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NonfictionAudioSocial Science

The Sum of Us

Review by Norah Piehl

A wide-ranging examination of racial inequity in America, written by the former head of a progressive think tank, might not be the most obvious audiobook choice for your next road trip. But to write The Sum of Us (11 hours), Heather McGhee traveled across the country—from coastal Washington and rural Kentucky to an evangelical church in Chicago and a Nissan plant in Mississippi—to understand the roots of white America’s zero-sum attitude toward racial equity and how this mistaken belief system damages everyone.

McGhee, who narrates the audiobook, brings the same thoughtfulness to her reading as to her writing. Listeners can hear the despair in her voice as she describes the atrocities of white plantation owners and the devastation caused by predatory housing lenders, as well as her hopefulness when she introduces listeners to coalitions succeeding in confronting voter suppression. From health care policy and environmental justice to the ongoing legacy of segregation, McGhee places urgent topics in a new framework, supported by research and illustrated by stories of Black and white Americans from across the country.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of the print version of The Sum of Us.

Heather McGhee, who narrates the audiobook for The Sum of Us, brings the same thoughtfulness to her reading as to her writing
NonfictionSocial ScienceMusic

A Little Devil in America

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Both of Hanif Abdurraqib’s earlier books—They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us and Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest—skillfully weave memoir and cultural criticism. He’s known for unraveling our ideas about music, history and culture and then using threads of commentary and insight to stitch a totally original pattern.

With the same ingenuity, Abdurraqib traces the depth and diversity of Black modes of performance in his brilliant A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance. Opening with an examination of Black dancers who participated in the dance marathons of the early 20th century, Abdurraqib dispenses prose in motions that shuffle forward, step sideways, leap diagonally and waltz gracefully through five sections exploring different facets of Black performance in America.

Performance can be liberating, like when dance marathons give partners “a powerful enough relationship with freedom that you understand its limitations.” It can also provide an opportunity to show off, as in the dance line on “Soul Train.” Performance can demonstrate self-awareness, too—a chance to define yourself by how your body moves when you’re throwing down in a beef, which Abdurraqib vividly illustrates as a kind of performance. He traces the rich history of performance through sketches of Black magicians, dancers and musicians, including Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Josephine Baker, Aretha Franklin and Merry Clayton, who’s most famous for her performance on the Rolling Stones’ track “Gimme Shelter.” Clayton’s chapter may be the best in the book, if only because it gives her the recognition she deserves for her ethereal voice.

A vibrant showcase of sharp writing, Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America attests that Black performance at its root is not simply an outward show of talent but also a means of survival. Read carefully. Abdurraqib’s book is a challenge not to accept the usual explanations for the performances we witness.

Hanif Abdurraqib unravels our ideas about music, history and culture and then uses threads of commentary and insight to stitch a totally original pattern.
NonfictionSocial Science

The Sum of Us

Review by Matt Gifford

Why can’t we have nice things? Depending on your lot in life, you may ponder this from time to time. Things like easy access to health care, fair public utilities, unions that provide job security and protect worker rights—these are all societal gains that many other nations have achieved. So why can’t the United States, the wealthiest nation on the planet, provide these and other amenities to every citizen?

This is the question that Heather McGee, former director of the think tank Demos, asks in The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. She ably moves through some of the largest infrastructural deficiencies in the U.S. and explains how a zero-sum mindset, combined with the constant plague of systemic racism, have led to fewer amenities for all.

McGhee’s anecdotes about the past read like cautionary parables for the future. For instance, throughout the 1920s, the Works Progress Administration built hundreds of public swimming pools across the nation to provide relief from the summer sun. But after federal courts ruled that segregated swimming was unconstitutional, many cities opted to fill their grandest pools with concrete rather than allow Black swimmers to use them. And so no one got relief from the heat.

