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The Containment

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

For civil rights attorney and legal scholar Michelle Adams, the story of the fight to desegregate schools in metropolitan Detroit in the 1960s and early 1970s is personal. Born and raised in the city, she was introduced to the law early: Her father was one of only two Black graduates from the Detroit College of Law in 1957. She is now the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and has been an expert law commentator for documentaries about the Constitution and the Supreme Court. 

As readers of The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North will discover, Adams is also a consummate storyteller with an in-depth understanding of her subject. She deftly illuminates the complex history and significance of the 1974 Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley, in which the court overturned a lower court ruling that had approved the desegregation of schools not only in urban Detroit, but in 53 districts throughout the wider metropolitan area. The higher court determined that the segregation that existed in suburban neighborhoods did not warrant the redrawing of school district lines to achieve integration because no intentional discriminatory acts by the districts could be proven. Adams effectively demonstrates that this decision put a stop to a visionary, holistic approach to integration—an approach that might have served as a model throughout the North. 

The prologue opens in 2006, when Adams attended oral arguments at the Supreme Court, having filed an amicus curiae brief to support a Seattle school desegregation case (which ultimately failed). Some of the issues raised in that case, especially the question of how discriminative policies in housing and neighborhoods impact schools, made her think again of Milliken v. Bradley, a case she had often taught. She reflects on the many ways in which the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, which asserted that separate facilities cannot be equal, has largely been unfulfilled. Instead, policies and practices keep Black families contained in neighborhoods served by failing schools.

Adams’ riveting narrative sweeps readers into the effort to challenge Detroit’s separate and unequal school system in the 1960s and early 1970s. She digs deep to tell the story about a creative, hard-fought attempt at metropolitan desegregation, recounting how the court’s decision impacted the city, the activists and even the district judge who presided over Milliken v. Bradley in Michigan. 

While The Containment reads at times like a legal thriller, Adams never loses sight of providing readers with broader historical context and what the failure of Milliken v. Bradley means for Americans today. Nevertheless, Adams is not without hope for the future. She concludes, “In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court took us down the wrong path. But we can still choose another.”

Reading at times like a legal thriller, Michelle Adams’ The Containment sweeps readers into the effort to challenge Detroit’s separate and unequal school system.
Science Fiction & FantasyNonfictionFictionLiterary FictionHorrorHistoryEssays

Want a short, sharp blast of literary excellence? Try one of these 4 novellas

Feature by the editors of BookPage

The Turn of the Screw

For every reader, there are things that will make them politely but firmly close a book and never open it again. For me, it’s always been what I deem perverse ambiguity. “Who’s to say what really happened! People are unknowable!” a book will proclaim, and I will grip it by its metaphorical lapels and demand to speak to its author. However, for some books, the ambiguity is the point, and there is no better example of this than Henry James’ eerie novella, The Turn of the Screw. The tale of a governess in Victorian England who becomes convinced that the children she cares for are being haunted by the spirit of her predecessor, The Turn of the Screw is horrifying because of its inscrutability. It could be a traditional ghost story, but tilt it just a few degrees, and it’s a tale of a woman trying so hard to suppress her sexuality that it becomes a paranoid obsession. Is her quest to protect the children a noble one, or does something heinous lurk within her need to safeguard their “purity”? A novel might not have been able to sustain such ill-defined anxiety, but as a novella, it’s an undiluted sliver of dread. 

—Savanna Walker, Managing Editor

Foster

In rural Ireland sometime in the past, a shy observant child has left home for the first time. Her long-suffering mother will soon have another child, so the girl will be looked after by the Kinsellas, a kind couple from her mother’s side of the family who own a small dairy farm. Though we don’t learn the girl’s name or specific details of her life at her home, it’s clear within two pages that her family is very poor, and her father is a layabout who would happily see her left on the side of a road, as long as another man didn’t put him to shame by helping her. And because the girl is telling the story, we know that she knows all this too. In the Kinsellas’ house, the missus tells her, there are no secrets and no shame, and the days the girl spends with the couple are filled with order and delight, as well as a mounting understanding that the Kinsellas are not entirely happy. Foster is filled with moments of ease, heartbreak and joy. Despite author Claire Keegan’s bucolic setting, the story never pretends that life is easy. Keegan’s writing is spare but never austere, and the hour spent in Foster’s quiet world will change you.

