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Nonfiction Views: This week's notable new nonfiction [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-09-19
Good evening, all. Nineteen selections this evening, as the fall publishing season is in full swing. Also check out my list of thirty books of interest to Black and Latino/a readers of all ages, posted as a comment in today’s Black Kos diary. Over at the Literate Lizard, I have books about work and labor In a Blistering Opinion, Judge Officially Blocks Texas Book Rating Lawdiscounted through the end of September in our month-long Labor Day feature, and a selection of books discounted in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month.
BOOK NEWS
Here’s a handful of interesting articles to read from the book world:
No one knows when it officially began, or how far the program reached; it involved FBI agents approaching employees in public or academic libraries and asking for names and other details of people who had used the library…
That said, [the law] misses the mark on obscenity with a web of unconstitutionally vague requirements. And the state, in abdicating its responsibility to protect children, forces private individuals and corporations into compliance with an unconstitutional law that violates the First Amendment.”
The updated eligibility requirements are meant to emphasize “the American nature of the work rather than the individual,” Marjorie Miller, the administrator for the prizes, tells the New York Times’ Alexandra Alter. “You can be American and write a book or play or a piece of music that is American without being a U.S. citizen.”
These newer memoirs don’t hold the long desired linear arc of “symptoms, diagnosis, treatment.” Instead, they articulate the ambiguity of living within symptoms that, for me, exist like shapeshifters inside my body. At an anecdotal glance, these more modern memoirs appear to have popped up around 2019, presenting a new style of chronic illness storytelling. These are no longer only narratives about illness. Yes, the details of embodiment are still there — the individual experience of feeling betrayed by a body, the symptoms, the procedures, the emotional response. But entwined in these personal accounts are socio-political histories of illness and being ill. These stories have become framed within broader histories of medical advancement and gendered and racial histories of symptoms being believed or dismissed.
THIS WEEK’S NEW NONFICTION
Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, by Kashmir Hill. Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. This technology has already been used in wrongful arrests in the United States. Unregulated, it could expand the reach of policing, as it has in China and Russia, to a terrifying, dystopian level. Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.” In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet.
American Identity in Crisis: Notes from an Accidental Activist, by Kat Calvin. A trailblazing activist’s passionate and incisive look at why she started a movement to ensure that 26 million Americans have access to the IDs they need to escape poverty and live healthy and productive lives. American Identity in Crisis weaves together three remarkable stories: the making of an activist in the wake of the 2016 presidential election; the fight against the onerous rules that are being used to keep vulnerable and targeted populations from participating in all facets of American life -from obtaining jobs and housing to going to the polls- and how we can solve a problem that impacts millions of American adults. We meet veterans, the unhoused, and senior citizens, and learn the story of the fierce advocate who insists on recognizing their humanity and seeing them as souls who are resilient and striving for change.
Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, by Ashley Shew. In a warm, feisty voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. To forge a more equitable world, Shew argues that we must eliminate "technoableism"--the harmful belief that technology is a "solution" for disability; that the disabled simply await being "fixed" by technological wizardry; that making society more accessible and equitable is somehow a lesser priority. This badly needed introduction to disability expertise considers mobility devices, medical infrastructure, neurodivergence, and the crucial relationship between disability and race. The future, Shew points out, is surely disabled--whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It's time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world.
Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation, edited by David W. Orr. The first major book to deal with the dual crises of democracy and climate change as one interrelated threat to the human future and to identify a path forward. Democracy in a Hotter Time calls for reforming democratic institutions as a prerequisite for avoiding climate chaos and adapting governance to how Earth works as a physical system. To survive in the “long emergency” ahead, we must reform and strengthen democratic institutions, making them assets rather than liabilities. Edited by David W. Orr, this vital collection of essays proposes a new political order that will not only help humanity survive but also enable us to thrive in the transition to a post–fossil fuel world.
The Court at War: FDR, His Justices, and the World They Made, by Cliff Sloan. By the summer of 1941, in the ninth year of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt had molded his Court. He had appointed seven of the nine justices—the most by any president except George Washington—and handpicked the chief justice. But the wartime Roosevelt Court had two faces. One was bold and progressive, the other supine and abject, cowed by the charisma of the revered president.
The Court at War explores this pivotal period. It provides a cast of unforgettable characters in the justices—from the mercurial, Vienna-born intellectual Felix Frankfurter to the Alabama populist Hugo Black; from the western prodigy William O. Douglas, FDR’s initial pick to be his running mate in 1944, to Roosevelt’s former attorney general and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson.
