From Kate Clinton

The past eleven months have been an attempted white-out of the policies and programs of our first black President. There’s freshly mined coal in the nation’s stocking. No peace on earth. Forget donning the gay apparel. The endless Muzak track at the D.C. mall is Ta-rump pum pum Trump. It’s a White Supremacist Christmas.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (One World) by Ta-Nehisi Coates is an answer to the meta-question of the year, “What happened?” The TF is understood. The book is a chronological collection of eight essays published in The Atlantic magazine during the presidency of Barack Obama.

Coates’s topics include the case for reparations, Michelle Obama’s roots in Chicago’s South Side, the Civil War, the legacy of Malcolm X, the black family in the age of incarceration, and the fear of a black President.

Each chapter is preceded by an essay reflecting Coates’s development in those eight years, his self-critiques of his own writing, his mistrust of becoming the “go-to writer on race,” his self-doubt, his struggle to write the unwritten story of race in America. In the epilogue, “The First White President,” he writes, “Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist . . . . But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation Books) by the historian Ibram X. Kendi shows the folly of thinking that eight years of a black President would usher in a postracial world. For Kendi, a racist idea is “any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.” It is a challenging page turner.

Kendi examines the racist ideas rationalizing slave-trading in the fifteenth century, through the colonial era, the Reconstruction, to the war on drugs, and tough on crime era. He organizes his massive research into the construction of white supremacy around the lives and works of Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis.

And, because you’ll need it after Coates and Kendi, I can’t recommend enough the audiobook of Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, read by the author, Trevor Noah. It’s a great stocking stuffer.

Kate the last Clinton standing is a humorist.

From Ruth Conniff

“I went abroad for the same reason everyone else does: to learn how to live,” Suzy Hansen writes at the end of her extraordinary book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Hansen, who describes herself as an ambitious, provincial young writer who went to New York City to make it big, moved to Istanbul shortly after September 11, 2001, in the grip of a personal crisis.

“My crisis, like many other Americans’, was about my American identity,” she writes.

In Istanbul, where she still lives, Hansen learned Turkish, reported on the Middle East for The New York Times Magazine, and embarked on a years-long exploration of what it means to be an American.

The guiding spirit on Hansen’s journey is James Baldwin, whom she first encountered as an undergraduate, in the library stacks at the University of Pennsylvania. Baldwin left her gobsmacked with his description of the “terrible innocence” of white people in the United States.

Later, Baldwin’s assertion that he felt more free as a gay, black man in 1960s Istanbul than he could ever feel in New York challenged and worried Hansen, propelling her on her path to Turkey, and ultimately launching this deeply thoughtful book.

Hansen tries to understand why America is a country where, as Albert Camus observed, “everything is done to prove that life isn’t tragic.”

“Because the Americans had never looked their tragic history in the face, they could delude themselves into believing that their own comparable superiority might create a better world,” she writes.

Reading this book in Mexico, I understood why Hansen takes so personally the sunny ignorance with which Americans view the rest of the world. She captures the shock of realizing that you are one of the world’s rich kids, and that your feelings of boundless possibility, happiness, and freedom exist because your country has aggressively and systematically crushed the possibilities, happiness, and freedom of others.

Much of the dark history of American foreign policy that Hansen uncovers—the propping up of dictators, betrayals of pro-democracy movements that looked to the United States for support, the training of foreign armies and secret police in torture techniques—will not come as a surprise to longtime readers of The Progressive. But Hansen goes deeper, provocatively connecting geopolitics to a culture that shapes us and blinds us.

Donald Trump, the prototypical Ugly American, has made Hansen’s book particularly timely this year. But, she writes, “From abroad, when I used to hear President Obama say that America is the greatest country on earth . . . I felt like I did as a child, not wanting to admit to my parents I knew there was no Santa Claus.”

This is a beautiful, angry, sad piece of writing that every American should read as we try to live in a world that has long known things about us that we are only now coming to understand.

Ruth Conniff is living and working in Oaxaca, Mexico, this year as The Progressive’s editor-at-large.