—Erica Ciccarone, Associate Editor

A Small Place

OK, this isn’t a novella. But if you’re looking for powerful literature that you can read the whole of in a single dedicated burst, this 80-page essay by the great novelist Jamaica Kincaid fits the bill perfectly. Kincaid grew up on Antigua, an island in the Caribbean that was colonized by the British in the 1600s and became the independent country Antigua and Barbuda in 1981. In A Small Place, written just seven years after independence, Kincaid addresses the North American and European tourists who vacation on the 9-by-12-mile island, picking apart a tourist’s mentality to reveal its willful ignorance, and drawing connections between centuries of slavery under British colonialism and the corruption of Antigua and Barbuda’s government. There’s so much here—careful tracing of how history becomes cultural narrative, evocative descriptions of the island’s “unreal” beauty, anecdotes about Kincaid’s love of her childhood library. Everyone living in our so-called “post” colonial world, especially anyone who’s ever been a tourist, should read A Small Place.

—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, Associate Editor

Train Dreams

Inside the worlds of Denis Johnson’s fiction, the mundane evokes great sadness, terror or joy. Simple acts are magnified in subtle yet staggering ways. Along with his straightforward, limpid prose, this aspect of his writing makes the National Book Award-winner (Tree of Smoke) exceptionally suited for the novella format, as proven by Train Dreams, which tells the story of Robert Grainier, an itinerant laborer in the American West during the turn of the 20th century. Johnson gracefully doles out disjointed portions of Grainier’s life as it unfolds in an era suffused with ordinary tragedy. All around Grainier, people die from dangers both natural and human-made. But just as a ravaged forest returns after a massive fire, “green against the dark of the burn,” so does the humanity that stubbornly persists in this rapidly changing landscape. Despite—or as a result of—its short length, Train Dreams showcases Johnson’s impressive capacity for creating memorable characters, whether it’s a dying vagrant, or a man shot by his own dog. It’s truly a wonder that a book can fit so much engrossing vibrancy within so few pages.  

—Yi Jiang, Associate Editor

Our favorite quick reads pack an enormous punch in a slim package.
NonfictionSocial ScienceHistoryAmerican History

The Crazies

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Who owns the wind? Should people use their own property as they see fit, even if it has an impact on their neighbors? Drawing on transcripts from court proceedings, county commission meetings and public inquiries, as well as a wealth of interviews, Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Gamerman explores these questions and others in her riveting The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West.

In Big Timber, Montana, population 1,673, winds howl down from the Crazy Mountains, 30-odd jagged peaks that surround the valley in which generations of ranchers have eked out a living raising cattle or sheep. With views of the Yellowstone River, the land is marked by a rugged beauty. In recent years, wealthy, politically connected figures have built private retreats in the area. Most often, these folks are neighbors, as was the case of Rick Jarrett, a fifth-generation rancher on the land, and billionaire Robert Gordy, who “collected land the way other rich men collect art.” In 2015, Jarrett was struggling to pay his debts and secure the ranch for his family’s future generations. For Jarrett, as for any rancher, financial security was elusive because profits from the annual sale of cattle had to be turned back into maintaining the ranch, often with little left over.

When wind prospector Marty Wilde came along, offering to put up wind turbines on Jarrett’s ranch, the rancher jumped at the chance to profit off this natural commodity: the winds screaming down the Crazies. Wilde’s Crazy Mountain Wind company would also provide electricity to Big Timber, and have environmental and economic benefits for the whole town. Billionaire Gordy immediately objected to the plan: Windmills, he claimed, would be an eyesore, marring the beauty of vistas he enjoyed from his property. The Crazies tracks this sprawling modern-day David and Goliath epic through lawsuits and appeals and public hearings for over two years.

Gamerman’s captivating account of the struggle over private property, conservation, renewable energy and greed in a small corner of Montana is a gripping parable for our times.

