BOOK NEWS
Add this bit of evidence to the pile of proof that J6 was a premeditated insurrection: Why Jan. 6 insurrectionists sent a letter to the Folger Shakespeare Library, from The Washington Post (the link will be free for all to read):
While insurrectionists were plotting to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, they took time to write and send a letter to an institution two blocks from their target: the Folger Shakespeare Library, the world’s largest collection of material related to the English playwright.
“We will be blocking access to your building … to prevent our persons of grievance from using you as a loophole,” read the insurrectionists’ letter, which circulated on a pro-Trump message board called TheDonald before the insurrection and was published this month in the Folger’s online archive.
The letter explained that the insurrectionists would create a 2.4-mile blockade “surrounding all buildings to which the U.S. Capitol has underground tunnels to” — including the John Adams Building of the Library of Congress, with which the Folger shares a block — presumably to prevent those inside the Capitol from escaping through the buildings.
Since the insurrectionists sent a letter to the Folger, you would think they would have sent one to the Library of Congress as well, but they didn’t. But as the Post points out, there is a bromance between white supremacists and Shakespeare.
But the Bard’s relationship to white nationalism — and specifically to a white American identity — has been long documented by scholars, including those who have drawn comparisons between the playwright’s works and the Jan. 6 insurrection.
In particular, white nationalists have invoked the play ‘Julius Caesar’ to “emblematize America’s white Shakespearean-Roman inheritance,” Shakespeare scholar Arthur L. Little Jr., an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in the introduction of a 2023 book he edited called “White People in Shakespeare.”
THIS WEEK’S NEW NONFICTION
- Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine, by Uché Blackstock, MD. This is the book I was hoping to review this evening, in tandem with a similar book published last September, The Bodies Keep Coming: Dispatches from a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal, by Brian H. Williams. Alas, I’ve run out of time for this week, but it will be the focus of Nonfiction Views next week. Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock’s odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician—to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.
- Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs, by Benjamin Herold. Outside Atlanta, a middle-class Black family faces off with a school system seemingly bent on punishing their teenage son. North of Dallas, a conservative white family relocates to an affluent suburban enclave, but can’t escape the changes sweeping the country. On Chicago’s North Shore, a multiracial mom joins an ultraprogressive challenge to the town’s liberal status quo. In Compton, California, whose suburban roots are now barely recognizable, undocumented Hispanic parents place their gifted son’s future in the hands of educators at a remarkable elementary school. And outside Pittsburgh, a Black mother moves to the same street where author Benjamin Herold grew up, then confronts the destructive legacy left behind by white families like his. Disillusioned braids these human stories together with penetrating local and national history to reveal a vicious cycle undermining the dreams upon which American suburbia was built. “Powerful . . . In a timely narrative, Herold draws attention to a morally urgent problem while offering a possible route toward revival.” —The Washington Post
- The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky, by Simon Shuster. Time correspondent Simon Shuster chronicles the life and leadership of Volodymyr Zelensky from the dressing rooms of his variety shows to the muddy trenches of Ukraine’s war with Russia. Based on four years of reporting; extensive travels with President Zelensky to the front; and dozens of interviews with him, his wife, his friends and enemies, his advisers, ministers and military commanders, Shuster tells the intimate and revealing story of the president’s evolution from a slapstick actor to a symbol of resilience. "An intense, evocative portrait of one of the most remarkable figures of our era. This book offers a front row seat to history as it is being made." — Anne Applebaum
- Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation, by . Yaroslav Hrytsak. Essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand Ukraine’s dramatic past and its global significance--from the 17th-century Cossack uprising to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and Ukrainian independence, and from the evolution of the Ukrainian language to the warning signs that anticipated Russia’s 2022 invasion. This book is the definitive story of Ukraine and its people, as told by one of its most celebrated voices.
- Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism, by Jenn M. Jackson. Across eleven original essays that explore the legacy of Black women writers and leaders—from Harriet Jacobs and Ida B. Wells to the Combahee River Collective and Audre Lorde—Jackson sets the record straight about Black women’s longtime movement organizing, theorizing, and coalition building in the name of racial, gender, and sexual justice in the United States and abroad. These essays show, in both critical and deeply personal terms, how Black women have been at the center of modern liberation movements despite the erasure and misrecognition of their efforts. Jackson illustrates how Black women have frequently done the work of liberation at great risk to their lives and livelihoods.
