Good evening, everyone. Here is this week’s curated list of new nonfiction published this week.
The latest book controversy has to do with new editions of some of British author Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s books. It seems that publisher Puffin Books, the children’s book imprint of the British Penguin Books, which itself is now subsumed within the megapublisher Penguin Random House, has edited them to tidy up some language “in an effort to make them less offensive and more inclusive, according to a representative from the author’s estate.” (The link to The New York Times article should be free for everyone to read.)
Reports show that there have been hundreds of edits to take away specifics about the appearance, gender or race of many characters. “Changes reported by The Telegraph include characters who are no longer described as “fat” and references to “mothers” and “fathers” that have been updated to “parents” or “family.” “
The article notes that Dahl was overtly anti-Semitic, and that over the decades his books have been criticized as “antisocial, brutish and anti-feminist.” Nevertheless, such books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and Matilda remain very popular among children...and filmmakers.
Dahl was also well known to battle with his editors, disliking suggested changes and resistant to sanitizing his stories. “I never get any protests from children,” Mr. Dahl once said. “All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like.”
I can’t say that I feel I was damaged in my childhood by anything I read. I think we need to trust kids a bit more, as well as respect literature as originally written by the authors. It just gives more ammunition to the right, both as something to jeer at as ‘woke culture,’ and as cover for their own much more dangerous censorship, hollowed-out history teaching and book banning. As the article states:
Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America, an organization that supports freedom of expression, said on Twitter that the organization was “alarmed” by the changes and that selective editing could “represent a dangerous new weapon.”
“Those who might cheer specific edits to Dahl’s work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities,” she said.
My Literate Lizard Online Bookstore is now on Spoutible as well, so follow me if you join up (and I am still on Twitter). There was a bit of a book brouhaha over there as well this week, with historical romance writer Courtney Milan (oft mentioned and admired in Reader and Book Lover diaries by our own anotherdemocrat) pointing out in a post that the terms of service were a little vague when it came to prohibiting explicit sexual imagery in Spoutible posts. There were suggestions that romance writers could be kicked off the site by posting book covers that were two suggestive, and the debate soon widened to making Spoutible a safe place for the LGBTQ+ community, as well as sex workers.
I read a lot of the back and forth on the issue, and my take was that Milan had a very good point: the terms of service on this issue are poorly spelled out (and Milan, a former Supreme Court Justice clerk, knows her way around these issues). And it was most upsetting how Spoutible founder Chris Bouzy got defensive and issued a flurry of mansplaining responses. On the other hand, the dire predictions about romance novel covers and other issues seem somewhat overblown. I’d like the TOS rewritten, as Milan suggests, and for people to stop being so quick to jump to conclusions. We shall see.
THIS WEEK’S NEW HARDCOVERS
- The Case for Cancel Culture: How This Democratic Tool Works to Liberate Us All, by Ernest Owens. In this manifesto from the openly gay Black journalist and President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, Owens offers a fresh progressive lens in favor of cancel culture as a tool for activism and change. Using examples from politics, pop culture, and his own personal experience, Owens helps readers reflect on and learn the long history of canceling (spoiler: the Boston Tea Party was cancel culture); how the left and right uniquely equip it as part of their political toolkits; how intersections of society wield it for justice; and ultimately how it levels the playing field for the everyday person’s voice to matter. In a world where protest and free speech are being challenged by the most powerful institutions, those without power deserve to understand the nuance and importance of this democratic tool available to them. Readers will walk away from this first-of-its-kind exploration not despising cancel culture but embracing it as a form of democratic expression that’s always been leading the charge in liberating us all.
- Trust the Plan: The Rise of Qanon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, by Will Sommer. The definitive book on QAnon from the reporter knows them best. He explains what it is, how it has gained a mainstream following among Republican lawmakers and ordinary citizens, the threat it poses to democracy, and how we can reach those who have embraced the conspiracy and are disseminating its lies. The great tragedy of this story is ultimately the legitimization of this ideology by mainstream politicians eager to gain access to a large and growing cohort of voters. Though 2020 brought the end of Trump’s presidency, his following within the QAnon community has simply pivoted and grown stronger. Trust the Plan shows us in granular detail who we’ll be up against for years to come, in the US and abroad. Understanding why and how something like Q happens is an indispensable exercise, and in showing us how we got here we can chart a path out.
- The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, by Jake Bittle.
Even as climate change dominates the headlines, many of us still think about it in the future tense—we imagine that as global warming gets worse over the coming decades, millions of people will scatter around the world fleeing famine and rising seas. What we often don’t realize is that the consequences of climate change are already visible, right here in the United States. From half-drowned Louisiana to fire-scorched California, from the dried-up cotton fields of Arizona to the soaked watersheds of inland North Carolina, people are moving. In the last few decades, the federal government has moved tens of thousands of families away from flood zones, and tens of thousands more have moved of their own accord in the aftermath of natural disasters. Insurance and mortgage markets are already shifting to reflect mounting climate risk, pricing people out of risky areas.
- It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, by Bernie Sanders. You can probably read this book in your mind without ever picking it up, but Sanders condenses his political views nicely. He argues that unfettered capitalism is to blame for an unprecedented level of income and wealth inequality, is undermining our democracy, and is destroying our planet. How can we accept an economic order that allows three billionaires to control more wealth than the bottom half of our society? How can we accept a political system that allows the super rich to buy elections and politicians? How can we accept an energy system that rewards the fossil fuel corporations causing the climate crisis? Sanders believes that, in the face of these overwhelming challenges, the American people must ask tough questions about the systems that have failed us and demand fundamental economic and political change.