The justices’ shameless capitulation and unwillingness to cross their beloved president highlight the dangers of an unseemly closeness between Supreme Court justices and their political patrons. But the FDR Court’s finest moments also provided a robust defense of individual rights, rights the current Court has put in jeopardy. Sloan’s intimate portrait is a vivid, instructive tale for modern times.
Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations, by Simon Schama. With the devastating effects of Covid-19 still rattling the foundations of our global civilization, we live in unprecedented times, or so we might think. But pandemics have been a constant presence throughout human history, as humans and disease have lived side by side for millennia. Over the centuries, our ability to react to these sweeping killers has evolved, most notably through the development of vaccines. The story of disease eradication, however, has never been one of simply science: it is political, cultural, and deeply personal. Ranging across continents and centuries, acclaimed historian Simon Schama unpacks the stories of the often-unknown individuals whose pioneering work changed the face of modern healthcare. Questioning why the occurrence of pandemics appears to be accelerating at an alarming rate, Schama looks into our impact on the natural world, and how that in turn is affecting us, all while interrogating how geopolitics has had a devastating effect on global health.
The Four Tests: What It Will Take to Keep America Strong and Good, by Daniel Baer. With today's fraught global and political climate, American hegemony is over and the assumption that America maintains its dominant status in global politics is waning. The divisions between us, economic changes driven by globalization and technology, as well as climate change, pandemics, and the resurgence of authoritarianism, make it difficult to be optimistic about America's future. But what if we use this moment as an opportunity to think about what might come next, and how to build what we need to succeed. In The Four Tests, Baer argues that we are living through a transition moment and lays out in depth the four tests we must meet: Scale, Investment, Fairness, and Identity.
Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things, by Dan Ariely. Preeminent social scientist Dan Ariely argues that to understand the irrational appeal of misinformation, we must first understand the behavior of “misbelief”—the psychological and social journey that leads people to mistrust accepted truths, entertain alternative facts, and even embrace full-blown conspiracy theories. Misinformation, it turns out, appeals to something innate in all of us—on the right and the left—and it is only by understanding this psychology that we can blunt its effects. Grounded in years of study as well as Ariely’s own experience as a target of disinformation, Misbelief is an eye-opening and comprehensive analysis of the psychological drivers that cause otherwise rational people to adopt deeply irrational beliefs. Utilizing the latest research, Ariely reveals the key elements—emotional, cognitive, personality, and social—that drive people down the funnel of false information and mistrust, showing how under the right circumstances, anyone can become a misbeliever.
Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America, by Michael Harriot. The columnist and political commentator presents a more accurate version of American history. Combining unapologetically provocative storytelling with meticulous research based on primary sources as well as the work of pioneering Black historians, scholars, and journalists, Harriot removes the white sugarcoating from the American story, placing Black people squarely at the center. With incisive wit, Harriot speaks hilarious truth to oppressive power, subverting conventional historical narratives with little-known stories about the experiences of Black Americans. From the African Americans who arrived before 1619 to the unenslavable bandit who inspired America’s first police force, this long overdue corrective provides a revealing look into our past that is as urgent as it is necessary. For too long, we have refused to acknowledge that American history is white history. Not this one. This history is Black AF.
The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis, by Maria Smilios. Back when tuberculosis stirred people’s darkest fears, killing one in seven, white nurses at Sea View, New York’s largest municipal hospital, began quitting en masse. Desperate to avert a public health crisis, city officials summoned Black southern nurses, luring them with promises of good pay, a career, and an escape from the strictures of Jim Crow. But after arriving, they found themselves on an isolated hilltop in the remote borough of Staten Island, yet again confronting racism and consigned to a woefully understaffed sanatorium, dubbed “the pest house,” where it was said that “no one left alive.” This remarkable true story follows the intrepid young women known by their patients as the “Black Angels.” For twenty years, they risked their lives working under appalling conditions while caring for New York’s poorest residents, who languished in wards, waiting to die, or became guinea pigs for experimental surgeries and often deadly drugs. But despite their major role in desegregating the New York City hospital system—and their vital work in helping to find the cure for tuberculosis at Sea View—these nurses were completely erased from history.
50 Years of Ms.: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution, edited by Katherine Spillar. For the past five decades Ms. has been the nation’s most influential source of feminist ideas, and it remains at the forefront of feminism today, affecting thought and culture with a younger-than-ever readership (ages 16-20!). Ms. was the first U.S. magazine to feature prominent American women demanding the repeal of laws that criminalized abortion; explain and advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment; rate presidential candidates on women’s issues; feature domestic violence and sexual harassment on its cover, long before either was widely understood or acknowledged; and commission and publish a national study on date rape.
