An intellectual biography of radical English writer and art critic John Berger. Examines his key work from the end of the Second World War to his death in 2017, in the context of at least the major features of his life, if not really the nitty-gritty details, and of the broader political and intellectual culture. …
A collection of short pieces written (or in some cases co-written) by Mariame Kaba, an abolitionist organizer in the US. Over her many years of involvement, she has done an incredible amount of work that exemplifies that quintessential abolitionist synthesis of the radical and the practical. She has thought deeply about what she does (and …
Historical scholarship. A sweeping history of the long sixteenth century, from the first voyage of Columbus in 1492 to the establishment of the first permanent English-speaking settlement in North America in 1607. Though it was really in the seventeenth century that it became clear that all of these interlinked phenomena would become the defining features …
Perhaps the most famous essay by one of the twentieth century’s great essayists. About racism and the US of A, but also Baldwin’s early life and faith and pain and rage and change and freedom. Raw and lyrical. A classic for a reason. And a compelling mix of of-its-time – it was written in the …
Nonfiction. Aimed at a general audience. An engagement with the ways we see the world around us. In each chapter, the author goes on a walk with someone different. Most of these someones are experts who, because of their expertise, perceive the places through which they are walking differently than most of us would, and …
I have a somewhat complicated relationship with John Green’s work. I discovered him not through his writing but through the YouTube channel he and his brother run, and I have read only the most recent of his novels, which I liked but which has not inspired me to go back and read the rest. What …
Memoir that sometimes reads like essays, with a heavy emphasis on linguistics. Written by a white English woman who is a literary translator between Japanese and English. Orbits around her time living in Japan when she was younger, and her complicated, ambivalent trajectory with Japanese nation, culture, and language. Reflects, through all of that, on …
Movement history. An interview-based and archival history of the emergence of the women’s liberation movement in the United States in the late 1960s. It particularly focuses on the ways in which women’s liberation came out of the experiences of women active in the civil rights movement and in the new left student movement earlier in …
In this book, prominent migrant justice organizer Harsha Walia writes migration and borders into our understanding of how power works at a global level. In a clear rejection of shallow liberal conceptualizations of the issue, it looks to root causes and to the many ways migration and its regulation are intertwined with capitalism, settler colonialism, …
Scholarly collection. Earlier this year, I read and reviewed *The Racial Contract* by philosopher Charles Mills, which inserts the realities of global white supremacy into the social contract tradition within political philosophy. As I said then, I’m not super interested in the social contract as a way of understanding the world, but one of the …