On Saturday I posted the fiction half of the 64 books I read in 2017. On to nonfiction!
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Nonfiction:
Politics/Current Events:
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America
Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics
Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding, eds., Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance & Revolution in Trump’s America
Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine
Z*e Qu*nn, Crash Override
Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions
Maria Stoian, Take It As a Compliment
There’s not a bad book on that list. The New Jim Crow is a well-researched, well-argued indictment of the War on Drugs and the way selective enforcement perpetuates a black underclass. Tears We Cannot Stop uses the format of a church service to address racism and police violence toward the African-American community.
Naomi Klein’s latest is a call to arms, asking us not just to say no to Republican shock-doctrine tactics, but to also figure out what kind of world we want to say yes to, and how to get there. Laurie Penny’s book is a collection of her essays addressing economic justice, feminism, and the Bitch Doctrine: anytime a woman speaks up, she’ll be called a bitch, so may as well quit watering down our message to try to avoid it.
Crash Override is part memoir about the author’s experiences as the first target of g*merg*te abuse, and part instruction manual to make your own online information as unhackable as possible, information she wished she’d had at the time.
Rebecca Solnit is best know for her essay collection Men Explain things to Me. She has a worthy follow-up in The Mother of All Questions, including the classic “Men Explain Lolita to Me.” I think Hope in the Dark is an essay that doesn’t need to stretch to book-length. It was written during the GW Bush era, but unfortunately it’s even more relevant now.
Take It as a Compliment is an amazing graphic novel (except not a novel, since it’s nonfiction). She took twenty stories from survivors of sexual abuse or harassment, and turned them into graphic format, giving each piece a unique visual style. The stories include different gender combinations of perp and victim, and span the spectrum from verbal harassment to rape, as well as those ambiguous “this feels sketchy but there’s still plausible deniability” situations.
Memoir:
Lenka Glassner, Czeching In
Gloria Lehnert, Planet Widow
John Lewis, Walking With the Wind
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery
The Washington book was a frustrating read. It’s what today would be called “respectability politics:” the idea that if African-Americans work hard and become educated, whites will have no choice but to abandon racism and accept equality. A century-plus after this was written, I’m gonna say his optimism was unwarranted. Those who benefit from oppression can always come up with ways to rationalize it.
John Lewis’s Walking With the Wind is powerful and unapologetic. Joining the civil rights protesters was a radical and physically dangerous choice for him, and his discussion of the Freedom Rides was particularly harrowing.
Planet Widow is about coping after suddenly becoming widowed as a young mother. Czeching In is about the author’s return to the Czech republic, 30 years after fleeing Soviet occupation. It’s more about Czech history and culture (and food, lotsa food) than the political side.
Plays:
Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues
Lillian Hellman, Another Part of the Forest
Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour
Lillian Hellman, Days to Come
Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes
Lillian Hellman, Watch on the Rhine
Moliere, The Would-Be Gentleman
George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara
George Bernard Shaw, St. Joan
Shaw was ahead of his time in dissecting the military-industrial complex in Major Barbara. Moliere’s The Would-Be Gentleman is a common comedy trope, the social climber pretending to be an aristocrat.
Hellman’s best-known play is of course her classic story of homophobia, The Children’s Hour. I thought Days to Come was a bit on-the-nose in places, but it tackles topic of union-busting. And she portrays some really, really dysfunctional families in her other plays.
The Vagina Monologues, of course, is all things vagina,, from sex to humor to abuse to giving birth. I’m reminded that at least one paper refused to advertise its “obscene” title, but had no problem with The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
Poetry:
Kim Addonizio, Wild Nights
Billy Collins, Nine Horses
Elana Dykewomon, What Can I Ask
Kerry Flattley & Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Eds., From the Republic of Conscience
Jill Hollis, ed., Love’s Witness
Melissa Kwamsy & M. L. Smoker, Eds., I Go to the Ruined Place
Octavia McBride-Ahebee, Assuming Voices
Charles Sullivan, ed., Loving: Poetry & Art
My two rules for poetry: I like it to be (1) comprehensible, and (2) actually about something. The McBride-Ahebee book was too obscure for my taste, and the Collins one had less of note to say than some of his other books.
From the Republic of Conscience and I Go to the Ruined Place are both collections of poems about human rights from around the world. They pack a punch.
Love’s Witness is a collection of love poems by women, from medieval times to the present. It’s organized to juxtapose poems on similar themes (first love, jealousy, breakups, etc), from different eras. Loving: Poetry & Art pairs love poems with paintings and other artworks. I enjoyed both books, which included some familiar poems and a lot that were new to me.
I’d read Elana Dykewomon before, and her poetry can be more subtle than the name might suggest, but always with a ringing clarity. I ran across one of Kim Addonizio’s poems in Raising Lilly Ledbetter, loved it, and went on to enjoy Wild Nights: passionate, irreverent, kind of a jazz/blues feel.
Misc Nonfiction:
Puneet Chawa, Hindu Beliefs and Rituals
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washington’s Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge
Joanna Russ, To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Science Fiction & Feminism
Julia Scheeres, A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown
Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures
Never Caught has an interesting topic, but as often happens when writing about enslaved people’s lives, the available information is sparse. To Write Like a Woman is an essay collection about science fiction and sexism. Some of it feels mercifully dated: gender-bending plots that Russ uses as examples of the unthinkable are now almost quaint. SF has come a long way, in part because of writers like Russ.
A Thousand Lives is an absolute standout. Depressing, but very informative, piecing together how Jim Jones and the People’s Temple drew in people who would never have thought of themselves as joining a cult, and pulled them into a nightmare that ended in a massive murder-suicide. I was struck by the parallels with domestic violence on the micro level, and with living under despotism on the macro level.
Since I don’t want to end on that depressing note: read Hidden Figures! It’s a bit less linear than the movie, but informative & inspiring.
On to Top Comments!
From ursulafaw:
This comment from uyanga is from my diary, "Trump Says He Will Beat Oprah In 2020..."
I like it because it's the perfect extension of this absurd cult of celebrity in our culture right now.
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