Here is the best reporting, fiction, and advertising, decade by decade, as well as the best photographs and features that reveal and reflect the changes set in motion by Ms., along with the iconic covers that galvanized readers. Here are essays, profiles, conversations with and features by: Alice Walker, Cynthia Enloe, Pauli Murray, Nancy Pelosi, bell hooks, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Brittney Cooper, and Joy Harjo, as well as fiction and poetry by Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove, and Sharon Olds, and many others.
Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates, by Katie Barnes. For decades women have been playing competitive sports, thanks in large part to the protective cover of Title IX. Since the passage of that law, the number of women participating in sports and the level of competition in high school and college and professionally, has risen dramatically. In Fair Play, award-winning journalist Katie Barnes traces the evolution of women’s sports as a pastime and a political arena where equality and fairness have been fought over for generations. As attitudes toward gender have shifted to embrace more fluidity in recent decades, sex continues to be viewed as a static binary that is easily determined: male or female. It is on the very idea of static sex that we have built an entire sporting apparatus. Now that foundation is being hotly debated as a result of intense culture wars. Many transgender and intersex athletes, including a South African runner, a wrestler in Texas, a Connecticut track star, and a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, have captured the attention of law and policymakers who want to decide how and when they compete.
Bartleby and Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener, by Gay Talese. “New York is a city of things unnoticed,” a young reporter named Gay Talese wrote sixty years ago. He would spend the rest of his legendary career defying that statement by celebrating the people most reporters overlooked, understanding that it was through these minor characters that the epic story of New York and America unfolded. Inspired by Herman Melville’s great short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the 91-year-old Talese now revisits the unforgettable “nobodies” he has profiled in his celebrated career—from the New York Times’s anonymous obituary writer to Frank Sinatra’s entourage. In the book’s final act, Tales offers a remarkable new piece of original reporting titled “Dr. Bartha’s Brownstone,” about an unknown doctor who made his mark on New York City one summer day in 2006 by blowing up (with himself in it) his cherished nineteenth-century high-stoop Neo-Grecian residence in mid-town rather than selling to pay the court-ordered sum of $4 million to the woman who had divorced him three years earlier.
The Trade Trap: How To Stop Doing Business with Dictators, by Mathias Döpfner. One of the world’s most powerful business leaders traces the rise and costs of Western dependency on China and Russia. And he suggests a radical new approach to free trade: The establishment of a new values-based alliance of democracies. Membership is based on the adherence of three very simple criteria: the rule of law, human rights, and sustainability targets. Countries that comply with these criteria can engage in tariff-free trade with others. Those who don’t will pay prohibitive tariffs.
Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune, by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe. The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story—of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention. “This meticulously detailed family saga is also rich with insight into U.S. history, including revealing chapters on topics ranging from mid-19th-century populist sentiments concerning Shakespeare (the Astor Opera House staged a performance of Macbeth that was widely reviled for its high ticket price) and the early 20th-century gay scene (when the Astor Hotel became a queer rendezvous spot). History buffs and readers fascinated by the rich and famous should take note.” — Publishers Weekly
Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, by Florian Illies. An ingeniously orchestrated popular history brings to life the most pivotal decade of the twentieth century. As the Roaring Twenties wind down, Jean-Paul Sartre waits in a Paris café for a first date with Simone de Beauvoir, who never shows. Marlene Dietrich slips away from a loveless marriage to cruise the dive bars of Berlin. The fledgling writer Vladimir Nabokov places a freshly netted butterfly at the end of his wife’s bed. Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Zelda and Scott, Dalí and Gala, Picasso and his many muses, Henry and June and Anaïs Nin, the entire extended family of Thomas Mann, and a host of other fascinating and famous figures make art and love, write and row, bed and wed and betray. They do not yet know that they, along with millions of others, will soon be forced to contemplate flight—or fight—as the world careens from one global conflict to the next.
What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds, by Jennifer Jewell. The author examines our skewed notions where "organic" seeds are grown and sourced, reveals how giant multinational agribusiness has refined and patented the genomes of seeds we rely on for staples like corn and soy, and highlights the efforts of activists working to regain legal access to heirloom seeds that were stolen from Indigenous peoples and people of color. Throughout, readers are invited to share Jewell's personal observations as she marvels at the glory of nature in her Northern California hometown. She admires at the wild seeds she encounters on her short daily walks and is amazed at the range of seed forms, from cups and saucers to vases, candelabras, ocean-going vessels, and airliners.
Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy, by Stephen M. Silverman. Lively, sophisticated, and filled with first-person tributes and glorious images, Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy lifts the curtain on a Broadway legend—a man who stood at the pinnacle of the American musical theatre for more than sixty years.
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