The Post-Woke Review of Books

A recap of what I've read over the past 15 months (it's long)

The last time I posted a few months ago, I laid out a plan to cover a wide range of ideas that have been weighing on my mind, hoping that by focusing on this list I could avoid getting lured into the week-to-week culture war topics. This has helped me accomplish one of my goals (namely, to regain some of my focus IRL), but unfortunately the lack of commitment to regular posting has led to a lull here. I thought I’d try to ease back into posting with something a little more straightforward: a recap of the books I’ve devoured in 2021 and late 2020.

In January 2020, it had been so long since I’d finished a real-life book that I made reading just two into a New Year’s resolution. I was halfway to that rather pathetic goal by October, when, realizing that maybe I had my entire worldview all (or mostly) wrong, I found myself suddenly desperate to get my hands on any content that I thought might be able to help me reconstruct a mental model of the world.

And so began my binge. Over the last 15 months, I finished 19 books as well as substantial portions of 3 additional books worth noting here. (Ok, I finished 20 if you include the one on potty training.) I thought I would share a recap by collecting the books by common themes or the “big idea” that could be synthesized by several in combination. If you’re looking for a new book to pick up, I hope you get a few ideas; otherwise, welcome to a little peek into how my brain is processing the world these days.

[Note: thank God for Overdrive and my local library. For whatever reason, my lifestyle is just not compatible with curling up with a printed book. The vast majority of these were finished via audiobook form in 20 minute chunks on the drive to and from daycare. (Sorry NPR; it’s not you, it’s me... Ok, it was kind of you too.)]

The causes and effects of American political polarization

The big idea: American political polarization is stuck in a vicious cycle, driving us further apart as we retreat into like-minded information bubbles that lull us into accepting extremism on our own side out of fear of extremism on the other side.

Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein (2020)

It’s an uncontroversial claim that the U.S. has become drastically more polarized than it was in the 1950s. After stepping through the recent history of the two major political parties, Klein provides a thesis of the causal mechanism that is so simple and elegant, it seems obvious in retrospect: As Americans have more free time for entertainment, news—specifically, national political news or info-tainment—has become the hobby of choice for a significant portion of the population. While the average American used to have multiple, cross-cutting forms of identity and connection with their fellow citizens (church, sports leagues, work, neighborhoods), many of us have gradually adopted our national party alignment as our primary form of identity. This can lead to extreme biases in what information we take in and how we process it. I do have one major qualm with this book: In a chapter entitled “Demographic Threat,” Klein makes the claim that Republicans are uniquely motivated by racial resentment (aka racism) and the rising tide of non-white immigrants. As I’ve explored previously, I feel like this is overly simplified and a major blindspot for Democrats, of which Klein is unapologetically one. This blindspot leads Klein to wrap the book by basically saying, “well, if our choice is polarization or racism, I guess I’m picking polarization.” One of my major beliefs at this moment in time is that it’s not either/or; it’s a vicious cycle that both parties are exacerbating.

The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt (2013)

Haidt develops several helpful mental models to explain puzzling aspects of human nature. Our mind is like a rider on an elephant, where the rational rider serves the emotional elephant. We have a “press secretary in our mind,” always ready to highlight whatever facts or considerations paint us in the best light or support our position. Humans are 90% chimp, 10% bee, and can activate a “hive mind” phenomenon to bind us into groups and achieve transcendence. Beyond these, he describes human morality as the evolutionary result of different tribes of people determining helpful rules to live by and then enforcing those rules within a culture. He explains how “morality binds and blinds,” contributing to the political division in America as each half of the country is operating on a different moral wavelength, gradually finding the other half more and more repugnant. Sadly, these phenomena have only gotten worse since he published this 8 years ago.

