Books of 2019

It's that time of the year again, LOBers! Every year in December we take stock of the cultural artifacts that have sustained us over the past year, something that I'd dare say is even more important in the Trump Era. We need reasons to be cheerful and here are some of them. 

1. Coleson Whitehead - The Nickel Boys: Whitehead’s last novel, the award-winning The Underground Railroad, reimagined the history of the freedom struggle. If anything, The Nickel Boys, Whitehead’s latest,hits even harder, forcing all of us to take a good look at ourselves and our educational institutions. Its portrayal at a recently-shuttered reform school in Florida is devastating, especially for those of us who have taught in Florida.

2. Chuck Klosterman - Raised in Captivity: Over the years, Klosterman has become one of my favorite essayists. He no longer writes exclusively about music (and sometimes doesn’t write about music at all) but, like Nick Hornby, his prose shines so bright that loyal readers like me are willing to go along for the ride for his tangents. In his latest book of short stories, he covers a myriad subjects but the connective fiber is unusual relationships between unusual people. My favorite story, which made me laugh out loud, features a weird high school football coach who insists on running the exact play over and over again.

3. Patricia Leavy - Spark: Sociologist Patricia Leavy wrote the most surprising novel of the year. In Spark, Leavy invents a mysterious conference set in Iceland that draws talented academics and artists from around the globe. The unspooling story has a lot to tell academics and those outside academia about the ways in which we can all work together collegially and collaboratively in order to better our world.

4. Nate Chinen - Playing Changes: Critics have been predicting the “death of jazz” for longer than I’ve been listening to the music. Yet, in this provocative survey, Chinen predicts great things for the future of the art form, largely by cross-pollinating with other forms. Jazz may never again be considered truly popular music - it’s been consigned to a position of art music played in conservatories and concert halls for decades - but Chinen is optimistic as he looks forward.

5. Richard Russo - Chances Are….: A new Richard Russo novel is always a welcome thing. In his latest, Russo places a group of aging college friends on a weekend trip to Martha’s Vineyard, where they reminisce about their glory days in the early 70s and try to uncover the mystery of a friend who disappeared forty-five years before.

6. Tim Alberta - American Carnage: In the Trump era, pundits have been scratching their heads about how a draft-dodging, areligious billionaire playboy suddenly captured the populist energy of the country and the Republican Party with it. Politico correspondent Tim Alberta provides some of the answers in this searching survey of conservative politics over the past 30 years.

7. Garth Cartwright - Going for a Song: Having spent an inordinate amount of time in my youth combing through the racks of used record stores, I thoroughly enjoyed this exhaustive study of the record store business in the UK. I especially enjoyed the section on East Anglia and my record store chain Andy’s Records. Cartwright’s words brought back a million sense memories of those lost days.

8. Dan Camilli -Reeya’s Earth Day: My student teaching mentor from Danvers High School on the north shore of Boston wrote a captivating novel about social justice pedagogy this year. Reading Reeya’s Earth Day, which portrays a day in the life of a group of bright, engaged high school social studies students, brought back many warm memories of those days.

9. Wayne Journell - Unpacking Fake News: In 2016, my Facebook feed was inundated with deliberate misinformation about candidates (#Pizzagate, anyone?). With the 2020 Presidential election looming, it’s imperative that social studies educators find ways to encourage effective media literacy work in our schools. This new compendium edited by Wayne Journell is a critical starting point to that work.

10. Randy Laist and Kip Kline - Cinema U: This year, I was proud to see the publication of a chapter in this wonderful new edited volume on mass media portrayals of college life. Beyond my humble piece, the essays point the way toward a new framework for understanding issues related to the public image of higher education.

Notable Others:

• Jared Diamond - Upheaval

• David Jaffe - Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell

• Rebecca Traister - Good and Mad

Disappointment:

• Robert Putnam - Our Kids: Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone was groundbreaking work on social malaise in 2000, digging deep into the alienation of modern American life. I was thus anxious to read his book on social class and the prospects for American children. Sadly, I found that Putnam has absorbed many of the conservative tropes about working class and poor communities and his pronouncements are the height of cultural insensitivity. What a shame.

I’d love to hear about the books that have kept you up late reading this year. :-)