SUGGESTED FICTION

Misha Berlinski, Fieldwork: A Novel (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007).

Misha Berlinski, Peacekeeping: A Novel (New York: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).

James Carroll, Warburg in Rome: A Novel (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) ("Padre Antonio--Pere Antoine--had been a young priest in Paris during the time of Dreyfus and had he not himself cheered on, if  from the side, those rabid monks and clerics who spouted Jew-hating slogans? Death to the Dreyfusards, damn the deicide people, down with the Jews! Even as a young cur'e, Antonine understood the ways in which anti-Semitism was useful to the Church, a way to reconnect with the French masses. That he had seen nothing amiss in this--weren't the Jews the enemies of Christ?--was now a source of wrenching shame. At last it was clear where it all had led. In die judicii, libera nos Domine. On the day of judgment, Good Lord deliver us." Id. at 66.).

Don DeLillo, Zero K: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2016) (From the book jacket: "'We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn't it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?' These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters. . . .  Don DeLillo's seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world--terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague--against the beauty and humanity of everyday life, love, awe, 'the intimate touch of earth and sun.'").

Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance: A Novel, introduction and translation from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury (New York: Anchor Books, 2016).

Jennifer Haigh, Heat and Light: A Novel (New York: Ecco, 2016) ("Long ago, in the navy, Rich Devlin learned his place in the world, his basic and inescapable smallness. Military life taught you the truth. He turned nineteen abroad the SS Roosevelt--the Big Stick, they called it, a ship so massive it seemed to be standing still as it carried six thousand men, three times the population of Bakerton, to the Persian Gulf, a distant and desolate place that mattered for one reason only. When he thinks of it now, he imagines the Big Stick gliding across a vast sea of other people's money, a thought that didn't occur to him at the time. . . .  We are all sailors." Id. at 427.).

Jean Giono, Hill, translated from the French by Paul Eprile, with an introduction by David Abram (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2016).

Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).

Maylis de Kerangal, The Heart: A Novel, translated from the French by Sam Taylor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).

David Means, Hystopia: A Novel (New York Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).

Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs: A Novel (New York: Little, Brown, 2015).

Kenzaburo Oe, Death by Water: A Novel, translate from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm (New York: Grove Press, 2015).

Lawrence Osborne, Hunters in the Dark: A Novel (London & New York: Hogarth, 2015).

Sunjeen Sahota, The Year of the Runaways: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2016).

PERHAPS ONE CAN GET THERE FROM HERE, THOUGH HERE AND THERE MAY NOT BE WHAT ONE EXPECTED

Andrew Solomon, Far and Aways: Reporting from the Brink of Change: Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years (New York: Harper, 2016) ("If we want to avoid learning why the rest of the world at once loves and hates us, it is advisable to stay home. I remain an American patriot when I am abroad, but I also see my country's failure of dignity, empathy, and wisdom. You can't fully interpret the American invective against immigration without visiting centers of emigration and refugee camps. You can't understand the bizarre tyranny of the NRA until you have spent time in other countries (most other countries, actually) where sensible gun laws limit violent crime. You can't discern how far America has lapsed in social mobility until you encounter a society moving toward economic justice. Travel [not tourism] is a set of corrective lenses that help focus the planet's blurred reality." Id. at 25.).

WHAT IS MEANT BY "RACE" IN AMERICA?

Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2011) ("Race . . . has multiple, and at times contradictory, uses in contemporary American discourse. While, in the most basic sense, race is the categorization of humans into groups based on heritable traits, many Americans have a limited notion of heritable traits as only referring to skin color (black, white, brown, etc.), facial features (lips, noses, eye shape/size, etc.), and hair type (straight, curly, kinky, etc.). Based on these traits, many would identify the races as white/Caucasian, black/African, and Asian. At times Hispanic/Latino/Chicano and Native American/American Indian are identified as races, and at other times they are identified as ethnicities. When Americans use the word race, it is often difficult to discern what they include in the term and what they exclude. If this is not muddled enough, there are times when race is also used to signify a set of cultural practices, such as specific ways of speaking, cooking, eating, and socializing and the historical narratives created that relate to these cultural practices. And there are also time when race is used to denote only nonwhite people, as if white Americans have no race. [] Part of the tension that arises when one discusses Shakespeare and race together is that one must interrogate which definitions are being employed, and which are being elided, at any particular moment." Id. at at 4.).

THE IDEA AND HISTORY OF THE GHETTO

Mitchell Duneier, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea ( New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016) (From the book jacket: "On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto--a closed quarter named for the cooper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck." "In this sweeping and original account, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot comprehend the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the ghettos of Europe, as well as earlier efforts to understand the problems of the American city." "Ghetto is the story of the scholars and activists who tried to achieve that understanding. . . ." From the text: "Hitler's came that he was reviving the ghetto of the Middle Ages was completely misleading. The Nazii ghetto was something entirely new" "First, the nazi ghetto illustrated that it was now possible to control a segregated population with absolute efficiency. [] Second, this efficiency made it possible for the Nazi ghettos to introduce as compete segregation as the world had ever seen. While the earlier ghettos had allowed relatively easy passage of people and merchandise during the daytime, many of the Nazi ghettos fenced in their inhabitants day and night. Only those who obtained the rare exit permit were allowed to pass through the gates, others who tried to do so were shot. [] Third, in earlier centuries religion had justified the segregation of Jews. A defining component of Nazi ghetto logic was, by contrast, race. [] Fourth, as in the earlier enforced ghetto, so too in the Nazi ghetto, problems fed on each other in a vicious cycle. This time the results were qualitatively different. Both qualified German physicians and ideological Nazis claimed that the Jews were carriers of disease who required quarantine. [] The purported probability that they would spend the illness was an important reason to have them ghettoized. [] Fifth, the Nazi ghettos were sites of continuous violence and brutality. Residents were forced to watch their fellow citizens die in mass executions, or to participate themselves in stoning fellow Jewish rule-breakers who were later buried in mass graves. To remain alive, to engage in self-preservation was the only imperative. . . ." Id. at 18-21. "On October 9, 1944, Virginia Dobbins brought a house on a white block just outside of Chicago's black neighborhoods. A few days later, when she arrived with her belongings, she found the neighbors removing the plumbing. 'We don't want a riot here,' the people next door explained. 'So we're tearing the house down. We don't want no trouble.' Mrs. Dobbins went to the Eighteenth District police station and pleaded for protection. The officer refused, explaining that while he could send a police car to check the house, he had no special order from the commissioner to guard it. The house was then torched and flooded by neighbors, leaving it in shambles." Id. at 26. Also, see Khalil Gibran Muhammad, "A People Apart," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/17/2016.).

