Barack Obama does it, so presumably we lesser mortals may also partake. Here are some of the books I’ve most enjoyed in 2019.
I read a handful of very good things with environmental topics. I opened 2019 by reading Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution on a long train trip across wintry Scandinavia. It’s come in for revision and critique from later scholars, but The Death of Nature is nonetheless an eye-opening, provocative read about how new packages of ideas for thinking about science, reason, and the world more broadly have long term consequences for “nature”--in many regards a recent category in human history--and for many social relationships connected to land and resources.
David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming combines reporting and essays to offer a series of short but powerful chapters that represent the author’s considerable knowledge and thinking about climate change. Wallace-Wells both documents the extensive damage already wrought to our natural and social surroundings by anthropogenic climate change, and takes readers into some of the forecasting about the future we face. This is not a “feel good” read, and rightly suggests that absent some changes on a scale that we as a nation and global collective seem disinterested in pursuing, we face a dark future. It and some other excellent writing on climate change should be preoccupying all of our minds.
Equally timely is Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World. Mann’s book is not, strictly speaking, about climate change. Instead, he tackles the post-1945 world through the biographies of Norman Borlaug (the Wizard of the title) and William Vogt (the Prophet). The former collaborated with international agencies and scientists and farmers in Mexico, South Asia, and other parts of the developing world to engineer the so-called Green Revolution, a transformation in the realm of agriculture that deployed the best that science and technology had to offer, to escape the hunger threatened many of the world’s people. Vogt, in contrast, argued that the short-term escape offered by technological innovation only postponed a more serious reckoning. On the one hand a fascinating look into one of the twentieth century’s lesser known but more consequential “revolutions,” the book is on the other hand an excellent work of non-fiction that captures contemporary debates about how to address climate change by situating them in a longer historical context.
If climate change is the most fundamental long-term threat to human society, the growth of ethno-linguistic nationalism also preoccupied many of us during 2019 as we watched boorish, would-be authoritarians go from strength to strength. Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin’s National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy attempts to tie together a wide range of data and qualitative observations to offer some thoughts about the causes and potential consequences of these political transformations across the world. Their conclusions don’t neatly fit any particular ideological parameters, and some sections of the short but engrossing book are more convincing than others, but the chapters represent compelling mediations on the political crisis that accompanies--and in some cases is not unrelated to--our climate crisis.
On the fiction front, my favourites for the year were a mix of returning to what felt like old friends, and an introduction to new faces. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body continues to follow Tambudzai, a figure she first brought to life in Nervous Conditions in 1988. In some ways, this is a maddening book. The prose is less smooth and the characters less compelling--to my mind--than in Dangarembga’s earlier two novels. But it is equally maddening for the straits in which Tambudzai finds herself as she navigates--or more accurately fails to navigate--contemporary Zimbabwe. In spite of the first drawbacks, and because of the unease the latter attributes of the book generate in readers, I could hardly contain my excitement when seeing this on the bookshelf, and enjoyed every minute of it.
The second piece of fiction set in Zimbabwe I read during the year was Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone. It might be my favourite novel of the year. Spanning the years surrounding independence and Gukurahundi during the 1980s to nearer the present, the book was a complex mediation on relationships that are near-universal, and events and circumstances generated by Zimbabwe’s tumultuous late-twentieth century history. Set mostly in Bulawayo to Dangarembga’s Harare, this might have been my favourite novel of the year, particularly because soon after reading it I spent a week in Zimbabwe.
With John LeCarre’s Agent Running in the Field, the return was not so much to a character--like Dangarembga’s Tambudzai--as to a milieu in which, no matter how much the world has changed, the same literary rhythms, currents of power, and tangled relationships govern the world. I thought that in common with some of LeCarre’s other recent work, Agent Running in the Field was not entirely satisfactory in its abrupt ending, and also crackles with more palpable anger than the author’s earlier works. Its focus on a contemporary theme--the negotiations surrounding Brexit--made it all the more enjoyable.