Who owns the wind? A fifth-generation rancher and billionaire go to court over the matter in Amy Gamerman’s captivating The Crazies.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

In Open Contempt

Review by Kelly Blewett

Who are American heroes? What are American values? How do the answers to these questions change with time and perspective? Irwin Weathersby Jr. takes up these fundamental issues of our times in his indispensable In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space, which examines how we bear witness to sites and perpetrators of racial trauma, both collectively and individually.

Weathersby opens the book in New Orleans, just after Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s 2017 fiat that Confederate statues be removed from public spaces. He visits the sites of these absences and talks with people there: unaware tourists, gloomy white supremacists, a man who paused to see whether his dog would be willing to pee on a pedestal that used to elevate the figure of Jefferson Davis. Elsewhere, sites attempt to tell a more complete history, such as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which offers a tour about the lives of Jefferson’s over 600 slaves. Weathersby also visits sites of counternarratives, including the partially completed Crazy Horse memorial that stands in tension with Mount Rushmore, and Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War, a bronze statue of a contemporary Black man atop a horse in the style of Civil War monuments. Weathersby explores public spaces from Louisiana to Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, New York and beyond, and his vivid prose will likely have you searching online to see what he describes.

Weathersby also examines the history of the public spaces he encountered throughout his life as a Black person from Louisiana. Weathersby’s longing for education led him to Morehouse, a historically Black college in Atlanta whose campus showcases inspiring sculptures created by Ed Dwight, the first Black candidate for NASA’s astronaut program, whose rejection by NASA spurred him toward the arts. Learning about Dwight’s life showed Weathersby “how our lives are often unconsciously shaped by unseen sculptors of the physical and divine.” The New Orleans street where Weathersby grew up was one of dozens in the city named after enslavers. His family home was demolished after Hurricane Katrina. Monuments, Weathersby writes, “may appear to underscore the past—and they do this too—but in the process, they suppress other events and stories that shaped the commemorated life and space.”

In Open Contempt asks the reader to explore their own landscapes, and Weathersby knows what they will find: many traces, both obvious and subtle, of white supremacy. “Go looking for white supremacy, find it everywhere. Go looking for nothing, find white supremacy everywhere.” In this impeccable book, Weathersby exhorts readers to pay attention, and he offers his own story of looking so that we can see—and confront—our history alongside him.

Irvin Weathersby Jr.’s indispensable In Open Contempt examines how we bear witness to sites and perpetrators of racial trauma.
NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

Embers of the Hands

Review by Alden Mudge

There is much that glitters in Eleanor Barraclough’s learned excavation of Viking history, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. No surprise there. Her title comes from a metaphor for gold found in a Norse kenning, a type of figure of speech. She herself is a witty, sometimes earthy writer and a wiz at popularizing scholarly pursuits. (In 2013, she was named one of 10 BBC New Generation Thinkers for her ability to turn her research into programs for broadcast).

After an introduction with a sketch of Viking history, she takes up matters of love, belief, home, slavery, play, physical life and travel. By “travel,” she does not mean the oft-told tales of raiding parties of Viking barbarians like the one that fell upon the English island monastery of Lindisfarne in 793 C.E., launching, some say, the Viking Age. Instead she means “a web of connections that spanned cultures, countries and continents,” including exchanges with Eastern Europe and Turkey and the colonization of Iceland and Greenland.

Her interest is in the experience of common Vikings, the “everyday humans who fell between the cracks of history.” She tells their stories through well-crafted riffs on bone fragments, game pieces, discarded implements, farmstead scraps of material and other detritus that remain centuries after their deaths. A stick etched with runes informs us that a woman named Gyda wants her man home from the tavern. The surprising pervasiveness of combs and corroborating travelers’ accounts let us know that Vikings were unexpectedly well groomed. Other objects enable a reasonable reconstruction of what an older man in a brown woolen tunic looked like. Still others suggest the desperate hardships of living on remote farmsteads in Greenland as the climate changed and it became too cold to sustain farming.

Embers of the Hands is a stunning and perplexing adventure. Stunning because we have these sharp splinters from the past that tell us something about Vikings. Perplexing because our knowledge is so incomplete, so unstable, so subject to revision and change. With a revolutionary sort of scholarly caution, Barraclough even questions the boundaries of the so-called Viking Age; she proposes here three alternative beginnings and three alternative endings to the era. Instead of being a canal with compartmentalized locks, history “is more like a great untamed river,” she writes. Some readers will surely seek higher ground away from the torrents of time. Others will plunge into the deep.

