by kate clinton
For the past twelve years, my holiday book accolades have been selected from a list that my beloved book group had discussed. Although we’ve all become close over the years, I’ll admit I was a little book shy after the reaction to a recommendation from me. who knew that a book on poetry would make the group’s sociologist sulk and complain, “but where’s the data?” however, i put a lot of pressure on my group to in the darkroom by susan faludi (metropolitan books). I’m sure even our data-mad resident sociologist will like it.
You are reading: Best progressive books 2016
faludi is an investigative journalist and winner of a pulitzer prize for explanatory journalism. In Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (Crown publication, 1991), she warned women not to take the gains of feminism for granted. in stiff: the betrayal of the american man (william morrow, 1999) recognizes that a few men are in most positions of power, but that many are poorly paid, unemployed, disillusioned and blame the women . In The Sleep of Terror: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America (Picador, 2008), she argues that the 9/11 terrorist attacks reinvigorated a climate of hostility toward women. the three threads inform not only our current policy but also the fourth book of it.
in the dark room is a memoir about her estranged father, who now lives in hungary and has transitioned from male to female. faludi returns to hungary to tell the story. it is a complex examination of gender, nationalism, antisemitism, sexual identity, and reconciliation.
Like Steven, his father had been a despot, a monster of rabid masculinity. like stefànie, her father is a flirt, a paragon of florid femininity. stefànie intimidates her daughter into dressing more like a woman and putting on an ovulation monitor.
faludi offers an impressive synopsis of the nation and character of hungary, from the Magyars to the Ottoman Empire, the Holocaust, and the current return of right-wing antisemitism. it is the personality of his father.
Like Steven, his father was a noted fashion photo retoucher. like stefànie, she is obsessed with retouching her new image with photoshop. faludi researches and presents a basic and useful overview of transgender theory, history, and practice. through her investigation, she comes to better understand her father. in the dark room is a surprising, rich and unsentimental piece of deep explanation. I don’t even care if the sociologist likes the book.
kate clinton is a humorist who writes every two months for the progressive.
by ruth conniff
The most powerful book I read this year was Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (Crown Publishing). Desmond, now a Harvard professor and recipient of a 2015 MacArthur “Genius” Scholarship, grew up in a family with little money. His parents couldn’t always pay the utility bills, but they were determined that his son would have a better life by going to college. Shortly after arriving at Arizona State University, Desmond had to return to help his parents move. They had lost the family home. That disconcerting and disturbing experience helped inform Desmond’s insightful and brilliant investigation into the nature of poverty and homelessness in America.
“I wanted to try to write a book about poverty that didn’t focus exclusively on poor people or poor places,” Desmond explains. “Poverty was a relationship, I thought, that involved rich and poor alike. to understand poverty, I needed to understand that relationship. This sent me searching for a process that would bring rich and poor people together in mutual dependency and struggle. the eviction was one of those processes.”
unlike other academics, including the celebrated charles murray, who inspired a generation of welfare reformers with thought experiments on the motivations and pathologies of the poor, people he doesn’t know and whose lives he imagines with clinical detachment and an impromptu sneer—desmond knows his stuff intimately. he moved into a milwaukee trailer park in may 2008. from that time until december 2009, he immersed himself in the lives of the people whose stories he tells. the result is this epic, tragic and gripping story that reads like a novel.
evicted takes the reader on an exciting journey with the families residing in the trailer park and dilapidated apartments of downtown milwaukee, where desmond next moved. he also paints an impressively empathetic portrait of landlords who make a good living renovating dire tenements where rent is high, plumbing is broken, and being thrown out onto the street is always a threat.
among milwaukee renters, one in five black women report having been evicted at some point. Most evicted households in Milwaukee have children, and the same statistical picture holds true in urban areas of the United States. The human cost of widespread housing instability for poor families in the United States is staggering and unacceptable.
“home is the center of life,” writes desmond. “It’s a refuge from the hustle and bustle of school, the pressure of work and the threat of the streets.” Home makes us who we are. “civic life starts at home too,” adds desmond. “Only after we begin to see a street as our street, a public park as our park, a school as our school, can we become engaged citizens.” without stable homes, we cannot function properly as human beings, nor as a society.
like katherine boo, whose brilliant and moving 2014 book on the lives of slum dwellers in india, behind the beautiful forever (random house), raised the stories of people who are treated like children more than human garbage, desmond makes us care. we feel the struggles, the joys and the pain of the people in her book. By witnessing their lives and telling their stories so compellingly, Desmond forces us to see that we are all the same and that, as human beings, we simply cannot continue to live with the injustice that she describes.
ruth conniff is editor-in-chief of the progressive.
by anne-marie cusac
During the drag of election season, I found myself wandering down the cookbook aisle. he wasn’t looking for physical nourishment so much as emotional comfort: flavors to bring human beings together. spicy and acid notes that remind me of the richness of cultural differences. to teach me again that it is worth trying and trying to understand.
