¡No Pasarán!: a book about coalitions
Logan W. Cole
Matt Christman’s account of the Spanish Civil War shows that he is one of the great popular historians even if he doesn’t want to be. Though it eschews the conventions of other history texts, like sources, you will understand more about history writ large from Christman’s brief sketch of this short slice of time in Spain, including the fraught Republican left-liberal alliance and fleeting post-war glimpses of a better world, than Yuval Noah Harari’s or Jared Diamond’s entire careers of failed attempts to formulate histories of everything. Christman’s gift is the ability to simultaneously accept what is true about Fisher’s Capitalist Realism while embracing the optimism of the collective.
Crazy Like Us: putting psychology on the couch
Jade Inverarity
In this book, globe-trotting journalist Ethan Watters shows how American (and by extension, imperialist and capitalist) “mental illness” has infected the whole world. He likens four examples of cultural erasure to endangered species: a rift between spiritual possession and schizophrenia in Tanzania; a response to disaster in Sri Lanka that fails to map onto our individualist notions of PTSD; disordered eating in young Hong Kong women; and mass-marketed depression wracking Japan. These stories’ villains are well-intentioned aid workers, researchers failing to examine their “objectivity”, and the naked greed of Big Pharma. All reveal the classist and white supremacist underpinnings of psychology.
An Indigenous Peoples’ History: looking in the mirror
Gregory Lebens-Higgins
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reframes the settler-colonial takeover of the North American continent. Pushing back against narratives of an industrious people expanding into untamed territories, Dunbar-Ortiz tells the story of existing First Nations—tied together by intricate trade routes and cultural practices, with complex governing structures, cities and villages, and wildlife management techniques—that are carved apart by unrestrained violence. We learn the identities of various tribes: Powhatans, Cherokee, Shawnee, Haudenosaunee, Muskogee, and many more; following them as they are pushed West—sometimes more than once—by European whites greedy for land. The story of genocide unfolds not as an event in the past, but as a continuous and ongoing structure. Yet we are also introduced to movements of resistance and liberation that are reclaiming the future from this legacy of capitalist-driven destruction.