BOOK NEWS
- Book banning continues to be a thing around the country, with school districts and libraries pulling books, and people pushing back with some success in the courts. One that caught my eye was the Orlando County, Florida school district pulling some 700 books. This was unusual in that in addition to the usual sex or ‘indoctrination’ challenges, a number of books about the Holocaust and Jewish life in general were pulled. The novels pulled included Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow’s Herzog (which played a part in my Bookchat contribution back in June), Jodi Picoult’s The Storyteller, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Myra Goldberg’s Bee Season, and Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française. Nonfiction pulled includes Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile, and the compilation of high school student’s writing The Freedom Writers Diary.
- The odious right-wing publishing house Regnery, which has been rolling out books by the worst of the conservative ‘thinkers;’ and was one of the principal publishers pushing the Swiftboat smear campaign against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, was in financial trouble. Alas, it has been rescued, as Skyhorse Publishing has offered to buy them out. Skyhorse is also a major publisher of conservative books, including ones by Alex Jones and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and they are the ones who published Woody Allen’s 2020 memoir Apropos of Nothing, after it was dropped by its original publisher Hachette because of the sexual allegations against Allen.
- On January 1st, books and films from 1928, and sound recordings from 1923, lost their copyrights and entered the public domain. We’ve got the debut appearance of Mickey Mouse in the cartoon Steamboat Willy; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D. H. Lawrence; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando; Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera; Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and much more. This means you’ll be able to buy shoddy editions from fly-by-night publishers, but if you want these works in book form, I recommend sticking to the major publishing houses (and buying them from The Literate Lizard!) A good overview of what’s entered the public domain can be found on Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
THIS WEEK’S NEW NONFICTION
- The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors, by Erika Howsare. I have to admit, after watching Leave the World Behind on Netflix, this title gives me the willies. A masterful hybrid of nature writing and cultural studies that investigates our connection with deer—from mythology to biology, from forests to cities, from coexistence to control and extermination—and invites readers to contemplate the paradoxes of how humans interact with and shape the natural world.
- Alexandria: The City that Changed the World, by Islam Issa. An original, authoritative, and lively cultural history of the first modern city, from pre-Homeric times to the present day. "Issa combines love for the city with nostalgia for its vanished past - for a place where for over two thousand years different communities coexisted. He describes them, their achievements and their woes with admirable balance. Issa has brilliantly illuminated the history of a great city."
— Literary Review
- The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now, by Hilke Schellmann. The author takes readers on a journalistic detective story testing algorithms that have secretly analyzed job candidates' facial expressions and tone of voice. She investigates algorithms that scan our online activity including Twitter and LinkedIn to construct personality profiles à la Cambridge Analytica. Her reporting reveals how employers track the location of their employees, the keystrokes they make, access everything on their screens and, during meetings, analyze group discussions to diagnose problems in a team. Even universities are now using predictive analytics for admission offers and financial aid. Here is an interview with the author.
- Black Women, Ivory Tower: Revealing the Lies of White Supremacy in American Education, by Jasmine L. Harris. Black women are heading to college in record numbers, and more and more Black women are teaching in higher education. But increasing numbers in college don't guarantee their safety there. Willpower and grit may improve achievement for Black people in school, but they don't secure their belonging. In fact, the very structure of higher education ensures that they are treated as guests, outsiders to the institutional family--outnumbered and unwelcome. Dr. Jasmine Harris shares her own experiences attempting to be a Vassar girl and reckoning with a lack of legacy and agency. Trial and error has been required of Black students to navigate systems of discrimination and disadvantage. But this book now offers useful support, illuminating the community of Black women dealing with similar issues. The author's story is not unusual, nor are her interactions anomalies. Black Women, Ivory Tower explores why.
- God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, by Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware. Shocking acts of terrorism have erupted from violent American far-right extremists in recent years, including the 2015 mass murder at a historic Black church in Charleston and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. These incidents, however, are neither new nor unprecedented. They are the latest flashpoints in a process that has been unfolding for decades, in which vast conspiracy theories and radical ideologies such as white supremacism, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and hostility to government converge into a deadly threat to democracy. “Hoffman and Ware have produced a revealing history of America's almost uninterrupted experience with domestic terrorism, from the Ku Klux Klan to the January 6 assault on the Capitol. This is an essential volume for understanding the dark side of the American dream and comes with an urgent call to reverse the drift toward violence and disunity.” --Lawrence Wright
- Not in My Backyard: How Citizen Activists Nationalized Local Politics in the Fight to Save Green Springs, by Brian Balogh. Rae Ely faced long odds when she launched a campaign in 1970 to stop a prison, then a strip mine, in Green Springs. The local political machine supported both projects, promising jobs for impoverished Louisa County, Virginia. But Ely and her allies prevailed by repurposing the same tactics used by the Civil Rights movement—the appeal to federal agencies and courts to circumvent local control—and by using new historical interpretations to create the first rural National Historic Landmark District. “Balogh’s gripping tale of one woman’s fight against the odds to preserve her historic community isn’t just an invaluable contribution to the history of land use—it’s also a terrific read.”—Yoni Appelbaum, deputy editor, The Atlantic
- Psalms of My People: A Story of Black Liberation as Told through Hip-Hop, by Lenny Duncan.
James Baldwin, in his famous talk "The Struggle for the Artist's Integrity," suggests that "the poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us." And to understand the truth about the history of Black peoples in America, argues lenny duncan, we must look to the modern Black poet: the hip-hop artist. In Psalms of My People, artist, scholar, and activist lenny duncan treats the work of hip-hop artists from the last several decades--from N.W.A, Tupac, and Biggie to Lauryn Hill, Jay-Z, and Kendrick Lamar--like sacred scripture. Their songs and lyrics are given full exegetical treatment--a critical and contextual interpretation of text--and are beautifully illustrated, with a blend of ancient and modern art styles illuminating every page.
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Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, by Francesca Peacock. A biography of the remarkable—and in her time scandalous—seventeenth-century writer Margaret Cavendish, who pioneered the science fiction novel. Margaret was a passionate writer. She wrote extensively on gender, science, philosophy, and published under her own name at a time when women simply did not do so. Her greatest work was The Blazing World, published in 1666, a utopian proto-novel that is thought to be one of the earliest works of science fiction that brought together Margaret's talents in poetry, philosophy, and science. Yet hers is a legacy that has long divided opinion, and history has largely forgotten her, an undeserved fate for a brilliant, courageous proto-feminist.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be truly appreciated. I would love to be considered ‘The Official Bookstore of Daily Kos.’ Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.)
My current 20% promo at The Literate Lizard is my annual Scary/Even Scarier feature: one list of scary horror books for Halloween, and one list of even scarier Current Affairs books for Election Day. There are over 50 books in all between the two lists, and discounts stack, so your DAILYKOS coupon code gets you another 15% off the already discounted prices.
We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month. Note that the DAILYKOS coupon code is only for the bookstore, not for the audiobook affiliate.
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