world?