SEXUAL VIOLENCE CULTURE, ETC.

Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do About It  (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2015) ("In the pages that follow, I'll ask you to empathize with many different types of people, but above all women (Specifically, Western women, because exploring rape cultures worldwide would turn this into a lifelong, multivolume project.) Women are no more important than any other potential victims, but we are the primary targets of the messages and myths that sustain rape culture. We're the ones asked to change our behavior, limit our movements, and take full responsibility for the prevention of sexual violence in society. Anyone can be raped, but men aren't conditioned to live in terror of it, nor are they constantly warned that their clothing, travel choices, alcohol consumption, and expression of sexuality are likely to bring violation upon them" "Even if you are a Western woman, empathizing with others of that cohort might not be an easy as it sounds. After all, it was a female, Teresa Carr Deni of the Philadelphia Municipal Court, who described the armed gang rape of a twenty-year-old sex worker as mere 'theft of services.' and told a reporter that such a case 'minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.' Another female judge, Jacqueline Hatch of Arizona, told the victim of a sexual assault that took place in a bar. 'If you wouldn't have been there that night, none of this would have happened.'" Id at 5-6.).

Louise O'Neil, Asking for It  (New York & London: Quercus, 2016) (From the "Afterword": "Our society may not appear to support sexual violence, but you don't need to look very far past the surface to see how we trivialize rape and sexual assault. Sexual assault (from unwanted touching to rape) is so common that we almost see it as an inevitability for women. We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. . . ." "I don't want to live in that type of world anymore. I see young girls playing in my local park and I feel so very afraid for them, for the culture that they're growing up in. They deserve to live in a world where sexual assault is rare, a world where it is taken seriously and the consequences for the perpetrators are swift an severe." "We need to talk about rape. We need to walk about consents. We need to talk about victims blaming and slut shaming and the double standards we place upon our young men and women." "We need to talk and talk and talk until the Emmas of this world feel supported and understood. Until they feel like they are believed." Id. at 319-321.).

Louise O'Neil, Only Ever Yours (New York & London: Quercus, 2015).

Jessica Valenti, Sex Object: A Memoir (New York: Dey St./ William Morrow, 2016) (From the book jacket: "From subway gropings and imposter syndrome to sexual awakenings and motherhood, Sex Object reveals the painful, embarrassing, and sometimes illegal moments that shaped Valenti's adolescence and young adulthood in New York City.") 

Emily Winslow, Jane Doe January: My Twenty-Year Search for Truth and Justice (New York: William Morrow, 2016) (What is truth, and what is justice? Neither is as simple, or as clear cut, as one may think or want.).

DO BETTER WITH RESPECT TO GENDER!

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminist (New York: Anchor Books, 2015) ("My own definition of feminist is a man or a woman who says, 'Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it.' All of us, women and men, must do better." Id. at 48.).

WHITE BACKLASH, OR WHY YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN TRUMP COMING A DECADE AGO

Marisa Abrajano & Zoltan L. Hajnal, White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("Many scholars contend that the large-scale movement of whites from the Democratic to the Republican Pary that occurred from the 1960s to the 1980s was mainly spurred by racial concerns. From this perspective, African Americans demands for increased civil rights coupled [with] the willingness of leaders within the Democractic Party to support those demands ultimately repelled millions of white Americans from theDemocratic Party and helped Republicans win nationally. In this sense, our book has its intellectual origins in the 'issue evolution' approach that Ted Carmines and James Stimson employed so influentially to explain how racial politics altered the nation's partisan dynamics. Just as their book was about what happens to US politics when race emerged as a political concern, our book is about what happens to US politics when immigrants and Latinos arise as a core political isseue." Id, at 8, "It is also worth noting that current patterns in US public opinion closely mirror many historical episodes of nativist reactions to growing immigrant populations. The United Statees is in both reality abd folklore a nation of immigrants [Note: Those of us of African-American accendary have a history of being "imported" as "chattel;" our ancestors did not "immigrate" to America. So, when one talk about a 'nation of immigrants, one excludes African American from that discourse.], but when the immigrants have arrivedd in large numbers or form distinct shores, they have often sparked widespead fear and concern among the public. Indded, the hsitory of the contion could be told through a series of challenging immigrant-nativist confronation. [Note: The hisotry can only be told that way excluding African Americans and slavery from that history.] The rising tide of German and French migrants at the end of the eighteenth century sparked one of the first large-scale nativist movements. But it was just one of many. It was followed by numerous episodes of anti-Irish discrimination in the 1850s, a populist backlash against Chinese immigrants inthe 1880s, prevalent anti-southern and eastern European sentiment in the early twentieth century, and a long history of animosity toward Mexicans dating back to the Mexican-American War. World War II generated similarly widesperead anti-immigrant concern and the internment of over a hundred thousabd Japanene Americans. One could also include current-day US anxiety about and discrimination against Arab Americans [Note: Anti-Muslim Americans discrimination as well.] in this lengthy list of nativisit movements." "The larger point is that contemporary concerns about Latinos and other immigrants are not new. They represent just one example of a much larger phenomenom. If American have so often rallied in large numbers against immigrants in the past, then there is a real possibility that we should expect the same kind of anti-immigrant mobilization today when the number of immigrants and the racial distinctiveness of those immigrants are at or near historical highs." Id. at 33-34. I am not sure the problem is that we don't learn from history, or that we learn the wrong lessons from history. If we learned from history, we should have seen Trump and his supporters coming. If we had learned the right leasons from history we would confront the anti-immigrant, anti-Mexican, anti-Latino,, not to mention the anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim sentiments head on. At it heart, it is an anti-people sentiment, unless those people are just like you.).

