Italian Election: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, & Patricia Smith, eds., The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, with a foreword by Terrance Hayes  (Fayetteville: U. of Arkansas Press, 2017).

Quraysh Ali Lansana & Sandra Jackson-Opoku, eds., Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writings of Gwendolyn Brooks (Chicago: Curbside SpLendor Publishing, 2017).

Trump, Parkland and the #NeverAgain Movement: A Closer Look

James Corden on Gun Control in America

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REFLECTING ON AMERICAN RACISM

Eric Lott, Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Black Mirror is a timely reflection on the ways provocative representations of racial difference serve to sustain white cultural dominance . . . [T]he fraught symbolism of racial difference props up white hegemony, but also tantalizingly threatens to expose the contradictions and hypocrisies upon which the edifice of white power has been built.").

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INSPECTOR MAIGRET #8

Georges Simenon, The Grand Banks Cafe (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by David Coward (New York: Penguin Books, 2014) ("'If anyone asked me what the distinctive feature of this case is,' he said, 'I'd say that it has the mark of rage on it . . . I don't make anything of it.  merely remark that I feel as if I'm in around in circles surrounded by a lot of made people . . . " Id. at 45-46.).

Robert Mueller and his pursuit of justice

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READ MORE AMERICAN HISTORY

Richard Aldous, Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian (New York: Norton, 2017).

Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 (New York: Norton, 2003).

Edward L. Ayers, The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America (New York: Norton, 2017).

Sidney Blumenthal, A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1849 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

Sidney Blumenthal, Wrestling with His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1849-1856 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).

Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (New York: Liveright, 2018).

Ron Chernow, Grant (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).

Paul Finkelman, Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation's Highest Court (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2018).

Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America's First Gilded Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017).

Robert W. Merry, President McKinley: Architect of the American Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

Michael S. Neiberg, The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2016).

Geoffrey C. Ward & Ken Burns, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History: Based on a documentary film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, with an introduction by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (New York: Knopf, 2017).

Brooks and Marcus on Florida school shooting rage, Rick Gates’ guilty plea

FOR WHAT DO THE MIGHTY FINE PEOPLE STAND? THEIR OWN INTEREST? OR THOSE OF FREE PEOPLE?

Henrietta Buckmaster, Deep River (New York: Book Find Club, 1944):

     'You haven't heard tell up here of Minute Men,' Simon answered slowly. 'Well, then I'll tell you. You can reason with God, maybe, but don't try any such foolishness with those fellers. They know they don't speak for the people, but they know how to make power talk. They figure that, in the end, it's the same thing. They figure that--give them twenty-five years--you won't know the difference. Shall we reason with tricksters and cutthroats who are afraid to trust the free ballot to Georgia men?'     'You've got no call saying' that! Guthrie cried out. 'I've supped and had bread with some of them mighty fine men.'     Simon was silent for a moment. Then he looked deeply at Guthrie and beyond him at the gallused the homespun, the hatted, the barefoot, who waited and spat and studied their minds. 'The day comes,' he said, 'when mighty fine men must be measured by only one yardstick: Which do they set first--their own interests, or the free will of the people?'

Id. at 423-424..

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

Annie Leibovitz, A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005 (New York: Random House, 2006)

Annie Leibovitz, Portraits, 2005-2016 (New York: Phaidon Press, 2017).

The Kids From Florida Aren't Acting

MARVIN KALB IN RUSSIA, 1956

Marvin Kalb, The Year I Was Peter the Great: 1956, Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2017).

SUFISM

Alexander Knysh, Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) ("Our task is to examine how Sufism has been imagined and, in the case of insiders, practiced based on this imagination, by various parties and actors since its inception up to the present." Id. at 1.).

IDENTITY'S RELATION TO THE OTHER: FIXED (AND VIOLENT) OR ONGOING AND IN PROCESS?

Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures), edited by Kobena Mercer, foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017):

Without its specific histories, identity would not have the symbolic resources with which to construct itself anew. Without its various languages, identify would be deprived of the capacity to enunciate--to speak and to act in the world. To locate oneself within a language is to take up its interdiscursive field of meanings. And since all identities must significantly mark that similarity to and difference from something else--for meaning is always relational and positional--then every identity, however provisionally it asserts itself, must always have a symbolic "other," which is what defines its constitutive outside. The difference lies not in whether there is, in fact, such an other to which our identities relate, but in whether the representation of that difference, that relationship to others, is fixed and degraded, so it becomes the objective symbolic violence, as in the operations of power in Hegel's master/slave dialectic, for instance, or whether the discursive inscription of difference is able to establish with others a dialogic relationship to alterity that, within this more Bakhtinian and Levinasian framework, can never be fixed and finalized but is always ongoing and in process.