From Jules Gibbs

Contemporary poetry has become necessarily political—the poetry of witness and the poetry of protest. It is a space where the most crucial, urgent issues of our day play out. We are in a very particular time, and the poetry world is responding with louder-than-Trump gusto. Is poetry necessary? Damn straight.

There are some knockout poets on the scene this year with new books that ask us to reconsider our often too-easy formulations of self and nation. These poets want to make us wrestle with what we think we know, and, in an ultimately constructive way, lend language to experiences that have been largely unnamed.

The most ambitious book of 2017 is Layli Long Soldier’s debut collection, Whereas (Graywolf Press), a finalist for the National Book Award. Long Soldier takes up the nation-state rhetoric of federal treaties and resolutions that have governed the complicated “domestic dependent” relationship between Native American tribes and the U.S. government. The book is a modern-day “Howl” for the indigenous voice. It at once appropriates the rhetoric of the oppressor even as it unmakes and remakes it with a new consciousness, with the assertion: “One word can be a poem believe it, one word can destroy a poem dare I. Say I am writing to penetrate the opaque but I confuse it too often. I negotiate instinct when a word of lightful meaning flips under/ buries me in the work of blankets.”

Long Soldier takes up the poetry of survival and does the impossible, making it sing with love for all who have been brutalized by it. Formally dynamic, bold in subject and craft, Whereas tells a dangerous, private truth that implicates us all. The language of statehood and nationalism wounds us in these lines, but in Long Soldier’s hands is miraculously transformed.

Three more poetry books of note: The January Children (University of Nebraska Press), a debut book by Safia Elhillo (see her poem in this issue, page 69) that explores a Sudanese American experience, written in English, but deeply engaged with Arabic language. Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press), another debut book by Javier Zamora that takes up “borderland politics, race, and immigration.” And Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf Press) by Erika L. Sánchez, a largely autobiographical account of what it is to be the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants.

Jules Gibbs, a poet and professor of literature at Syracuse University, is poetry editor for The Progressive.

From Mrill Ingram

I was lucky to see Elena Passarello give a stage performance of “Sackerson (1601),” an essay included in her 2017 book, Animals Strike Curious Poses (Sarabande Books). Otherwise, I might not have gathered that the essay, about the career arc of a bear forced to fight dogs for entertainment in seventeenth-century London (and just down the street from Shakespeare’s Globe Theater), is written entirely in iambic pentameter.

Passarello is a riveting performer—and I can say as much for her writing. Eclectic, impeccably researched, and above all, unexpected, the seventeen essays in her collection explore the lives of famous animals and those humans with whom they are—often tragically—intertwined. Her collection is a blast of oxygen into our very deflated sense of the human-animal relationship.

Passarello interweaves storytelling of animals’ “poses” (and yes, it’s a reference to the Prince song) with creative explorations of human history and narrative form. We learn how we might see animals if we had a smidge of the creativity that she does. She offers an essay on Jumbo the elephant and the development of the electric chair as a form of capital punishment, another on a relationship between Mozart and a starling with a wickedly catchy whistle, and a third on Darwin’s relationship with a besotted tortoise.

Animals Strike Curious Poses suggests tragedy: how much animal sense we have lost between the mammoth hunter in her first essay whose “life is spent watching animals,” and the lion-hunting dentist in the final chapter who says of Cecil, “Nobody in our party knew, before or after, the name of this lion.” But Passarello’s sense of adventure and whimsy save the day. Her crafted essays will delight readers with their creative investigations of human history and how much can be revealed about us and the animals in our lives.

Mrill Ingram is The Progressive’s online media editor.

From Bill Lueders

Dar Williams’s brilliant career as a singer-songwriter has taken her all over the country, often to smaller hamlets where she’s cultivated ardent fans, like me. In the process, she has become an expert on what makes some cities succeed as places where people want to live. This is the basis for her important new book, What I Found in a Thousand Towns: A Traveling Musician’s Guide to Rebuilding America’s Communities—One Coffee Shop, Dog Run, and Open-Mike Night at a Time (Basic Books).

