Although my family has been healthy and more fortunate than most through 2020, this was a year that deprived many not only of their health, wellbeing, jobs, or even their lives, but also of many of the pleasures of life. Of travel. Of meeting--outside of zoom--with friends. Of enjoying public spaces. This past year did not do wonders for my ‘productivity’ on most counts. But it did not take away my reading material, or my ability to enjoy reading at great length. I read plenty of lousy things along with the great things, but below are some of the highlights of my reading year and, as always, I’m keen for recommendations from anyone out there.
My “work” and “pleasure” books often overlap. This was particularly the case for a whole group of things I’ve read since March with environmental themes.
Most recently, I read Chris Otter’s Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology. Otter studies the way that foodstuffs--meat, sugar, and what--and human bodies--their metabolism and wellbeing--were altered as industrializing Britain’s habits and patterns of consumption took it far beyond its boundaries in a quest for food and the things to sustain food. Whole ecosystems--in South America, the Canadian Prairies, India, Australia--were altered to feed Britons, whose changing diets, and the technologies necessary to sustain those diets, literally altered the planet. Otter’s book not only makes a huge intervention about the relationship between food and ecology, but links this relationship to social inequality.
Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson’s Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District, takes readers to an ostensibly more bucolic environment. I’ve spent a great deal of time in England’s Lake District, and enjoyed this take on attempts to build community and find meaning out of a discomfort with the sweeping global changes that Otter described in Diet for a Large Planet. The book brings together histories of families, social networks, movements, and environments.
Even more enjoyable was Patrick Barham’s Badgerlands: The Twilight World of Britain’s Most Enigmatic Animal. Barkham takes readers through a bit of the history of human’s interactions with badgers--spoiler: they have not always been regarded as cute, cuddly, and worthy of protection. But most fascinatingly, he describes his travels around Britain meeting individuals who have become fascinated by and invested in the wellbeing of these animals. Finally, the book offers a snapshot of the intense debates in Britain over the past decades about whether badgers need protecting or destroying, because of their contested role in spreading bovine tuberculosis.
Thomas Lekan studies a very different ecosystem and set of issues in Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti. Lekan examines the involvement of German zookeeper and conservationist Bernhard Grzimek in redefining for Germans and the world the value of the Serengeti ecosystem in Tanzania. Grzimek’s advocacy created a history of Western investment in Tanzania’s protected areas and wildlife that endures to the present, but steamrolled other historical uses of the Serengeti’s landscape and human-scape, and represented real hubris, informed, Lekan tells us, both by West Germans’ post-World War II history, and East Africa’s history of colonialism.
One of my grad school advisors, Tabitha Kanogo, published a short biography of Wangari Maathai in Ohio University Press’ Short Histories of Africa series. Maathai was a Nobel Prize-winning Kenyan conservationist, and Kanogo puts her environmentalism and feminism center stage. The book is not only a great account of Maathai’s life, but also takes readers through some of the most important developments in Kenya’s history over the past century.
Grad school colleague, Bathsheba Demuth, wrote Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. I hugely enjoyed this incredibly well-written and very moving history of the people, animals, and relationships that cross over national boundaries past and present in the Arctic. I’m excited to re-read this book in the spring, when students in my environmental history class read it as a case study.
The last of the environmental-themed books that numbered among this year’s favorites was James Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Scott draws on the last couple of decades of scholarship of early peoples and states to get at issues that anthropologists and others have previously raised about the origins of human settlement, hierarchy, and state-formation. Scott suggests that agriculture might have bound people less because of the bounty it represented, than because of the power it--and grains in particular--gave the powerful to consolidate their authority. This very thought-provoking read, both because and in spite of Scott’s anarchist vantage point, is another one I’m having students read in the spring.
I had a hard time keeping my “favourites” among the African history books I read the past year this short, but here’s my attempt.
In my many visits to Kenya, I’ve ridden, dodged, and watched the ubiquitous matatus (minivans that serve as mass transit). Kenda Mutongi’s Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi is a phenomenal history of the rise of the matatu, and charts public transit in Nairobi from the segregation-stained days at the end of British rule through entrepreneurial attempts by matatu owners to occupy or create markets for mass movement. The book documents strikes, organizational leadership, commuter experiences, and much more.
Paul Lovejoy uses his book Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions to argue that West African jihads on the Sahel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should take their place alongside the French and American and Haitian Revolutions of the same period for their world history significance. Lovejoy argues that many jihads or their leadership were at least partly responding to the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and played a role in contesting--at least for people regarded as a part of the words of places like the Sokoto Caliphate--the endurance of that system. He also documents the role of enslaved people from areas affected by the jihads in leading anti-slavery risings in the Americas. I include this book although I think the topic and argument was somewhat let down by the editing, writing style, and density in some places. Its claims are definitely deserving of a broad audience.
