I read Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet, written by astrophysicist turned climate scientist Kate Marvel and with audiobook narration by Courtney Patterson.

This was a good overview of where we are and where we’re headed. Marvel makes the science of climate accessible to the lay reader, and may I just say, as someone who has edited writing by astrophysicists, I strongly appreciate that.

Marvel weaves her personal experience into the narrative, not enough to make the book a memoir, but enough to make her relatable. She writes about missing California, not just because she relocated to New York, but because she misses the California she knew as a child. Climate change has made it a hotter, dryer place. I’ve never been to California, but I recognize her grief. That’s how I feel about North Carolina.

Reading books about the climate is never emotionally easy, but Marvel does include reasons to hope, including the advances we have made in sustainable energy and the promise of future technologies that may one day scrub our atmosphere of the excess carbon and methane. Climate change is my biggest fear and my biggest grief, but Marvel personally has hope for the future, which makes me feel less pessimistic.

I fell in love with Russian literature as a teenager, which led me to majoring in Russian history in college, but somehow I missed out on reading Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). I very much enjoyed the first part of his autobiography, My Childhood.

The story begins with Maxim’s father dying of cholera and, from there, does not get happier. My biggest warning to readers is this: Steer clear if you do not want to read about a child being beaten, repeatedly. Other people too.

If you have the stomach for reading about violence and poverty, I recommend this one. Gorky is a hell of a storyteller. I came to care about the characters—young Alexei (Maxim’s name before his adopted nom de plume), his troubled mother, his saint of a grandmother. I found Gorky to be more accessible to the modern reader than most of the classic Russian writers.

I enjoyed the audiobook as narrated by Nicholas Boulton, who did a great job with the voices, even if their accents were English rather than Russian. That took some getting used to.

Besides the plot and the characters, I loved Gorky’s way with words.

“Much later, I realized that Russian people, because of the poverty and squalor of their lives, love to amuse themselves with sorrow, to play at it like children, and are seldom ashamed of being unhappy. Amidst their endless weekdays, grief makes a holiday.”

I read one of the most important nonfiction books of the modern era, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, still relevant fifteen years after its 2010 publication.

Though drug use and distribution is consistent across races, law enforcement polices Black communities at starkly disproportional rates. And ever since Reagan launched the War on Drugs, the penalties for drug use are draconian. Drug offensives that would result in a few months or a year turn become years and decades in the United States.

Even if the sentence is light, the punishment stays with the offender forever. Former felons may be denied the right to vote and the right to serve on juries…and more importantly in terms of basic survival, they may be denied housing, public benefits, and employment.

The American criminal justice system prosecutes Black people for drug crimes at far higher rates than other races, leading to a form of social control that is the descendent of Jim Crow laws, in turn descended from chattel slavery. And like Jim Crow, the mass incarceration of Black people, especially Black men, is on the surface race neutral. Under Jim Crow, anyone could vote if they could pass a literacy test, regardless of color; but since the tests were only administered to Black people, illiterate whites still maintained civil rights not afforded to illiterate people of other races.

“Few Americans today recognize mass incarceration for what it is: A new caste system thinly veiled by the cloak of colorblindness,” writes Alexander. In one of the more heartbreaking passages in a book filled with sorrow, she describes how this is true even among Black people, who are often ashamed to share with their neighbors that a loved one has been incarcerated. Slavery and Jim Crow were visible, while the mass incarceration of Black men is not.

Of books about Black people in the United States written in the twentieth century, I rank The New Jim Crows as essential reading. If you read in Black Studies at all, you will have heard of it, but if you have not personally read it, I encourage you to move it to the top of your TBR.

I read Elie Mystal’s second book, Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, and now I have a reinvigorated hatred of the Hyde Amendment.

Mystal is one of my favorite political writers because he takes complex topics and makes them accessible and also there is lots of swearing. I always learn something.

Bad Law dives right in with voter registration. In America, we burden individuals with proving themselves eligible to vote. This is fine if you can you’ve got a driver’s license or some other form of ID, but if you don’t, then you have to go get one. That costs money and hours at the DMV, which is a big ask for people in low-wage hourly jobs. The state, not the individual, should bear the burden of proving voter eligibility. Which seems obvious now that I think about it.