- The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with “big government” and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and Conway document campaigns to rewrite textbooks, combat unions, and defend child labor. They detail the ploys that turned hardline economists Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman into household names; recount the libertarian roots of the Little House on the Prairie books; and tune into the General Electric-sponsored TV show that beamed free-market doctrine to millions and launched Ronald Reagan's political career. By the 1970s, this propaganda was succeeding. Free market ideology would define the next half-century across Republican and Democratic administrations, giving us a housing crisis, the opioid scourge, climate destruction, and a baleful response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets will serve, not stifle, democracy.
- Walk Through Fire: The Train Disaster That Changed America, by Yasmine Ali. The first book to examine the rarely-acknowledged Waverly Train Disaster of 1978 – the catastrophic accident that changed America forever and led to the formation of FEMA. On the night of February 22, 1978, a devastating freight train derailment drastically altered Waverly, Tennessee, and its place in history. This was one of the worst train explosions of the twentieth century, killing 16 people, injuring hundreds more, and causing millions of dollars in damage. What could have been dismissed as a single community’s terrible misfortune instead became the catalyst for radical change, including the formation of FEMA, much-needed reforms in emergency response training, and the creation and enforcement of national and state safety regulations. Response to the disaster reshaped American infrastructure and laid the groundwork for the future of emergency management and disaster relief.
- Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created, by Nick Tabor.
In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon. That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates’ direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive. Many community members believe the pollution from the heavy industry surrounding their homes has caused a cancer epidemic among residents, and companies are eyeing even more land for development. This story was also told in last year’s The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning, by Ben Raines, which centers on the discovery of the wreckage of the Clotilda.
- A Stone Is Most Precious Where it Belongs: A Memoir of Uyghur Exile, Hope, and Survival, by Gulchehra Hoja. In February 2018, twenty-four members of Gulchehra Hoja's family disappeared overnight. Her crime – and thus that of her family – was her award-winning investigations on the plight of her people, the Uyghurs, whose existence and culture is being systematically destroyed by the Chinese government. This extraordinary memoir shares an insight into the lives of the Uyghurs, a people and culture being systematically destroyed by China—and a woman who gave up everything to help her people.
- Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think about Animals, by Christopher Preston. The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction. Bear in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? What shifts in thinking did it demand? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and challenges at the heart of these resurgences.
- The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WWII and Shape Modern America, by Christopher C. Gorham. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s special envoy to Europe in World War II she went where the president couldn’t go. She was among the first Allied women to enter a liberated concentration camp, and stood in the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountain retreat, days after its capture. She guided the direction of the G.I. Bill of Rights and the Manhattan Project. Though Anna Rosenberg emerged from modest immigrant beginnings, equipped with only a high school education, she was the real power behind national policies critical to America winning the war and prospering afterward. Astonishingly, her story remains largely forgotten.
- Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell about Fear, by Erica Berry. “This is one of those stories that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank.” So begins Erica Berry’s kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7’s record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body. As Erica chronicles her own migration—from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather’s sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily—she searches for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world.
- Tell Me Good Things: On Love, Death, and Marriage, by James Runcie. In early 2020, as the world sunk into the pandemic, James Runcie and his wife Marilyn Imrie were going through a different, far more personal tragedy. After 35 years of miraculously happy marriage, they learned that the painful, frustrating symptoms Marilyn had been experiencing for two years were a sign of Lou Gehrig's Disease. With this diagnosis, during the isolation and strangeness of the pandemic, James and Marilyn's lives were transformed. Now, in his startling and intimate memoir, James tells the story of Marilyn's illness and death–-in all its moments of tragedy, rage, and strangeness-–while painting a vivid portrait of her life, in all its color, humor, and brightness. Tender, funny, and deeply true, Tell Me Good Things is an unforgettable story of life before death and love after grief.
- The Diary Keepers: World War II in the Netherlands, as Written by the People Who Lived Through It, by Nina Siegal. Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to record this unparalleled time, and maintained by devoted archivists, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before, from the stories of a Nazi sympathizing police officer to a Jewish journalist who documented daily activities at a transport camp.
- The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History, by Joel Warner. The original manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom, a tiny scroll penned in the bowels of the Bastille in Paris, would embark on a centuries-spanning odyssey across Europe, passing from nineteenth-century banned book collectors to pioneering sex researchers to avant-garde artists before being hidden away from Nazi book burnings. In 2014, the world heralded its return to France when the scroll was purchased for millions by Gérard Lhéritier, the self-made son of a plumber who had used his savvy business skills to upend France’s renowned rare-book market. But the sale opened the door to vendettas by the government, feuds among antiquarian booksellers, manuscript sales derailed by sabotage, a record-breaking lottery jackpot, and allegations of a decade-long billion-euro con, the specifics of which, if true, would make the scroll part of France’s largest-ever Ponzi scheme.
- Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears, by Michael Schulman. Chronicles the remarkable, sprawling history of the Academy Awards and the personal dramas—some iconic, others never-before-revealed—that have played out on the stage and off camera. Unlike other books on the subject, each chapter takes a deep dive into a particular year, conflict, or even category that tells a larger story of cultural change, from Louis B. Mayer to Moonlight. Schulman examines how the red carpet runs through contested turf, and the victors aren't always as clear as the names drawn from envelopes. Caught in the crossfire are people: their thwarted ambitions, their artistic epiphanies, their messy collaborations, their dreams fulfilled or dashed. Featuring a star-studded cast of some of the most powerful Hollywood players of today and yesterday, as well as outsiders who stormed the palace gates, this captivating history is a collection of revelatory tales, each representing a turning point for the Academy, for the movies, or for the culture at large.
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. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. 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 15% each week). 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.