The stunning, adventurous Embers of the Hands examines the lives of everyday Vikings who otherwise might have been lost to history.
NonfictionHistory

An African History of Africa

Review by Priscilla Kipp

We all come from Africa. Anyone who believes in science knows this to be true. It makes sense, then, that the award-winning Sudanese British broadcaster, filmmaker and journalist Zeinab Badawi begins her exhaustive An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence with Dinkenesh, a hominin female whose remains were discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia. Called Lucy in the West after the popular Beatles song, she lived more than 3 million years ago and is a definitive link to our common beginnings. Dinkenesh draws the reader in from the start. Then, Badawi leads us on an epic march through time.

Badawi is an expert guide, visiting ancient, overlooked ruins and telling the stories, often carried on through oral traditions of long-ago kingdoms. She describes the mosques, tombs and monuments with a sense of awe that is palpable and contagious. Badawi was especially struck by the Koutoubia Mosque’s “vast scale” and the “elegant simplicity of its arched interior” in Marrakesh, Morocco. The mosque was built in the 12th century by the Almohad people, who dedicated their wealth to the pursuit of science, medicine and mathematics; their work later influenced European intellectuals. Kings, queens, warriors and mystics come back to life, like Mansa Musa, a 14th-century king of the Mali Empire, whose wealth is still legendary. These stories are invigorated by the passionate voices of the many people Badawi interviews, including archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and local storytellers. At the same time, she shows the devastating impact of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and the political unrest that have ruptured the continent for centuries.

Badawi makes her immense wealth of knowledge absorbing. There’s the tragic story of the women of Nder, a village that is now part of Senegal. In November 1819, Arab enslavers tried to capture the village women and enslave them for sex. The women sent their children into the fields and fought off the soldiers. When the enemy regrouped, the women gathered in a hut and set it ablaze, “so, it will be ash that meets the enemy,” their leader proclaimed. One pregnant woman fled and later told their story of resistance. The village’s annual festival of Talata Nder commemorates these valiant ancestors.

Badawi further illuminates how African countries have gained their hard-won independence, surviving genocides, apartheid and epidemics; she also shows how some governments continue to struggle with nation-building. As Badawi adroitly proves, Africa’s story is far richer than the West chooses to believe, and historians and activists alike are working to reconstruct these many histories. An African History of Africa is a long overdue corrective that should be studied in every school and available in every library across the West.

Zeinab Badawi’s incredible An African History of Africa should be studied in every school across the West.
NonfictionHistoryBiographyAmerican History

A Man on Fire

Review by Roger Bishop

In 1881, Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in his diary that in the unlikely event someone would write his biography, “the key to my life is easily to be found in this, that what I longed for from childhood was not to be eminent in this or that way, but to lead a whole life, develop all my powers, and do well in whatever came in my way to do.” As Douglas R. Egerton shows in his magnificent, exhaustively researched and beautifully written A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the colonel, abolitionist, minister, legislator and writer did just that.

Egerton writes that “Higginson’s lifelong refusal to tether himself to a single issue has today kept him from fame by association with one. Scholars, whether of antislavery or literary or gender studies, tend to tell only part of Higginson’s story.” A noted Civil War historian, Egerton guides us expertly through the issues and personalities in Higginson’s various causes. He raised funds for evangelist-abolitionist John Brown’s fateful raid on the U.S. Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. As a Civil War army colonel, he led the first Black Union regiment and wrote about that experience in his classic Army Life in a Black Regiment. A prominent man of letters, Higginson corresponded with Emily Dickinson about her poetry, and his own essays and poems appeared frequently in magazines and newspapers. A noted public speaker, Higginson supported women’s suffrage and advocated for women’s participation in governance.

Egerton also sensitively captures the private life of this very public man, highlighting Higginson’s relationships with his mother; his first wife, Mary, who died in 1877; and his second wife, Minnie, and their daughters. Higginson had a basic optimism that drove his extraordinary activism. Despite the struggles for the reforms he fought for, he said in 1871 “that this is a remarkably good world, and there are remarkably good people in it.” This bright outlook rings through A Man on Fire, especially in Higginson’s writings, which Egerton cites throughout. In his memoirs, Higginson wrote, “It has been my privilege to live in the best society all my life—namely that of abolitionists and fugitives.”