A FORGOTTEN AMERICAN GENOCIDE

Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Catastrophe (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000 [that is, 80 percent]. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter. He reveals the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, and who did the killing and why the killing ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide." "Madley describes pre-contact California and precursors to the genocide before explaining how the gold rush stirred vigilante violence against California Indians. He narrates the rise of a state-sanctioned killing machine and broad societal, judicial, and political support for genocide. Many participated: vigilantes, volunteer state militiamen, U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. congressmen, California governors, and others. Ultimately, the state and federal governments spent more than $1,700,000 on campaigns against California Indians. Besides evaluating government officials' culpability, Madley considers why the slaughter constituted genocide and how other possible genocides within and beyond the Americas might be investigated using the methods presented in this groundbreaking book." From the text: "It is difficult to know what to call the hundreds of thousands of people who flooded into California before, during, and after California's gold rush. Many saw themselves as 'settlers,' transforming chaos into order, and savagery into civilization. California Indians, of course, saw things differently. To them, the immigrants were invaders who transformed order into chaos, and civilization into savagery. Thus, the term settler--with its implications of settling unsettled land, settling a dispute, and creating a legal settlement--is problematic at best. . . .  Most US citizens are unused to thinking of 'pioneers' and 'settlers' as invaders, but in California between 1846 and 1873, they often were." Id. at 15.).

THEY WILL LET YOU IN, BUT ONLY ON THEIR TERMS AND ONLY IF YOU STOP BEING YOU.

T. J. Stilles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America (New York: Knopf, 2015) ("They had been treated as external clients of the American economy--though that would soon end, Already the U.S. government attempted to break down the Indians' distinctiveness in order to digest them. The Medicine Lodge Treaty defined a fixed location for the residence of the Southern Plains nations--giving three million acres in exchange for the ninety million they had roamed across--and promised them farm implements, schools, teachers, skilled artisans. Grant called for their integration into U.S. society; in this inaugural address, he supported 'any course toward them which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship.' . . ." "This was a great contradiction, or conundrum, produced by the civil rights revolution of Reconstruction. With the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and later the Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, Americans brought to fruition the vision of universal, individual rights expressed by the Declaration of Independence. As noted earlier, the triumph was flawed. The framers of the Civil Rights Act meant to exclude resident Chinese and 'Indians not taxed,' and the latter phrase reappeared in the Fourteenth Amendment. With black men, the intended beneficiaries, equality long remained merely theoretical; and women did not receive the right to vote until the twentieth century. Still, for the first time, the nation's basic law guaranteed the same freedoms to every person regardless of race. It was a profound break with the European past. Before the modern era, liberty generally referred to the protected status of a given location or population, not universal, personal rights. The Edict of Nantes, for example, issued by France's King Henry IV in 1598, exempted the Protestant Huguenots from religious laws and granted them armed sanctuaries in designated towns; it did not establish a general principle of freedom of conscience. And the British colonies in American were long exempt from taxation. Something of this traditional concept of liberty persisted in relations between the United States and the Indian nations. As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Worcester v. State of Georgia in 1832, the federal government acknowledged 'the Indians as a separate and distinct people, and as being vested with rights which constitute them as a state, or separate community--not foreign, but a domestic community . . . existing within [the United States.]' American Indian rights were community rights, in the eyes of U.S. law--the exemptions and privileges of people who stood apart, yet lived within the domain claimed by the federal government. Grant wished to extend to the indigenous the revolution of individual rights--but their autonomy stood in the way. They would have to move out of the category of 'Indians not taxed,' or the category itself would have to be abolished, if they were to be citizens. The Peace Policy's irony is that it could only work after the Indians' functional independence had been crushed." Id. at 330-332.).

HARMFUL MEMORIES?

David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) ("[O]n what basis other than the narcissism of the living or a reckless disregard for history and logic could anyone seriously suggest that even the most coherent and solid of the [nation] states that now exists will still be around in anything like the same form in another thousand years, to two, or three?" "The reality is that no intelligent person believes anything of the sort.  Id. at 6-7. From the book jacket: "The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana's celebrated phrase, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' Today, the consensus that it is immoral to forget is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff . . . insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, 'inoculate' the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds--whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces--neither remedies injustices nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a meal option--sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it might be more moral to forget." From the text: "I do not claim that forgetting would be an appropriate response in cases where justice or forgiveness (or both) are a realistic alternative, as in many cases, including some grave and seemingly intractable ones, they will be. But the ultimate metric here should not be the ideal by the probable, or at least the feasible. Bismarck's celebrated remark that no one should look too closely at the making of sausages or laws surely applies even more forcefully to peace settlements. When it is possible, by all means let societies remember, provided of course--and this is a very big caveat indeed, and one those convinced that remembrance is a moral imperative consistently underestimate--remembering does not engender further horrors. But when it is not possible, then, to paraphrase the slogan of the anti-Vietnam War movement of the late 1960s, it may be time to give forgetting a chance, which is another way of saying that it is time to give politics a chance and idealism a rest." Id. at 101. Sometimes I wonder--putting aside whether 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned repeat it'-- whether those who remember the past are highly likely to get it wrong, or at least learn the wrong lessons, and, thereby, increase the likely of not repeating the past but of doing something far worse.).