Id. at 128-129

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #7

Georges Simenon, A Crime in Holland (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Sian Reynolds (New York: Penguin Books, 2014) ("Duclos belonged to a category of men that the inspector knew well. Men of science. Study for study's sake. Ideas for ideas. A certain austerity of manner and lifestyle, combined with a taste for international contacts. A passion for lectures, conferences and exchanges of letters with foreign correspondents." Id. at 17.).

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AFRO-ASIAN SOLIDARITY?

Gerald Horne, Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity (New York: New York  University Press, 2018).

SLAVERY IN THE FUTURE MOTOR CITY

Tiya Miles, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (New York: The New Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Most American believe that slavery was a creature of the South, and that northern states and territories provided stops on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. In this paradigm-shifting book, celebrated historian Tiya Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest's iconic city; Detroit.").

THE GREAT MIGRATION IN PAINTINGS

Dickerman, Leah, & Elsa Smithgall, Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (New York: The Museum of Modern Art/ Washington, D.C.: The Phillips Collection, 2015).

IS (CAPITAL) ECONOMIC REASONING MAD?

David Harvey, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reasoning (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2018):

Marx's prescient commentaries on capital's laws of motion and their internal contra-dictions, its fundamental and underlying irrationalities, turn out to be far more incisive and penetrating than the one-dimensional macroeconomic theories of contemporary economics that were found so wanting when confronted with the crash of 2007-2008 and its long-drawn-out aftermath. Marx's analyses along with his distinctive method enquiry and his mode of theorizing are invaluable for our intellectual struggles to understand the capitalism of our times, His insights deserve to be taken up and studied critically with all due seriousness. 

Id. at xiv.

RE-READING THE NEW TESTAMENT

David Bentley Hart, trans., The New Testament (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017).

THE WARSAW UPRISING

Miron Bialoszewski, A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, translated from the Polish with an introduction and notes by Madeline G. Levine (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2017). From the back cover:

On August 1, 1944, Miron Bialoszewski . . . went out to run an errand for his mother and ran into history. With Soviet forces on the outskirts of Warsaw, the Polish capital revolted against five years of Nazi occupation, an uprising that began in a spirit of heroic optimism. Sixty-three days later it came to a tragic end. The Nazis suppressed the insurgents ruthlessly, reducing Warsaw to rubble while slaughtering some 200,000 people, mostly through mass executions. The Red Army simply looked on.

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #6

Georges Simenon, Night at the Crossroads (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New York: Penguin Books, 2014) ("She laughed. A very, musical laugh. And more than ever, she was wreathed in what American movies portray as sex appeal. For a woman can be lovely without being alluring, while other, less classically beautiful women unfailingly inspire desire or sentential feeling." Id. at 65.).

Threats to democracy in the Trump era

BEAUTY EVOLVES

Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World--and Us (New York: Doubleday, 2017):

In many ways, Darwin's idea that the aesthetic evaluations involved in mate choice among animals constitutes an independent evolutionary force in nature is as radical toady as it was when he proposed it nearly 150 years ago. Darwin discovered that evolution is not merely about the survival of the fittest but also about charm and sensory delight in individual subjective experience. The implications of this idea for scientists and observers of nature are profound, requiring us to acknowledge that the dawn bird song chorus, the cooperative group displays of the blue Chiroxiphia manakins, the spectacular plumage of the male Great Argus Pheasant, and many other wondrous sights and sounds of the natural worlds are not merely delightful to us; they are products of a long history of subjective evaluation made by the animals themselves.

Id. at 523.

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BLACK HISTORY IN PHOTOGRAPHS

Darcy Everleigh, Dana Canedy, Damien Cave, & Rachel L. Swarns, Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives (New York: Black Dog & Lenenthal Publishers, 2017).