Mystal did not set out to write a book that would win hearts and minds across America. He set out to write a book that help progressives make better arguments against bad laws.

If you like audiobooks, at all, even a little, this book deserves to be listened to. If you’re merely audiobook-curious, here’s your nudge to take the plunge. Mystal’s reading is delightful. He narrates like he’s having a conversation. It’s lovely. And there is this one passage with excerpts of the writing of founding father John Adams where Mystal goes into this fussy, be-wigged white guy voice and it is hysterical.

I listened to The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, written by Jessica Pishko and narrated by Nan McNamara.

Eligibility requirements for sheriff vary by state, with some states requiring no education beyond high school and no experience in law enforcement. Unlike chiefs of police, who are appointed, sheriffs are elected to office. They answer to nobody except the electorate, which is not terribly reassuring, since around half of the races for sheriff are uncontested. It’s even less reassuring when you understand that something like ninety percent of incumbents win re-election.

These entrenched sheriffs are overwhelmingly white, male, and Republican, and a great many of those are politically far right. And as I learned in Pishko’s book, a whole lot of sheriffs see themselves as the highest legal authority in their county. For interpreting and enforcing the law, they claim supremacy above congress, the president, and federal agents.

Covering topics including immigration, gun control, covid mask mandates, and sundown laws, Pishko shows the outsize influence sheriffs have on social control within their communities, how they incarcerate people for profit and even as shocking numbers of people die in their custody.

Read Pishko’s book to understand how much power is concentrated in the office of sheriff and the ways it is widely abused

In America, Trump is attacking DEIA—diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility—though if you’d prefer not to use an acronym, the easy way to say it is: Trump is bringing back segregation. He hasn’t been in office a month and he’s already dismantling everything that makes this country good.

In early January, before this attack on America’s people and institutions, I started reading a couple of books about Black history, one fiction, one nonfiction, in anticipation of Black History Month. Reading this history feels more important now than ever…though with all the bad things happening, part of me wishes I’d picked something fluffy to read. A cozy mystery where the cat solves the crime.

Published to widespread praise on its publication in 2014, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, written by Edward E. Baptist with audiobook narration by Ron Butler, is a detailed study of the ways slavery and capitalism helped each other grow.

I appreciate how Baptist centers stories of individual enslaved people throughout. He draws on slave narratives, historical newspapers, oral histories recorded by Works Progress Administration employees, and other primary sources to flesh out the experiences of real human beings in bondage.

I further appreciate the special care he takes toward dismantling the notion that the South was fighting for states’ rights. This pernicious myth captivated American historians for decades. If you hear someone arguing that the confederates seceded from the union over the abstract notion of states’ rights, point them toward this book. It was about slavery. It was always about slavery.

Also, if you didn’t already want to punch Andrew Jackson in the mouth, this will put you over the top.

After listening to a meditation guided by Shinzen Young in my meditation app, I wanted to know more about him. I was excited to see he’d written a book called The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works. Books about the neuroscience of meditation are my jam.

Turns out, this was not a book about the neuroscience of meditation.

Meditation has made me kinder, more grateful, more resilient. I’m a better person for it. I want to take my practice deeper, and so I’ve been meditating more, with more intentionality, and I’m trying to read more about it. I want to understand better the mechanisms behind meditation. How does it, you know, work exactly?

Young’s book does not answer that question. Instead, he uses science language and metaphors to describe the practice of meditation. There’s some cool stuff in here, but it’s not what I was looking for. And he spends most of his time talking about concepts that are beyond me. Even after six years of a daily mindfulness meditation practice, I still very much feel like a beginner.

His discussion on impermanence, for instance, went almost entirely over my head. I still don’t understand what impermanence is or why it’s important to happiness and enlightenment. Though for what it’s worth, I’m incorporating his advice on noticing when things end, not just when they begin. The sound of a passing car might draw my attention, but I’m trying now to notice when that sound fades. But I can’t pretend I understand why this is valuable, despite having read the book.

Confession: I tend not to like books about meditation. I find the concepts too abstract, the writing too inaccessible. I feel the same frustration with books about philosophy and religion. Though I can point to any number of delightful exceptions, these genres as a whole are not my favorites.

