10 Years in 10 Books for Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon 2012-2017

It's the last hour of Dewey's 24 hour readathon and time to finish my recommendations for books published in each year between 2007 and 2017.

2012: Although it was founded soon into Obama's presidency, the Tea Party became more central in the public eye in connection with the preparation for the 2012 presidential election. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's detailed study The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism is one of the best books on the subject.

2013: Another analysis of right-wing organizing that anticipated the rise of Gamergate and the growth of anti-feminist radicalism is Michael Kimmel's Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the end of an Era.


2014: Without a doubt the funniest comic I've read in the last several years, Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky's Sex Criminals came out in its first trade collection in 2014. Here is an antidote to the generally paranoid and anxious right-wing cultural turn of the last six years, one that also shows us the positive and playful side of a left wing cultural movement that has been labeled as censorious and humorless by a growing backlash of right-wing activists.

2015: Sherrie Randolph's wonderful biography, Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical  is also something of an antidote to the books documenting the rise of the right.  Bringing back the story of this second-wave era Black feminist is an important corrective to a homogeneous narrative of the history of women's liberation as being about only led by "white middle class women."

2016: Christina Heatherton's and Jordan Camp's edited collection about police abolitionist movements and the global crisis in policing, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter is another important book for understanding the current moment. This includes both interviews with current activists and more academic studies of policing, inspired by the activist scholarship of Stuart Hall.

* 2017:  In a year when new fascist formations have been the subject of general alarm and countless quick research articles, Alexander Reid Ross's Against the Fascist Creep is the most detailed and historically informed of the books published on this subject. Run out and read it right now!

10 years in 10 books for Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon Part One: Books from 2007-2011

It's about 25 minutes before the official readathon start, and I'm doing this challenge from Dewey's 24 hour readathon. Since this blog is mostly for academic books, I will include a fair number of these, but they'll be things that I think might interest the readathon crew.

1. 2007: Ruthie Wilison Gilmore, The Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California. This book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in mass incarceration. Gilmore has been involved in prison abolition activism for decades, and this book is the culmination of years of scholarship and activism. If you're not already convinced, here's a video:

2. 2008: Janice Peck, The Age of Oprah: Icon for theNeoliberal Era This is a book I've taught in the past, and it is always very, very popular with students. One of my former students even went to study with Peck for her PhD as a result of reading it. While this book is definitely about Oprah Winfrey, it is also a very clear explanation of neoliberalism that connects Oprah's particular version of self-help ideology to a history of pop psychology going back to the 19th century.

3. 2009: Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. I believe that this book won both the American History and American Studies first book prizes when it came out. It's another book about economics that is highly readable. It's an informative analysis of how this superstore developed through an ideological fusion of Christian evangelical religion and free market ideology.

4. 2010: Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality. I'm teaching this book in a few weeks and it's one that is usually popular with my students. Kunzel's book is both historically informative and theoretically sophisticated, while also being readable. If you're interested in the history of sexuality, prisons, and social movements, this is a really valuable book.

5. 2011: What is a better way to remember 2011 than with N+1 collection, Occupy: Scenes from Occupied America ?  This book is a collection of short pieces produced during the Wall Street occupation and gives you the feeling of being there.