Happy Friday, nonfiction lovers! This week has been a stretch, with some work travel and inconsistent weather that’s left me feeling a bit discombobulated. For today’s newsletter, I want to celebrate the upcoming election with some books about the importance of democracy.
Bookish Goods
All Booked Up Blanket from HandcraftedWithJoy
Who doesn’t need another throw blanket for your reading nook. I love all the colors this one comes in. $36
New Releases
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee
A new Siddhartha Mukherjee book! In this book, Mukherjee explores “medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells.” Like his other two magnificent books, he goes back in history to the 1600s with the creation of the microscope. From there, he follows the implications of understanding cells, including understanding humans as a “cellular ecosystem” to medicine that works by manipulating cells. His writing is so empathetic and human while still being great science — I can’t wait!
Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West by Katie Hickman
Many of the stories about the American West center around the experiences and impacts of men. In this book, best-selling history writer Katie Hickman tells the stories of women — wives and mothers in wagon convoys, Chinese sex workers in San Francisco, displaced Native American women, and more. To tell these stories, Hickman looks to primary and secondary sources to share many specific and universal stories about how women helped transform the country. This sounds great, and the cover of this book is so good too!
Looking for more new releases? Check out our New Books newsletter!
Riot Recommendations
With the midterm election less than two weeks away, I wanted to take this opportunity to share a couple of books about why supporting democracy is so important:
The Great Democracy: How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy, & Unite America by Ganesh Sitaraman
This book looks at two big eras of American democracy — the liberal era from the passing of the New Deal through the 1970s, and the neoliberal era “of privatization and austerity” from the 1970s forward. Ganesh Sitaraman, a legal scholar and policy expert, argues that as the neoliberal era starts to fall apart, we have the chance to look at what’s next — nationalist oligarchy or “great democracy.” I’m excited to read this one to get a sense of the kinds of things we may need to do to get to the culture we want.
How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
After the 2016 election, scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt began to ask an almost unheard of question — is our democracy in danger? Both have spent more than 20 years studying the breakdown of democracy in Europe and Latin America, and so in this book, turn what they’ve learned to the United States. They argue that democracy, more often than not, ends with a whimper — a slow eroding and weakening of critical institutions and political norms. I appreciate historians who can make connections to today, so this is definitely on my list.
One final recommendation is a daily newsletter from historian Heather Cox Richardson — Letters from an American. Each day she summarizes the major headlines and gives them some context, often back to the period after the end of the Civil War. She also co-hosts the Now & Then podcast and is the author of two books — How the South Won the Civil War and To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party. She’s amazing, highly recommended!
For more nonfiction reads, head over to the podcast service of your choice and download For Real, which I co-host with my dear friend Alice. If you have any questions/comments/book suggestions, you can find me on social media @kimthedork or send an email to kim@riotnewmedia.com. Happy weekend!