McGhee unpacks how this kind of thinking shows up in every sector of society. Businesses have stoked racial mistrust to divide unions in their factories, using social capital to turn workers against collective bargaining. Years of accumulated racial resentment have kneecapped attempts to provide universal healthcare coverage, from Harry Truman’s era to Barack Obama’s. State-subsidized college tuition and affordable housing were vilified as handouts for the undeserving poor, which led to absurdly high tuition rates and the housing market crash of 2008.

Supported by remarkable data-driven research and thoughtful interviews with those directly affected by these issues, McGhee paints a powerful picture of the societal shortfalls all around us. There is a greater, more just America available to us, and McGhee brings its potential to light.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: The Sum of Us is excellent on audiobook, read by the author.

Heather McGee moves through some of the largest infrastructural deficiencies in the U.S. and explains how systemic racism has led to fewer amenities for all.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Raceless

Review by Deborah Mason

Georgina Lawton was born to a white mother and father and had a white brother. She grew up nestled in the love of her white extended family—English on her father’s side, Irish on her mother’s. Growing up in a predominantly white borough of London, she attended majority-white private schools and became close friends with her white classmates. And yet, as we learn in the first pages of Lawton’s eloquent memoir, Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity and the Truth About Where I Belong, Lawton is not white. She is biracial, born nine months after her mother’s one-night stand with a Nigerian man. Clinging to the myth of a “throwback gene” from survivors of the Spanish Armada on the west coast of Ireland, her parents fiercely insisted that their daughter, despite all outward appearances, was white. When Lawton discovered the lie at the heart of her identity, her shock and sense of betrayal were nearly enough to break her.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Georgina Lawton shares her experience of transforming memory and truth, joy and pain, into her compelling memoir, Raceless.

Raceless is the personal narrative of Lawton’s struggle to create a new sense of self. It’s a thoughtful and far-reaching investigation of the importance of racial identity, covering a wide variety of issues including identity theft, the perils and pluses of DNA analysis, how beauty standards are used to repress women of color and the soul-destroying effects of microaggressions. Lawton writes about her journey with passion, erudition and more than a touch of sass. Most of all, she writes with searing honesty—about herself, her family and our society.

Ultimately Lawton’s story is one of reconciliation and redemption, which can only ever be achieved with truthfulness, and of the limitations of love. Her father lavished his love on her from the day she was born until he died from cancer, but his love also allowed her family’s deception to flourish. In this new chapter of her life, Lawton’s fearless quest for the truth enables her to forgive her mother and rebuild their love.

Beautifully and movingly written, Raceless is an important book about the cost of deception and the value of identity.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Georgina Lawton was born to a white mother and father. And yet, as we learn in the first pages of her eloquent memoir, Raceless, Lawton is not white.

NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

The Soul of a Woman

Review by Anna Christensen

“My anger against machismo started in those childhood years of seeing my mother and the housemaids as victims,” writes Isabel Allende in The Soul of a Woman, her reflection on how feminism has shaped her life. “They were subordinate and had no resources or voice. . . . My feelings of frustration were so powerful that they marked me forever.”

Allende, a fixture of Latin American storytelling since the publication of The House of the Spirits in 1982, is well qualified to deliver a feminist manifesto. Those who have followed her career are familiar with the number of times she has struggled defiantly to overcome roadblocks in her path. The House of the Spirits, which addressed the ghosts of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, was rejected by Chile’s macho publishing culture. (Eventually it was published in Argentina instead, to great acclaim.) While many critics have praised her work, comparing her to Gabriel García Márquez, she’s also had many detractors, mostly male writers who seemed determined to dismiss her. In The Soul of a Woman, Allende describes these experiences and others that imbued her with the grit and tenacity that define her today.

Allende discusses her past matter-of-factly and directly, without losing her piquante humor. Her mother was an unconventional and vivacious woman who grew bitter under the heavy hand of patriarchy and misogyny. Allende decided to adopt a different way of life for herself, despite the misgivings of her mother and stepfather, the Chilean ambassador to Argentina. She details her career from its roots in feminist journalism through the literary pursuits that made her a success in spite of adversity and personal tragedy.