Today’s cookbooks are striving to outdo the internet recipe box. in 2012, the already famous jerusalem: a cookbook (ten-speed press), by yotam ottolenghi, was offered, as well as recipes such as “clementine and almond syrup tart” and “aubergines stuffed with lamb and pine nuts”, photographs capturing the cultures of the city of jerusalem and commentary on the political energy of food.
In 2016, the same press published Cuba!: Recipes and Stories of Cuban Cuisine (ten-speed press). The authors, Dan Goldberg, Andrea Kuhn, and Jody Eddy, made repeated trips to Cuban organic farms and home kitchens. there are recipes here for standard fried plantains, mojo, and congrí (black beans and rice). and there are flavors for the adventurous: squid ink empanadas with roasted red pepper sauce, rice pudding with toasted coconut, guava barbecue sauce. Photos of Cuban home life alone are worth the price of the book.
Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Kurdistan (Artisan), by Naomi Duguid, offers recipes from across the ancient Persian Empire. As with Cuba, these countries seemed out of reach for those of us with memories of the Soviet bloc and the Iranian revolution. duguid, who is also the author of burma: rivers of flavor (handmade), learns from home cooks, but also functions as a cultural reporter, providing insights into the home life of mountain nomads, explaining why people outside of russia tend not to have tried caucasus wines: “many vines were uprooted in the 1980s when gorbachev, then leader of the ussr, declared drunkenness a big problem and restricted production and sale of wine.
and a word for new anthony bourdain appetites: a cookbook (ecco). Bourdain is known for celebrating street food. the itinerant chef’s book of recipes he cooks at home is iconoclastic. “Caesar salad is of Mexican origin. you probably didn’t know, attributing it to the Italians. No. Another reason to love Mexico, unless he insists on putting sad, overcooked, characterless grilled chicken cutlet strips on top and shredding them to landfill. god doesn’t want you to put chicken in your caesar.”
Cookbooks like these foster the belief that ordinary people are worth approaching and trying to understand; food offers that opportunity.
Finally, the people I care about published great books this year. I want to mention two: John S. Watson, Prairie Crossing: Building an American Conservation Community (University of Illinois), and Thomas Suja, The Missing American Jury: Restoring the Critical Constitutional Role of Juries Criminal, Civil and of accusation (cambridge university press). John is my husband and Suja was my college roommate, so I know I have a conflict of interest. still, go read these books. they matter!
Anne-Marie Cusac is a professor of journalism at Roosevelt University and the author of Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America (Yale University Press, 2009). Her current exhibition with Thomas Ferrella, “Not Forgotten: Chicago Street Memorials,” at Roosevelt University’s Gage Gallery was listed as one of “America’s 32 Exhibitions.” photo exhibitions you can’t miss” from time.com lightbox.
Jules Gibbs
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“I think without imagination we can’t get anywhere,” Rita Dove once told an interviewer. indeed, we often seem stuck in our collective need for imagination, personal, national, between what is and what is possible. this lack makes poetry more necessary than ever. To that end, let me prescribe a few outstanding books published in 2016; consider these affordable medicines, salves, and sustenance for our beleaguered imaginations.
This year saw two must-have books for any progressive book shelf: the complete works of two great poets: Complete Poems: 1974-2004 by Rita Dove (W.W. Norton), and adrienne rich collected poems: 1950-2012 (w.w. norton). Rich changed the course of American poetry by training the poetic eye on new feminist themes. she married a traditional poetry of the 1950s with a radical poetry of the 1960s and pushed the genre forward. If poets are, as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it, “the world’s unacknowledged legislators,” then much law has been written from these pages.
We lost wealth in 2012, but we have seven decades of your work to celebrate. likewise, the new dove collection allows us to explore one of the great imaginative minds of our time; We need Paloma both for her multivocal lyricism and her unflinching gaze at historical racial injustice, and for what it means to be a woman in this life. Taken together, her work does what Whitman said all poems should do: “put a second brain in the brain. . . put second eyes to the eyes and second ears to the ears.”