Republican Like Me, Ken Stern (2017)

I’d long assumed that Republicans were just generally more selfish, ignorant, and cold-hearted than Democrats; why else could they support the policies they do? By last fall, I was wondering if maybe there was more to the story. I almost didn’t pick up this book because of the title and cover, which suggested a conversion story (it’s not). Stern, a former NPR executive, had a similar realization as I had and decided to reach out to conservatives across the country to hear their perspectives directly from them. He explains how, for many conservatives, skepticism of government-run welfare programs is not about money so much as poor results. Many prefer to support private charitable organizations focused on training and matching people to job opportunities, for example. He presents an understandable portrait of climate catastrophe skepticism driven by concern about confirmation bias within universities as well as activist demands that would make things worse instead of better. I didn’t have to agree with these positions to see that they weren’t necessarily rooted in malice or stupidity.

Divided We Fall, David French (2020)

French divides (ha) this book into three parts. “Part I” is by far the strongest segment of this book, giving a thought-provoking analysis of the current state of America’s culture wars and a pretty scathing (but fair) critique of the excesses of wokeness. One chapter is dedicated to an exploration of Cass Sunstein’s study of group polarization, explaining that even a slightly skewed group coming together to discuss a controversial issue will result in most members moving towards a more extreme position. Another chapter explores the concept of Overton windows, the range of political ideas that the public considers palatable. French makes the case that thanks to segregated media sources, America effectively has pushed the Overton window outward into two, separate, and non-overlapping windows, meaning members of each party find the other party’s positions repulsive. He starts to lose steam in “Part II” with his imagined civil wars, and “Part III”’s proposed solution of Madisonian federalism left me feeling meh. But Part II does include a vivid and compelling depiction of the pro-life perspective (for anyone who still can’t quite grasp it).

How modern social justice activism is backfiring

The big idea: Despite a groundswell of Americans who genuinely want to combat racism, the leading voices of the movement have unintentionally led us into a divisive, counter-productive space that hurts everyone—most especially those it attempts to support.

How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram Kendi (2019)

Kendi’s primary arguments have already gotten a lot of coverage: you’re either racist or antiracist, there’s no in-between. Disparities have to be caused by either racism or inherent flaws in minority groups, and an antiracist knows it’s racism. (Despite the viral clip of Kendi describing “racism” in a circular fashion, he does clearly define a racist as someone who believes the racial groups are not equals.) I disagree with many of his binary claims, but, Kendi actually has a lot of thoughtful stuff to say that doesn’t get quite enough coverage. I thought it was interesting how he wove personal milestones and vignettes into a larger story about his current philosophy on race while acknowledging that he has changed his mind many times and will continue to. Contrary to some of the internet-woke, he believes black people do have power and that it is possible to be racist against white people. And most incisively, he states that if your words and actions are not achieving your goal of closing racial disparities, they are not antiracist. Early on, frankly, it was confirmation to me that questioning my own tunnel vision was a necessary step forward. Anyway, if you’re going to critique the guy, it’s worth reading this with an open mind first.

The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (2018)

Despite the terrible title (it is as if Haidt did not read his own book about appealing to your audience’s intuitive elephant first), this book has a strong central thesis: social justice concepts like micro-aggressions, privilege, and trigger warnings are exacerbating mental health issues among young adults. They describe a worrisome picture of epistemic closure on college campuses, with bureaucracies of thought-police and armies of thin-skinned young adults. I do feel the authors overstated their claim that the root cause of the entire illiberal wing of the social justice movement was helicopter parenting and “safetyism.” The whole project would have been much stronger if it had just been framed as “when good intentions backfire.” Far too much of the social justice mindset is based on, and exacerbates, painful cognitive distortions that lead to anxiety and depression.

Don’t Label Me, Irshad Manji (2019)

Manji speaks from personal experience as a promoter of liberal values within her faith, Islam. In her advocacy, she came to realize that by viewing her intellectual opponents as enemies, they too would see her as an enemy, and would not listen to anything she had to say. As not just a Muslim and person of color but also an immigrant and a lesbian, Manji has the background and advocacy bona fides to push back against social justice excesses. Specifically, she challenges us to practice what we preach: welcoming diversity of not just skin color but thought; eschewing labels and stereotypes for others; and practicing the moral courage required to stand up for what we believe is right even when our friends disagree. She continues this work through her Moral Courage College organization, which offers a curriculum for K-12, college and corporations, including a DEI program called Diversity Without Division. (In full disclosure, this is one of the three books on the list that I have not completed yet. Also note: it is structured as a somewhat cloying conversation between the author and her dog—this format that has bugged some readers, but doesn’t stop me from recommending it.)