Jacob Dlamini’s The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police was an intriguing meditation on memory, violence, and the logic of South Africa’s apartheid government, as it compiled details--sometimes exhaustive, sometimes contradictory--on the lives of its critics and opponents. Dlamini launches his investigation through, as his title suggests, a document or set of documents known as the Terrorist Album.
Historian Wendy Laura Belcher translated The Life of Walatta-Petros, a seventeenth century text about Walatta-Petros, an Ethiopian saint from the same era. I had previously read the full-length version, with extensive annotations and beautiful illustrations, but my students and I read the concise edition. The Life is a spectacular window into Christianity in seventeenth century Ethiopia, the lives of women, and the political dynamics of the African kingdom.
Many non-historians might be familiar with the history of the Congo during the nineteenth and early twentieth century through Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. Africanist Robert Harms approaches the history of the Congo basin and its surroundings from a different direction in Land of Tears: The Exploration and Exploitation of Equatorial Africa. Harms’ magnificent book explores the final few decades of the nineteenth century through the interactions of traders, explorers, and political powerbrokers. This book also moves more from east to west, charting connections with the East African coast and Indian Ocean world. Like King Leopold’s Ghost, this is designed to be accessible to a wider audience.
A few other non-fiction things stood out this year.
With students, I read Stuart Hall’s memoir, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. Hall was a British cultural theorist, and his moving memoir is a window not just into the intellectual circles in which he moved and that he helped to shape, but into a life lived, as the title suggests, between the Caribbean and Britain.
But my favourite memoir of the year was Sisonke Msimang’s beautiful Always Another Country. Msimang grew up in the community of South African exiles living in Lusaka, her father part of the African National Congress’ External Mission. Her memoir is a child’s and young woman’s perspective of the last decades of apartheid--seen from Lusaka, Nairobi, Canada, and the U.S.--and the first decades of South Africa that emerged from it. It was beautifully written and moving.
Also related to South Africa was a memoir/history from Larry Writer, Pitched Battle: in the Frontline of the 1971 Springbok Tour of Australia. Writer documents how the Australian anti-apartheid movement targeted the South African rugby team’s 1971 tour. For anyone still stubborn enough to think that sports and politics first became unnaturally entwined by Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, this should be an eye opener, particularly because the determined methods of the anti-apartheid protesters and the brutal response of authorities resemble the politics of our own era.
Distant from most of my reading about Africa and European history was Amy Offner’s Sorting out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas. This elegant book focused on Colombia, and how disillusioned New Dealers took their expertise in development abroad on a quest for privatization in Latin America. American internationalism in the 1950s and 1960s is usually associated with attempts to export social democracy, but Offner shows how this was not always the case. Colombia became a proving ground for the privatization, austerity, and hostility toward social democracy that neoliberals later enshrined in the U.S.
I particularly enjoy historical scholarship on areas and periods I know less about when historians master the ability to capture a place and a time in its various dimensions. Gyan Prakash accomplishes this in Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point. The turning point in question is India’s “Emergency,” and what it meant for Indian democracy, but Prakash interweaves details of the country’s universities, automobile manufactures, sterilization campaigns, and more to create a lasting impression of the circumstances in which Indira Gandhi left her fateful marker on India’s historical trajectory.
I read three very different California-themed books. The first was Jim Newton’s Man of Tomorrow: The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown. Regular readers of this blog--I assume one or two might exist--will know that if he knew I existed, I would be Jerry Brown’s nemesis. This biography is nonetheless far better than others that have been produced about California’s four-term governor in recent years. While still on balance fairly uncritical in its approach, it does a really nice job of situating Brown’s life and career against the backdrop of California’s twentieth century history. In addition to learning much about Brown, readers will gain insights into cultural, economic, political, and other trends in California.
My colleague William Bauer takes a very different approach to California’s past in California through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History. Using oral history projects from the New Deal era, Bauer writes a history of California that upends the usual benchmarks of time and place and source material by letting the Indigenous participants in the oral history projects, their memories, their myths, their names, and their paths guide us through the state we thought we knew. I particularly enjoyed this because many of the places Bauer and his narrators explain are ones in the northern half of the state that have played some role in my life.
The final read was also “personal,” in that northern California has been badly ravaged by wildfires in the past years. These fires are bigger, hotter, and less seasonal versions of the ones that forced my family’s evacuation on multiple occasions as a child. We thankfully had a home in the woods to return to on each occasion, unlike the residents of Paradise, California. Alistair Gee and Dani Anguiano shed light on the havoc the Camp Fire wreaked on many of the town’s residents in Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy. The book profiles a tragedy, but also the lives of people in rural and suburban northern California.