GOT TO WONDER ABOUT THOSE SMALL TOWN VALUES IN THE HEARTLAND OF AMERICA

Dan Barry, The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland (New York: Harper, 2016) (From the book jacket: "It is a Dickensian tale from the heartland: a group of men with intellectual disability, all from Texas, living in a tired old schoolhouse in the tiny Iowa farm town of Atalissa and reporting before every dawn to eviscerate turkeys at a processing plant. In return, they receive food, lodging, and sixty-five dollars a month. Day after day, year after year, decade after decade, living in near servitude." [Note: Let me take a moment to hum to myself a few bars of Steve Goodman's "Somebody Else's Troubles." 'It ain't to hard to live with . . . .'] "The people of Atalissa accepted and befriended the men--known as the 'boys'--but failed to notice the hints of neglect, exploitation, an physical and emotional abuse. It was not until a few conscientious social workers, a local journalist, and one tenacious government lawyer came to their rescue that the men, though much older and grayer, found justice last last." "[Journalist Dan Barry reveals how these men remained all but forgotten for more than three decades, blending into the rural rhythm as occasional complaints about their living conditions went mostly ignored. . . . He explores why this small town missed the telltale signs of exploitation, details how those responsible for such profound indifference justified their actions, and chronicles the lasting impact of a dramatic court case that has spurred advocates to push for just pay and improved working conditions for people with disabilities." From the text: "The complainant, Reyes, went on to describe the cockroaches in the food; the failure to provide medical attention the men for ulcers, asthma, and other ailments; the wholesale neglect and constant abuse. Shoving paper towels in Tommy Johnson's mouth to keep him from talking. Forcing Henry Wilkins to eat jalapeño peppers. On top of all this, she reported, was the financial exploitation: Last year, the labor Department came in & made the farm pay the men for wages, but since they control all the money, they just took it out of one pocket & put it in another." "The Department of Inspections and Appeals sent two investigators to the schoolhouse on three successive days. It then notified [T. H.] Johnson that the allegation of operating an unlicensed health-care facility had not been substantiated, on the grounds that his operation was not a residential health-care facility as defined by Iowa regulations." "Once again, Henry's Turkey Service had dodged censure and possible shutdown because its schoolhouse operation did not write fit any description in Iowa's reams of definitions and regulations. If it was not a health-care facility, the other allegations were not for the moment." Id. at 187. Orwellian!! By the way, when people suggest there are too many lawyers, understand, even if true, there are certainly not enough lawyers engaged in social justice for the weak, powerless, marginalized members of our society. And $100,000 dollars in law school debt is not an excuse; it is mere self-serving rationalization on our part, including mine. Ask yourself, were there no lawyers in and around Atalissa, Iowa?).

IF GENES ARE DESTINY, WHO CONTROL OUR GENES CONTROLS ARE DESTINIES.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History (New York: Scribner, 2016) ("Genetic diagnoses and genetic interventions are also used to screen and correct mutations in human embryos. When 'intervenable' mutations in certain genes are identified in the germ line, parents are given the choice of genetic surgery to alter their sperm and eggs before conception, or prenatal screening of embryos to avoid implanting mutant embryos in the rest place. Genes that cause the most detrimental variants of illness are thus excluded form the human genome up front by positive or negative section, or by genome modification." Id. at 401. "In 1990, writing about the Human Genome Project, the worm geneticist John Sulston wondered about the philosophical quandary raised by an intelligent organism that has 'learned to read its own instructions.' But an infinitely deeper quandary is raised when unintelligent organism learns to write its own instructions. If genes determine the nature and fate of an organism, and if organisms now begin to determine the nature and fate of their genes, then a circle of logic closes on itself. Once we start thinking of genes as destiny, manifest, then it is inevitable to begin imagining the human genome as manifest destiny." Id. at 402.).

MELANCHOLGY AND THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE

Laszlo F. Foldenyi, Melancholy, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson, foreword by Alberto Manguel (New Haven & London: A Margellos World Republic of Letters Book/Yale U. Press, 2016) (From "Chapter 9, Trembling From Freedom": "Of course, no culture appreciates all kinds of understandings and modes of existence; moreover, the possibility is excluded theoretically, though the limits of tolerance vary from era to era. From this point of view, the tolerance of Western culture in most recent times has been low: the tolerance of which Western society is so proud limited to two respects. Any one can say or think anything, form an opinion--but society loses its patience if an ideology 'comes to the boil,' and is realized in practice, and it also loses its patience if ideology 'freezes' and degenerates into a private interpretation of existence going beyond the bounds of any sort of social collusion. Anarchists, terrorists, and revolutionaries (and often even reformers) are just as suspect as mystics, prophets, or merely despairing people: the label of mental illness (or deviance, to put it more elegantly) can just as easily be branded on both this group, and should the occasion raise the former and the desperate nihilist can be stuck in the same closed ward. That is not to say that there are no patients among the occupants of closed wards, but it depends on the tolerance of a society how far the limits of disease are stretched or narrowed down. This tolerance does to depend on medical attitudes: a physician's decision in so-called borderline cases is usually influenced from the outset by the cultural and political milieu, to which the medical practice is linked by a million invisible threads." Id at 293-294.).

AS LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III HAS SONG: "ABANDON WHAT IS RANDOM, DON'T YOU LEAVE IT UP TO LUCK"

Henry T. Greely, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016):

"This is a book about the future of our species, about the likely development of revolutionary biological technologies, and about the deep ethical and legal changes our societies will face as a result. But the best way to sum it up I think, is to say that it about the coming obsolescence of sex.

* * *

"I expect that, sometime in the next twenty to forty years, among humans with good health coverage, sex, in one sense, will largely disappear, or at least decrease markedly, Most of those people will no longer use sexual intercourse to conceive their children. Instead of being conceived in bed, in the backseat of a car, or under a 'Keep off the Grass' sign, children will be conceived in clinics. Eggs and sperm will be united through in vitro fertilization (IVF). The DNA of the resulting embryos will them be sequenced and carefully analyzed before decisions are made (passive voice intentional) about which embryo or embryos to transfer to a womb for possible development into one or more living, breathing babies. "Prospective parents will be told as much as they want to know about the DNA of, say, 100 embryos and the implications of that DNA for the diseases, looks, behaviors, and other traits of the child each of those embryos might become. Then they will be asked to pick one to two to be transferred into a womb for possible gestation and birth, And it will all be safe, legal, and , to the prospective parents, free." "In short, we humans will begin, very broadly, to select consciously and knowingly the genetic variations and thus at least some of the traits and characteristics of our children. This idea is not new." 