Ultimately Allende tells us of a life lived fully, for better or worse. The passionate choices she has made are boldly laid out without apologies in this slim volume. Allende even reflects on the twilight of her life, though it seems unbelievable that such a vibrant spirit could ever dim. But when it does, the blaze her life leaves behind will illuminate this world for decades to come.

 

In The Soul of a Woman, Isabel Allende describes the experiences that imbued her with the feminist grit and tenacity that define her today.
NonfictionSocial ScienceFamily & Relationships

American Baby

Review by Alice Cary

In 1961, 16-year-old Margaret Erle fell in love, got pregnant and was sent to a Staten Island maternity home. She gave birth to a boy she named Stephen, but as an unwed mother, she wasn’t allowed to hold her child. She and her boyfriend, George Katz, were saving money to elope (against their parents’ wishes) and wanted to keep their son. Despite their repeated resistance, social workers forced them to sign away their parental rights, and their son was adopted by a loving couple and renamed David Rosenberg.

Fast forward to 2007, when journalist Gabrielle Glaser met Rosenberg in Oregon for an article she was writing about his kidney transplant. Rosenberg revealed that he hoped the article would somehow help him connect with his birth mother. Then in 2014, he called Glaser to say that he had finally located Margaret Erle Katz. George had passed away by then, but his birth parents had indeed married and had three additional children. Rosenberg jubilantly added, “She’s loved me my whole life.”

Glaser realized that Katz’s story represents the experiences of more than 3 million young women who became pregnant in the decades between World War II and 1973, the year that abortion became legal in America. Her resulting chronicle, American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption, tells a heart-wrenching tale that will resonate with many.

“Stephen was part of a vast exercise in social engineering unlike any in American history,” Glaser writes. These closed adoptions made tracking down birth parents or adopted babies nearly impossible before DNA testing. To make matters worse, unscrupulous agencies often lied to both birth mothers and prospective parents. Rosenberg’s parents, for instance, were told that his birth mother was a gifted science student who wanted to continue college rather than become a mother. In truth, Katz longed for and worried about her son every day of her life—for a while they unknowingly lived just blocks away from each other in the Bronx—and her anguish rings loud and clear on the page.

The results of Glaser’s extensive research read like a well-crafted, tension-filled novel. Even though its form is vastly different from Dani Shapiro’s personal DNA memoir, Inheritance, both books deal with reconciling the past and uncovering long-buried secrets.

American Baby is a powerful, memorable story of “two journeys, a lifelong separation, and a bittersweet reunion” shedding light on a chapter of history that changed the lives of millions of Americans.

Gabrielle Glaser’s extensive research into adoptions that took place between World War II and 1973 reads like a well-crafted, tension-filled novel.
NonfictionSocial ScienceBusiness & Finance

Made in China

Review by Jessica Wakeman

Many Western consumers know that the cheap items we buy are made by people who are paid poorly. But fewer consumers know about the worshippers, political dissidents and others in China who are forced to make these items against their will.

In the fall of 2012, an Oregon mom was going through some Halloween decorations when something fell out of her package of styrofoam gravestones. It was a letter. She opened it up to find an anonymous plea asking the reader to report to a human rights organization about the Chinese forced labor camp where the decorations were made. Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods by Amelia Pang is the story of that forced labor camp and the man who wrote the letter.

His name was Sun Yi. He was once an employed and happily married man, but because he was a Falun Gong practitioner (a meditation practice that the Chinese government considers a cult), he was sent to a forced labor camp called Mashanjia. China calls these camps laogai—“reeducation through labor” or “reform through labor.” In laogai, prisoners are forced to make goods that are sold around the world. Yi was kept at Mashanjia for several years, making decorations for nearly 20 hours every single day.

Readers should be aware that horrific violence occurs throughout the book. Pang's reporting provides an unflinching glimpse into the human costs behind our cheap products, and those costs include sexual assault, torture, maiming and death. There are descriptions of the extensive torture Yi endured in the camp, as well as a chapter that deals with forced organ donation.