Random Exorcisms (Louisiana State University Press) is Adrian C. louis’s latest book of poetry, and like much of his work, criticizes injustices, public and private, in a scathing commentary on our utter everydayness. The exorcisms here take on all manner of demons, from self-delusion to social media delusions to delusions of freedom. It’s a smart, drunken inquisition that could drag you down if it weren’t for Louis’ wry humor and the sheer ignition of his lyrical powers, at times ceremonial, haunting, radical, a kind of reverent irreverence. the poems are utterly accessible, born from a common vernacular that sings into his hands, raucous and sometimes obscene, even when tender, vulnerable.
The discovery of unpublished writings by the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was greeted with much emotion this year. Forrest Gander, who translated the poems in the book Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda(Copper Cannon Press), likened it to discovering a trove of new Michelangelo sketches. A political activist, diplomat, and elected official who was likely assassinated after the coup that brought Pinochet to power, Neruda remains one of the most beloved poets of all time. his poems of lost loves reach us like a letter sent from impossible distances:
that’s why my heart
expands and rises
in bread for your mouth to devour,
and my blood is wine spilled for you.
you and I are the earth with its fruit.
bread, fire, blood and wine
compose the earthly love that burns us.
jules gibbs, poet and professor of literature at syracuse university, is poetry editor for the progressive.
by bill lueders
The best new political book I read in 2016 is Spiral: Trapped in Eternal War by mark danner (simon & schuster), which chronicles America’s ill-fated battle against murderous fanatics, based on On faulty premises and unrealistic goals, like President George W. Bush that “it will not end until all terrorist groups of global reach have been found, stopped and defeated.”
danner, a former writer for the new yorker, seeks to provide a critical perspective, such as that lightning strikes kill more Americans than terrorist attacks, or that the declared goal of terrorists is to provoke precisely the kind of exaggerated response they have given bush and now obama. the book laments the “quiet acceptance” that the war on terror has brought about among the American public, even as it has “nurtured . . . powerful national security institutions” that will seek their own preservation. He expects a reckoning and reconsideration but, even before Trump’s election, he saw little sign of that happening. Fasten your seatbelts, everyone, as we spiral forward.
Another worthy book that takes a broad view of historical events is America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (Random House) by Andrew J. Bacevich, a retired US Army colonel and professor of history and international relations at Boston University. provides a guided tour of the missteps that make up the u.s. policy toward the region, from the Iranian hostage crisis to the rise of the Islamic State, concluding that the smart thing to do now would be to withdraw.
Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics (anchor), by ari rabin-havt and media matter for america, examines how weavers driven by money or ideology have contaminated debate on issues including tobacco, climate change, immigration, guns, voter registration, abortion, and gay marriage. it demands weaponizing the truth and marginalizing known liars. But when one of the most shameless liars of all time can seize the presidency, it’s hard to imagine how it will be enough.
When such desperate thoughts intrude, it helps to remember that those who value truth and the freedom to discuss it have made progress. Indelible Ink: The Trials of John Peter Zenger and the Birth of America’s Free Press (W.W. Norton), by Richard Kluger, takes us back to a time when the publication of commentary critical of the government officials was considered a crime, regardless of its veracity.
“It’s no less libel because it’s true,” said the prosecutor at Zenger’s trial in 1735, after the New York printer had already spent nine months in jail for publishing mild rebukes of a corrupt politician. The Zenger Test helped pave the way for the First Amendment and, ultimately, the American tradition of vigorous and skeptical journalism. Kluger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, closes his story with a critique of the modern press and an examination of the actions of Edward Snowden.
the memoir of born to run bruce springsteen (simon & schuster), is worth reading just to read how, after years of playing in bar bands and on the cusp of success, the boss was so unlucky that he found himself auditioning for what turned out to be a group of teenagers in a garage. The 500-plus-page book is a fun journey through a life of rock ‘n’ roll, but one part of it feels undistilled. For every heartfelt recollection, like those about his distant, brooding father and his selfless mother, there are passages full of discarded lines brimming with bravado (“I knew I had an amazing band and if we couldn’t do the job, show me the men who could”). Still, Bruce’s honesty is refreshing, even if it makes him less likeable at times.
guilty pleasure: tv (the book): two experts choose the best american programs of all time(grand central publishing). Authors Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz select and analyze the 100 best shows on American television. Sure, it sounds vulgar, but the authors apply insightful analysis and brim with enthusiasm for what are in many cases legitimately great works of art (all in the family, the wire, mad men, louie). will make you want to subscribe to hulu and binge watch.
bill lueders is associate editor of the progressive.