Id. at 1-2. The End of Sex . . . is a very worthwhile read on "preimplantation genetic diagnosis," and the consequences of its use, as it becomes less expensive and less dangerous and more informative.  What Greely calls "Easy PGD". Though it should not impact your receptivity to the brave new world of Easy PGD, you might want to pause to consider whether you--YES YOU--would be here to read this post had your parents had Easy PGD available to them. Would they have selected the embryo that became you? Probabilities are not in your favor. Also, one should think about the issues of control of technology. Will Easy PGD be regulated? If so, how? Will prospective parents' choices be restricted in anyways? Or, will the control be in someone else's hand? Though not talking about Easy PGD, Loudon Wainwright III anticipated some of the issue in the lyrics to his song "1994":

There's been a brand new breakthrough
Though they're not sure what it means
We used to blame our parents
Now we can pin it on our genes
Hey and I'm not talking 501's
I don't mean no pair of pants
I'm talking about a future
Where nothing's left to chance

If you're dumb, fat, queer, or crazy
No one is to blame
You've just been dealt a lousy hand
In the genetic poker game
And if you start killing people
It's not evil you're not cruel
It's just a little goop polluting
Your genetic swimming pool

CHORUS:
They can spot the culprit
And magnify it on a screen
Those scientists and doctors
Can pinpoint that nasty gene
And with a little engineering
They can take that wayward train
And they can get it back on track
So you're smart, straight, thin, and sane

Abandon what is random
Don't you leave it up to luck
Why not submit yourself to a little
Genetic nip and tuck
Yeah we can put a man upon the moon
And we can conquer inner space
With a little genetic tinkering
We can make a master race

Now back there in the first verse
I sang that nothing is left to chance
We're locked into a box or a goose step
In life's DNA dance
Now the future is no mystery
Finally you can make plans
Yes it's your destiny and you won it
Just pray it stays in your hands

DON QUIXOTE IN THE AMERICAN MIND

Ilan Stavans, Quixote: The Novel and the World (New York & London: Norton, 2015) ("The Founding Fathers, in their eighteenth-century quest for a nation where everyone would be entitled to a decent life, where liberty and the pursuit of happiness would be the central tenets, saw in Cervantes's hero an ideal. The belief that the United States needed to be a bastion of tolerance and individualism, a place where people would be free to engage in quests of the imagination, led these political leaders to embrace Don Quixote as their own advisor." Id. at 146.).

JILL LEPORE IS ALWAYS AN INTERESTING READ

Jill Lepore, Joe Gould's Teeth (New York: Knopf, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Joe Gould's Teeth is a Poe-like tale of detection, madness, and invention.").

HOW THE EAST HELPED CREATE THE DOMINANCE OF WESTERN EUROPE

Peter Frankopan, The First Crusade: The Call from the East (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2012) (From the book jacket: "Nearly all historians of the First Crusade focus on the papacy and its willing warriors in the West, along with innumerable popular tales of bravery, tragedy, and resilience. In sharp contrast, [Peter] Frankopan examines events from the East, in particular from Constantinople, seat of the Christian Byzantine Empire. The result is revelatory. The true instigator of the First Crusade, we see, was the Emperor Alexis I Komnenos, who in 1095, with his realm under siege from the Turks and on the point of collapse, begged the pople for military support. Basing his account on long-ignored eastern sources, Frankopan also gives a provocative and highly original explanation of the world-changing events that followed the First Crusade. The Vatican's victory cemented papal power, while Constantinople, the heart of the still-vital Byzantine empire, never recovered. As a result, both Alexios and Byzantium were consigned to the margins of history. From Frankopan's revolutionary work, we gain a more faithful understanding of the way the taking of Jerusalem set the stage for western Europe's dominance up to the present day and shaped the modern world.").

Anna Komnene, The Alexiad, translated from the Greek by E. R. A. Sewter, revised with Introduction and Notes by Peter Frankopan (London: Penguin Classics/Penguin Books, 2009) (From the back cover: "Anna Komnene (1083-1152) wrote The Alexiad as an account of the reign of her father, the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I. It is an important source of information on the Byzantine war with the Normans, and on the First Crusade in which Alexios participated. Offering a startling different perspective to that of Western historians, Anna's character sketches are shrewd and forthright--from the Norman invader Robert Guiscard ('nourished by manifold evil') and his son Bohemond ('like a streaking thunderbolt') to Pope Gregory VII ('unworthy of a high priest'). The Alexiad is a vivid and dramatic narrative, which reveals as much about the personality of its intelligent and dynamic author as it does about the fascinating period through which she lived.").

BYZANTIUM AND ISLAM

Helen C. Evans & Brandie Ratiff, eds., Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition 7th-9th Century New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2012) (From the book jacket: "This groundbreaking volume explores the epochal transformation and unexpected continuities in the Byzantine Empire form the seventh to the ninth century. As the period opened, the empire's southern provinces--the vibrant, diverse areas of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean--were at the crossroads of trade routes reaching form Spain to China. These regions experienced historic upheavals when their Christian and Jewish communities encountered the emerging Islamic world, and by the ninth century an unprecedented cross-fertilization of cultures had taken place. . . . With its masterful exploration of two centuries that would shape the medieval world, Byzantium and Islam provides a revelatory interpretation of a period with profound ramifications for the modern era.").

MAINLY WHITE MEN SUFFERING LATE LIFE PENIS PROBLEMS

Harel Shapira, Waiting for Jose: The Minutemen's Pursuit of America (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) (The author's analysis, though balanced, is not very nuanced. And, the Minutemen, though moaning about America's loss of greatness, never really provide a clear vision of what specifically made America "great" back whenever. In that way, they are very much like Donald Trump: we know he/they don't think America is great right now; he/they want to bring America back to greatness; and that enemies (both external and internal) are undermining America's greatness. But he/they cannot articulate what his/their great America would actually look. I suspect it is a stylized version of the 1950s. That is, America before the civil rights movement and Brown v. Board of Education; before the more liberal immigration policy when immigration was pretty much limited to western European; when women (or at least middle class white women) stayed home; when mom would admonish you to finish all your food on your plate and to think of all the starving children in China; when a man would get a job at the factory, stay there for forty years, then retire with a company pension; when Europe was in shambles due to WWII, the United States was the only working economy, and having the $$ enabled America to call the shots internationally; etc. That America was not everybody's America, and it certainly was not great for everybody. Like the American West in the American mind, it is a myth. And myths are stories, lies really, we tell ourselves to deal with our fears. Building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, describing Mexican immigrants as 'aliens.' 'rapists,' 'drug dealers,' 'terrorists,' etc., is not going to make America great.).