Woke Racism, John McWhorter (2021)

A very salty John McWhorter lays out his most thorough case yet that not only is wokeism indistinguishable from religion in its rigid morality, scripture, and clergy, but it’s actively causing harm to the American black community by infantilizing it while avoiding the hard work of implementing policy change. If you’ve read most of McWhorter’s free posts at his Substack blog, or listened to his conversations with Glenn Loury, there is not much new here. His Catechism of Contradictions lays out how many common social justice axioms, if taken to their logical ends, are fundamentally incompatible. I wish that he hadn’t taken such an “us versus them” approach, effectively declaring that “this book is not for ‘The Elect,’ there’s no hope for them,” (I’ll bet he hasn’t read Manji’s book!). Here I am, a former “Elect” who changed their mind, naively hoping others still can… But this is just me returning crankiness with crankiness; I actually like McWhorter, it’s a quick read (I listened to it in 3 days) and he’s not wrong on most of it. The sharpest critique he’s received is one he deserves. He foolishly claims that black people are effectively stuck cos-playing the civil rights movement because they “didn’t win it for themselves, white people handed it to them,” (in so many words, not a direct quote but what he said wasn’t any better), handing his critics all of the ammunition they need to dismiss his entire thesis and avoid painful reflection.

Challenging our concept of “race”

The big idea: When one stops to reflect on the absurdities of “race”—its origins and applications as tool for subjugating populations; how it becomes non-sensical when attempting to categorize people who defy labels—one is left wondering why we, as progressive activists, accept it as an eternal given while being willing to challenge so many other aspects of our world.

Born a Crime, Trevor Noah (2019)

This book is just freaking hilarious—I could not stop laughing about five-year-old Trevor having a secret bowel movement on the floor in front of his blind grandmother, or his story about a high school dance party with his friend, Hitler (Yes, Hitler). But, of course, it’s also thought provoking. Noah, the son of a black mother and German immigrant father, was the product of a literal crime: miscegenation under South African apartheid. He describes the absurdities of growing up in such a segregated, race-obsessed society as someone who crossed uncrossable barriers. He often passed for colored in order to protect his mother (“colored” in South Africa refers not to black or simply biracial people, but instead to a distinct population of people descended from 17th century racial intermingling that then became illegal). With blacks, whites, and colored people each maintaining their own sense of identity and culture, Noah often struggled to fit in. And yet despite his clear rejection of racism, Noah seems to still feel trapped by race.

As apartheid was coming to an end, South Africa’s elite private schools started accepting children of all colors… In my class, we had all kinds of kids. Black kids, white kids, Indian kids, colored kids. Most of the white kids were pretty well off. Every child of color pretty much wasn’t. But because of scholarships we all sat at the same table. We wore the same maroon blazers, the same gray slacks and skirts. We had the same books. We had the same teachers. There was no racial separation, Every clique was racially mixed… It was a wonderful experience to have, but the downside was that it sheltered me from reality. Maryvale was an oasis that kept me from the truth, a comfortable place where I could avoid making a tough decision. But the real world doesn’t go away. Racism exists. People are getting hurt, and just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening. And at some point, you have to choose. Black or white. Pick a side. You can try to hide from it. You can say, “Oh, I don’t pick sides,” but at some point life will force you to pick a side.

Self-Portrait in Black and White, Thomas Chatterton Williams (2019)

Like Noah, Thomas Chatterton Williams has one black and one white parent, though the similarities largely end there. In Self-Portrait, Williams argues that in order to truly and finally beat back racism, it will require us to retire the concept of race all together. It is must-read for anyone who wants to fight racism but is wary of reifying race in the process. Here is the summary I shared in an early post:

Williams is privileged in many ways, no doubt, but he acknowledges this throughout the book. Blackness was a huge part of his identity well into his adulthood, and he expresses poignantly what it meant to him, his father and his brother, and what it means to so many others; to de-emphasize his own blackness would be akin to rejecting the struggles of not just your ancestors, but anyone who ever suffered under racist oppression. [He always assumed his children would share his black racial categorization,] but when Williams’ first daughter was born with blue eyes and blonde hair, he questioned what it even means to be “black”. Why should the ignorance or bigotry of others become a defining feature of who one is? Williams reflects that if his identity were defined by the way he is perceived by others, in his adopted home of Paris, he would effectively be an Arab (which he is most commonly mistaken for). He does not deny the realities of racism, but he does reject racial essentialism as a counter-measure. He instead argues that the only effective way to defeat the ugly lie of race is to stop reinforcing it.

The Lies That Bind, Kwame Anthony Appiah (2019)

Like the first two authors in this grouping, Kwame Anthony Appiah also grew up with one white parent (his mother, an English Anglican) and one black parent (his father, a member of the Ghanian elite). Appiah is a philosopher, and in this book he is attempting to dissect the very concept of “identity” as we use it today: social membership in a group shared with others that we believe speaks to a deeper essence of who we are. Through stories, examples, and counter-examples, he challenges our assumptions about five major categories of identity: color (race), creed (religion), country, class, and culture. For any trait that we might claim describes all members of any of these categories, exceptions abound, to the point that the lines seem ridiculous to draw at all. I’ll steal this excerpt from the Amazon description because it’s apt:

Identities are then crafted from confusions - confusions this book aims to help us sort through. Religion, Appiah shows us, isn't primarily about beliefs. The idea of national self-determination is incoherent. Our everyday racial thinking is an artifact of discarded science. Class is not a matter of upper and lower. And the very idea of Western culture is a misleading myth. We will see our situation more clearly if we start to question these mistaken identities.

Racecraft, Karen Fields and Barbara Fields (2012)

A book from later in this list (Why Fish Don’t Exist) explains that “There’s an idea in philosophy that certain things don’t exist until they get a name. Abstract things like justice, nostalgia, infinity, love, or sin.” Well, you can add racecraft to that list. The Fields sisters (one a historian, the other a sociologist) define racecraft as the process by which we create and apply racial categories to each other; like witchcraft, “cause and effect disappear,” magically transforming racism (the practice of applying a double standard based on ancestry—“something an aggressor does”) into race (“something the target is”) with phrases like “because of their skin color.” As Karen Fields put it in a 2017 podcast interview with Jacobin,

Racecraft encompasses the fact that the race that is pictured by the subjects as real in fact is not; it’s made to be real and envisioned collectively as something real. People begin to think, “I have a racial identity, I have a race. As a black person or white person, I have certain characteristics: I’m smart; I deserve to be at the bottom, and so on.” These things are programmed into people through the activity of doing that first thing, the act that is ostensibly based on heritage. That puts somebody in his or her place.

(You can also hear Barbara Fields read an excerpt of the book here in a 2013 dialogue with Ta-Nahesi Coates.) Now, this text is dense—it’s intended for an academic audience—and I don’t believe the Fieldses are laying out the case for colorblindness that many in the anti-woke internet circles seem to think they are (note at timestamp 13:50 in the video above that she gives Coates relief by telling him that she does not believe black people have the legal or social power to enact racism, for example). But they do challenge the reader to more clearly witness the process of reifying race, with race is socially constructed by each of us every day. [Disclaimer… this is another one I haven’t completed. Its dense academic style and lack of audiobook option have stymied me, but the first few chapters alone were eye-opening.]

Understanding human cultures and rejecting hierarchies

The big idea: Culture, the ability of groups of humans to develop and pass along knowledge and norms, was the key development that allowed humans to dominate the globe. But our fixation on hierarchies—the idea that some species, genetic traits, or cultures are obviously more advanced than others—can lead even well-intentioned individuals to find themselves suppressing the rights of others to advance “the greater good.”