Even closer to home, although more distant in its chronological setting, was Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Set in the U.S. during the rise of fascism in Europe, the novel explores an alternative historical frame in which Charles Lindbergh is compromised by a foreign power and challenges Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency. High politics form the compelling backdrop to how the slow drip of authoritarianism blended with antisemitism affect a Newark family and their neighborhood.
I found Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer to be a magnificent novel, touching on big questions about identity, loyalty, belonging, beginning, and migration. It was told with a convincing voice, a central character who seemed all-too-real in his internal musings, foibles, and dilemmas, and against the backdrop of spaces and events (surrounding the Vietnam War and its aftermath) that have traditionally surfaced in fiction in much different ways.
If several of these books represented new--at least for me--authors and characters, Laurie R. King’s The Murder of Mary Russell represented a return to a long-time indulgence: post-Doyle retellings of the Sherlock Holmes story. In King’s case, the mysteries center on the character--and in this case the disappearance of--Mary Russell, Holmes’ domestic and professional partner. I have long enjoyed these fun mysteries, but had fallen a couple of years behind, and so used the summer to read the most recent few in the series, of which I thought this was the best.
When a colleague reported hearing a review of Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, a novel set in Northern Rhodesia and then Zambia, I planned my reading of the novel for a summer stint in Lusaka. A multi-generational epic, with careful doses of magical realism, Serpell’s novel spans well over a century of entangled multi-racial Central African families and lives. The novel embedded its sprawling cast of characters in a range of turning points in Zambia’s history with a light touch, keeping the focus not on the historical drama so much as on how a series of interlocked families lived simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary lives amidst changes occurring at a distance. The Old Drift was all the more enjoyable to read when my daily movements took me past some of the places its characters traversed in Lusaka.
Also employing magical realism was Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, the earliest of a number of the Spanish author’s books dealing with hidden libraries, the real and ethereal power of the pen, intergenerational family drama, spectral dwellings, tortured relationships, and the rise and consolidation of Falangism in Spain. I read a couple of Ruiz Zafon’s books during the years, and although all were compelling reads which more than once made me stumble off a curb with my nose embedded between the pages while walking home from work, the first was the best, partly because some of the elements and motifs grew repetitive when read in close succession.
I generally prefer my fiction in the form of novels, but I became engrossed in Jennifer Mansubuga Makumbi’s series of short stories, Manchester Happened. This very moving collection--in which a couple of characters make repeat appearances in different stories--deals with the experiences of Ugandan migrants in the UK and, on a few occasions, the experiences of those migrants when they return to Uganda. Perhaps partly because 2019 was yet another year in which the vulnerability of migrants to cruel and destructive nationalism was so apparent, and partly because the author of the epic Ugandan novel, Kintu, proved herself equally adept at this genre, this collection was certainly near the top of the year’s fiction list.
However, I can more easily justify time spent on non-fiction, and so the last portion of this list is largely devoted to such works tangentially related to things I write and teach about. Priya Lal’s African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World, is a fascinating account of the Tanzanian state’s attempt to craft a genuinely national version of collectivism. What makes Lal’s work particularly brilliant is how she anchors her study so carefully and compellingly at various scales--from village-level to the global arena on which Ujamaa carried symbolic level. The book gave me much to think about, not just in relation to Tanzania’s national history, but in relation to themes, trends, and events in the broader world of 1960s and ‘70s Africa that I’m trying to capture in my own work.
A very different read dealing with African history was Francois-Xavier Fauvelle’s The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages. This book consists of a series of short investigations of objects, narratives, people, or texts that in different ways shed extraordinary light on medieval Africa. I found the writing to be oddly clunky (it is in translation), but in spite of sometimes weird prose, the short sections, sometimes as short as four or five pages, represent a brilliant integration of historical, archaeological, linguistic, and philological study of early African history. The Golden Rhinoceros gave me many ideas for my African history course in the spring, and was enjoyable for the frankness with which it discussed the challenges of interpretation, the necessity of hypotheticals, and the richness of the African past.
