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.

Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon Countdown

It's 29 days to the 10th annual.Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon. This will be my first time participating in it, and my third social-media based readathon of the year.

Here, I'll post my updates in the comments section instead of doing separate blog posts.

For now, I'll post what I think I'll be reading on October 21st, Philosopher, Kelly Oliver's Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human and possibly, a series of comics, or a graphic novel. Perhaps, to keep with the Animal Lessons theme, it will be Michael Tisserand's book on Krazy Kat, cartoonist, George Harrison: Krazy: George Herriman A Life in Black and White, or if I am going to engage in some research for my book, it will be anti-fascist history, because that is always appropriate. I guess I'll decide in a month. There's a lot out there.

Bout of Books - 7 Day Wrap Up

On Sunday, the last day of Bout of Books, I finally managed to do my usual daily reading minimum - 40 pages of a book that I am not teaching this semester. I read more about police violence in Sao Paolo, along with people's justifications for it in Teresa Caldeira's excellent City of Walls.  The problem of citizen-endorsement of police violence is global.

As far as the week's wrap-up goes, I was defeated by the hectic nature of the first weeks of a new school year.  In the summer, I was easily reading close to 100 pages a day. Last week, our second week of classes, despite my best efforts, I read less than 40 pages most days - with the exception of things I had assigned and was teaching. The immediate need to prepare for a class full of students will always drive every other goal to the margins, or, for me, to 5:00 am - and sometimes, I will have to get up that early just to be ready for a 6:30 pm seminar.  I'm hoping that I'll get used to the weekly routine and will be back to my serene morning reading soon.

Bout of Books Day 6, or Yesterday's News

Yesterday was a writing day for me, so I didn't read very much, unless you count re-reading. I'm working on an academic essay that includes a discussion of Weapons of Democracy by Jonathan Auerbach. Weapons is an intellectual history of how early 20th century US reformers and politicians understood the field of "public opinion", the mass media, and how they interacted with the newly created field of public relations. While many of us have heard of Edward Bernays and George Creel, this slim book could serve both as a new introductory text for people unfamiliar with this field, as well as being an original contribution to an ongoing discussion about the history of American media and the Progressive movement.  Auerbach is also the editor of a recent Handbook of Propaganda Studies, and his work seems especially relevant now, given the attention we are currently giving to the problem of "fake news" and the president's attacks on the press. I was surprised to read, for example, that Theodore Roosevelt had attacked investigative journalists of his time, inventing the term "muck-raker" to describe them in a speech to the Gridiron Club, where he" worked himself into a fever pitch over 'hysterical sensationalism' and against those 'wild preachers of unrest and discontent, the wild agitators against the entire existing order.' "

Saturday Morning Reading and Listening - Distracto-Machine

Just caught myself dancing at the standing desk while doing some long postponed reading for peer review.  This might make me a more generous reader. Let's see.

Bout of Books 5 - Friday Update

  As much as I wanted to continue reading today, my main reading that wasn't for teaching happened between 4:30 and 5:30 am, when I was reading the Russian Debutante's Handbook, before I could finally fall asleep again, and between 11 and midnight when I got back to it before bed. In this section of the book, our hero, Vladimir is organizing a literary magazine/Ponzi scheme in the ex-pat community of "Prava"  - the hipster scene in Prague of the 1990s.

   I can't believe it took me so long to read Shteyngart. For years, I bypassed paperback copies of this book on the shelves of my favorite Brooklyn used bookstores, never believing I had time to read it.  It was then, as a brand-new college professor that I most ascetically only read things that were related to work, whether for my own book-in-progress, or in order to teach classes in unfamiliar subjects that I was scheduled to teach with only weeks to go before the opening of a semester.  Now that I'm reading it, I would say it's both exactly the kind of book I like, and that it is in many ways close to my own personal history. Shteyngart's only a little bit younger than I am, so many of the cultural references of the 1990s are familiar. I knew some people who went to Prague and traveled to Eastern Europe during this era - the band I sang for in college played a song written by one of these folks, with the title "the Bucharest Blues." (chorus: "I got the Bucharest Blues/ I gotta get outta this place") During my assistant professor years, I briefly dated a scientist from Azerbaijan who'd moved to LA with his family shortly after the fall of the USSR  When he talked about his childhood, he told me he'd once aspired to be a "Soviet Man," passionately memorizing and reciting passages from Mayakovsky. The way he described it made it sound like an adolescent rite of passage, in the way that many in the US describe feverish teen-aged reading of another all-too-American Russian emigré, Ayn Rand. And, of course, as a CUNY professor, I had so many students from the former USSR. In my first two years living in Brooklyn, I taught developmental English classes in Brighton Beach, often called "Little Odessa"   Finally, it was after seeing them open for Manu Chao on Central Park's Summerstage in 2001, that I became a devotee of the "gypsy punk" Ukrainian band, Gogol Bordello, although despite years of hearing about it, I never made it to see Hutz DJ at the Bulgarian Bar.

 I finally gave myself the pleasure of reading the Russian Debutante's Handbook by making it part of work. That is, incorporated a section on US- Eastern European connections into my syllabus for American Studies this year, as part of my syllabus is meant to introduce students to theories of transnational American Studies through fiction. It seemed worthwhile to spend some time on the former USSR, given the current keen interest in our President's relationship with Russia. We'll be reading a short story by Molly Antopol, a chapter set in Shteyngart's Prava, and watching the movie made by a CUNY grad, Darko Lungulov called Here and There, which I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival years ago. I imagine that this urban cosmopolitanism will be as foreign to my current students in the suburban US South as Garrison Keillor once was to my immigrant students in New York City, one of whom once asked if "born-again" Christians believed in reincarnation.




I did get some other scattered reading done.  While cooking dinner, I listened to Crosbie Wells' letters to Alistair Lauderback in The Luminaries.  My official (non-teaching) reading of the day was Caldeira's City of Walls. I woke up late and got about ten pages in before I realized I had to do a ton of things on the computer because I was working from home. Among the things I had to do were read a couple of journal articles that I've assigned my students for next week, both about broader effects on communities created by policing and incarceration. I wish I had found a place on the syllabus this semester for City of Walls - there are so many connections with this week's assignments in particular. One of these days, I'll teach this class again, I hope, and then I can find a place for Caldeira in a section on policing/incarceration in the Americas beyond the U.S. That way, I could also include some of the great work being done in surveillance studies in Canada. It may be slow progress, however, as it seems the semester is going like this: