My own national book awards

The long list of National Book Award nominees for nonfiction for 2014 was released on September 17. It came to my attention when a friend on Facebook pointed out the limited diversity of the list--just one woman, and no people of color (more accurately, one, Anand Gopal).  But the lack of diversity is just one of the list's problems. If the major goal of non-fiction is to provide insight into important questions facing the larger society--certainly I think this is the goal--the list is almost a complete failure. Excluding Gopal's book, which sheds light on how Afghanis have experienced the American occupation of Afghanistan, I can't see how any of the books on the list (I admit I haven't read them) could qualify. Some of the list reads like a parody of current publishing cliches. There is neo-gilded age kitsch called "The Innovators." There is presidential hagiography, the main form of popular history in the US. Apparently we are moving on from Lincoln to FDR. If you pay any attention to these things, you will not be surprised that the words "at war" follow the president's name in the title. Another author has written a memoir apparently focused on her dysfunctional parents, not at all an overcrowded genre, and hailed as a breakthrough because it is in cartoon form ("the first cartoonist honored by the National Book Awards in the adult categories"). I would add, only a couple of decades after "Maus." A journalist travels around China in another title--I'm guessing he meets ambitious people who aren't too worried about the government, discovers there is a lot of corruption and pollution, and that inequality is growing. Three titles form a mini-treatise on the religious views of the nominating committee. "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic" sounds like pushback against Tea Party nonsense that postulates the founding fathers as fundamentalist Christians. But then "The Heathen School: A story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic" sounds somewhat sympathetic to Christian efforts to educate a multicultural cast of "heathens", demonstrating that the nominating committee is not rigidly anti-religion. And then E.O. Wilson's "The Meaning of Human Existence" offers a scientist's reflections on deep philosophical questions, showing that these sorts of meditations are not the monopoly of the religious. Rounding out the list are titles on Tennessee Williams and Paris under the German occupation seemingly plucked at random from a list of respectable sounding books published this year. What a dismal, unexceptional list. Excluding Gopal, efforts to engage with the major problems of our time are practically absent,  unless you want to believe the culture war between the religious and secular still constitutes the major dynamic.And the sad thing is this has been a great year for non-fiction works. I therefore offer the following list of books that should have been honored. It is not especially counterintuitive. A number of these books have gotten a fair share of attention. Two hit the bestseller list. This only raises more questions about the official list.(disclaimer--I haven't read all of the books below. I don't claim to agree with everything any of these authors say)

1. Thomas Picketty, Capital in the 21st Century I wasn't able to find rules on the National Book Award's website. I certainly hope, for their sake, that the rules forbid authors based outside the US. How else to explain the absence of the unchallengeable non-fiction book of the year? Simultaneously a serious economic history, an endorsement of a populist prognosis that the rich seem to be getting almost continuously richer at the expense of everyone else, and a bestseller, Picketty played a key role in returning inequality to public debate, after it had receded with the demise of Occupy.

2. Gerald Horne, The Counter Revolution of 1776 Horne's depiction of the American colonialists as simultaneously obsessed with expanding slave society and terrified of the prospect of slave revolt is not easily shaken. His narrative culminates with a fresh approach to the American revolution, as a rebellion against the prospect of abolition.

3. Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge Perlstein's history of the US in the seventies generated unfounded charges of plagiarism. His real crime--chipping away at the halo around Ronald Reagan, the signal historiographical achievement of the right wing in the last thirty years.

4. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything A very timely intervention putting both questions about the role of the state and the question of capitalism on the climate change agenda. 

5. Simon Head, Mindless:Why Smarter Machines are Making Humans Dumber Largely neglected, perhaps because of its unfortunate subtitle. A serious examination of the transformation of the labor process by computer business systems, that also highlights how these systems migrated out from the military. A worthy successor to Harry Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capitalism."

6. Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity A true story of slave rebellion that inspired fiction by Herman Melville provides a window into the relationship between slavery and capitalism.

7. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism  Now famous as a book The Economist declared was too hard on slaveholding whites, this also illuminates the relationship of slavery and capitalism. A big topic getting very belated attention is worth two nods on the list.

8. Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction That the Civil War presaged the total war of the twentieth century is a cliche; this book left me convinced that we should think of the wave of reactionary violence after the Civil War, ultimately successful in defeating the push for African American rights, as a precursor to the twentieth century reactionary terror in Spain, Indonesia, Chile, etc.

9. Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars Provides actual historical background that can be used to put the current attacks on teachers' unions and public schools in context.

10. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People's History of the United States Rather overdue telling of American history from the perspective of its victims. Hopefully this just released book will reopen a question that the American left has quietly abandoned.

11. Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City  Among other things, this ethnographer witnessed the police kill a man and falsify a report about it. Her subject--the relationship of young African American men to the justice system that torments rather than serves them--is crucial.


I could go on. There are many books being produced that develop insights into key historical and social questions of our time. These are books whose goal is not to score a few academic points, but to foster debate among a much broader public. Some of them have actually succeeded in doing so. I don't really understand the case for honoring the non-fiction on the long list of the National Book Awards as opposed to my list. Perhaps they have some other criteria. Maybe they have a more aestheticized understanding of non-fiction, in which what matters is the artfulness of the prose and the narrative structure. This sounds like a terrible idea to me. But even so, such a list probably wouldn't include celebrations of dot com entrepreneurs and presidents. Those books are not the next "In Cold Blood." Rather, the list seems to be saying "don't raise important questions. Keep producing grist for the NPR mill. We will honor you anyway." 

My 2013 Top Ten Books

Don’t trust “best books of the year.” Nobody really has the time to assess more than a tiny portion of the titles actually published. My own tastes run towards academic historical work, but I recommend these ten books to anyone curious about changing the world and interested in learning more about oppressive structures and efforts to change them. A few were published before 2013, but all were published in the last couple of years.

Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street by Mark Bray

Part ethnographic research on Occupy, part insider account of how things worked at Zuccotti, part sprinkling of the author’s thoughts on various topics like capitalism and anarchist strategy (better on the latter than the former), this book provides strong evidence for its thesis--that, at heart, Occupy was an anarchist movement that deliberately toned down its rhetoric so as to appeal to a much larger community.

Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of the U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia--Andrew Friedman

Mixing biographical vignettes, architecture criticism, and post-colonial history, Friedman illuminates the way Northern Virginia, home of the C.I.A., numerous private contractors, and more, has been critical to U.S. imperialism, and vice versa. Particularly vivid rendering of the evacuation of Saigon, which you may think has nothing much to do with Northern Virginia, but you would be wrong. Among other things, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the general executing a man during the Tet Offensive in one of the most famous photos from the Vietnam war, opened a pizza shop there.

Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economc Justice, 1960-1974--Gordon K. Mantler

Recovers the history of multi-racial coalitions as they developed during the sixties. Particularly memorable for its chapters on the Poor People’s Campaign, Martin Luther King’s last effort, an encampment in Washington D.C. that came to fruition just months after his assassination. Although remembered as a failure, Mantler shows the way it was a step forward in the construction of multi-racial coalitions, and also as a way to draw attention to a number of group’s causes. The largest demonstration of the campaign, the Solidarity Day March, compared favorably with the larger and much better known March on Washington in 1963 in terms of radicalism of message, diversity of speakers and inclusion of women.

Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present--Julian Go

Debunks the idea that the US is exceptional for its failure to exercise its power in the form of empire building. By closely comparing the US to Great Britain, Go shows how the forms of rule exercised by both states are virtually identical, varying in their application mostly because of changes in the global context. For example, while it is often said that the US exercises power indirectly while Britain formally subordinated colonies, Go reminds readers that the US had, and continues to have colonies, while Britain at times ruled indirectly, either using native elites to run colonies, or exercising decisive influence over formally sovereign states.

Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil--Timothy Mitchell

Ambitious book that maps the history of workers’ power, democracy, and decolonization on to the transition from coal as the major source of fuel to oil. In a nutshell, coal production and usage actually facilitated democracy and workers’ power, which were undermined by the move to oil. What’s next?

The Black Revolution on Campus--Martha Biondi Did you know that in 1969, historically Black A&T university in North Carolina was subject to a “”combined ground and air  offensive” ...featuring six hundred National Guardsmen, a tank, several armed personnel carriers, (and) an airplane and a helicopter”? No? Perhaps, like me, your understanding of the campus revolts of the sixties is mostly limited to predominantly white campuses. This book is a good place to start to fix that. It also explores the Black revolts on predominantly White campuses, and the movement for Black Studies. Like the Mantler book above, it leaves little standing of the myth that the identity-based movements of the sixties ignored economic issues.

We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution by George Ciccariello-Maher--Focused on the evolving relationship between the revolutionary left in Venezuela and the people, culminating in two great moments--the Caracazo riots of 1989 and the reversal of the coup in 2003--one hopes this book will lay to rest racist myths of Chavez as caudillo holding the Venezuelan masses in thrall. Instead, Chavez is here portrayed as a product of an upsurge in struggle, yet not the limit of that struggle. This book could conceivably lead to a more fruitful dialogue between Marxists and anarchists.

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom--Walter Johnson

Incredibly rich description of the slave system in the Mississippi valley, the heart of American capitalism in the decades before the Civil War. Johnson describes everything from the dogs used to chase slaves to the financial transactions that underpinned steam ships. He ends with chapters describing the adventures of those who tried to expand the system to Nicaragua and Cuba. Essential American history.

The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite by Mark S. Mizruchi

In response to a new climate at the end of WWII, with labor unions strong and assertive, a corporate elite consolidated committed to proposing solutions to the nation’s problems. For the most part, the policies it advocated for were to the left of what has been on offer from the Obama administration. Then the economic climate worsened in the seventies, and the corporate elite moved to the right, and successfully smashed its two constraints--labor unions and state regulators. Having triumphed, the elite fractured, and the US has drifted to the right ever since, unconstrained by either popular forces or a corporate elite that can see beyond its next tax break.

Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Movement as Myth and Memory by Penny Lewis

Another new perspective on the sixties, here dispelling the persistent notion that the anti-war movement consisted of students at elite colleges. Instead, Lewis highlights anti-war activity like rebellions of GIs, the anti-war aspect of African American and Chicano nationalism, and even anti-war activity in unions.