When Higginson’s 1898 memoir, Cheerful Yesterdays, was published, his friend Samuel Clemens observed, “He was always doing the fine and beautiful and brave disagreeable things that others shrank from and were afraid of—and his was a happy life.”

 

Douglas R. Egerton’s magnificent, exhaustively researched and beautifully written A Man on Fire charts the extraordinary life of multitalented abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryMusicLiteratureHistoryFood & DrinkBlack HistoryBiographyAmerican History

The 12 best biographies of 2024

List by Editors
STARRED REVIEW
December 11, 2024

The 12 best biographies of 2024

Throughout 2024, biographies consistently stole the show. From renowned authors to heads of state, game-changing activists and cultural icons, these 12 illuminating profiles delighted and inspired us.
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Ira Gershwin

By Michael Owen

Michael Owen’s thoughtful, engaging biography illuminates the life and work of Ira Gershwin.

Michael Owen’s thoughtful, engaging biography illuminates the life and work of Ira Gershwin.

The Icon and the Idealist

By Stephanie Gorton

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.

Survival Is a Promise

By Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Audre Lorde gets her flowers in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is a Promise, a masterful, poetic biography of the literar and feminist icon.

Audre Lorde gets her flowers in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is a Promise, a masterful, poetic biography of the literar and feminist icon.

Night Flyer

By Tiya Miles

With the exquisite Night Flyer, Tiya Miles looks at Harriet Tubman from an entirely new perspective: her spirituality.

With the exquisite Night Flyer, Tiya Miles looks at Harriet Tubman from an entirely new perspective: her spirituality.

Loving Sylvia Plath

By Emily Van Duyne

Unearthed letters from Sylvia Plath may have shocked the world in 2017, but Loving Sylvia Plath shows we’ve long had all the evidence we needed to condemn her abuser, poet Ted Hughes.

Unearthed letters from Sylvia Plath may have shocked the world in 2017, but Loving Sylvia Plath shows we’ve long had all the evidence we needed to condemn her abuser, poet Ted Hughes.

Ascent to Power

By David L. Roll

Ascent to Power is a carefully crafted biography that superbly captures the presidency of Harry S. Truman.

Ascent to Power is a carefully crafted biography that superbly captures the presidency of Harry S. Truman.

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Throughout 2024, biographies consistently stole the show. From renowned authors to heads of state, game-changing activists and cultural icons, these 12 illuminating profiles delighted and inspired us.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

The Cure for Women

Review by Anna Christensen

When Charlotte Perkins Gilman published “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1892, it was a resounding hit among Victorian readers. What many did not know was that the story was a fictionalized account of Gilman’s own experience with the madness-inducing “rest cure” popular among doctors at the time, used to subdue any sort of mental or emotional complaint brought to their attention by women—or by their husbands. Gilman, in the throes of postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter, had undergone the treatment, which unsurprisingly offered her no relief, while in the care of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell. She did eventually find relief, however—not at the hands of the male doctors who brushed off her symptoms, but with the help of one of the first eminent female physicians in America, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi.

Lydia Reeder’s monumental The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine That Changed Women’s Lives Forever recounts the incredible life and achievements of her subject. Somewhere between Jacobi’s adventures in wartime Paris during her medical school days, her unrelenting efforts to open the doors of first-class medical schools to women, and her dogged work for women’s suffrage, she conducted research into women’s menstrual cycles by collecting data from women themselves—the first time any doctor or scientist had done so. As demonstrated by Gilman’s case, Jacobi treated her patients by listening to them and accepting them as fellow partners in their own health.

Jacobi’s research compelled other women to follow; Reeder notes that today, 60% of practicing physicians under the age of 35 are women. Yet it is possible to draw a direct line from the now obviously absurd and cruel “cures” Victorian doctors prescribed for women and the many ways that women’s health care remains lacking 150 years later. Neuroscientists are still confronting research effected by biological determinism and gender essentialism that echo the Victorian belief that women’s abilities are limited by their biology. By restoring Jacobi’s fascinating story to the forefront of the historical imagination, Reeder returns to us a much-needed, inspiring voice that is equally suited to our current moment in time.