THE AMERICAN FANTASY AS TO, OR WILLFUL REFUSAL TO OWN UP TO, ITS TRUE CHARACTER

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder )New York; Metropolitan Books, 2017):

But more than anything written before, [Frederick Jackson] Turner's earnest celebration of the pioneer farmer as a 'rash prophet,' herald of 'a better world,' would become immensely celebrated and influential. Americans wanted to believe that grit, spunk, and the strength of their own ax-wielding arms had raised a democracy in the wilderness. They wanted to believe that felling forests, breaking sod, and turning 'free land' into golden grain had indeed 'furnish[ed] the forces dominating American character.' Millions of people who never read Turner's thesis nonetheless came to hold it dear, treasuring the fantasy that a fistful of dollars and a plow could magically produce not only a farm but a nation.
    Since1893, scholars have analyzed deconstructed, and debunked the Frontier Thesis, noting its sentimentality and biases. Turner failed to address key factors, including the role of railroads, banks, and other corporate entities benefiting from the federal government's largesse, in the form of millions of acres of the best farmland. As Turner spoke, he also neglected to take into account the remorseless ecological ravages of American agriculture and the widespread collapse of farms taking place around him.
    But in all the Great Plains literature to come . . . every writer would be echoing the assumptions of the Turner thesis. It was a manifesto of the country's willful refusal to recognize the limitations of the land.

Id. at 173-174, citations omitted. True then, still true now!

"IT'S A MICROBE'S WORLD--WE'RE JUST LIVING IN IT."

Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of Empire (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017):

There are maybe a trillion microbial species in total; the average human lumbers around bearing some 40 trillion bacterial cells alone. They have been here for some three and a half billion years. It's a microbe's world--we're just living in it. Most of this wondrously diverse panoply is indifferent to us. There are only some 1400 microbes known to be pathogenic to humans. These have evolved the molecular tools--virulence factors--to menace us despite the defensive armory of our remarkable immune systems. The rise of a planer full of pathogens is very much the consequence of microbial evolution, which in turn has been profoundly determined by the explosion of human numbers and our species' pitiless transformation of landscapes across the globe. Evolution is propelled by the blind force of random mutation, but we have created the context in which evolution tinkers and experiments.

Id. at 291-292.

SELF-DOMESTICATION

L. S. B. Leakey, The Progress and Evolution of Man in Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).

      I submit that once man became a maker of tools to a set and regular pattern, he initiated the process of self-domestication, in exactly the same way as he later did it for the dog . . .
     I suggest, then, that we have in the past overlooked the fact that long before man first domesticated any other animals he domesticated himself, and he created himself thereby those very factors which we know are so potent in accelerating the effect of the natural processes of evolutionary change.

Id. at 40-41.

QUOTE-OF-THE-DAY FROM THE NYT

QUOTATION OF THE DAY "I think confidence is silent and insecurity is loud. America is the most powerful country in all of human history, everybody knows it, and we don’t need to show it off." Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, on President Trump’s desire to hold a military parade in Washington.

WHY THE QUR'AN MATTERS

Garry Wills, What the Qur'an Meant: And Why It Matters (New York: Viking, 2017) (From the book jacket:

There was a time when ordinary Americans did not have to know much about Islam, but that is no longer the case. We blundered into the longest war in our history without knowing basic facts about the Islamic civilization we were dealing with, and we are constantly fed false information about Islam--claims that it is essentially a religion of violence, that's sacred book is a handbook for terrorists. There is no way to assess these claims unless we have at least some knowledge of the Qur'an.

Seyyed Houssein Nasr, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E. B. Lumbard, & Mohammed Rustom, eds., The Study Quran: A New Translation (New York: HarperOne/HarperCollins, 2015). From the "General Introduction":

The Quran, then, is the foundation of Muslim life and of Islamic civilization in all its aspects. It is a sacred reality that accompanies Muslims throughout their lives. It is at once the means of discernment between truth and error, the criterion of judgement of their actions, and their protector and source of grace and comfort. It is both their judge and their friend; it indicates in the soul both the love and fear of God. For believers the Quran is not an inanimate book, but the living Word of God. Its verses words, and even letters are living beings that speak to believers and also mysteriously 'hear' them. The Sacred Text is the Muslin's constant companion from the beginning tot the end of life and in beyond earthly life on the journey to that Reality from which the Quran descended.

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LOUISE THOMPSON PATTERSON

Keith Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle for Justice (Durham & London: Duke U. Press, 2017).

MISOGYNY'S PERVERSE LOGIC

Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2018).