Today is American Thanksgiving, a holiday mired in whitewashed politics and history. I’m trying to unlearn the propaganda I imbibed as a child, trying to teach myself indigenous history.

So here I am reading a book by a *checks notes* white man…?

It’s a classic in the field. The way our systems and education and history have shaped things, most classics in most fields are written by white men.

William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983) is a seminal work of ecological history. Cronon studies how natives interacted with the natural environment and compares it to European interactions.

It’s a short book, but dense. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Bob Souer, and I will confess I zoned out at times. But the gist is: European-style, balls-to-the-wall exploitation of the land is not sustainable. Your crops will fail if you keep planting the same seeds on the same fields, year after year. Your multiplying sheep will trample the ground, compacting the soil so they have to graze further and further afield.

There is more subtlety in this book than “Natives good, Colonizers bad,” but I have to say, the Europeans don’t come out looking great. Also they were shit at honoring treaties.

I’m glad I read the book, since it is a foundational text of ecological history, but it was a slog. I used to have patience for academic writing. It was necessary when I was an undergraduate history major. I am losing that patience as an adult.

I listened to Black Indians (1986; rev. 2012), written by William Loren Katz and narrated by Bill Andrew Quinn. It examines the intersection of Black and indigenous cultures in North America and what would become the United States.

Okay, I just looked it up and Katz died in 2019 (age 92!) so it won’t hurt his feelings if I criticize the book a little. I was hoping for more discussion of the broader themes of race and culture, but that is perhaps a contemporary bias. I shouldn’t expect much sociology in a forty-year-old history book.

A kinder perspective would be to appreciate that Katz, a white man, did scholarship about minoritized groups well before that was common in the literature, even if it does wander sometimes into the noble savage stereotype.

Katz is strongest when speaking about individuals. Of the people he describes, three stand out:

• Wildfire, also known as Edmonia Lewis, was born in 1844(?) to a Black father and a Chippewa mother. After studying sculpting at Oberlin, she made a career as a sculptor and was an active abolitionist.
  
• Labor hero Lucy Parsons, born 1851 or so, became a social anarchist and, finding that too mild, ultimately landed on anarcho-communism. Her ancestry is uncertain, but she was born into slavery and claimed a Mexican and Native American heritage.
• Bill Picket (born 1907?), of Black and Cherokee ancestry, was a showman who invented the rodeo.

The book has aged better than you might expect. It’s not flawless, but it’s a quick read and I learned quite a lot.

I read bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), with audiobook narration by Adenrele Ojo.

When I was an undergraduate, we learned that the first wave of feminism (focused on women’s suffrage) and the second wave of feminism (focused on women’s liberation) served middle and upper class white women to the exclusion of others. By the time I came along as a Women’s Studies major in the early 2000s, the curriculum had a strong focus on inclusivity.

Those gains are due in no small part to hooks. Though the term intersectionality wasn’t yet in the scholarly parlance, hooks anchored Ain’t I a Woman on the intersection of race and sex, with class and labor making frequent appearances.

Three takeaways:

One. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, like so many early feminists, was anti-slavery but not anti-racist. She wanted Black people free from chains on religious grounds, but she did not think of them as equals. I know we covered this when I was in college, but either they weren’t emphatic enough or I distorted the message. It would have been in character for me to tamp it down, to apologize for her (she meant well, she was doing the best she could for the time, etc.). Nope. Lady was a straight-up racist. Abolitionists can be racist.

Two. The labor forces have changed so much, so quickly. I was born in the year hooks published the book, 1981. hooks devotes ample time to the idea of women in the workforce, because that was still one of the big social questions of the time. Yet it already seemed hopelessly outdated when I was growing up, the idea of women staying at home, expecting a man to provide for them.

Capitalism was happy to assist with that social change. That sped things along. Laborers who earn less but control more of the household spending decisions? Let’s flood the workforce with them!

Final takeaway: then, as now, our social movements cannot afford to exclude people’s needs. “Let’s fix patriarchy first, and then we’ll focus on sexism. Let’s solve poverty first, and then we’ll worry about accessibility.” No. We lift up everyone or we lift up no one.