The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich (2015)

The main idea of this book is so simple and compelling that it seems obvious and revelatory at the same time—not unlike Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the driving force behind genetic evolution. Henrich explains that what makes humans unique among all other forms of life on earth is not so much our innate intelligence (which is arguably inferior to other animals on many tasks) or strength (even more inferior), but our ability to learn, improve upon, and instruct others about ideas. This tendency also led to co-evolution with our genes, favoring humans with longer childhoods (for learning), longer post-reproductive years (for teaching), and other traits to facilitate communication. Over time, groups of ideas have developed into “cultural packages” specific to a human society’s needs in a particular place and time—packages that include technologies (axes, boats, igloos) as well as norms and taboos (against incest or infanticide, or which cousins you’re allowed to flirt with). He points out that often these norms or technologies develop through trial and error, and are usually adopted before humans even have a causal understanding of their benefit. (For example, spicy peppers have antimicrobial properties and have been used in cuisines around the world thousands of years before germ theory despite not tasting very good to un-acculturated humans.) Norms can be sticky, and some that are still prevalent today could have benefits we still don’t understand while others could be ready for retirement. I still have 3 hours left of this 17 hour (!!) audiobook, so we will see how he wraps it up… but one of the aspects I’ve found most eye-opening about this theory is how innate some of our most annoying tendencies might be. Our urge to give unsolicited advice, encourage others to do what we do (hey there, recommended reading list!), seek out prestigious or successful people to emulate, judge and distrust others who violate our cultural norms, feel shame and guilt when we fail to live up to the expectations of our community, feel anger when people don’t behave the way we think they should… those are all arguably in-born tendencies that have helped us develop and pass along cultural packages. The course of human history is littered with cultural branches and off-shoots not unlike the genetic evolutionary tree of life, but at an exponentially faster pace, as a huge number of changes can happen within single lifetimes. The trial-and-error nature of the process means we’ll inevitably go down dead-end roads, but any one of us has a world menu of cultural innovations to study and choose from.

Gods of the Upper Air, Charles King (2019)

This 5-in-1 biography tells the story of the foundation of modern anthropology by Franz Boas, who is credited with popularizing an approach of cultural relativism (as opposed to the ethnocentrism that had been popular up to that moment in time), along with his students that included Margaret Mead, Zora Neal Hurston, Ruth Benedict, and Ella Deloria. This quote captures the essence of his approach, one that resonates with me as I try to learn more about the diversity of perspectives and cultures even within America:

If you found yourself upset at some other society’s customs, Boas argued, the truly scientific thing to do was to analyze your own reaction. It was probably a good clue to the things that your own culture held dear. The best data generator was your own sense of disgust.

Here, Boas believed, method was everything. If you really wanted to understand what was happening in a Kwakiutl village or an Inuit camp, you had to try as hard as possible to divest yourself of the opinions common to the environment in which you were born. You had to struggle to follow new trains of thought and new logic, grab on to new emotions. It took work to feel a fearful tug in your gut, a rising anger, a deep sadness—all for reasons that might seem strange and unfamiliar—and then take yourself to the point of acting in accordance with those feelings: the twitch of a foot ready to take flight or the tremble of a hand about to strike out. Otherwise you couldn’t claim to understand anything at all. You were simply staring at your own biases, reflected back to you in the mirror of someone else’s culture.

Over the course of the book, King uses this framing and the work of the “renegade anthropologists” to show how, even 100 years ago, these people were tearing apart the constructs that generations before them had taken for granted: race and rigid gender roles, to be sure, but also the concept of “advanced civilizations”—that Europeans were “further along” some linear path of human cultural development and needed to help other societies “catch up.” Their revolutionary approach has become the liberal norm today. As Ruth Benedict put it in Patterns of Culture (quoted in the book),

The recognition of cultural relativity carries with it its own values, which need not be those of the absolutist philosophies. It challenges customary opinions, and causes those who have been bred to them acute discomfort. It rouses pessimism because it throws old formulas into confusion, not because it contains anything intrinsically difficult. As soon as the new opinion has been embraced as customary belief, it will be another trusted bulwark of the good life. We shall arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new basis for tolerance, the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence.

Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller (2020)

A combination personal memoir and biography, Miller tells the story of David Starr Jordan, a famed ichthyologist and founding president of Stanford University. Jordan was obsessed with order and hierarchy, identifying thousands of new species of fish and meticulously cataloging them all. Miller starts off deeply admiring Jordan, looking to him for clarity on seeking purpose and structure in life. But the more she digs into his past, the more disturbing details she discovers. He ruthlessly stepped on others to advance his own career. He may or may not have committed murder. And he became a hugely influential advocate for forced sterilizations as part of the eugenics movement. Miller speaks extensively about the American eugenics movement—a distinctly progressive cause at the time. As we learned about evolution and natural selection, why wouldn’t we want to advance the human species by preventing the passing along of flawed genes? Wasn’t this about the greater good? It laid down the foundation for the Holocaust, and yet we don’t learn much about it in school. (Earlier this year I heard a progressive colleague utter something like, “Can’t conservatives look back at history and see they were always in the wrong?” Clearly he’s unaware of the eugenics movement.) Where did Jordan, who was so certain he was doing the morally right thing by promoting eugenics, go so wrong? Miller traces it back to his belief in a hierarchy, of the ability to rank creatures on a ladder ascending toward perfection. Dovetailing with the other two books in this group, it’s striking to realize that many of the traits eugenicists thought they were selecting for are overwhelmingly cultural, not genetic. It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when movement activists lose sight of the value of individual autonomy and the limits of our own systemic understanding. Humanity is not something that can be optimized.

Practicing critical thinking

The big idea: We all have a tendency to see what we want to see, overlook or deny what we don’t want to see, and make really poor decisions in order to protect our sense of pride or membership in a group.

Think Again, Adam Grant (2021)

A good primer on cognitive biases for the uninitiated and a basic defense of the merits of “unlearning.” Grant describes our favored modes of thinking and communicating as “preachers” (defending our sacred beliefs), “prosecutors” (attacking threatening ideas), or “politicians” (attempting to win others over to our side), as opposed to a “scientist” whose top priority is finding the truth. (I prefer Galef’s Soldier/Scout dichotomy below.) Grant provides some good advice for influencing the thoughts of others. He recommends beginning a debate or lecture with open-ended questions to trigger a “rethinking cycle” (humility, doubt, curiosity, discovery) as opposed to a “overconfidence cycle” (pride, conviction, confirmation bias, validation). I used this approach in talks this year I gave about rethinking inclusion, asking the audience “How do you imagine your current approach to DEI will achieve the outcomes you desire?”—asking “how” leads people to reflect on their assumed causal path and start to question whether it will be effective. An interesting story he included was about motivational interviewing as an approach for reaching out to vaccine-hesitant parents, asking probing questions with respect and a lack of judgment to help parents determine and interrogate the roots of their own beliefs on vaccines.

Scout Mindset, Julia Galef (2021)

Very similar to Think Again, but more focused on individual clarity and rational decision making. Galef’s analogy for the mind is that it can operate as either a Soldier or a Scout. In battle, a soldier is focused on winning for their side at all costs. A scout, however, is motivated to collect an accurate lay of the land, whether that indicates what you hope it will or not. It’s a warmer, more personable version of rationalism than you’ll find in the comments section of Astral Codex Ten. I particularly liked her description of how beliefs can become identities, and her advice to “hold your identity lightly.” If you liked her TED talk, it’s well worth a read.

Cultish, Amanda Montell (2021)

Montell clarifies right off the bat that it’s hard to define what a “cult” is, but for her purposes, it’s an intense ideology built and strengthened by unique forms of language. She starts with stories of bonafide cults like Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate, moves on religions like Scientology, explores multilevel marketing (see also: LuLaRich), fitness brands, and finally social media. What is it about cults that leads people to sacrifice their autonomy? Most of them engage you with “us versus them” framing, building up your pride through your association with the group and encouraging you to distance yourself from skeptics and outsiders. They often use a complex language that you’re drawn to want to master, which reinforces the insider/outsider dynamic. Finally, thought-terminating cliches are unleashed to attempt to rein us back in and prevent us from finding the flaws in the ideology. This deserves its own post, but I couldn’t help thinking about just how cultish the social justice movement has become as I was reading this book (despite a few tells from the author that she herself subscribes to it).