Prior knowledge about China is not needed to understand Made in China. The book is an excellent entry-level explanation of Chinese religious and political history, and how human rights abuses intersect with billion-dollar businesses. Pang connects the dots between globalization, Western consumption and sustainability to create a clear, cohesive picture of the problem, as well as of potential solutions.

Made in China is an excellent entry-level explanation of Chinese religious and political history, and how human rights abuses intersect with billion-dollar businesses.
NonfictionSocial Science

Waste

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Something was wrong in Lowndes County, Alabama. Sewage was backing up into people’s yards, and the county was threatening to arrest residents who lacked a proper septic system. But buying and installing a new septic system was cost prohibitive for many residents of this rural county, where the systems are prone to failure because of the soil’s high clay content.

Environmental activist Catherine Coleman Flowers brought senators, activists, media and other public figures to her home county to show them the conditions people lived in. She wanted to bring awareness and funding to people who couldn’t “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” because they didn’t have any boots to begin with, she writes in Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret. Flowers pressured the state to stop criminalizing poverty, and as awareness grew, she was able to coordinate new septic systems and sometimes even new homes for people in need.

In Waste, Flowers recounts a lifetime of advocacy that has culminated in the battle for one Alabama county. Flowers was raised by Civil Rights activists, with others in and out of her home, and so advocacy has been a theme throughout her life. And though Lowndes County is at the heart of her work, Flowers writes about similar conditions across the United States.

Known as “the Erin Brockovich of sewage,” Flowers shares many insights into America’s need for environmental justice. “I believe we will find solutions if we can direct the energies of academics, business, government, and philanthropy toward finding them," she writes, "and that’s where public policy comes in: to make this issue a priority, set standards for how we will live in the United States, and provide incentives for innovative solutions.”

Her direct, easy-to-follow prose offers a plain look at the challenges that face many people in poverty and the value of activism. The lessons she takes from seeking wastewater solutions may inspire advocates nationwide. 

Something was wrong in Lowndes County, Alabama. Sewage was backing up into people’s yards, and the county was threatening to arrest residents who lacked a proper septic system. But buying and installing a new septic system was cost prohibitive for many residents of this rural…

NonfictionSocial Science

Mediocre

Review by Sarojini Seupersad

Ijeoma Oluo, author of the bestselling book So You Want to Talk About Race, offers a historical and sociological view of the toxic white male identity in her new book, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. Oluo persuasively argues that American society is structured to preserve the power (and tastes) of white men and outlines how we got here.

Our now-ingrained power structure wasn't inevitable but was purposely designed to center white men. Looking back at centuries of American history, Oluo shows how white male entitlement took hold from the early beginnings of this country—from slavery to westward expansion to the genocide and displacement of Indigenous Americans; from cowboy mythology glamorizing the violence of “Buffalo Bill” Cody to the modern-day obsession with spoiled but dangerous white men like Ammon Bundy.

Americans are taught that the United States is a meritocracy and that anyone who tries to get ahead will be rewarded with opportunities. However, the evidence doesn’t bear this out. With example after example—the male feminists of the early 20th century, NFL owners, presidential candidates and even their supporters—Oluo deftly shows how the society that white men built now rewards mediocre white men, regardless of their skills or talent, while punishing women and people of color for anything less than perfection. Unfortunately, when ordinary white men do not receive the unmitigated success they feel is their right, they turn their disappointments and anger on these women and people of color instead of on the elite white men who hoard opportunities and power for themselves. Because of this, disaffected white men are now the biggest domestic terror threat in the United States.

Oluo expertly shows how inequality, toxic masculinity and an unequal power structure deeply hurt all Americans, including white men. Through careful research and scholarship, she breaks down the system that sustains the status quo while shedding light on the ways others can also dismantle this system to ensure a more equitable future for all. It’s an essential read during times of political upheaval and unsure futures.

