July Reading List

Here’s my list of books read in June. Last month’s list is here. You can follow previous months from there. This goes out to my book patron, known as PS, who sends me books that make up a good portion of the fiction list. Your generosity is beyond appreciated. This is also your monthly thread on books so talk about what you’ve read, which I hope to god includes some fiction. What is the saddest sentence in the English language? “I don’t read fiction.”

Professional Reading:

1. Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022). Gerstle co-edited The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order back in 1989. That was an important book. Three decades later, watching the rise and fall of the neoliberal order, he decided to write a history of that period. It’s hard to do. First, are we through with the neoliberal order? I’ve heard other well respected historians argue this too and I tend to agree, not because deregulation is over but because the nation has now entered a period of just open corruption. Plus at the center of neoliberalism was the idea of open borders, open exchange of culture, and free trade. All of that is pretty much dead with Trump. Feel free to disagree of course but Trump hates everything about neoliberalism. Anyway, Gerstle does a good job on the rise of the neoliberal order, but the fall tends to be a pretty standard history of Obama/Trump/Biden, up to the early moments of the Biden administration. But it’s awfully hard to do anything more than chronicle what is going on as it is going on. It’s still a useful book.
2. Holger Droessler, Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa (Harvard University Press, 2022). Not easy to write a labor history of Samoa for a number of reason–lack of archives, lack of Samoan voices, etc. But Droessler writes a very solid history that argues for the centrality of these small islands in the history of colonialism and globalization. He examines all sorts of workers–the copra farmers, imported Chinese laborers, educated Samoans doing translation work or accompanying German or American (the islands were split between the two, with New Zealand taking the German ones after World War I) travelers, the Samoans who ended up on trips for World’s Fair for the whites to see exotic people like they were in a zoo. Overall, it’s about as good a labor history as I think one could write on this place. Good book.
3. Nora E. Jaffary, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). An excellent history of reproduction and attempts to stop it in colonial and 19th century Mexico. There’s actually quite a bit of pre-1750 material in here too, often drawn from secondary sources, to explore how issues including abortion, childbirth, midwifery, contraception, and miscarriage were seen over the centuries. One thing that’s important for everyone to remember is that the idea of history as a march of progress is just not true at all. Again and again here, we see what so many histories show us–that things got much more repressive during and after the Enlightenment than they were in the early modern period. Turns out the rise of modern “science” was a superb tool for repression, in this case of women, but as many other historians have shown, of people of color around the world. In Mexico for instance, basically no one seems to have cared about abortion in the colonial period, but the Porfiriato of the late 19th century with their modern theories sure did and prosecutions of women rapidly rose. That’s just one example. In fact, Jaffary openly rejects the idea that women today are somehow more liberated or highly valued by society than three hundred years ago.
4. Tristan G. Brown, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton University Press, 2023). Going way outside my comfort zone on this one. This is a truly fascinating legal history of the Qing Dynasty through examining the role of fengshui in understanding space. With China rapidly changing, especially in the latter decades of that dynasty, fengshui played an outsized role in legal cases, such as developing mines or telegraph lines. I guess it’s as legitimate a legal construct as any other.
5. Max Krochmal, Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). There’s been a big upsurge over the last 15 years or so in books about cross-racial coalitions in various places. They are of varying quality, often wishcasting and reading more into them than what really existed, a constant problem for leftist historians who wish America wasn’t what it was. There are some exceptions. My former colleague Shana Bernstein has a very good book on Los Angeles. Krochmal’s book on Texas between the late 30s and the mid 60s is another. This is a really deep dive on how Black, Mexican, and white liberal communities tried to work together to transform Texas politics over that quarter-century. It didn’t always go well. And obviously Texas never became some kind of liberal place. But these campaigns still did things such as fight the poll tax and bring workers’ voices into Texas politics. The thing that makes this so good is what I would rarely praise–it’s long. Usually, when I read a 400+ page book, I see the places where editing could take place. Here? The book is exactly as long as it needs to be to allow readers to really understand the depth. Very good book.