Bridging the early-modern and modern worlds, but feeling all to contemporary, William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire was a fairly epic and very lively account of the trajectory of the East India Company, the joint stock company which morphed into a territorial ruler of much of South Asia. What made Dalrymple’s book on the East India Company relatively distinct was the wonderful attention it gave to the politics and personalities of the Indian subcontinent and its many states and empires, in some ways provincializing the place of the East India Company--even if that place became increasingly prominent over time. It is cliche but also crucial to note that this approach--relying on impressive, multi-lingual sources--grants these important Indian empires, kingdoms, and confederacies the agency that they deserve. Written for a broad audience but still eye-opening for this historian with only limited knowledge of South Asian history, this massive book was an immensely enjoyable read.
In a year in which Brexit comprehensively dominated British politics, Robert Saunders’ Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain was a great jaunt into the recent past and to another recent debate about the place of Europe in Britons’ lives, and of Britain in Europe. Saunders is careful in the connections he draws between the ‘70s and the present, but Yes to Europe! documents the orientations and strategies of Britain’s political parties, the sometimes curious collections of interests that coalesced around the two sides of the debates and, as the title suggests, the 1970s as a whole, a period oft-caricatured, but seldom well understood in Britain.
Another excellent book on recent British history was Camilla Schofield’s Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. Powell was a Conservative British politician who famously and dramatically framed British debates about multiculturalism as a life and death struggle for the integrity of a racially-defined British community in a changing world at the end of an empire he once adored but later came to see as an albatross of sorts around Britons’ necks. Schofield’s book is a good intellectual biography not just of Powell, but of a whole interrelated series of communities and ideas in ‘60s and ‘70s Britain in particular. In a different way from Yes to Europe! this book is an origins story of sorts for contemporary Britain.
While the 1975 referendum and Powell’s argument that diversity was an inevitable recipe for strife and communal breakdown take readers back in time, Lewis Goodall’s The Strange Death and Rebirth of Labour Britain is interested in using the very recent past to more explicitly look at events unfolding beneath our feet, and to look forward. Goodall is a young journalist from a working class background, and therefore representative, he convincingly argues, of a constituency once central to Britain’s Labour Party, but increasingly feeling left behind. Goodall’s book ranges from the qualitative--layered descriptions of his working class upbringing--to the quantitative--looking carefully at polling and public opinion--in exploring the limits of Jeremy Corbyn’s regeneration of left politics in the Labour Party. Ironically, Goodall is of the opinion that Corbyn’s hair-splitting on Brexit was probably the best approach the Labour Party could have taken in order to retain the working class that was once, but is now far less so, a central component of its governing coalition. The concerns of Corbyn’s corner of the left, along with longer-term changes in the Labour Party’s orientation toward British and global politics, Goodall suggests, make the twenty-first century a real challenge for whomever wins the leadership of the Labour Party as Corbyn departs from power.
The last of my favourite two books of 2019 were for me nostalgic reads of different kinds. The first was an indulgent return to the curmudgeonly and retired Inspector Rebus, the Scottish detective brought out of retirement in Ian Rankin’s In a House of Lies to do battle with sinister crime bosses, recalcitrant former office bosses, and the intricacies of a cold case. Having not read any of Rankin’s books in a few years, it took a little while to reenter the rhythm of his writing and reacquaint myself with the cast of characters, but soon my Scottish noir sea legs were back in place.
Fifteen years ago in September I sat down in my first college lecture course. James Egan’s Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology course not only converted me almost instantly to an anthropology major, but blew my mind by introducing culture and debates over its nature as something incredibly important for understanding everything in the world around us, past and present. The idea of culture as an important construction has become commonplace, but was not an idea I had explicitly encountered in my then-eighteen years. Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century took me back through a catalogue of names and ideas to which I was first introduced through that course. The book centers on path-breaking anthropologist Franz Boas and his intellectual progeny, and the work they did in contributing to the dismantling of the idea that biological race defined supposedly-innate differences in our world. I most enjoyed the discussion of these ideas, their development, and their transmission, but the book also deals in great depth with the often tormented personal relationships between the small world of Boas’ students.
I have a long list of books to take me through 2020, and hope to add to it as friends and families share recommendations. And I maintain the hope that even a little bit of the right kind of writing and reading can play some role both in improving our troubled world and, when we are weary of it, temporarily transporting ourselves to interesting pasts, better futures, and alternative perspectives that shape us as individuals and communities. Happy New Year, and fiat lux!