DIFFERENT ROAD TO THE GOOD LIFE

Michael Puett & Christine Gross-Loh, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016) (From the book jacket: "It's because the course changes all our modern assumption about what it takes to flourish.").

"NATURALNESS BIAS"

Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance  (New York: Scribner, 2016) ("The 'naturalness bias' is a hidden prejudice against those who've achieved what they have because they worked for it, and a hidden preference for those whom we think arrived at their place in life because they're naturally talented. We may not admit to others this bias for naturals; we may not even admit it to ourselves. But the bias is evident in the choices we make." Id. at 25. "Talent x effort = Skill." "Skill x effort = achievement." Id. at 41-42.).

LIBRARY OF ARABIC LITERATURE 6

Philip F. Kennedy & Shawkat M. Toorawa, eds., Two Arabic Travel Books: Abu Zayd al-Sorafi, Accounts of China and India, edited and translated by Tim Mackintosh-Smith;  and Ibn Fadlan, Mission to the Volga, edited and translated by James E. Montgomery (Library of Arabic Literature) (New York & London: New York U. Press, 2014).

CROSSING GENDER LINES

Deirdre N. McCloskey, Crossing: A Memoir (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago, 1999) (From the book jacket: "We have rad the stories of those who have 'crossed' race lines, class lines, and cultural lines. But few have crossed--completely and entirely--the gender line. Deirdre Mccluskey, the former Donald, had done so, and she now tells the dramatic and poignant story of her travel in her memoir. Crossing." "A renowned economist and historian, a husband and father, Donald McCloskey had crossdressed for years without wanting more. But rather suddenly, at age fifty-two, a sense that he was denying his real identity grew to the point that he knew he had to become a women. Crossing is the story of this realization and its consequences. McCloskey relates in detail the process of physically becoming a woman but also describes the emotional wake--personal and professional--left by the decision. Her mother accepts her; her children reject her. Some conservative economists prove to be gender libertarians, but some progressive feminists prove to be gender authoritarians. McCloskey's account of her crossing and her painstaking efforts to learn to 'to a woman' enfold all the aspects of her journey into fundamental questions about about gender and identity, hatred and anxieties, that have surprising answers." "Crossing is the story of a golden boy of conservative economics, a child of the 1950s and 1960s privilege, who became a woman. Of necessity she also became an artist performing, and them embodying, gender. She notes that the performance was enacted 'often with no audience and seldom with a script.' Crossing is the start of an engrossing, terrifying, and uplifting scripts. It is also an amazing story beautifully told.").

Meredith Russo, If I Was Your Girl (New York: Flatiron Books, 2016) (young adult fiction).

PRELUDE TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Adam Hochschild, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (New York & Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) (What does not get reported: "At the heart of the Authorized Version of the Spanish Civil War was an easy-to-understand, heroes-vs.-villains narrative. Spain has a democratically elected government fighting a right-wing military coup backed by Hitler and Mussolini, and a great European city [Madrid] was under siege. This, of course, was also the story that the Republic's government and its supporters urgently wanted told. . . . If you search the American and British press during these years, for every thousand articles about the ground gained and lost on the battlefield or bombs falling on Madrid, you are lucky if you can find one that so much as mentions the way Spaniards briefly wrote a new chapter in Europe's centuries-old battle between classes. Nor did any of the gifted photographers who won fame covering this war . . . ever turn their lenses on this story. Foreign correspondents had little interest in the revolution's epicenter, Catalina. 'The Catalans . . . are sort of fake Spaniards,' Martha Gellhorn wrote dismissively to Eleanor Roosevelt." "The fact that a utopian social revolution might have been an impractical and romantic dream even in peacetime, and was surely an impossible one when fighting a terrible war, made it no less worth reporting. Of the many hundreds of correspondents from abroad who passed through Spain during the war, not one showed much interest in the revolution that for months surround them. . . . Rare was the journalist who mentioned such things, even in passing. Not a single one bothered to spend a few days in a Spanish factory or business or estate taken over by its workers, to examine just how the utopian dream was faring in practice." Id, at 217-218. And, does this sounds somewhat contemporary?: "Meanwhile the demagogic Sir Oswald Mosley led an increasingly aggressive British Union of Fascists, its militants dressed in black tunics, black trousers, and wide black leather belts with brass buckles. Whenever Mosley was heckled at one of his rallies, he stopped speaking and searchlights focused on the heckler as jackbooted men beat him and then threw him out of the hall. With trumpet fanfare and flags showing a bolt of lightening, ranks of Mosley followers marched through Jewish neighborhoods of London, shouting insults, giving the Fascist salute, and violently attacking anyone in their way. The group boasted 50,000 members." Id. at 94.).

THE JEWISH-ISRAELI/ARAB-ISRAELI DIVIDE & THE ISRAEL/AMERICAN JEWISH DIVIDE

Ilan Peleg & Dov Waxman, Israel's Palestinians: The Conflict Within (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2011) ("Arguing that a comprehensive and lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict depends on a resolution of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict within Israel as much as it does on resolving the conflict between Israel and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, this timely book explores the causes and consequences of the growing conflict between Israel's Jewish majority and its Palestinian-Arab minority. It warns that if Jewish-Arab relations in Israel continue to deteriorate, this will pose a serious threat to the stability of Israel, to the quality of Israeli democracy, and to the potential for peace in the Middle East. The book examines the views and attitudes of both the Palestinian minority and the Jewish majority, as well as the Israeli state's historic approach to its Arab citizens. Drawing on the experience of other states with national minorities, the authors put forward specific proposals for safeguarding and enhancing the rights of the Palestinian minority while maintaining the country's Jewish identity." Id. at i.).