6. Mary Bosworth, Supply Chain Justice: The Logistics of British Border Control (Princeton University Press, 2024). Criminology is a very frustrating field to both myself and many other historians I know. It’s grown by leaps and bounds, largely because students watch a lot of CSI and think that majoring in Criminology is a great future of them. And lest you think I am being my usual snarky self, this is the explanation told to me by a criminologist colleague of mine for the major’s popularity. But that’s not really my issue–I don’t care what students choose as their major. My problem is that most of the field is inherently compromised by the reality that to do this research, you have to maintain good relations with the cops or prison officials or other officials of the carceral state, meaning you can’t really criticize them that much. Again, I’ve heard criminologists express this themselves as a problem, though they are less concerned about it in my experience than I would be. But hard to condemn the carceral state when you rely on the carceral state for your professional research. Pretty serious conflicts of interest. That’s what I thought of her, on this book where the criminologist Bosworth explores the working conditions and thoughts of employees working in British’s neoliberal immigration system, talking to the workers laboring for the contracted companies in charge of deportations. That’s not unimportant–though honestly the findings aren’t all that interesting, turns out that working in an outsourcing situtation isn’t super. We do need to know what these people are thinking. But as a field of its own with these sorts of compromises inherent to it, I dunno…….
7. Vera Keller, The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). This is an interesting book about a topic where I don’t bring a ton of background knowledge. Keller explores the “project” guys of this era, rich people sucking up to James I by proposing lunatic projects that would supposedly change the world and bring massive wealthy into the British crown. But she takes them seriously, noting that the roots of the scientific revolution were based on massive violence and exploitation that resonates to today through the colonial outposts where so much of this took place. Given the fantastical idiots trying to destroy the basic tenets of humanity through AI, this book takes on unexpected resonance today.
8. Lucie Genay, Under the Cap of Invisibility: The Pantex Nuclear Weapons Plant and the Texas Panhandle (University of New Mexico Press, 2022). Genay is a French historian of the nuclear United States and this book is both a history and a sociology of the Pantex plant in Amarillo and the people who live around it and defend it based on God, Country, and Profit. There’s a bit of pushback when Pantex was potentially the choice to be the nation’s nuclear dump site, but that’s about it. There’s a few people around who protest all the horrible things going on there, but not many and they are seen as weirdos, outsiders, and communists. It’s a depressing part of the country.
9. Toni Gilpin, The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland (Haymarket Books, 2020). Gilpin explores the Farm Equipment Workers, the communist union her father was involved with and its fight against International Harvester and then, when the anti-communist backlash hit after World War II, the United Auto Workers. It’s a good book, but Gilpin most definitely does the labor historian thing of romanticizing small, lefty unions that had no chance of ever leading the labor movement. Like for a lot of these books, Reuther is the anti-communist bad guy. Given that the rest of the nation–and much of the labor movement–saw Reuther as way too far to the left, it does add to the skewing of the field of labor history way far out to the left of the actual labor movement. Honestly, as a field, labor historians do not provide a very full vision of the American labor movement. Of course, one can forgive this in a study that is also a family study. Also, International Harvester was one evil company.
10. Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press[Hachette], 2024). Jackson, one of the most prominent historians of Black activism working today, completely rejects the white liberal nonviolence fetish–which is not the same as rejecting nonviolence–and highlights the forceful way Black Americans have resisted oppression in five categories–revolution, protection, force, flight, and joy. An absolutely must read, especially for the white liberal world whose vision of King’s nonviolence isn’t much more accurate an understanding of his thought than white conservatives who cynically claim him. And please, don’t start whining about this–just buy and read the book and then we can talk. Like so much history these days, it’s a very accessible read for the average educated person. And a very good one. Easily the one history book I’d most suggest to you that I read this month.

Fiction/Literary Non-Fiction

1. Don DeLillo, End Zone. How I had not read a DeLillo book on football before? I do not know. It’s certainly a solid part of DeLillo’s catalog and I enjoyed it, but honestly, it also feels like a smarter version of M*A*S*H, both the book and the film, if not the TV show. Obviously the football scene at the center of the latter two invites the comparison, but there’s definitely the same somewhat cliched, if not inaccurate, views of football culture combined with reveling in characters playing it who are also countercultural figures in one way or another. The DeLillo book is much better of course.
2. Leonard Gardner, Fat City. I’ve read this once before and I am glad I read it again. Gardner chronicles marginal boxers in a marginal town–Stockton. These guys are du

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