 

Lydia Reeder celebrates the female physician who debunked sexist Victorian-era medicine in The Cure for Women.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

The Icon and the Idealist

Review by Anne Bartlett

It’s not as if birth control methods weren’t used in the olden days. Condoms, pessaries and douches didn’t magically appear in the late 19th century. But something did change significantly at that time in the United States: The Comstock Act of 1873 effectively criminalized the distribution of contraceptive devices and information about their use. The result was several generations of vituperative battles over a practice that had previously been routine for many, though seldom discussed in public.

At the vanguard of the fight for safe, effective and accessible birth control in the early 20th century were two dedicated activists, Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett. Author Stephanie Gorton tells the story of their interconnected lives in The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America, a compelling dual biography that has striking parallels to the contemporary abortion debate.

Despite a common goal, the two women loathed each other. Sanger, the “icon” now remembered as the mother of Planned Parenthood, spearheaded a mass movement that broke laws and made questionable compromises. Dennett, the “idealist,” played a more genteel inside game, lobbying Congress for a permanent change to the Comstock Act.

Obviously, they should have coordinated their efforts. But Dennett made a foolish mistake about Sanger early on, and Sanger never forgave her. Gorton adeptly shows how their contrasting backgrounds and personalities fed a grudge that helped shape our current world. The fact that you’ve probably heard of Sanger but not of Dennett tells you who prevailed at the time. But, as Gorton notes, the debate about whether court challenges or statutory change is the wiser long-term strategy has been renewed after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Gorton doesn’t shy away from the fact that both women allied themselves with the racist and xenophobic eugenics movement, which put “a scientific sheen on white supremacy and ableism.” Dennett and Sanger, she writes, “were intent on disrupting a specific form of oppression and yet were active in perpetuating another.” Wherever readers fall on the impact and morality of the two reformers, after reading Gorton’s fair-minded biography, it’s indisputable that their efforts helped an increasing number of ordinary Americans use birth control more safely and effectively. As Gorton writes, “Dennett and Sanger were instrumental in forcing lawmakers to recognize the kind of world Americans actually lived in, one where fertility control was nearly universally practiced.”

 

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
NonfictionHistoryBlack HistoryAmerican History

Resist

Review by Natalia Berry

From the Scottsboro Nine to Black Lives Matter, Black youth have positioned themselves at the center of the battle for civil rights for the past 100 years. In Resist: How a Century of Young Black Activists Shaped America, award-winning Nigerian American journalist Rita Omokha makes an unwavering push to put these young Americans’ stories at the forefront of the public record. 

Omokha’s research was spurred partially by the tragic murder of George Floyd and the unprecedented wave of protests around the country. A master of storytelling with a knack for thoughtful investigative journalism, Omokha has created a shining reexamination of history through a Black lens. For example, most of us learn about the Scottsboro Nine—the nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931—by reading the outlines of their case and legal proceedings, but how many of us see the ordeal from the Nine’s perspectives, or realize how thousands of students organized for charges to be dropped? It’s here where Omokha excels, providing a ground-level look at how young people were often thrust into organizing for civil rights. “Crucially, the most illuminating insights from history were not solely defined by actions but by the fervent optimism of the young. . . . Young ones who have intentionally learned from history, cautious of its perils, ready with their folded chairs at the table.” 

Omokha draws a clear line from these young people to the Black youth activists of today, exploring how technology has helped resurrect Black liberation movements in the past 20 years. When George Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder for killing Trayvon Martin, three Black women—Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Ayo Tometi—“declared what seemed spiritual, a sacred psalm in three simple words preceded by a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter.” Resist includes the stories of Darnella Frazier, the woman who videotaped George Floyd’s murder, and Johnetta Elzie, a co-creator of the Mapping Police Violence project, who launched into action after the shooting of Michael Brown. With the help of Omokha’s meticulous reporting, their stories go beyond the headlines and hashtags.

Ultimately, Resist is a must-read for anyone looking to dive into the collected history of Black youth activism and its immense impact on America—and perhaps learn how to take action themselves.

