Timely Reads Part 2
Recommended reading for right now
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting social distancing we have composed a recommended reading list focused around books helpful for this moment.
Crisis! by Cedric de Leon is a timely analysis of the power and limits of political parties—and the lessons of the Civil War and the New Deal in the Age of Trump. Crisis! takes us beyond the common explanations of social determinants to illuminate how political parties actively shape national stability and breakdown.
The award-winning Broke and Patriotic by Francesco Duina asks “why are poor Americans so patriotic?” Duina conducted over sixty revealing interviews in which his participants explain how they view themselves and their country. This book offers a stirring portrait of the people left behind by their country and left out of the national conversation.
Are you reflecting on the challenges balancing childcare and work? In After the Rise and Stall of American Feminism Lynn S. Chancer articulates the need for universally affordable and high-quality daycare in order to achieve gender parity in the workplace.
Do you find yourself thinking more about your relationship with your neighbors? Los Angeles is a city of borders and lines, from the freeways that transect its neighborhoods to streets like Pico Boulevard that slash across the city from the ocean to the heart of downtown. The Border and the Line by Dean J. Franco takes up the central conceit of "the neighbor" to consider how the geography of racial identification and interracial encounters are represented and even made possible by literary language.
How are changes in our understanding of health and healthcare reshaping twenty-first-century personhood? One Blue Child by Susanna Trnka examines the emergence of self-management as a global policy standard, focusing on how healthcare is reshaping our relationships with ourselves and our bodies, our families and our doctors, companies, and the government.
Are you interested in the global medical community? The award-winning Ungovernable Lifeprovides insight into Iraq’s healthcare system. Trained as a doctor in Baghdad, Omar Dewachi writes a medical history of Iraq, offering readers a compelling exploration of state-making and dissolution in the Middle East.
What can we learn from previous health crises? In At Odds With Aids Alexander García Düttmann examines arguments bearing on the epochal significance of AIDS, the idea that AIDS reveals something uniquely characteristic of our time, hence that the epidemic marks a historical caesura. He develops a theory of historical witnessing suggesting that the phenomena of historical event and bearing witness are not at all separate, but instead are co-originary, inhering in the same complex.
Occupational Hazards by Elanah Uretsky follows a group of Chinese businessmen and government officials as they conduct business in Beijing and western Yunnan Province.
"Elanah Uretsky's forceful ethnography examines the entrenched male rituals of doing business in China, which include banqueting, drinking, smoking, and sexual entertainment—much to the detriment of these men's integrity and health, and to China's HIV/AIDS epidemic more broadly. Occupational Hazards is an important contribution to our understanding of this simultaneously powerful and vulnerable population, and to our understanding of public health in China."
—Arthur Kleinman co-author of Deep China and Director, Harvard University Asia Center
The Lived Nile by Jennifer L. Derr follows the engineers, capitalists, political authorities, and laborers who built a new Nile River through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the root of this investigation lies the notion that the Nile is not a singular entity, but a realm of practice and a set of temporally, spatially, and materially specific relations that structured experiences of colonial economy.
Are you meditating on how lucky you are to be able to shelter in place in relative comfort?
Hamas rules Gaza and the lives of the two million Palestinians who live there. Tareq Baconi’s book Hamas Contained offers the first history of the group on its own terms. Drawing on interviews with organization leaders, as well as publications from the group, Tareq Baconi maps Hamas's thirty-year transition from fringe military resistance towards governance. Hamas's reliance on armed struggle as a means of liberation has failed in the face of a relentless occupation designed to fragment the Palestinian people. As Baconi argues, under Israel's approach of managing rather than resolving the conflict, Hamas's demand for Palestinian sovereignty has effectively been neutralized by its containment in Gaza.
"Judicious and impartial, this important work adds nuance to the portrait of one of the Middle East's most divisive players."
—Publishers Weekly
Are you following the wisdom of Mister Rogers’ mother and “looking for the helpers?” We recommend the award-winning The Politics of Compassion by Bin Xu, which looks at the civic engagement of the unprecedented wave of volunteers and civic associations that streamed into Sichuan to offer help after a 2008 earthquake killed 87,000 people and left 5 million homeless.
Fateful Decisions edited by Thomas Fingar and Jean C. Oi brings together leading experts from a wide range of disciplines to write about China’s trajectory.
"No challenge today equals that of understanding China's future. A sterling team has sagely put together a powerful guide to the future of China, where the economy's weaknesses and strengths will continue to shape outcomes in politics, foreign policy, society, and security, and where the emerging economic and related downsides facing 21st-century China will more likely dominate its future than its amazing performances of the last five decades. A must-read!"
—Thomas R. Pickering, former US Under Secretary of State
Does social distancing have you reflecting on connection? We recommend the award-winning Connected by Steven Cassedy.
"Cassedy and his publishers don't want your eyes glazing over at the thought that this is yet another treatise bout how Twitter and Facebook and the like are changing the world. Instead, it's a frequently engaging look at how deeply the United States was changed over the course of a couple of decades in science, medicine, technology and art, and more significantly, in how it viewed itself."
—John Wilkens, U-T San Diego
Faces of Aging edited by Yoshiko Matsumoto foregrounds a spectrum of elder-centered issues—social activity, caregiving, generational bias, suicide, sexuality, and communication with medical professionals, to name a few—from the perspective of those who are living them. he volume's diverse contributors represent the fields of sociology, anthropology, medicine, nursing, gerontology, psychology, film studies, gender studies, communication, and linguistics, offering a diverse selection of qualitative studies of aging to researchers across the social sciences.
Now that pornography is on the Internet, its political and social functions have changed. So contends Why Internet Porn Matters by Margret Grebowicz in this imperative philosophical analysis of Internet porn.
"Grebowicz's skillful argument goes far beyond the usual debates about whether Internet pornography is 'good' or 'bad', encouraging us to think instead about the deeper philosophical and political meanings of porn and its distribution today."
—Karmen MacKendrick, Le Moyne College
