Summer reading

The beginning of June is probably a good time to roll out a few book recommendations. I'm getting the brain worms in my early old age now and I find I need to do a better job of keeping a record of what I've been reading. I used to have a Library Thing account for that. And there's still a Goodreads linked here on this very blog but I haven't used that in ages. Recently I've reverted to just keeping a boring old spreadsheet. But I'm going to try posting books here more often.  Otherwise, like everything else in life, if I don't take a second to write it down, I'll never remember any of  it happened.  So here are some titles I've finished over the past few months.  If I remember to do this more frequently, these posts won't be quite so long.  

• Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age Of Revolutions by Rashauna Johnson (2016)
  
  There is a long overdue movement in the treatment of slavery in popular history writing to place it in its proper context as a (if not the) founding institution of modern global capitalism.  Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told and Matthew Karp's This Vast Southern Empire are a couple of relatively recent popular books I can recommend here. Also here is a two part episode of The Dig podcast recorded during this "Slavery's Hinterlands" symposium at Brown University.
  
  Johnson's book contributes something to this as it traces the movement of enslaved people to, through, and from New Orleans during a pivotal period centered around the Haitian revolution. The context of this book is global but most of the focus is local. Slavery marked every aspect of life in the city. Johnson describes its effect on domestic living patterns in the city's neighborhoods. She discusses its influence on popular culture and entertainment. One example of ths is an explicit characterization of the sometimes romanticized raquette matches played near Hunter's Field during this period as a brutal and exploitative use of black bodies.  She also writes about the local jail's role as an aggregator and lessor of slave labor (some things never change.)
  
  Here also is a brief WWNO interview with Johnson from last May.



• The Parade by Dave Eggers (2019)
  
  This is a short novel you can read in a day or two if you want to. I'm not sure you actually have to, though. The style is a faux parable where two main characters (their names are not given) go to work for a contractor building a new road across a recently war-torn country (also unnamed) supposedly located somewhere in the global south. Things happen along the way but it ends pretty much the way you expect.  Imagine if Dave Eggers had tried to write The Road by Cormac McCarthy and this is what you would get.



• The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson (2018)
  
  This is a juvenile/YA novel that will probably show up on a lot of middle school summer reading lists this year. A young girl and her mother spend the summer away from their home in Atlanta at her grandmother's house in a small town in South Carolina. She discovers a letter in the attic that leads her and a neighbor boy to investigate a mystery from the town's past. That premise frames a story built around fictionalized historical episodes from the segregationist South combined with a sort of Count Of Monte Cristo story.  Explores themes of racial justice and LGBTQ acceptance.



• Automating Inequality: How High Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks (2018)
  
  Data driven systems for intake and management of social services make poor people easier targets for police. Eubanks describes experiments with screening systems for welfare benefits in Indiana and homeless services in Los Angeles as well as a "predictive" tool for assessing the risk of child abuse in Allegheny County, PA. She argues that these and systems like them constitute a "digital poorhouse" and an insidious expansion of the 21st Century police state.
  
  This is all very much worth paying attention to for New Orleanians as the City Council and Mayor implement so-called "tough love" homeless management and juvenile justice policies that can end up doing a lot of harm to vulnerable people under the very likely bad faith offer of aid.



• She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore (2018)
  
  This week, protesters took to the streets in Monrovia to express frustrations with the Liberian government headed by former soccer star George Weah.
  

  Among protesters’ main gripes: a stagnant economy in which most still live in deep poverty and a scandal in which the country last year lost $100 million in newly printed bank notes destined for the central bank.
  
  “Weah is not governing our state the right way,” said Ishmael Hassan, who voted for Weah in 2017 but has since become disillusioned. “The economic situation in our country is going down the drain.”

  Weah's election had been seen as a relief from the stagnation and corruption of the EJ Sirleaf government. Sirleaf came into power with high hopes after years of civil war under the dominant influence of Charles Taylor. Taylor came into power having led a revolt against the corrupt Samuel Doe. Doe came in... look this goes back a ways. Maybe we should start from the beginning.
  
  Okay so the nation we know as Liberia finds its origin in the efforts of the, ostensibly abolitionist, but primarily white supremacist American Colonization Society.  The idea behind ACS was to remove as many Americans of African descent as possible from the US by sending freed slaves to a newly founded colony on the West African coast. The Americo-Liberian colonists clashed with and quickly came to dominate the indigenous tribes living there. This continued on into the Twentieth Century as the elite colonizing classes collaborated with international corporations (most notably Firestone) to exploit Liberia's natural resources.  Basically, it was run as a big rubber plantation. Later, like pretty much every Third World nation, Liberia became a pawn in the US/Soviet Cold War rivalry until that played itself out at which point matters really began to deteriorate.
  
  You won't learn any of this by reading She Would Be King. But Moore's magical realist novel does attempt to relay some of the essence of Liberia's founding elements. Her three main characters are basically avatars of the country's ethnic mix embodied as folk heroes. They begin their stories living separate and oppressed lives in Virginia, Jamaica and the African back country.  Each discovers a unique magical gift as they move along on their journeys before coming together at the moment of the nation's independence.  The novel is successful in creating a mock folk legend about the people of Liberia. It's less compelling as a beginning-to-end narrative but that's not really the primary aim.



• Cities: The First 6000 Years by Monica Smith (2019)
  
  This is a quick and engaging survey of the archaeology of urban places that isn't anywhere near as ambitious as the title might sound. It's really more a personal summary of the author's observations and general theories based on her own work in the field. Most of which is quite fascinating although here and there the reader gets a sense of a creeping Pinkerist message. Trash is good, actually. Capitalism and class hierarchy are good and permanent fixtures of human society, actually. Things that seem bad now are actually not that bad because they are not new.  Probably the author doesn't mean for this to come through quite so explicitly. But if you are a reader who is sensitive to that sort of thing you might grow a little suspicious. Don't let that detract too much from what is really a delightful book, though. You're probably overthinking it.