I read a handful of very good things with environmental topics. I opened 2019 by reading Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution on a long train trip across wintry Scandinavia. It’s come in for revision and critique from later scholars, but The Death of Nature is nonetheless an eye-opening, provocative read about how new packages of ideas for thinking about science, reason, and the world more broadly have long term consequences for “nature”--in many regards a recent category in human history--and for many social relationships connected to land and resources.
David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming combines reporting and essays to offer a series of short but powerful chapters that represent the author’s considerable knowledge and thinking about climate change. Wallace-Wells both documents the extensive damage already wrought to our natural and social surroundings by anthropogenic climate change, and takes readers into some of the forecasting about the future we face. This is not a “feel good” read, and rightly suggests that absent some changes on a scale that we as a nation and global collective seem disinterested in pursuing, we face a dark future. It and some other excellent writing on climate change should be preoccupying all of our minds.
Equally timely is Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World. Mann’s book is not, strictly speaking, about climate change. Instead, he tackles the post-1945 world through the biographies of Norman Borlaug (the Wizard of the title) and William Vogt (the Prophet). The former collaborated with international agencies and scientists and farmers in Mexico, South Asia, and other parts of the developing world to engineer the so-called Green Revolution, a transformation in the realm of agriculture that deployed the best that science and technology had to offer, to escape the hunger threatened many of the world’s people. Vogt, in contrast, argued that the short-term escape offered by technological innovation only postponed a more serious reckoning. On the one hand a fascinating look into one of the twentieth century’s lesser known but more consequential “revolutions,” the book is on the other hand an excellent work of non-fiction that captures contemporary debates about how to address climate change by situating them in a longer historical context.
If climate change is the most fundamental long-term threat to human society, the growth of ethno-linguistic nationalism also preoccupied many of us during 2019 as we watched boorish, would-be authoritarians go from strength to strength. Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin’s National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy attempts to tie together a wide range of data and qualitative observations to offer some thoughts about the causes and potential consequences of these political transformations across the world. Their conclusions don’t neatly fit any particular ideological parameters, and some sections of the short but engrossing book are more convincing than others, but the chapters represent compelling mediations on the political crisis that accompanies--and in some cases is not unrelated to--our climate crisis.
On the fiction front, my favourites for the year were a mix of returning to what felt like old friends, and an introduction to new faces. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body continues to follow Tambudzai, a figure she first brought to life in Nervous Conditions in 1988. In some ways, this is a maddening book. The prose is less smooth and the characters less compelling--to my mind--than in Dangarembga’s earlier two novels. But it is equally maddening for the straits in which Tambudzai finds herself as she navigates--or more accurately fails to navigate--contemporary Zimbabwe. In spite of the first drawbacks, and because of the unease the latter attributes of the book generate in readers, I could hardly contain my excitement when seeing this on the bookshelf, and enjoyed every minute of it.
The second piece of fiction set in Zimbabwe I read during the year was Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone. It might be my favourite novel of the year. Spanning the years surrounding independence and Gukurahundi during the 1980s to nearer the present, the book was a complex mediation on relationships that are near-universal, and events and circumstances generated by Zimbabwe’s tumultuous late-twentieth century history. Set mostly in Bulawayo to Dangarembga’s Harare, this might have been my favourite novel of the year, particularly because soon after reading it I spent a week in Zimbabwe.
With John LeCarre’s Agent Running in the Field, the return was not so much to a character--like Dangarembga’s Tambudzai--as to a milieu in which, no matter how much the world has changed, the same literary rhythms, currents of power, and tangled relationships govern the world. I thought that in common with some of LeCarre’s other recent work, Agent Running in the Field was not entirely satisfactory in its abrupt ending, and also crackles with more palpable anger than the author’s earlier works. Its focus on a contemporary theme--the negotiations surrounding Brexit--made it all the more enjoyable.
Even closer to home, although more distant in its chronological setting, was Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Set in the U.S. during the rise of fascism in Europe, the novel explores an alternative historical frame in which Charles Lindbergh is compromised by a foreign power and challenges Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency. High politics form the compelling backdrop to how the slow drip of authoritarianism blended with antisemitism affect a Newark family and their neighborhood.