by ashley maag
American soccer player Abby Wambach, the all-time leading goal scorer in the international game for both male and female players, wrote a memoir that she says is “not, in essence, a book about football”. In Forward: A Memoir (Street Books of the Day), Wambach details her journey of success and failure, culminating in her call to “defy labels. . . whether imposed by others or by yourselves.”
wambach, who played college soccer at the university of florida and was a star for the united states. women’s national soccer team, she recounts the many labels that have been applied to her, including “tomboy,” “rebel,” “leader,” “g.o.a.t.” (the greatest of all time), “lawyer”, “control freak”, “addict” and “human”. wambach describes this as a process of transcendence, one label at a time. This book is not a highlight reel of an iconic athlete’s career, but rather a deeper look at the struggles many of our idols face on their way to and through stardom.
c. Richard King’s most recent book, Redskins: Insult and Brand (University of Nebraska Press), also takes issue with how certain words define people and groups. examines how the name of the washington, d.c. football team affects Native Americans. King, a professor of comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University, criticizes “r*dskin,” as he translates the team’s name, as an insult, one that “denigrates and dehumanizes.” worse yet, he argues, its use in sport has “kept the word alive.”
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after examining the origin and connotations of the word, king defends its removal from everyday vocabulary, along with other words we no longer use because they are offensive. the r-word, in his opinion, is a “racial slur masquerading as a sports brand.”
ashley maag is an editorial intern at progressive.
by ed rampell
pulitzer prize winner david cay johnston has known donald trump since 1988, when he began covering atlantic city casinos for the philadelphia inquirer. Drawing on decades of personal interactions and public records, Johnston paints a startling portrait of Trump’s background and predatory business practices from Manhattan to Waikiki at Donald Trump’s Creation (Melville House). Yuuuuuuge revelations and allegations include: Trump’s father, Fred, was arrested in a 1927 KKK riot in Queens. trump, a casino owner, did not know many rules of the game. When Donald faced bankruptcy, Fred saved him from ruin. Throughout his life, Johnston told me in an interview, Trump “has embraced hustlers, swindlers, mobsters, reputed Russian mobsters and a major drug dealer in his business dealings.”
as the sioux tribe confronts the dakota access pipeline, a prominent left-wing historian reveals how a republican icon orchestrated energy-related regime change in indian territory. The Politics of Murder: Barry Goldwater’s Arizona Organized Crime (Gracenote Books) by Dave Wagner chronicles mob heists, gambling, etc. This longtime Arizona newspaper publisher links the extremist 1964 Republican presidential candidate, five US terms. Senator Goldwater, for transgressions leading to the 1881 shooting at Tombstone’s O.K. pale barnyard in comparison.
In June 1976, reporter Don Bolles was killed by a Phoenix car bomb. Although Wagner does not directly link Goldwater to the explosion, he does point to a connection to Goldwater’s dirty tricks against the Navajo Nation, including planting a faulty dynamite bomb on the reservation in January 1976.
In Frightened: How the CIA Manipulates the Media and Fools Hollywood (Hot Books), Nicholas Schou explores how the CIA, through “embedded” manipulative programs, “manages” the news. From Homeland to Zero Dark Thirty, the CIA influences and injects movies and TV shows with Agitprop disguised as mass entertainment. Schou writes, “In exchange for special tours at Langley and lunches with national security czars, Hollywood filmmakers have eagerly become propagandists for perpetual war and apologists for crimes against humanity.”
greg palast is the lefty santa claus who takes the “lists” (voter censuses) and checks them twice. In The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Story of Billionaires and Election Bandits (seven stories press), election thieves who purge, cage, collate and disenfranchise minority voter casters . to the city. Wearing shoe leather, Palast investigates voter suppressors, capitalist vultures, and the state of our disunity with his trademark wit, including a Ted Rall comic book insert.
Los Angeles-based film historian/critic Ed Rampell writes frequently for the Progressive and is the author of Hollywood Progressive: A History of America’s Popular Cinema and co-author of the Book of Hawaii Film and Television .
by norman stockwell
justice delayed is democracy denied.
– roberto f. kennedy
Lately I find myself reading many books on “transitional justice”: the measures employed by populations subjected to human rights abuses, usually during wars or dictatorships. several recent court cases have made this a very interesting field, with perpetrators from years ago finally facing justice.