LUCY PARSONS

Jacqueline Jones, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (New York: Basic Books, 2017):

Although this book focuses on the life of one person born in the middle of the nineteenth century, it reveals much about our own time. Parson and her comrades analyzed America's political economy in ways that are recognizable and instructive to us now, illuminating the effects of technological innovation on the workplace, the erosion of the middle class, the corrosive effects of money and influence on public policy making, and the fecklessness of the two major parties in addressing extreme forms of inequality. At the same time, Lucy Parson's own career amounts to an indictment of sorts of the radical labor leaders who fell back on threats of violence, misread the fears and disdained the deeply held values of many laboring men and women, and alienate key constituencies as unworthy and irrelevant to the fight for justice. In certain respects, then, the story of Parsons's times is the story of our own.

Id. at xv.

AFTER TRUMP?

E. J. Dionne, Jr., Norman J. Ornstein, & Thomas E. Mann, One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not0Yet Deported (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017).

RICHARD GREENER, 1844 - MAY 2, 1922

Katherine Reynolds Chaddock, Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017):

The Chicago Broad Ax remembered him as "one of the best educated and most prominent colored men in the United States." [] He was interred in Chicago's Graceland Cemetery, where he joined such luminaries as Cyrus McCormick, Marshall Field and Joseph Medill. In a final irony for a life that often played out in an invisible space between black and white, Richard Greener's official death certificate identified him as "white."

Id. at 160.

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #5

Georges Simenon, The Yellow Dog (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Linda Asher (New York: Penguin Books, 2013) ("'Do you believe it too--that he's done something wrong?' 'I never believe anything. You should do the same, madame. Tomorrow is another day.'" Id. at 99.).6

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"ESCAPE IS NOT EASY"

Atia Avawi, A Land of Permanent Goodbyes (New York: Philomel Books, 2018).

Humane always found ways to divide themselves, to identify themselves. Whether it be by families, tribes or nations, it has always been your way to individualize. These identities define you before your are even born and follow you from one end of the earth to another. But what's puzzling is that what you hold so sacred can be forgotten after generations. Your great-grandchildren may learn to hate something you held precious, not knowing that that piece lives within them. Like when a man of Irish Catholic descent in America joins the Ku Klux Klan, unaware that generates before, his family was targeted by that very group. Or the opposite can happen, like a Muslim marries a Christian--both unaware that they are descendants of ancestors who fought one another during the Crusades.

Id. at 112-113.

GLOBALIZATION IN LITERATURE

Adam Kirsch, The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016).

Lecia Rosenthal, Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation (New York: Fordham U. Press, 2011).

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WHY BLACKLIVESMATTER MATTERS!

Angela J. Davis, ed., Policing the Black Man (New York: Pantheon, 2017).

Claire Hartfield, A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 (Boston & New York: Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018).

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RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1880

W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, introduction by David Levering Lewis (New York: Free Press, 1998).

Brooks D. Simpson, ed., Reconstruction: Voices from America's First Great Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Library of America, 2018). From the "Introduction":

Most Americans don't know very much about Reconstruction, and in many cases what they may think they know is wrong. This shortcoming is understandable. Sometimes passed over in traditional high school or college history courses, the period can also be marginalized as an unseemly interval between the heroic drama of the Civil War and the advent of the tremendous economic, social, and political changes set into motion by the late nineteenth-century triad of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. Popular imagination of the era in the early twentieth century was captured in two famous films based on best-selling novels, Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939), both of which offered vivid portrayals of the persistence and eventual triumph of southern whites over the forces of evil represented by a malevolent alliance of greedy carpetbaggers, treacherous scalawags, and ignorant freedman. Although some scholars challenged this perspective--most notable, W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction (1935)--only in the 1950s did a wave of revisionist reassessment, inspired in part by the civil rights movement, begin to present different perspectives as historians debated the meaning of Reconstruction and why it turned out as it did. These debates have yet to become part of our popular memory. [] For many Americans, Reconstruction is not an essential part of our national story, or fundamental to our sense of who we are today. The exception to this marginalization is to be found in the consciousness of black America, where the invocation 'forty acres and a mule' powerfully evokes memories of an era of promise and betrayal.

Id. at xxiii.).

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KARA WALKER

Kara Walker, Dust Jackets for the Niggerati (New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2013).

Kara Walker, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007).