My fiction reads for the year ranged from some really superb things below, to lousy fiction I used to while away the tedium of quarantine.
Tade Thompson’s Rosewater was a sci-fi piece set in Nigeria around a team of government agents and scientists dealing with the presence of an alien biodome that has embedded itself in Nigeria’s soil. I don’t read a ton of sci-fi these days, and so I’m not sure how this measures up to other things in the genre, but I enjoyed the characters and the premise, and hope to get to the second two installments of the trilogy it inaugurates during 2021.
I enjoyed Maaza Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze when it came out some years back. The Shadow King is, if anything, better. Along with The Dragonfly Sea, this was probably the most elegantly written of the fiction I read this year. The novel focuses on Ethiopian women involved in resisting the Italian invasion in 1935. Memory, photography, and the weight of histories, personal and political alike, that different women from across Ethiopian society carried with them into the tumult of the ‘30s make the book an intense read.
Words like “lyrical,” “beautiful,” and “poetic” get overused to the point of meaninglessness by reviewers. But Yvonne Adhiambo Ouwor’s The Dragonfly Sea was all of those things, and the best novel I read this year. I don’t generally dog-ear novels the way I do books I’m using for research, but did so with this one, finding passages that elegantly captured a perspective, a fictional embodiment of some historical or contemporary event, or were just simply too perfect not to revisit. Set on Pate, and island off the coast of Kenya, the novel follows a young woman beyond the far reaches of the Indian Ocean, where she serves as the embodiment of a China-Africa relationship that slumbered for centuries. Her island community disrupted by Kenya’s participation in the War on Terror, studenthood in China, and the oceanic voyages all make for a magnificent novel.
Water is also at the heart of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. Set in a dystopian future (maybe 2021 at the rate we’re going) in which water is a commodity worth killing for in the arid American west, the novel imagines the power that state water agencies would wield, the black market trade around the natural resource and its unnatural uses, and the havoc this would inflict on its characters. From a literary standpoint the book doesn’t have the virtues of some of those above, but it’s a good read.
My book club chose Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous for one of the year’s reads. This poetic novel-that-reads-like-and-sort-of-is-a-memoir dealt with coming of age, migration, generation, and sexuality, in a way that made the author’s previous work as a poet entirely unsurprising. Well worth it.
At a job talk in the English department, someone mentioned Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. The short, powerful novel satirizes the self-help genre, while taking readers through in a moving way through its protagonist’s life story, and the paths taken and not taken.
Peace Adzo Medie’s His Only Wife explored the dynamics of family, social class, marital expectations, and womanhood in contemporary Ghana. In many ways unremarkable in its plot, this was nonetheless a fast-paced read that created a strong sense of pace and both a good central character and supporting “cast.”
I wanted to like Jonathan Coe’s Middle England more than I actually did. I can’t decide if it was the book that didn’t do as much for me as the earlier two installments in Coe’s fictional postwar Britain--The Rotter’s Club and The Closed Circle--or if I just didn’t like the characters as they had aged. The book was also billed as the novel to capture Brexit era Britain, and that didn’t feel quite right either. So it’s on here partly out of nostalgia for a return to characters who’ve been sitting unremembered on the shelf for a decade and a half, but also because some of the moments of absurdity Coe writes into his characters frequently bumbling lives make the book enjoyable, even if not the thing to sum up Britain’s 2020 zeitgeist.
There were a few books this year that I was particularly anticipating. One of them was Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gikuyu and Mumbi. In this epic, Ngugi retold the Gikuyu founding narrative in grand style. There were places where I felt things fell a little flat, or were a bit anachronistic, but even so The Perfect Nine was fantastic in capturing the energy of a world and society being made anew against a Kenyan ecoscape smoldering with magic and myth and history and human presence.
Determined to have students in my spring class read a novel, I decided on Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island, widely heralded as a novel that captures the dynamics of the Anthropocene. It certainly did a marvelous job of capturing a world of people on the move, willingly and otherwise. That same world is undergoing rapid environmental change, and Ghosh takes readers right to the places where these things meet.
In some ways, however, I enjoyed even more Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, set in the Sundarbans on the Indian coast. Also a candidate for class assignment, it felt a little too long and a little less on the nose, but it actually introduces some of the characters--better fleshed out--who make appearances in Gun Island. The book revolves around homecomings of various sorts, scientific study of an ecosystem in flux, and the power of the environment--amplified by human meddling--to wash away whole worlds.
The year isn’t over, and I’m currently alternating between Stephen Platt’s Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age and a volume edited by three historians, Global White Nationalism: From apartheid to Trump, both of which are very promising. But in the meantime, any and all recommendations for 2021 are welcome!
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