The special sauce is what Williams terms “positive proximity, or a state of being where living side by side with other people is experienced as beneficial.” She profiles seven U.S. cities and one region to illustrate viable community-building efforts. Some are centered on a shared appreciation of natural wonders (Moab, Utah), history (Phoenixville, Pennsylvania), culture (Carrboro, North Carolina), and food (the Finger Lakes region of New York). Others succeed because of creative partnerships and residents who serve as community “bridgers.”

Williams’s book, like her music, is profound, occasionally funny, and uplifting. It should serve as a guide to hometowns everywhere.

Why is the criminal justice system often an instrument of grave injustice? It’s an important question with readily identifiable answers. Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Convictions (University of California Press) by Mark Godsey, a former federal prosecutor who now heads the Ohio Innocence Project, examines the causes of wrongful convictions, from faulty eyewitness identifications to investigator tunnel vision, while drawing on a depressingly vast array of shocking examples. He graciously allows that the police, prosecutors, and judges whose “unreasonable and intellectually dishonest positions” have led to unjust convictions and avoidable suffering acted not out of malice but out of the abundant capacity for human error. If that’s so, then corrections can be made; blind injustice, it turns out, is a curable condition.

Some people have the courage to put themselves into dangerous situations. Others have no choice in the matter, but nonetheless respond heroically. An example of the latter is Nadia Murad, author of The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State (Tim Duggan Books). In 2014, when she was twenty-one, Murad was one of hundreds of members of the Yazidi religious minority abducted from her home in northern Iraq and pressed into sexual slavery by the Islamic State. She endured, escaped, and ended up becoming an international campaigner for human rights. This is a harrowing and brave book, a testament to human resilience.

Speaking of harrowing, wait until you read Mike Ervin’s review of the movie The Last of the Mohicans. It’s one of the essays included in The Progressive contributor’s slender new volume, Smart Ass Cripple’s Little Chartreuse Book. The movie came out in 1992, and Ervin is just now writing about it. Spoiler alert: He says almost nothing about the film; his focus is on what happened in the movie theater when he went to see it. And the book’s cover is black, not chartreuse. Buy it.

Bill Lueders is managing editor of The Progressive.

From John Nichols

The 2017 conversation—political, social, and literary—was constrained by a seventy-one-year-old commander-in-chief who, one year after his election, had tweeted his way down to a 33 percent approval rating. Many fine books were written about Donald Trump and his administration. But as the year wore on I found myself drawn to books that were bigger than Trump, in their explanations of our current circumstance and in their hopes for how we might get out of it.

Of the explainers, the most important was Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking). The William H. Chafe professor of history and public policy at Duke University, MacLean tells the story of how the radical right worked its way from the fringe of American politics to the White House. She traces the progress—if it can be called that—of a project that began six decades ago to remove barriers to unrestrained capitalism while erecting new barriers to democracy. This is a gripping book that fills in the historical void and creates an understanding of how our discourse, our politics, and our governance has been warped to the breaking point by self-serving billionaires, academic activists, and politicians who practice what former White House counsel John Dean refers to as “conservatism without conscience.”

Of the several 2017 books that might best be described as “roadmaps” for a future that renews America’s promise and extends it to all, the finest is Gar Alperovitz’s Principles of a Pluralist Commonwealth (Democracy Collaborative).

A veteran Congressional aide and special assistant with the U.S. Department of State, Alperovitz is a political economist and historian who taught at the University of Maryland, College Park. He reports from the frontlines of the struggle to forge a new economy that meets individual, community, and ecological needs by breaking the bonds of corporate capitalism. And he is optimistic.

Alperovitz’s book projects a politics that will go well beyond the Trump presidency. Drawing on his work with the visionary New Economics Institute and Democracy Collaborative projects, Alperovitz concludes that “a broad range of new institutions is quietly developing just below the surface of most political reporting.” Those institutions form the outlines of a next America that has nothing to do with the narrow calculations that gave us Trumpism and everything to do with the real democracy that will forge “a system robust, rigorous, and resilient enough to tackle all the hard questions.”

John Nichols, the national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a longtime contributor to The Progressive.

