Author: Alice Burton

The Black Panthers were founded in 1966 in Oakland, California and quickly became a hugely influential group in America. This graphic novel “explores the impact and significance of the Panthers, from their social, educational, and healthcare programs that were designed to uplift the Black community to their battle against police brutality through citizen patrols and frequent clashes with the FBI, which targeted the Party from its outset.”

Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman in America to receive a medical degree (which she was able to achieve in part because the students voting her into the school thought it was a joke). She and her sister Emily, also a physician, founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women, and were very interesting figures. Check this out if you’re looking for some new women’s history reads.

Ok, this is awesome. McKinley, a writer and curator, looked at how images of African women were primarily seen from an anthropological perspective or exoticized, and so in this book, she “draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos to present a visual history spanning a hundred-year arc (1870–1970) of what is among the earliest photography on the continent. These images tell a different story of African women: how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in their style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of the colonial oppression that threatened their selfhood and livelihoods.” Awesome.

Once again: fwoof. Patricia Highsmith was a…hm. Lot going on there. Author of Carol (aka The Price of Salt), Strangers on a Train, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, she was an acclaimed writer. But in this new biography, Bradford “considers Highsmith’s bestsellers in the context of her troubled personal life; her alcoholism, licentious sex life, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and abundant self-loathing.” He also points out that “her status as an LGBT icon is undermined by the fact that she was excessively cruel and exploitative of her friends and lovers.” If you want to learn more about Highsmith and what on earth her deal was, here’s this new bio.

I continue to be very into the James Baldwin Renaissance we all seem to be living through. Originally written in 1963, a year that I think we can relate to in this upside-down time, it contains two essays: “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind.” It’s a modern classic and at 130 pages, one you can fit into your reading sched.

I really admire when someone can tell a story in the number of pages it should be told. This story’s really neat! But I don’t need a padded-out 350 page book about it. We just straight-up didn’t have longitude at sea figured out for most of human history. You could figure out your position based on the stars (hey there, Polynesian wayfinding), but if you were trying to calculate longitude, couldn’t do it. UNTIL THIS GUY. He invented a way to figure out where you were at sea, which meant you had less of a chance of being completely lost/shipwrecked. This is the story of how he did it.

This book! So short! So good! Such an iconic cover. I read this over my lunch break at a women’s history museum, because they sold it in the gift shop. It’s adapted from Adichie’s TEDx Talk, which was given in 2012. Remember in 2014 when Emma Watson gave a speech in the U.N. and people were like, “Emma Watson said she’s a feminist!!” Because that word was still associated with the scorn that people had been piling on it for years? Adichie saying “We should all be feminists” was pushing all that baggage off it and saying something unusual and extremely impactful. It’s an important read!

When Murakami was training for the New York City marathon, he decided to keep a journal. This resulting book is about “his intertwined obsessions with running and writing, full of vivid recollections and insights, including the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer.” I’m not a runner in the slightest, but this is getting bumped way up in my TBR pile.

What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Toni Morrison is here to get into those and other Giant Questions, but in a limited number of pages, because she doesn’t need a lot of fluff and nonsense to make herself understood. This clocks in around 136 pages and seems like an excellent read for 2021.

You know how sometimes you vaguely remember something like talcum powder causes cancer, but you don’t remember where you heard it and have no idea if it’s true? This book is there to give you some solid footing or some solid undercutting of your belief in medical myths. Yasmin has done a pretty good video series on these, and has helped debunk a number of COVID-19 myths this past year. Really looking forward to this one so I can confidently discuss whether we are running out of antibiotics (probably not if it’s in the myth book!).

It’s 1597. You’re a Dutch explorer (just go with it). You’re in the Far Arctic and your ship has been crushed by icebergs. Some people love survival-against-the-odds stories, and if you’re one of those people, you’ll love this story of how William Barents and his crew spent nine months fighting polar bears. It also talks about “survival at twenty degrees below, the degeneration of the human body when it lacks Vitamin C, the history of mutiny, the practice of keel hauling, the art of celestial navigation and the intricacies of repairing masts and building shelters.” Omg it sounds so FACT-filled.

You’ve hopefully seen Amber Ruffin on Late Night with Seth Meyers or her excellent Drunk History episodes. This book, written with her sister Lacey, centers around Lacey’s experiences living as a Black woman in Nebraska. I like how the stories are described as “entertainingly horrifying” and it also references their “laugh-out-loud sisterly banter.” I love sisterly banter! My wife is exTREMEly excited about this book.