Rita Omokha’s Resist is a must-read for anyone looking to dive into the history of Black youth activism and its immense impact on America.
NonfictionHistoryCultural History

Golden Years

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

There will soon be more Americans over 65 than under 18. In the compelling, informative study, Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age, sociologist James Chappel explores the development of the old age movement in America and attempts to imagine how both individuals and policymakers can address our “gray future.”

Drawing on a wealth of historical, social and economic data, Chappel traces the various ways that Americans have described and addressed aging. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, individuals on farms and in factories worked until disability or death. By the mid-1930s, though, the passage of the Social Security Act sent a message to older Americans that they deserved dignity and security, even if they had stopped working. As the number of older Americans grew in the latter part of the 20th century, both government agencies and organizations in the private sector, such as AARP, attempted to enact policies and to create opportunities that would allow older Americans to live a dignified old age. (First called the American Association of Retired Persons, AARP now goes by its acronym alone, because people do not need to be retired to join.)

Chappel shows, though, that these policies “had always been premised first and foremost on the needs of one class of people: middle-class, married, white couples.” For example, older people with disabilities were left to fend for themselves by Medicare in the 1960s, and many of them were shunted into nursing homes. In addition, older Black Americans often faced (and still face) discriminatory treatment in nursing homes. Chappel highlights the work of activists like Black sociologist Jacquelyne Jackson, who lobbied Congress seeking new policies that would “recognize the specific realities and challenges confronting older Black people.” Another challenge to older Americans, Chappel observes, is that, by the end of the 20th century, the government began to increasingly push the burden of growing older back on families and individuals, often creating financial insecurity across generations.

Since we’re all growing older, how can we work together to shape decisions that will affect the ways we live out our old age? Golden Years is sometimes dense, but it’s worth the effort. Chappel offers a thought-provoking glimpse of how America has tried to imagine the needs and value of an aging population in the past, and how it might best understand and deal with a graying populace.

James Chappel’s thought-provoking Golden Years offers strategies to understand and address the needs of America’s aging population.
NonfictionSocial ScienceHistory

Custodians of Wonder

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

“So often, we hear stories about the first person to do something: the innovators, the pioneers,” Eliot Stein writes in his introduction to Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive. “But rarely is there a whisper for the last person to carry on a tradition, or a pause to look back and consider how these rites have shaped us and the places we come from.” Stein offers more than a whisper as he highlights 10 such customs around the world, profiling the women and men who preserve them.

Some of these customs are food- or craft-based, like the rare Sardinian pasta so fine that it’s called su filindeu (threads of God); and an ancient West African percussion instrument called a balafon that has been protected by a tiny village for 800 years. Others are rituals or jobs, like that of the night watchman in Ystad, Sweden, who every night climbs 14 stories of a 13th-century church to a bell tower to keep watch over the village, blowing a horn every 15 minutes to declare that all is well.

Stein sets his scenes in vividly painted settings. Introducing the temple village of Aranmula, on India’s southwestern coast, he writes, “Coconut trees swooped low like Nike swooshes over the water’s edge. . . . The night before, hot, heavy raindrops the size of nickels had fallen sideways in sheets.” Each chapter offers an in-depth profile of a practitioner, like Sudhammal J., Aranmula’s 48-year-old “Secret Lady Keeper,” who carries on her family’s ancient craft of melting tin, copper and other metals to make a highly reflective mirror believed to reveal one’s true self. Throughout these profiles, Stein threads cultural, geographic and political history, drawing out a few key details, and compressing centuries of history into a few paragraphs.

Despite the subtitle, not all the book’s customs are ancient. Asia’s last film poster painter practices a 20th-century craft. Nor are all the customs disappearing: The Japanese maker of traditional fermented soy sauce has seen demand grow, and he’s committed to helping others learn traditional techniques. Ultimately, Custodians of Wonder is a hopeful book, making the case that seemingly idiosyncratic and antiquated practices in distant corners of the world still matter; they reveal a particular place’s identity, and offer comfort, community and beauty even through centuries of change.

Eliot Stein’s vivid Custodians of Wonder documents the last people maintaining some of the world’s ancient cultural traditions, and proves that comfort, community and beauty never get old.

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