Ijeoma Oluo, author of the bestselling book So You Want to Talk About Race, offers a historical and sociological view of the toxic white male identity in her new book.

NonfictionSocial ScienceHistory

Magic

Review by Catherine Hollis

In Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, From the Ice Age to the Present, Oxford professor of archaeology Chris Gosden treats readers to a history of humanity through the lens of magic. Gosden defines magic as human participation in the universe through ritual and art. From Paleolithic cave art and Egyptian burial practices to 19th-century spiritualism and 20th-century paganism, magical objects and rituals have always been a part of the human experience. Even in cultures guided predominantly by the two other great belief systems, religion and science, magic has often persisted alongside them.

In this beautifully illustrated and written book, Gosden offers an encyclopedic compendium of magical practices across the globe and throughout history. Readers will gain much from the transhistorical perspective Gosden offers. For example, the shamanism practiced on the Eurasian Steppe in 5000 B.C. traveled from Mongolia to Iron Age Western Europe, where it was practiced by the Celts. This history can be traced through the objects found in ancient burial sites and under excavated stone circles, examples of which are reproduced throughout the text.

The global and historical reach of Gosden’s knowledge is astonishing and makes this book an essential reference work. But Gosden has another compelling trick up his sleeve. The book’s humane, urgent conclusion suggests that magic may even offer some clues for surviving our current global climate crisis. Many of the magical rituals and practices discussed here rely on the notion of an animate and sentient natural world. “To be human is to be connected,” Gosden argues. If we can reawaken our sense of connection to the natural world—to trees and animals and oceans—we may be able to encourage more humans to practice living lightly and harmoniously with the world around us.

In Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, From the Ice Age to the Present, Oxford professor of archaeology Chris Gosden treats readers to a history of humanity through the lens of magic. Gosden defines magic as human participation in the universe through ritual and…

NonfictionSocial Science

Can’t Even

Review by Jessica Wakeman

It is my sincere hope that millennials will read Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Petersen’s new book about the professional zeitgeist—that is, if they’re not too burned out to do so.

In nine well-researched chapters, Can’t Even feistily fleshes out Petersen’s viral 2019 BuzzFeed article about millennial burnout. Interviews with a diverse array of millennials and deep analyses of labor history, class and sociology illustrate just how bad life has gotten for many members of this age group. What was called “workaholism” in the 1980s is called “hustle” in the 2020s—and if you can’t hack it, that’s on you. The result for too many Americans is insurmountable student debt, an erosion of job security, the rise of the gig economy, the fetishization of freelance work, a lack of leisure time and a trend toward “competitive martyrdom” in parenting.

Woven throughout Can’t Even is a sharp critique of boomer parents and employers. White, middle-class boomers in particular inculcated high expectations for the future in their children while tearing down the safety net beneath them. Petersen drives home the point that our current problems are not personal but societal—and yet, when a millennial cannot afford health insurance or a down payment on a house, it’s judged as laziness. No wonder so many people experience life as constant busyness and feel guilt for relaxing. “Burnout . . . is more than just an addiction to work,” she writes. “It’s an alienation from the self, and from desire. If you subtract your ability to work, who are you?”

However, readers don’t need to be personally burnt out for Can’t Even to resonate. If social media or the gig economy touch your life in any way, there’s something to chew on here. Fortunately, Petersen doesn’t offer any “hacks” or “tips” to pare back our busy lives. Instead, she advocates for societal self-reflection and an assessment of our values to spur change: Do we really want to live this way?

It is my sincere hope that millennials will read Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Petersen’s new book about the professional zeitgeist—that is, if they’re not too burned out to do so.

In nine well-researched chapters, Can’t Even feistily fleshes out…

NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Conditional Citizens

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

“Being a citizen of the United States, I had thought, meant being an equal member of the American family, a spirited group of people of different races, origins, and creeds, bound together by common ideals,” writes Laila Lalami. “As time went by, however, the contradictions between doctrine and reality became harder to ignore. While my life in this country is in most ways happy and fulfilling, it has never been entirely secure or comfortable.”