I honestly think this is the main example of microhistories that always comes to mind, mainly because it was so weird in 1998 that someone wrote a book all about cod. Did Kurlansky start the trend? PERHAPS. He did also write the one on salt. His theory here seems to be that without cod, people would’ve just sat around not eating, and the Basque people would’ve had nothing to sell. INTERESTING STUFF.

Imagine it. Someone asks you what you’re reading and you say, “Oh, just Brolliology: A History of the Umbrella.” Saying “brolliology” is extremely fun, but also, think of how long in human history we just did not have umbrellas and how extremely annoying the rain must have been. When did that annoyance lessen due to the umbrella’s invention! Find it out here.

Historian Painter looks at the last two thousand years and “not only the invention of race but also the frequent praise of “whiteness” for economic, scientific, and political ends.” This history starts with the ancient Greeks and ends in the twenty-first century. If you want some solid facts about the invention of whiteness, check this out.

Am I adding this because For Real’s Kim liked it? Yes. Kim has good taste. Also, why not take a moment when a good percentage of the workforce is suddenly NOT in an office and see why we ended up in offices in the first place. This is the “fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is—and what it might become.”

This book is so good! Beck looks at “how elitism and racial prejudice has driven the narrative of feminist discourse.” The way I keep talking about it is that it’s made me reeeeally examine my own assumptions about feminism and women’s history and how those were put in place initially. It’s informative, it’s thought-provoking, get into it.

I confess to including this at least partially because it’s published by Pegasus Books, which has an endearing history of publishing nerdy history books. The Battle of Hastings was that pivotal 1066 battle when the Normans booted out the Anglo-Saxons and William the Conqueror became King of England. This looks at who the Normans were, who the Saxons were, and apparently gets reeeeal into battle specifics, so be aware if you’re not into military tactics.

Effa Manley, the first and only woman inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, was the co-owner of the Newark Eagles, who won the Negro League World Series in 1946.
“[J]ust as her Eagles reached their pinnacle, so did calls to integrate baseball, a move that would all but extinguish the Negro Leagues.” This tells her story and the story of the “teams coached by Black managers, cheered on by Black fans, and often run by Black owners.”

I cannot tell you how excited I was to see this title coming out. If you’re like a lot of people in America, you at some point have been anxious that you’re not DOING enough. Price’s book “explores the psychological underpinnings of the ‘laziness lie,’ including its origins from the Puritans and how it has continued to proliferate as digital work tools have blurred the boundaries between work and life. Using in-depth research, Price explains that people today do far more work than nearly any other humans in history yet most of us often still feel we are not doing enough.” Should we all read this? Probably.

The next entry in Prothero’s 25 Discoveries series (previous works include fossils and dinosaurs) shares 25 vignettes concerning those who made discoveries that became important to our understanding of evolution. Seems a good book to dip in and out of, which is always a useful thing to keep on hand.

Look. Some books I put on here for you, some books I put on for me, and some I put on because I assume someone somewhere is interested. But no, delving deep into any subject can be fascinating, and master distiller Arnold travels the world and tells you all about flavor, what farmers are doing, and what terroir is and why it definitely is not the word terror.

You might have heard of the Green Book, but if you haven’t, it was what offered Black American travelers some measure of safety from the 1930s to 1960s. The Green Book listed hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for them. Taylor’s book “shows the history of the Green Book, how we arrived at our present historical moment, and how far we still have to go when it comes to race relations in America.”

In 2016, Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch, was murdered in a suspected honor killing. Journalist Maher tells Baloch’s story and “depicts a society at a crossroads, where women serve as an easy scapegoat for its anxieties and dislocations.”

Historian Chatelain not only covers the history of fast food companies and their relationship with Black communities, but how those companies have historically exploited those communities. It “tells a troubling success story of an industry that blossomed the very moment a freedom movement began to wither.”

It’s not a secret that mainstream feminist issues were decided by white, middle-to-upper-class women. Kendall argues that “food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care” are all feminist issues, and should be included in the narrative.

This is on a lot of “best of” lists this year. The Galvin family had 12 children born between 1945 and 1965. Six were diagnosed as schizophrenic, and the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. tw: abuse

Friendship book! Sow and Friedman are the hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend and have been friends for more than ten years. In their Book of Friendship, they highlight the importance of “society’s most underappreciated relationship.” Roxane Gay said “This is the kind of book that makes you want to reach out to your best, biggest friends to say thank you.”

