Second edition from 2014 of a classic of US liberalism first released in the early George W. Bush years. The author is a cognitive scientist who has devoted much of his career to applying the findings of experimental neuroscience to politics. He has published a bunch of scholarly work along these lines too, but this …
History. A reexamination of the Black civil rights movement in the US. The conventional narrative frames it as a struggle that took place from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and that involved pushing the US nation and state to more completely live up to the supposed high principles of its founding by admitting Black people …
A lot of Serious People who do Serious Things when it comes to knowledge tend to treat stories and other kinds of experience-based narratives as inherently suspect and not terribly useful. Some do this from a sort of empiricist place, an unreconstructed Enlightment approach to knowledge in which our best approximation of accuracy and reliability, …
A short nonfiction collection by Rebecca Solnit. Most of the contents originally appeared online between 2017 and 2019. The pieces fell roughly into three categories. Some focused relatively directly on the theme described by the book’s title, the relationship between power and stories. The second category, which overlapped with the first, included a range of …
A book about struggles for social change in the Muslim Middle East, mostly focused on Iran and Egypt but with scattered references to other countries as well. The first edition was written not long before the Arab Spring and laid out an analysis that didn’t quite predict the uprising but that described dynamic circumstances allowing …
A classic work (originally published in 1990) theorizing aesthetics and politics starting from the ways in which the experiences of people in the Caribbean have historically been organized. By a renowned intellectual and poet from Martinique. Translated from French (and not just any French, but a French infused with Creole and torqued through linguistic innovation …
Memoir. By a well-known Antiguan-American novelist. Focused on her gardening. Perhaps an odd choice for me, given that I have never read any of Kincaid’s novels (though I do remember carrying stacks of them when I briefly worked at a campus bookstore many years ago) and that I am not a gardener (though I dabbled …
History of six major social reform movements in the United States from the early 19th to mid 20th centuries – abolitionism, populism, progressivism, the so-called “first wave” of the women’s movement, the labour movement, and the socialist and communist movements. The focus is how the white-dominated core of each related to racism, and how Black …
By a prominent US scholar of slavery. A mixture of history, memoir, and essay. Organized around an extended stay in Ghana and an exploration of the key sites of the slave trade there. An intense, often painful meditation on loss, forgetting, remembering, legacies of relentless violence, and the impossibility of return. Focused to a significant …
A revised and updated version (published in 2018) of Katsiaficas’ classic book (originally published in 1987) on the uprisings of 1968, notable as the first attempt to understand the peak years of the New Left in a truly global context. There are definitely some quirky elements to this book. I’m not convinced, for instance, that …