From Ed Rampell

With a post-Charlottesville “ripped-from-the-headlines” vibe, Occupy Wall Street organizer Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House) is the latest addition to the pantheon of books opposing rightwing totalitarianism. Whereas Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism explored the irrational mindset of fanatical followers of Hitler and others, Bray focuses on practical policies and tactics for resisting night riders in white robes, blackshirts, and brownshirts.

Based on extensive research and dozens of interviews with U.S. and international anti-fascists, Bray places the resurgence of neo-Nazi-type politics within a historical, global context. A lecturer at Dartmouth College, Bray looks at how today’s anti-racist, anti-sexist militants can defeat contemporary hate speech and violence that targets refugees, LGBTQ persons, and religious and ethnic minorities.

Antifa suggests the Ku Klux Klan’s post-Civil War formation down south to terrorize newly emancipated ex-slaves is fascism’s origin story. But to restate Newton’s Third Law of Physics, for every reaction there is an action, with Bray noting, “Where there was proto-fascism, however, there was also proto-anti-fascism.” Bray notes that for every fascist movement there is an opposition group, including the anti-Mussolini anarchist-founded People’s Daring Ones, the White Rose in Hitler’s Germany, and America’s Anti-Racist Action Network.

Antifa ponders twenty-first-century anti-fascists’ direct action tactics, writing that from antifa’s perspective, “the safety and well-being of marginalized populations is the priority.” Bray reminds us that there are many restrictions on absolute, unfettered expression, from homeowners’ associations trumping First Amendment rights to kiddie porn bans and the outlawing of Holocaust denial in many European countries.

Just as the Nazis called themselves “National Socialists,” Bray shrewdly observes, “Fascism Steals From Left Ideology.” The most prominent current case-in-point is the right’s campus “Free Speech Movement,” dubiously co-opting the anti-war, student rights slogan that erupted in 1964 at Berkeley. Although Bray generally defends militancy against neo-Nazism, regarding public speech prohibitions, he warns leftists that “the tables [could be] turned” against them, especially by conservative governments. In the Trump era, Bray’s Handbook is essential reading.

Ed Rampell is a Los Angeles-based film historian and critic who contributes regularly to The Progressive.

From Norman Stockwell

I agree with John Nichols: Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking) is an important book. This meticulously researched, engaging story illuminates the quiet plan developed by economist James Buchanan, and adopted and supported by billionaire Charles Koch, to remake American politics in the twenty-first century.

MacLean, a social historian, was granted unprecedented access to the late Buchanan’s archives. She paints a grim picture of how we got where we are today, from a 1956 attempt to avoid school desegregation to the current “crippling division among the people.”

A useful study of the possibilities of resistance comes in Zoltán Grossman’s new book, Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands (University of Washington Press). Grossman, a longtime Wisconsin activist and scholar who now teaches geography at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, focuses largely on his experiences in Wisconsin’s Treaty Rights and antimining coalitions. But his book reaches all the way forward to the historic alliances in 2016 against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Grossman is a cartographer, and the book is filled with maps and photos (many his own), but it is the stories and voices of activists and everyday folks that make it a powerful instruction manual to groups seeking to build unity around protecting the planet.

In a year of fiftieth anniversaries, one book with appeal to anyone who was there is Danny Goldberg’s In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea (Akashic Books). Goldberg, a longtime music industry executive and journalist, takes the reader through the history of the year 1967 and the social transformations that led up to it. The book is full of names and references and tales that stir memories of the time. “Millions of people feel empowered today who would have felt like isolated freaks before the sixties,” he notes. The book is a tribute to a time gone by that helps us better understand who we are today.

Marc Becker, who teaches Latin American Studies at Truman State University, was once listed by conservative author David Horowitz as one of the “101 most dangerous professors in America.” He continues to prove it in The FBI in Latin America: The Ecuador Files (Duke University Press), using an obscure collection of released FBI files to document the role of the Bureau in Ecuador and at the same time reveal a little-known history of leftist political movements.