Dov Waxman, Trouble in the Tribe: The American Jewish Conflict Over Israel (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) ("This book offers an in-depth look at the internecine battle over Israel among American Jews, a battle that is growing ever more intense as Israel faces mounting international condemnation, its domestic politics shifts further to the right, the Israeli-Palestinian peace-process remains in deep freeze, and the two-state solution appears increasingly remote, if not altogether unlikely. The book's central thesis is that a historic change has been taking place in the American Jewish relationship with Israel. The age of unquestioning and unstinting support for Israel is over. The pro-Israel consensus that once united American Jews is eroding, and Israel is fast becoming a source of a division rather than unity for American Jewry. As the consensus concerning Israel within the American Jewish community is slowing coming apart, a new era of American Jewish conflict over Israel is replacing the old era of solidarity. In short, Israel used to bring American Jews together. Now it is driving them apart." Id. at 3.).

Alan Wolfe, At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014) ("One question majorities rarely have to answer seems to preoccupy minorities endlessly--what to do about assimilation? To blend in with everyone else threatens to obliterate all those features that make a minority distinctive. To opt for separation is to choose a certain degree of alienation, cutting oneself (and one's group) off form the dominant culture. Because Jews have lived in the Diaspora for so long, they have debated the question of assimilation more thoroughly than most. The creation of a Jewish state has not changed matters all that much. If anything, the existence of a Jewish majority in one place make the question of how best to live as a minority everywhere else all the more compelling." Id. at 131.).

CAN WE LEARN FROM THE PAST?: TOLERANCE AMONG MUSLIMS, JEWS, AND CHRISTIANS IN MEDIEVAL SPAIN

Jerrilynn D. Dodds, Maria Rosa Menocal & Abigail Krasner Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (New Haven & Lndon: Yale U. Press, 2008) ("This book is about the lost memory of Castile, about the history that created churches like San Jorge Martir and made them the products of Castilian culture. Because this memory goes counter to so many received truths, it is also an attempt to restore to the general image of Castilian culture some of its disorder, to recognize its changing and evolving meaning." Id. at 2. 
"The continued presence in the peninsula of both Muslim populations within Castile and Islamic kingdoms of the various sorts provided an ongoing source of vital political, and thus cultural, engagement. What lies behind 1492 is not so much the history on an implacable opposition but rather a tense shuffle of convenient alliances and warfare, of alternating compliance and confrontation, in which the players became known to each other, at times despite themselves. The culmination of the Christian-Muslim competition for territory and political control vividly evoked by 1492 is thus the end not only of the struggle but also of centuries of ongoing renovation of often intimate ties to the rich world of Islamic and Arabic intellectual and artistic practices. The monuments of medieval Castilian culture inherited by the Catholic kings--from the very language of the Castilian empire, created by Alfonso X and his translators out of Arabic itself, to the palaces of Seville, with their Arabic writing in praise of the Christian monarch--speak loudly to an identity forged out of cultural praxis rather than ideological purity." Id at 266.).

Maria Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1987) (Why "did I encounter [a] situtation, one in which belief in the 'Arabist theory' (a nebulous term that covers any number of different and often conflicting theories) was considered at best idiosyncratic?" Id. at xii. "The number of books and articles on some aspect or other of the Arabist question is much greater than most Romance scholars might assume. [] But as I began to read in this extensive body of scholarship, I noticed that most works have several things in common. The first is that almost all begin or end with the observation that acceptance of the apparent facts or tendered theories they present is difficult, that Westerners--Europeans--have great difficulty in considering the possibility that they are in some way seriously indebted to the Arab world, or that the Arabs were central to the making of medieval Europe. A second shared feature of such studies is that they do not explore such observations further and go forward with the explicit or implicit assumption that whatever the nature of those blinders or the cause of the neurosis, the weight of the truth, reasonable argument, or unarguable fact that they proceed to disclose will win out." "But the third feature they have in common is that fate and reception of Europeanists have proven this assumption to be illusory: The powers of 'reason' and 'fact' in this sphere (as least as they have seemed to many) have not succeeded in altering the assumptions that shape the view of the Middle Ages held by most medievalists. The power of the general view remains considerably stronger. It rarely allows for the acceptance of specific studies, the canonization of specific texts, or the integration of specific bits of knowledge into our working body of information about the period. I became increasingly convinced that those scholars who pointed out the blinders of the West in this regard were no less blocked from the field or vision of most of their colleagues for having done so."  "The present study is thus based on the premise, and derived from the conviction, that no specific study of any of the theories called 'Arabist' can be successful so long as the most general views we have of the medieval period are as hostile to the notions of such influence and interaction as they currently are." Id. at xii-xiii. Query: Menocal was writing in 1987. Are Westerners, especially Americans, any less hostile and more open to the notion of Arab influence on thinking and literature in the past or presently? Given the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim "tone" in much of American politics, I think the answer is no. Our chauvinism, which we call "patriotism" blinds us to the many influences others, including Arabs, have had on Medieval Europe and, consequently, on America, American history, American thought, etc.).

Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, with a foreword by Harold Bloom (New York: Little, Brown, 2002) (From Bloom's "Foreword": "I come away from a reading of Menocal's book with a sense of loss, another tribute to her evocative power. Our current multiculturalism, the blight of our universities and of our media, is a parody of the culture of Cordoba and Granada in their lost prime. All the cultural achievements so passionately described by Menocal, from the Alhambra to the poetry of Judah Halevl, were aesthetic triumphs, strong in conception, exquisite in execution. As a contribution to cultural memory, in its best aspects, The Ornament of the World is an authentic and heartening gesture of the spirit." Id. at xv-xvi. From the book jacket: "The story begins as a young prince in exile--the last heir to a glorious Islamic dynasty---flees the massacre of his family and found a new kingdom on the Iberian peninsula a;-Andalus. Combining the best of what Muslims, Jews, and Christians had to offer, al-Andalus and its successors influenced the rest of Europe in dramatic ways, giving it the first translations of Plato and Aristotle, the tradition of love songs and secular poetry, advances in mathematics, and outstanding feats of architecture and technology." "In a series of captivating vignettes, Menocal travels through time and space to reveal the often paradoxical events that shaped the Andalusian world and continue to affect our own. Along the way, we meet a host of intriguing characters, the brilliant and dedicated Jewish vizier of a powerful Muslim city-state, the Christian abbot who commissions the first translation of the Quran, the converted Jew who, under a Christian name, brings a first taste of Arabic scholarship and storytelling to northern Europe." "This rich and complex culture shared by the three faiths thrived, sometimes in the face of enmity and bigotry, for nearly seven hundred years. Ironically, it was on the eve of the Renaissance that puritanical forces finally triumphed over Spain's long-standing traditions of tolerance. ushering in a period of religious repression. In the centuries since, even the memory of the vital and sophisticated culture in which Muslims, Jews and Christians once lived and worked side by side has largely been overlooked or obscured." From the text: "On August 25, 1992, the Serbian army began shelling the National Library in Sarajevo. On purpose. Over a million books and more than a hundred thousand manuscripts were deliberately destroyed. Three months earlier, the same army had attacked the Oriental Institute in that city, with its magnificent collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts, and over five thousand of these were burned. Why? Since when are libraries strategic military targets? But wars are, of course, fought on many fronts, and the attack on those Sarajevan palaces of memory took place for reasons not unlike those that led to the burning of so many books in sixteenth-century Spain, and to the destruction or mutilation of any number of the memory palaces of al-Andalus. Books, like building, like works of art, like songs and sometimes even like languages of prayers, often tell stories about the complexities of tolerance and cultural identity, complexities that ideological purists deny, both as an immediate reality and as a future possibility. Books--and the kindred fruits of the human imagination--often reveal that beneath the facades of even the most strident official tyranny, social and cultural intercourse will surely try to carry on. The artifacts, the books and the buildings that manage to survive, are themselves the acts of tolerance and resistance, or at least their best concrete measure." Id. at 278.).


Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham & London: Duke U. Press, 1994) ("We love being modern, and we love being the present-day descendants of the Greeks, but since it is harder to publicly and professionally delight in the other side of that particular coin, it is elided and ignored. After 1492 we forgot that in 1225 or 1230 to sit at Frederick II's dinner table in Palermo it was de rigeur to have intimate knowledge of Plato and Aristotle, of Maimonides and Ibn Rushd, as well as to be able to tap one;s feet to the rhythm of the latest muwahshaja brought from al-Andalus. Instead, we remember, and claim as out ancestor, poor Petrarch, first Renaissance man, heroic for living much of his life with a barely literate Calabrian Greek, in the apparently vain effort tolerant a smattering of the new holy language of the newly 'discovered; ancestors. Except among the intellectual descendants of Don America, whose work it has been to restore those particular memories, these odd juxtapositions are largely set aside. Within this minoritarian construct, the other version of 1492 is a memorialistic one, an act of recuperation, but also one of profoundly sad, melancholic closure, perhaps uncannily like Petrarch's when he thought of what he had lost as e sat contemplating the ruins of Rome. Id at 20. "It turns out, then, that, in crucial ways, the medieval world I see resonating in 1492 and its children in the New World is a virtual opposite of what our thesauruses suggest, of what the grand recit has needed. Here, mosques are around every corner, and the Other lives next door, and all manner of unwritten languages are head in the marketplace in the early morning. Here, literature struggles and dances around with allayer of cultural alternatives, sometimes, in difficult conduct." Id. at 45.).

HOW EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN GOT TO SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL

Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016) ("The story of black colonization has played a peripheral role in our understanding of the struggle against slavery. It has almost never featured in our analysis of another pivotal episode in nineteenth-century American history: the removal of Native Americans. [] "The parallels between black colonization and Indian removal are striking. Both came to dominate the national conversation in the two decades following the War of 1812. Both were premised on the idea that contact between non-whites and whites tended to 'degrade' the former, preventing them from achieving their natural potential and making equal citizenship all but impossible. Both promised a happier future for non-whites beyond the borders pf the United States in self-governing and prosperous offshoots of the American republic. Crucially, both were couched in terms of benevolence. Missionaries and religious reformers took the lead, anchoring their good intentions with a simple promise: colonization should be voluntary. When African Americans and Native Americans expressed wariness or outright opposition, the white architects of colonization instead that black and Indians would eventually realize the benefits of resettlement and willingly leave the United States. [] Andrew Jackson was so determined to remove native peoples form the southeastern states that he abandoned the pretense of consent, exchanging colonization for explosion. [] But this profoundly illiberal outcome took root in the same soil that had nourished black colonization: the insistence that racial segregation was a benevolent and far-sighted measure that would allow non-white people to thrive. If we place these efforts to rest black people and Indians in a single frame, an unsettling but inescapable truth emerges. White reformers, politicians, and churchmen believed that non-whites could only realize their innate potential as human beings--and perhaps even their quality with whites--by separating themselves from the American republic." Id. at 6-7. Thus, the "enlightened" American reformers embrace of "separate but equal," which we now realize results in separate and unequal. Be wary of reformers, liberals and progressives, they are often conservatives and reactionary in disguise . . . changing clothing when self-interests are threatened. Also see, Eric Foner, "Separate, Equal and Far Away," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/1/2016: "Viewing the story fundamentally as a problem of race relations obscures the crucial difference between the place of Native Americans and blacks in the emerging national economy. The bottom line is this: To fulfill their own aspirations, white Americans needed Indian land and black labor. That is why Indian removal took place but black colonization--apart from a few thousand souls--never did." Id.).

GREAT LAKES NATIVE PEOPLES

Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2015) (From the book jacket: "Highlighting the long-standing rivals and relationships among the great Indian nations of North America, McDonnell shows how Europeans often played only a minor role in this history, and reminds us that it was native peoples who possessed intricate and far-reaching networks of commerce and kinship, of which the French and British knew little. As empire encroached upon their domain, the Anishinaabeg were often the ones doing the exploiting. By dictating terms as trading posts and frontier forts, they played  crucial part in the making of early America.").