Lalami is an American citizen. She earned that title in 2000, eight years after she came to this country to earn her doctorate at the University of Southern California. She is also a Muslim woman and a native of North Africa. She may have passed the United States’ citizenship test with ease, but because of the markers that identify her as an immigrant, Lalami’s citizenship is often treated as conditional.

In Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, Lalami examines the ways in which people of color and people who live in poverty are often treated as less than. It’s the first work of nonfiction for Lalami, a novelist who won an American Book Award and became a Pulitzer finalist for The Moor’s Account. In this new work, Lalami blends analysis of national and international events with her own personal narrative. For example, a woman at one of the author’s book events asks Lalami to explain ISIS. Would a white writer of a novel set in an earlier time be asked to explain the Ku Klux Klan, she wonders. Conditional citizenship means being seen as representative of a monolithic group, rather than as an individual. These citizens are often asked to explain their entire ethnic groups to white people, Lalami writes.

Conditional Citizens is thoroughly researched, as evidenced by its detailed source notes and bibliography, but in this gifted storyteller’s hands, it never feels like homework. Lalami braids statistics and historical context with her lived experiences to illustrate how unjust policies and the biases that feed them can affect individual lives.

“Being a citizen of the United States, I had thought, meant being an equal member of the American family, a spirited group of people of different races, origins, and creeds, bound together by common ideals,” writes Laila Lalami. “As time went by, however, the contradictions…

NonfictionSocial SciencePop Culture

The Sprawl

Review by Alden Mudge

Think of The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs as an idiosyncratic road trip through America’s suburbs. Your guide, Jason Diamond, grew up in suburban Chicago but has lived much of his adult life in New York City. A recurring question during this excursion is whether or not Diamond will live in the suburbs again.

He tells us he has recently read everything he could find about suburbia. This includes fiction by John Cheever, who shaped our experience of suburban New York, and work by Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury and Celeste Ng. And let’s not forget William Gibson, the speculative-fiction writer who founded the cyberpunk genre and grew up in suburban Charlottesville, North Carolina, which he once described as “like living on Mars.”

There are movies, music and TV here, too. Who could forget Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candle or "Leave It to Beaver"?  Or the work of David Lynch, whom Diamond credits with darkening our simple notions of the suburbs with a haunting idea that “there’s darkness hiding in the corner of the [suburban] room or standing on the nice lawn.” Music? Yes! We park for a time along grassy streets to listen to garage bands rouse the neighbors. We imagine other garages where teens tinker toward new technologies.

“I like to seek out places connected to movies and shows I love,” Diamond writes. Thus we travel to Seaside, the real-life location of Seahaven Island from Jim Carey’s The Truman Show. More out of curiosity than love, we visit Celebration, Florida, Disney’s planned community, which Diamond says is pretty creepy in its near-perfection. We’ve already visited ur-suburbs like Zion, Illinois, and Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, would-be Edens founded by confused or saintly hucksters to escape the evils of city life without actually going back to hunting and gathering. And of course there is Levittown, New York, the very image of suburban regimentation. Finally, we pause in a cul-de-sac to briefly consider the changing demographics of suburbs in the age of movements like Black Lives Matter.

Like all road trips, The Sprawl has its lolling moments. Diamond’s suburbs are lonely and boring places in need of a sense of community or at least a trip to the mall. Our attention wanders, and we focus on what Diamond reveals about himself, his boyhood bouncing from suburb to suburb to be with one or another of his divorced parents. But then a thought rouses us: The very blandness of these burbs is at the root of an ongoing restless, creative explosion. Diamond, as promised, lets us see “just how much the suburbs have influenced our culture.”

Think of The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs as an idiosyncratic road trip through America’s suburbs. Your guide, Jason Diamond, grew up in suburban Chicago but has lived much of his adult life in New York City. A recurring question during this excursion is whether or…

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