“Thanks to the FBI’s counterintelligence activities, we gain a better appreciation of [the left’s] activities,” Becker writes. “The lessons that they leave for future generations are invaluable.”

Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.

From Alexandra Tempus

Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (W.W. Norton) has a way of gutting the reader with plain statements. The density of his research allows the author to be devastatingly direct.

“Racial segregation in housing was not merely a project of southerners in the former slaveholding Confederacy,” Rothstein writes in the preface. “It was a nationwide project of the federal government in the twentieth century, designed and implemented by its most liberal leaders.”

From that thesis, Rothstein literally maps out the case that, unlike how the Supreme Court has argued, most segregation is not the product of private citizen discrimination but has been, in fact, explicitly government sponsored. For this, he argues, and according to the court’s own logic, “the Constitution requires a remedy.”

Metropolis by metropolis, Rothstein takes us on a tour of middle-class suburban America as it was made. Through personal stories and familiar twentieth-century figures—Langston Hughes, Richard J. Daley—we see the way government agencies like the Federal Housing Administration, which refused to insure mortgages on homes sold to African Americans, limited access to the so-called American Dream.

We get to know black World War II defense workers with torturously long commutes in the San Francisco Bay Area, and see the creation of Ferguson, Missouri, which would later erupt in protest around the police killing of black teen Michael Brown. In one particularly eye-popping section, readers follow Rothstein across America and witness how the construction of New Deal public housing in cities from Atlanta to Cleveland not only reinforced rigid segregation but sometimes introduced it where it did not already exist.

The lasting effect of these policies on my own life is astoundingly clear. I recently moved from the East Coast back to Wisconsin, where I grew up in a county that is nearly 90 percent white. I have often wondered how much freedom my partner, who is black, would have to live in the bountiful and beautiful countryside here. He remains in Essex County, New Jersey, in a dense neighborhood among other black and immigrant families. They live on the municipal boundary that separates their city from an extraordinarily wealthy, and very white, village.

On the other side of that invisible border, the streetlamps shrink from utilitarian poles to old-fashioned, picturesque torches. Palatial homes sit on neatly tended lawns. My partner doesn’t have equal access to that land either, just steps from the street where he’s lived most of his life. These realities clouded my mind as I read this book, one day noticing the description for the color-coded map on the cover:“ ‘Essex County, New Jersey’ June 1st, 1939.”

Alexandra Tempus is associate editor of The Progressive.

From Dave Zirin

This has been a remarkable year for sports as resistance, and 2018 promises an avalanche of books that deal with the questions raised by this new movement of athletes who have taken a stand by taking a knee. So consider this year’s book collection the calm before the storm—although both of my selections deal with issues that are anything but placid.

My first pick is Baseball Life Advice: Loving the Game That Saved Me (McClelland & Stewart). Written by Canadian baseball columnist Stacey May Fowles, Baseball Life Advice avoids the pitfall of so many baseball books that obsess over complicated statistics. It focuses instead on the incredible characters in the game and the unique intricacies of the sport itself, what Fowles calls the “long pauses punctuated by tiny miracles.”

Fowles weaves her baseball stories with her own battles to achieve mental wellness in difficult times. I love that Fowles takes quotes from players about the sport and uses their insights about this beautiful game as a compass for life.

My other book pick this year has nothing to do with either sports or even a reliance on the written word. It is Devin Allen’s collection of staggering photographs from the 2015 protests following the police murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland.

The book is called A Beautiful Ghetto (Haymarket Books) and I wish I possessed the words to match the heartbreaking poetry that Allen captures with his photographs. They weave together a story of resistance, pain, and oppression while demonstrating why struggle will always be the secret of joy.

I may be biased in my affection for Allen’s work because I was in Baltimore for many of the protests he documents. While the media focused on a burned and looted CVS store, Allen captures the reality: people struggling for human dignity amidst poverty, deindustrialization, and racism.

For those in your life who are in the struggle, this book is a remarkable testament to the fight. For the people you know who ignored what happened in Baltimore, this book is a necessity. Allen’s work is living proof, in the words of James Baldwin, that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Dave Zirin covers sports for The Nation and The Progressive.