- The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill: Abortion, Death, and Concealment in Victorian New England, by Marcia Biederman. In 1898, a group of schoolboys in Bridgeport, Connecticut discovered gruesome packages under a bridge holding the dismembered remains of a young woman. Finding that the dead woman had just undergone an abortion, prosecutors raced to establish her identity and fix blame for her death. Suspicion fell on Nancy Guilford, half of a married pair of “doctors” well known to police throughout New England. Focusing on the women at the heart of the story—both victim and perpetrator—Biederman reexamines this slice of history through a feminist lens and reminds us of the very real lives at stake when a woman's body and choices are controlled by others.
- Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation, by Dr. Jen Gunter. Most women, transgender, and non-binary people who menstruate can expect to have hundreds of periods in a lifetime. So why is real information so hard to find? Despite its significance, most education about menstruation focuses either on increasing the chances of pregnancy or preventing it. And while both are important for many people, those who menstruate deserve to know more about their bodies than just what happens in service to reproduction. At a time when charlatans, politicians, and social media are succeeding in propagating damaging misinformation with real and devastating consequences, Dr. Jen provides the antidote with science, myth busting, and no-nonsense facts.
- The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-do-wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction, by Lee Gutkind. In the 1970s, Lee Gutkind, a leather-clad hippie motorcyclist and former public relations writer, fought his way into the academy. Then he took on his colleagues. His goal: to make creative nonfiction an accepted academic discipline, one as vital as poetry, drama, and fiction. In this book Gutkind tells the true story of how creative nonfiction became a leading genre for both readers and writers. Gutkind documents the evolution of the genre, discussing the lives and work of such practitioners as Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Rachel Carson, Upton Sinclair, Janet Malcolm, and Vivian Gornick. “An enlightening critical history . . . [that] adds up to a thorough appraisal of the genre.”—Publishers Weekly
- Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu. Copyright is everywhere. Your smartphone incorporates thousands of items of intellectual property. Someone owns the reproduction rights to photographs of your dining table. At this very moment, battles are raging over copyright in the output of artificial intelligence programs. Not only books but wallpaper, computer programs, pop songs, cartoon characters, snapshots, and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties—making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws with colorful and often baffling rationales covering almost all products of human creativity. Who Owns This Sentence? is an often-humorous and always-enlightening cultural, legal, and global history of the idea that intangible things can be owned, and makes a persuasive case for seeing copyright as an engine of inequality in the twenty-first century
- Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s, Sarah Ditum. A scathing reexamination of the lives of nine female celebrities in the 2000s, and the sexist, exploitative culture that took them down
Welcome to celebrity culture in the early aughts: the reign of Perez Hilton, celebrity sex tapes, and dueling tabloids fed by paparazzi who were willing to do anything to get the shot. It was a time when the Internet was still the Wild West, and when slut-shaming, fat-shaming, and revenge porn were all considered perfectly legitimate. Celebrity was seen as a commodity to be consumed, and for the famous women of this era, they were never as popular—or as vulnerable—as when they were in crisis. “Readers will rethink what they thought they knew about some of the most publicized celebrity stories of the early 2000s.”
— Publishers Weekly
- The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, by Adam Shatz. In the era of Black Lives Matter, Frantz Fanon’s shadow looms larger than ever. He was the intellectual activist of the postcolonial era, and his writings about race, revolution, and the psychology of power continue to shape radical movements across the world. In this searching biography, Adam Shatz tells the story of Fanon’s stunning journey, which has all the twists of a Cold War-era thriller.
- Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, by Brian Klaas. If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same? Or could making an accidental phone call or missing an exit off the highway change not just your life, but history itself? And would you remain blind to the radically different possible world you unknowingly left behind? In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas dives deeply into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people’s neat and tidy storybook version of reality. The book’s argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives—and our societies—could be radically different. "This utterly captivating book will make you rethink everything you have ever done.”
—Sabine Hossenfelder, physicist
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