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The summer is ending and the Fall publishing season is heating up. Here are some notable nonfiction books hitting the shelves in September.
It is now thirty years since George Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and since Anita Hill testified before the Senate Judiciary committee about the sexual harassment Thomas had inflicted on her. Joe Biden chaired those hearings, and although she did endorse him in 2020, it is an uneasy truce. In her new book Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence, Hill takes a powerful look at how little has changed over the past three decades, and examines how gender discrimination and violence remain prevalent in daily life, even with the renewed awareness brought about by the Kavanaugh hearings and the #MeToo movement. Publication date is September 28th.
Speaking of #MeToo, Tarana Burke, one of the founders of the movement, hits the shelves on September 14th with Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement. Burke takes us from the shame she felt from her childhood sexual assault through becoming a fierce organizer on issues of racial justice, arts and culture, anti-violence and gender equity. Check out her website as well.
Native American poet (and current U.S. Poet Laureate) Joy Harjo has a new memoir coming out on September 7th. Poet Warrior: A Memoir weaves together prose, poetry and song about her ancestors, her life, her inspirations and her activism. Her earlier memoir, Crazy Brave, as well as her books of poetry and her children’s book For a Girl Becoming are also available.
The posthumous memoir of the artist Wilfred Rembert is arriving September 7th (he passed away earlier this year at age 75). Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South is illustrated throughout with examples of his paintings on carved leather, artwork based on his life story of growing up in Jim Crow Georgia, of his time on a prison chain gang, and of the time, at age 21, he was stripped of his clothing and strung upside-down from a tree by a group of white men intent on lynching him. The artwork is luminous, the story gripping and inspirational. Check out the Winfred Rembert website to see his artwork.
The Chinese immigrant experience in America also gets the memoir treatment in Qian Julie Wang’s Beautiful Country: A Memoir, coming out September 7th. In China, her parents were both professors, but in 1994, when the author was seven years old, they emigrated to the United States for a life as illegals working in New York City sweatshops. It’s an amazing story of the emotional and physical toll of lives lived in the enforced shadows of anti-immigrant America.
The American Revolution and the Civil War get fresh treatments in two new histories. In The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783, Joseph Ellis takes as his starting point the idea that the colonialists viewed their action as a ‘cause, rather than a ‘revolution’. This ambiguous term gave cover to a wide range of competing improvisations that somehow coalesced into a new nation. He takes a deep look at the issue of slavery, and also offers profiles of the roles played by overlooked women, Black and indigenous participants. Coming September 21st.
Allen Guelzo takes a new look at the Civil War Confederate general in Robert E. Lee: A Life. Early reviews seem filled with words like ‘even-handed’, ‘balanced’ and ‘judicious’, which in some cases may feel like subtle synonyms for reclamation or whitewashing. My sense is that the book strives to put the man into his historical context while exploring what the publisher calls Lee’s “hypocrisy and courage, his outward calm and inner turmoil, his honor and his disloyalty”. We shall see. Coming September 28th.
A number of new books deal with racial politics. Kristin Henning was a public defender in the Washington DC juvenile unit, and the professor today heads the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at the Georgetown University Law Center. Her book The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth looks powerful. She examines the dehumanization of Black youth, where everything from language and sexuality to hair and clothing styles are feared, vilified and criminalized, unlike white children whose testing of boundaries is normalized. The book offers a deep, distressing analysis of the effects such trauma inflicts on Black Youth and families, and offers some policy changes for the future. Coming September 28th.
Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, by Farah Jasmine Griffin, is part memoir of her intellectual development, and part celebration of Black artistry, and the social sources from which their work emerged. The book ranges from Billie Holliday and Marvin Gaye to Toni Morrison and James Baldwin to Romare Bearden and so many more musicians, writers, and artists past and present. Coming September 14th.
Bob Woodward is back with another one of his insider political reportages with Peril, covering the final months of the Trump administration and the transition to Biden. His last book, Rage, generated controversy when we learned that Woodard for months pre-publication had sat on the information (recorded on tape, no less) that Trump had known from the beginning how lethal Covid-19 would be. Given that history, I can’t help but wonder if now we’ll learn that Woodward has been sitting on a recorded interview from last September in which Trump detailed his plans to hold onto power at any cost. Peril is coming out September 21st; the paperback of Rage comes out September 14th.
If you need a break from politics, here are a couple pop culture icons who are releasing memoirs in September. Musician and actor Stevie Van Zandt, of Springsteen’s E Street Band and of The Sopranos on television, tells his tales in Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir, arriving September 28th. And kitsch horror queen Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) spills outrageous memories in Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark, coming September 21st.
Nonfiction is my usual beat here on Daily Kos (read my weekly Nonfiction Views diary every Tuesday at 7:00pm EDT, 10:00 PDT) but I’ll mention three notable fiction books arriving in September: Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (September 14th), Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr (September 28th), and Bewilderment, by Richard Powers coming September 21st.
And once again, if you can throw some support to my Literate Lizard Online Bookstore, I’d be truly grateful. The coupon code DAILYKOS in checkout gets you 15% off your order. There is a wishlist function if you want to remind yourself of books you’re longing for, Happy reading!