The Biggest Bluff, Maria Konnikova (2020)

Konnikova, who has a PhD in psychology, decides to spend a year learning to master poker (with no prior knowledge) to observe how humans process the complex interplay of luck and strategy. She describes the lessons, online games, tournaments, and world travel that ensued; she recounts some games card-by-card, explaining how her thought processes led her astray or helped her take full advantage of her lucky breaks. She learned to observe her own emotions more clearly and practiced seeing them from an external perspective in order to tease out what influence they might have over her observational and decision-making abilities—learning when to stay in the game despite fear, or when to fold despite embarrassment. It was a fun romp but a bit of a letdown compared to this fascinating Freakonomics interview which delved into more philosophical questions whether life is driven more by skill or chance, which is what had originally inspired me to check out the book.

Potpourri

The big idea: There is none. These are just three great books that didn’t really fit in anywhere else!

Ghettoside, Jill Leovy (2015)

Another incredible, eye-opening book that I recapped at length previously.

Leovy, a former homicide reporter with the Los Angeles Times, embeds herself for over a year with a homicide detective team within LAPD’s South Bureau. Deaths in communities like the Seventy-seventh Street Division she describes in the book account for a large portion of, but far from all, homicides in the U.S.. … Let me say up-front that the book was a bit jarring at first. She unflinchingly describes a community in pain from “black-on-black crime,” a phrase I’d long considered to be blatantly racist. … However, Leovy is attempting to describe a specific dynamic within specific communities; far from an indictment of black people or black culture, she describes with compassion the historic and systemic root causes, and the resulting psychological carnage, of gang-related violence in certain low-income urban communities (which, it’s important to note, are only a subset of predominantly black communities nationwide).

If you care at all about police reform or reducing the impact of violent crime in marginalized communities, you owe it to yourself to read this one.

Zealot, Reza Aslan (2013)

I attended Catholic school for ten years, so this book surprised me by highlighting just how little I actually learned about the historical circumstances Jesus lived within. It doesn’t feel right to call this a biography of the historical Jesus so much as a revisiting of what we know about the foundational period of Christianity looking through a unique lens. Aslan depicts Jesus as a member of a politically radical movement within Judaism, the Zealots, who were steadfastly opposed to Roman occupation, pushing for revolution and seeking an independent Jewish state (“the Kingdom of God”.) Personally, I am a skeptical agnostic, so Aslan’s depiction of Jesus as a mere mortal did not bother me, but some may find it offensive. There is also worthy critique that he has a tendency to cherry pick bible quotes that support his thesis and brush off those that challenge it. But what I found most interesting about this narrative was how Aslan describes the early rift between Jesus’s brother James and Paul in the early years after Jesus’s crucifixion. James, a devout Jew, wanted to build a movement upon the foundation of Jewish traditions and incorporate Jesus’s teachings. Paul, however, sought to convert gentiles throughout the region to a brand new religion, more casually brushing aside Jewish law. Aslan also makes the claim that Paul sanded off the rough edges of Jesus’s political advocacy, casting him as a subservient subject of the Roman Empire. I recognize this view is not unique to Aslan nor is it without controversy, but it was a new perspective for me. I did not realize the large majority of the New Testament was written by Paul or his acolytes, and it brings an additional way of interpreting some bible quotes than I had previously.

Becoming, Michelle Obama (2018)

Just a fun, fascinating personal history of an awesome woman. Like Hillary Clinton, she is a brilliant woman that we for too long only saw through the lens of her role as the spouse of a brilliant man. Hearing about how she grew up in Chicago, how her hopes and dreams changed over time, and how her worldview contrasts with Barack’s was very cool.

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That’s it! I’m interested if any of you have read any of these and had different takeaways to share. Are there any great reads you’d recommend to the rest of us that fit with these themes?

As we wrap up 2021, thank you, all 140 of you fabulous subscribers, for joining me on this adventure so far this year. Here is hoping you all are having a wonderful holiday season and that 2022 brings us all some clarity and peace.