You know how nonfiction by poets can just hit differently? “As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these ‘minor feelings’ occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity.” If you missed this one this year, add it to your 2021 list.

My wife LOVES this book. “Four years ago, Glennon Doyle, author, activist and humanitarian, wife and mother of three—was speaking at a conference when a woman entered the room. Glennon looked at her and fell instantly in love.” This is her journey to build a life of her own, “one based on her individual desire, intuition, and imagination.” This feels like a good start-of-the-year sort of read.

This is part of Beacon Press’s ReVisioning American History series, written by two excellent historians. In fewer than 300 pages, they share the stories of enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and “women who lived outside the law.”

Let’s get the first point out of the way right away: Merlin Sheldrake is an amazing name. He covers yeast, he covers mushrooms, he covers “fungi that range for miles underground and are the largest organisms on the planet.” It’s so neat!! We can’t see them, but they’re there! Love to round out a roundup with a fungi read.

It is the VERY FIRST full-length biography of Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell. Terrell was first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a founding member of the NAACP and worked with people like Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells. She also died in 1954, which blows my mind, because I can’t fathom someone working with Douglass and also knowing about I Love Lucy. But she did! Presumably.

I love a young readers adaptation. Sometimes you don’t have time for adult nonfiction but you still wanna learn about a thing. Roundtree was a civil rights activist and lawyer, winning a 1955 victory before the Interstate Commerce Commission in the first bus desegregation case. She was also an officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in WWII, and later became a minister. Basically she did absolutely everything. Side note: I love this cover.

Wright puts the idea out there that American Christianity’s slow embrace of abolition hinged on its millennarian (assumption the world’s about to end) beliefs. If you’re a nerd about early American history or want to read about how a dominant religion helped and hindered the end of enslavement in America, check this out. I’m really jazzed about it.

This is the week for reformer bios to be released! If the name Pankhurst sounds familiar, it’s basically the Pankhursts basically ruled the English suffragist movement, led by Sylvia and her sister Christabel’s mother, Emmeline. “The vote was just the beginning of her lifelong defence of human rights, from her early warnings of the rise of fascism in Europe, to her campaigning against racism and championing of the liberation struggles in Africa and India.” Basically, she did a ton and this new biography is here to tell you all about it.

Sometimes you just want to read a book about books. Or reading. Or how great reading about books is. There are chapters like “The Joy of Sesquipedalians,” “Never Do That to a Book,” and “My Catalogical Imperative.” Mmm, cozy.

The tales of a veterinarian from Yorkshire! For those unfamiliar with the TV adaptation, never fear, because a new one is coming to PBS in January. Nothing says something’s a cozy read like the adjectives “witty and heartwarming.”

Botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Kimmerer “shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass ― offer us gifts and lessons.” This was a bestseller and made a lot of “best book” lists. What’s cozier than essays like “The Gift of Strawberries” and “Epiphany in the Beans”?

This 1906 reflection on tea is not only a history of tea, but a reflection on the East and the West (again, grounded in the fact it was 1906) and the beauty of the present. Okakura writes: “The whole ideal of Teaism is a result of this Zen conception of greatness in the smallest incidents of life.”

Hunt is an American journalist who has been living and working in London for a decade. Here we have her collection of essays on “what it means to be black, a woman, a mother, and a global citizen in today’s ever-changing world.” Wondering about the title? Read the first essay.

Y’know how sometimes you just want some history-related escapism, possibly in the form of a biography about a child-prodigy-turned-iconic-composer? Swafford has also written biographies of Beethoven and Brahms, so Mozart clearly had to be included through the means of a little backstep. If you’re a music nerd, or just curious about it, “it’s nearly impossible to understand classical music’s origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.”

Stand-up comedian, host of The Circle, co-host of the podcast Adulting and more, Michelle Buteau is hilarious. Here she recounts stories from her career, her dating life, and how she met her Dutch photographer husband at a club (remember how that used to happen? or at least did in movies?). I’ll bet the audiobook of this is gonna be great.

Look at that fun cover. And from a university press book! Juavinett “provides a candid look at the field, offering practical guidance that explores everything from programming to personal stories.” This includes the history of neuroscience, how to apply to a PhD program, the daily life of a grad student, and more. I honestly want to read this just to know how all that goes, because dang, what a complicated field.