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!