I found Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer to be a magnificent novel, touching on big questions about identity, loyalty, belonging, beginning, and migration. It was told with a convincing voice, a central character who seemed all-too-real in his internal musings, foibles, and dilemmas, and against the backdrop of spaces and events (surrounding the Vietnam War and its aftermath) that have traditionally surfaced in fiction in much different ways.
If several of these books represented new--at least for me--authors and characters, Laurie R. King’s The Murder of Mary Russell represented a return to a long-time indulgence: post-Doyle retellings of the Sherlock Holmes story. In King’s case, the mysteries center on the character--and in this case the disappearance of--Mary Russell, Holmes’ domestic and professional partner. I have long enjoyed these fun mysteries, but had fallen a couple of years behind, and so used the summer to read the most recent few in the series, of which I thought this was the best.
When a colleague reported hearing a review of Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, a novel set in Northern Rhodesia and then Zambia, I planned my reading of the novel for a summer stint in Lusaka. A multi-generational epic, with careful doses of magical realism, Serpell’s novel spans well over a century of entangled multi-racial Central African families and lives. The novel embedded its sprawling cast of characters in a range of turning points in Zambia’s history with a light touch, keeping the focus not on the historical drama so much as on how a series of interlocked families lived simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary lives amidst changes occurring at a distance. The Old Drift was all the more enjoyable to read when my daily movements took me past some of the places its characters traversed in Lusaka.
Also employing magical realism was Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, the earliest of a number of the Spanish author’s books dealing with hidden libraries, the real and ethereal power of the pen, intergenerational family drama, spectral dwellings, tortured relationships, and the rise and consolidation of Falangism in Spain. I read a couple of Ruiz Zafon’s books during the years, and although all were compelling reads which more than once made me stumble off a curb with my nose embedded between the pages while walking home from work, the first was the best, partly because some of the elements and motifs grew repetitive when read in close succession.
I generally prefer my fiction in the form of novels, but I became engrossed in Jennifer Mansubuga Makumbi’s series of short stories, Manchester Happened. This very moving collection--in which a couple of characters make repeat appearances in different stories--deals with the experiences of Ugandan migrants in the UK and, on a few occasions, the experiences of those migrants when they return to Uganda. Perhaps partly because 2019 was yet another year in which the vulnerability of migrants to cruel and destructive nationalism was so apparent, and partly because the author of the epic Ugandan novel, Kintu, proved herself equally adept at this genre, this collection was certainly near the top of the year’s fiction list.
However, I can more easily justify time spent on non-fiction, and so the last portion of this list is largely devoted to such works tangentially related to things I write and teach about. Priya Lal’s African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World, is a fascinating account of the Tanzanian state’s attempt to craft a genuinely national version of collectivism. What makes Lal’s work particularly brilliant is how she anchors her study so carefully and compellingly at various scales--from village-level to the global arena on which Ujamaa carried symbolic level. The book gave me much to think about, not just in relation to Tanzania’s national history, but in relation to themes, trends, and events in the broader world of 1960s and ‘70s Africa that I’m trying to capture in my own work.
A very different read dealing with African history was Francois-Xavier Fauvelle’s The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages. This book consists of a series of short investigations of objects, narratives, people, or texts that in different ways shed extraordinary light on medieval Africa. I found the writing to be oddly clunky (it is in translation), but in spite of sometimes weird prose, the short sections, sometimes as short as four or five pages, represent a brilliant integration of historical, archaeological, linguistic, and philological study of early African history. The Golden Rhinoceros gave me many ideas for my African history course in the spring, and was enjoyable for the frankness with which it discussed the challenges of interpretation, the necessity of hypotheticals, and the richness of the African past.
