Timothy Egan, The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero:
Thomas Francis Meagher was the son of a wealthy Irish family who was sent to Tasmanian prison for his political agitation during the Irish famine; he escaped and came to America, where he ultimately became a Union general and then acting governor of the Montana territory. He had quite a life, mostly tragic in his aspirations and experiences. If you want an ambiguously inspiring version of the endless American promise, here it is.
Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster:
Recounts how the reactors were built (shoddily) and then tested without sufficient understanding or controls, so that a known weakness in the technology was triggered. Subsequent attempts to fix the problem wasted lives and resources without doing much except making further fixes harder-a reminder that “don’t just do something-stand there!” is sometimes really good advice, although of course the difficulty is always figuring out when that should be the case. We were stunningly close to a much worse disaster in various ways; Higginbotham also tracks the cleanup and the unraveling of the coverup to the present day, where the area is half wildlife refuge and half case study in long-term radiation exposure. Have we learned any lessons? That is the open question.
Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland:
A widowed mother of numerous children was taken from her home one evening, presumably to her death, presumably by the IRA, but decades of silence left the details a mystery, only partially unraveled with the later decision of some IRA members to talk about the past. Keefe weaves this story with others about the IRA, including the story of Dolores Price, who was part of a bombing conspiracy that mostly failed. She was sentenced to decades in prison, but went on a hunger strike; after force-feeding her in ways amounting to torture, the British ultimately paroled her. She went on to marry actor Stephen Rea and to reject the IRA in many ways. (As an American, one of the most astonishing things for me was that the British only locked her up, and not for life; we are so used to our representatives of law and order inflicting death in this country-though the British also killed their share in Ireland, including by having secret death squads, so it’s not as if there’s an overall clear difference. For example, Mao said that guerrillas should move through the people like fish through water; one British counterinsurgency expert, who was tasked with pacifying Northern Ireland during the Troubles, chillingly updated that with “If a fish has got to be destroyed it can be attacked directly by rod or net, ... But if rod and net cannot succeed by themselves it may be necessary to do something to the water …” though he did continue by saying that poisoning the “water” should be a last resort. The British acted accordingly, although they took more pains than most American police departments to conceal that from the public.) It’s a powerful, ambiguous story about violence, evolution from violence, and the compromises that societies make to move on.
David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom:
A somewhat distant portrait of Douglass, who wrote a lot but very little about his internal state after slavery, and who spent most of his time away from his family. His first wife, a free woman who came with him when he escaped slavery, was a homemaker who had to put up with having other women-professional colleagues, with no evidence that Douglass had any closer relationship to them than working with them on his newspaper/other endeavors, but other women nonetheless-traveling with him or living in her home. His second wife, after her death, was scandalously a white woman. Douglass spent a lot of time retelling his experiences under slavery, rewriting them and occasionally softening the treatment of particular white people while never forgiving the institution itself. He also spent a lot of time scrambling for money and feuding with other abolitionists. I wish there’d been a few more extensive quotes-we get “power concedes nothing without a demand” but nothing from “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America:
The various ways in which the law constructed and racialized “illegality” over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A telling example: in the mid-twentieth century, noncitizens who’d committed minor crimes but had lived in the US for decades could sometimes get relief from deportation by exiting the US and reentering-but only on the Canadian border; the option was not made available to Mexicans. Ngai’s organizing conceit is that the law both made “illegality” inevitable and yet excluded unlawful migrants from the category of people with rights, thus producing an “impossible” subject. I never really got that; it is obviously not at all impossible to have a category of rightsless people subject to the will of the state. It’s just truly awful.
Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy:
Enslavers didn’t always object to federal power; in particular, they really liked the idea of a strong navy so that they could protect the other slave powers of the hemisphere. This wasn’t just a matter of wanting to annex Cuba; they particularly wanted to defend Brazil as a slave nation. It’s another facet of US history that was shaped by slavery.
Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think:
People overestimate the worldwide percentage of women who haven’t graduated primary school, the percentage in the worst poverty (under $1/day), the percentage that haven’t been vaccinated for anything at all, and similar things-though not the level of consensus on climate change. The book principally argues that (1) lots of people in countries that rich Westerners think of as poor are doing better than we imagine, with implications for business and foreign policy as well as for fixing the remaining terrible problems that do exist, and (2) rather than there being a big divide between rich and poor countries, there are four relevant groupings, with the kind of people who read books like this largely unable to distinguish the incredibly important ways that $1/day is much different than $16/day. The most powerful incident in the book is Hans’s story of how, working to improve health in an African country, he contributed to horrific deaths: there was an outbreak of sickness that probably wasn’t contagious, but when a worried local official suggested a quarantine, he agreed. They shut down the roads to the city, and the women and children who needed to get to the city to make a living used boats instead … which, overloaded, capsized and drowned the passengers. This is part of the background for the arguments that (1) we should assume that people have reasons for what they’re doing that reflect their resources, values and desires, and (2) sometimes we should wait and gather more data before acting, which seems both true and also often unhelpful if you can’t figure out in advance when that would be true, especially since the arguments of the book oscillate between “not everyone is alike” and “we share basic needs and goals.”
Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific:
Newspaper reporter’s narrative of his life in the Marines during WWII, which is a lot more boredom and hunger than terror, though there is a fair amount of horror and death. Also a lot of racism; “Japs” is the only word ever used for the Japanese, and the various indigenous people of the Pacific appear as mostly silent and/or ridiculous, plus there’s the Southern racist whose charming quirk is how much he hates black people, but you had to like him anyway because “you” was a bunch of white guys. Takeaway: it’s possible to be a sharp observer of certain white/military foibles without being reflective in other ways.
Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment:
Bauer previously spent two years in prison in Iran, having inadvertently crossed the border, and then came back to the US and went undercover in a Louisiana private prison. Even with that background, he can’t help being changed into a prison guard-although the Stanford Prison Experiment has been justly criticized for a lot, it’s important to acknowledge that our actual prisons are set up to encourage indifference, at best, to prisoners’ welfare, and guards respond to those conditions. It’s an incredibly compelling and horrific story of how ill-paid guards subject to corporate profit-oriented rules must and do cut corners, which he integrates with a larger history of for-profit prisons and their intimate connection to chattel slavery in the US. Highly recommended but very hard to read.
Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland:
In one sense, you don’t need to read this book; Metzl introduces us to the thesis with one of his interviewees, a man dying of liver failure because of untreated hepatitis and hard living, who would refuse to sign up for Obamacare because he’s damned if Mexicans would take his money. That’s the book, in a nutshell. But if you can stand it, the examination of specific topics (guns and gun suicide in Missouri, health care in Tennessee, and educational funding in Kansas) is, while occasionally bogged down with numbers, penetrating and powerful. Metzl, himself white, has a lot of empathy for the whites he interacts with, while never losing sight of the fact that as a group they have made nonwhites suffer even more, for the sake of an evanescent privilege. He did a particularly good job of this with white male gun suicide, noting that most discussions of homicide seem more willing to break out race as a variable while the special vulnerability of white men to gun suicide went unaddressed. And while the epidemic of white male death by gun suicide can be connected to a “crisis of masculinity,” he points out that masculinity has been in crisis for a while; that the rhetoric of crisis can suggest that white men are so fragile that if they’re not in control they destroy things including themselves, while everyone else is supposed to be strong through adversity; and that most white men were never wealthy masters, making the conservative story of white privilege under threat a lie about the past as well as about the present.
I also liked the point that, although it’s simple to call white rejection of health care self-defeating/deluded, it has connections to other forms of protest through bodily suffering that liberal readers often treat with more sympathy (although he rarely fails to mention that the suffering chosen by white conservatives is also inflicted on many other people who didn’t choose it). On education, he argues that the long-term damage of major cuts is not just in educational and related health outcomes, but in expectations about what public education can be like, which affects views of what it should be like-which is, of course, part of the point of those who would destroy it. Things we did very recently-like funding higher education-slip from memory and become socialist pipe dreams. And they do so not naturally but because to forget them serves a set of wealthy people’s interests.
Alejandro de la Fuente & Ariela J. Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana:
A lot of fascinating detail about how the laws surrounding freedom for enslaved people (including laws about interracial marriage, manumission and self-purchase) constructed the meaning of slavery and of race. Where there were more free people of color and a tradition of less-racialized slavery, in Cuba, enslavers found it harder to make race and slavery coterminous conditions, despite attempts to borrow from the British/Americans the concepts they developed to degrade blacks. The laws governing free people of color-suppressing churches, schools, and militias/ownership of firearms and dogs-became models for Jim Crow after the American Civil War. Tidbit that stood out to me most, showing the age of the argument “we wouldn’t have needed to deny you rights if you hadn’t been so mean to us!” is a quote from a New Orleans observer in 1856: “It is probable that the South would have continued merely to apologize but for the denunciations of the abolitionists, which led to the... consequent conviction that slavery, as it exists in the United States, in all its aspects, moral, social, and political, is not inconsistent with justice, reason, or religion.”
Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World:
Covering hundreds of years of history, this book reviews the successes of Genghis Khan and the successes then failures of his descendants, who began the process of connecting Eurasia and brought major innovations to warfare and to governance. I would’ve liked more about the military tactics, in fact; they sound perfectly terrifying.
Kevin M. Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth:
Thousands of enslaved men served Confederate soldiers in camp; a few may have taken up arms in particular circumstances, but they were always considered slaves of individual soldiers rather than soldiers themselves, and the Confederacy never accepted the idea of “arming slaves,” even in extremis. After the war, however, the myth of the loyal slave led whites to overemphasize their roles-though within a generation of the Civil War whites were still cognizant that these had been enslaved servants of individual soldiers. In the later twentieth century, a combination of ignorance (carefully created by those with the power to shape memory) and continued willful misreading led whites to insist that there were actually black soldiers in the Confederate army. Online, photos of an enslaved man in a Confederate uniform holding a prop gun (his enslaver had a proud photo of the two of them taken before heading off to the army) and a monument that showed a camp slave along with Confederate soldiers have been reinterpreted to insist that these were black soldiers and that therefore the Civil War could not have been fought to preserve slavery and black subordination.
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