A new book, scheduled for release in January, is Murder of a Saint: The Plot to Assassinate Óscar Romero and the Quest to Bring His Killers to Justice (university of california press , 2017) by matt eisenbrandt, human rights lawyer and former legal director of the center for justice and accountability. recounts an investigation of the center and the eventual trial in fresno, california, of Álvaro saravia, former head of security for salvadoran death squad leader roberto d’aubuisson.
Part detective story, part historical reminiscence, shows the reader how difficult it is to prosecute these cases and why so many human rights violators go unpunished. In an epilogue, Benjamín Cuéllar, executive director of the Human Rights Institute of the Central American University in San Salvador, puts the life of Archbishop Romero in context, after his beatification in 2015 by Pope Francis.
transitional justice in latin america: the uneven road from impunity to accountability (routledge), edited by elin skaar, jemima garcia-godos and cath collins, is an academic monograph that analyzes cases in argentina, brazil, chile, colombia, guatemala, el salvador, paraguay, peru and uruguay. latin america is a diverse region, with a long history of impunity for human rights violators.
“However, in recent decades, beginning in the 1980s,” the editors write, “Latin America has pioneered transitional justice mechanisms aimed at dealing with the legacy of military governments or internal armed conflicts in last”. The book reviews various attempts to reform judicial systems and create mechanisms for accountability, including the role of international courts and jurisdictions. since the book came out in may, the lifting of el salvador’s 1993 amnesty law has resulted in the advancement of new cases.
Finally, a forthcoming book, The Blood of Emmett Till (Simon & Schuster, 2017) by Timothy B. Tyson, Senior Research Fellow at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, offers a new look at the decades-old case of the 1955 lynching of a fourteen-year-old in Mississippi. Tyson retells the story in gripping detail, informed by both recent research and interviews with key participants.
The case was a key catalyst for the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but it also has great relevance for black lives matter activists today. My father vividly remembers being one of the more than 100,000 people who filed past the open casket of the teenager brutally murdered sixty-one years ago in Chicago. Tyson cites Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. when he refers to the assassination of till as “the lynching of the statue of liberty”, a quote that resonates powerfully today as the united nations recently condemned racial disparity and police brutality in this country following the murder of michael brown.
“America continues to kill emmett till,” tyson writes, “and often for the same reasons that fueled the violent segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s.” But Tyson finds reason to be hopeful in contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter. “To see beyond the ghosts,” she tells us, “all of us must develop the moral vision and political will to crush white supremacy, both the political agenda and the unconscious assumptions.”
norman stockwell is the publisher of the progressive.
by dave zirin
There are two books at the intersection of sports and politics that have rocked my world in 2016. I wrote the introduction to both of them, and in both cases, I didn’t get paid a dime. I asked to do it after reading the first unpublished drafts and being unspeakably moved by what lay between the pages. The first book is Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape (on the edge of sports/akashic books) by sportswriter and first-time author Jessica Luther. the second is Long Shot: The Struggles and Triumphs of an NBA Freedom Fighter (haymarket books, 2017), the memoir of one of my childhood heroes, former NBA player craig hodges.
Both books tell stories of people bravely speaking truth to power in an arena where “power” often doesn’t admit dissent. Jessica Luther analyzes dozens of sexual assault cases involving college football players and finds that “institutional betrayal” is rooted in reasons new and old: There is a new financial need to protect college football’s multi-million dollar cash cow and there is the old misogyny, where women, especially, and those who “cry rape” are ignored, stigmatized or even persecuted.
but luther’s book is not simply a neat analysis of the roots of rape culture in college football. he also outlines thirteen recommendations at the end of his treatise so that college football locker rooms can foster change and football players can help lead the fight against rape culture.
Craig Hodges belongs to a generation in the 1980s and 1990s in which NBA players were expected to be seen and not heard. No player exemplified this mentality better than Hodges’ Chicago Bulls teammate Michael Jordan. But Hodges was a different kind of human being and found himself shut out of the league.
From wearing a dashiki to the White House to delivering a letter protesting the war to President George H.W. bush to unsuccessfully trying to get jordan and magic johnson to boycott game one of the 1991 nba finals between his bulls and the los angeles lakers, as a champion of racial justice, hodges was never content to be as politically pliant as he was in his time. His book, co-written with Rory Fanning, is at once moving, searing, and above all, the definitive inside look at how political silence is engineered and the courage it takes to stand up and be heard.
Both books show that we don’t have to consign sports and clothing to the dustbin of reaction. sports can speak to the best angels of our nature, but only if we are brave enough to imagine a better way to play.
dave zirin hosts the edge of sports podcast and is the nation’s sports publisher. his latest book is brazil’s dance with the devil.
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