Bridging the early-modern and modern worlds, but feeling all to contemporary, William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire was a fairly epic and very lively account of the trajectory of the East India Company, the joint stock company which morphed into a territorial ruler of much of South Asia. What made Dalrymple’s book on the East India Company relatively distinct was the wonderful attention it gave to the politics and personalities of the Indian subcontinent and its many states and empires, in some ways provincializing the place of the East India Company--even if that place became increasingly prominent over time. It is cliche but also crucial to note that this approach--relying on impressive, multi-lingual sources--grants these important Indian empires, kingdoms, and confederacies the agency that they deserve. Written for a broad audience but still eye-opening for this historian with only limited knowledge of South Asian history, this massive book was an immensely enjoyable read.
In a year in which Brexit comprehensively dominated British politics, Robert Saunders’ Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain was a great jaunt into the recent past and to another recent debate about the place of Europe in Britons’ lives, and of Britain in Europe. Saunders is careful in the connections he draws between the ‘70s and the present, but Yes to Europe! documents the orientations and strategies of Britain’s political parties, the sometimes curious collections of interests that coalesced around the two sides of the debates and, as the title suggests, the 1970s as a whole, a period oft-caricatured, but seldom well understood in Britain.
Another excellent book on recent British history was Camilla Schofield’s Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. Powell was a Conservative British politician who famously and dramatically framed British debates about multiculturalism as a life and death struggle for the integrity of a racially-defined British community in a changing world at the end of an empire he once adored but later came to see as an albatross of sorts around Britons’ necks. Schofield’s book is a good intellectual biography not just of Powell, but of a whole interrelated series of communities and ideas in ‘60s and ‘70s Britain in particular. In a different way from Yes to Europe! this book is an origins story of sorts for contemporary Britain.
While the 1975 referendum and Powell’s argument that diversity was an inevitable recipe for strife and communal breakdown take readers back in time, Lewis Goodall’s The Strange Death and Rebirth of Labour Britain is interested in using the very recent past to more explicitly look at events unfolding beneath our feet, and to look forward. Goodall is a young journalist from a working class background, and therefore representative, he convincingly argues, of a constituency once central to Britain’s Labour Party, but increasingly feeling left behind. Goodall’s book ranges from the qualitative--layered descriptions of his working class upbringing--to the quantitative--looking carefully at polling and public opinion--in exploring the limits of Jeremy Corbyn’s regeneration of left politics in the Labour Party. Ironically, Goodall is of the opinion that Corbyn’s hair-splitting on Brexit was probably the best approach the Labour Party could have taken in order to retain the working class that was once, but is now far less so, a central component of its governing coalition. The concerns of Corbyn’s corner of the left, along with longer-term changes in the Labour Party’s orientation toward British and global politics, Goodall suggests, make the twenty-first century a real challenge for whomever wins the leadership of the Labour Party as Corbyn departs from power.
The last of my favourite two books of 2019 were for me nostalgic reads of different kinds. The first was an indulgent return to the curmudgeonly and retired Inspector Rebus, the Scottish detective brought out of retirement in Ian Rankin’s In a House of Lies to do battle with sinister crime bosses, recalcitrant former office bosses, and the intricacies of a cold case. Having not read any of Rankin’s books in a few years, it took a little while to reenter the rhythm of his writing and reacquaint myself with the cast of characters, but soon my Scottish noir sea legs were back in place.
Fifteen years ago in September I sat down in my first college lecture course. James Egan’s Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology course not only converted me almost instantly to an anthropology major, but blew my mind by introducing culture and debates over its nature as something incredibly important for understanding everything in the world around us, past and present. The idea of culture as an important construction has become commonplace, but was not an idea I had explicitly encountered in my then-eighteen years. Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century took me back through a catalogue of names and ideas to which I was first introduced through that course. The book centers on path-breaking anthropologist Franz Boas and his intellectual progeny, and the work they did in contributing to the dismantling of the idea that biological race defined supposedly-innate differences in our world. I most enjoyed the discussion of these ideas, their development, and their transmission, but the book also deals in great depth with the often tormented personal relationships between the small world of Boas’ students.
I have a long list of books to take me through 2020, and hope to add to it as friends and families share recommendations. And I maintain the hope that even a little bit of the right kind of writing and reading can play some role both in improving our troubled world and, when we are weary of it, temporarily transporting ourselves to interesting pasts, better futures, and alternative perspectives that shape us as individuals and communities. Happy New Year, and fiat lux!
