Library
This library is a record of books that I’ve read, with a written response to each. There are no ratings here. I limit recommendations, and I do not write with the aim of reviewing. A book might make me think about something else, I may engage extensively with one passage, or I might evaluate the argument of the text as a whole. The texture of my responses will shift depending on the text.
One caveat: the write-ups from before 2024 read more like book reviews, because that’s what they were. Most started life on Goodreads, a few in graduate seminars, back before this site existed.
Some of my responses are short (perhaps a few paragraphs) while others may be entire essays. The amount written is a reflection not of the quality of the book, but of my own thinking.
My books are listed in reverse-chronological order by when I completed them. Each entry is listed in full bibliographic form, with a short annotation below. Some of these I own, others I do not.
2021
Zahn, Timothy. The Last Command. The Thrawn Trilogy, 3. London: Cornerstone, 2020.
A really good conclusion; realistically, this is what the sequel trilogy probably should have looked like.
Rooney, Sally. Beautiful World, Where Are You. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
The emails destroy the momentum, and characters this unlikable shouldn’t get a happily ever after.
Zahn, Timothy. Dark Force Rising. The Thrawn Trilogy, 2. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.
Weaker characterization but much stronger action; the Noghri expansion is excellent, the Honoghr scenes among my favorites.
Ward, Jesmyn. Sing, Unburied, Sing. New York: Scribner, 2017.
Brutal historical legacies and familial trauma, the literal ghosts absolutely critical; absolutely incredible.
Probably the best synthetic work on the period, though I disagree on the Reagan Revolution.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960.
The one nineteenth-century American poet everyone needs to read, dashes and all.
Zahn, Timothy. Heir to the Empire. The Thrawn Trilogy, 1. Turtleback Books, 1992.
I can’t think of a better story to expand Lucas’s world: Thrawn is multi-dimensional where Vader was wholly evil.
Krauss, Nicole. The History of Love. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
I really, really like Krauss’s writing; the ending left me wanting, but I’ll hold on to this story.
Baldwin, Davarian L. Chicago's New Negroes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Good cultural history showing the “New Negro” and “Black Metropolis” weren’t restricted to Harlem.
Transformative: the black and white Great Migrations read “stereoscopically,” with much of my own family history inside; highest recommendation.
Fascinating: historians have excluded African Americans from the suburbs better than white suburbanites did.
Fedorov-Davydov, G.A. The Silk Road and the Cities of the Golden Horde. Zinat Press, 2001.
Not transformative, but almost everything in it was new to me.
The worst of the Oxford series, so weak on analysis it functions more as chronicle than history.
A good monograph on “chocolate cities” and “vanilla suburbs”; the Dodgers chapter aside, really solid.
Miller, John Jackson. Kenobi. Del Rey, 2013.
A pretty decent story: a run-of-the-mill Western with a Star Wars cast; a shame it’s no longer canon.
Dense but full of fantastic analytical nuggets, uniting the suburbanization and civil rights stories; I think he’s right.
Wartime East Bay migration assimilated whites and segregated black migrants, feeding the violence of the 1960s.
Examines black southerners at all stages of the migration, making it as much about the South as Chicago.
A good basic reference, but there’s more than Europe in Italian foreign policy.
The first novel by an African-American slave; less subtle than some, but quite an achievement.
An interesting Great Migration case study: black Milwaukeeans “rose” into industrial labor rather than falling into it.
A great study of black women’s wartime migration; urban poverty traces to spatial isolation, not a “culture of dependence.”
Its most skillful innovation: citizenship as a category constituted locally through regional conceptions of race and gender.
Larner, John. Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Exudes excitement: a great introduction to “Polo Studies” for the academically-oriented non-specialist.
One of the best in the Oxford History series: balanced and informative, high politics with on-the-ground coverage.
Kennedy, Joe and Dana Gioia. An Introduction to Poetry. Boston: Longman, 2010.
Kennedy’s strength is the wealth of poems with exercises attached, plus a nice anthology in the back.
Long, slow, full of stereotypes; the Liberia ending leaves Stowe guilty of the Northern racism she criticizes.
Doerr’s tastes are consistently solid without the highest highs; Krauss’s “Seeing Ershadi” stuck with me most.
Brett, Michael. Ibn Khaldun and the Medieval Maghrib. Variorum, 1999.
A weird, misnamed collection whose real value is gathering Brett’s hard-to-find articles.
A good synthesis on immigrant women, cramped by its brevity; still an achievement.
Packard, William. Art of Poetry Writing. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.
A short, easy book on poetry’s main aspects, though poetry slams don’t deserve the derision they get.
Comes out more on the side of the Shi’a; hard to get through, but I learned a lot.
Recovers the invisible Cape Verdeans, problematizing the assumption that whites have “ethnicity” while everyone else has “race.”
A classic: the most heavily engineered colonial cities faced the largest nationalist movements.
Why late-generation Americans claim distant ancestries; significant and interesting, especially on the ethnic revival’s context.
A standard bureaucratic history whose surprise is the war years; a pretty good job.
So great I double-checked Orsi’s background: American Catholicism as lived religion, outstanding work.
Not the best history, not meant to be; his 1970s city stayed true to my 2010s experience.
I like the methodological point about early Arabic sources, but Crone pushes too hard the other way.
I, uh, love this book: the “Rooseveltian nation” is utterly convincing; highest recommendation.
A good if simplistic study of a small lobby that, like UKIP, succeeded into non-existence.
Blames Britain for the war’s conditions; realpolitik par excellence, and I’m skeptical, but generally solid.
Too soft on Laval, too hard on Britain, mostly right on Italian foreign policy.
A great study of gender and Boston’s urban space, with women far more divided than united.
Brown, Peter R.L. The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150-750. Thames & Hudson, 1971.
A whirlwind: fifty years old and dated, but an illuminating taste of era and region.
Melville, Herman. The Piazza Tales. Independently Published, 2020.
The stand-outs are “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby the Scrivener”; the others leave much to be desired.
The institutional argument convinces, but the claim that “white flight” hardly existed does not hold up; racism still drove it.
Progressive charter reform, not perennial Yankee-Irish conflict, made Boston’s ethnic politics contentious.
Melville, Herman. Pierre or The Ambiguities. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
One of the weirder novels I’ve read: potentially compelling, but difficult to follow and drier than its contemporaries.
A good survey near the top of the Oxford History series, but it runs a bit too “top-down.”
Excellent on how the wartime state won legitimacy through rights and Americanism; the GI Bill deserves a full chapter.
A decent study whose real strength is treating Germans as a collection of peoples, not German-ness as such.
Old-fashioned diplomatic history of interwar Franco-Italian relations; it misses the crucial social factors but still holds up.
Foundational: the starting point for all studies of Italian emigration.
Social history at its best; I recognize my own family, white flight in Chicago, in it.
Widely respected but hard for me to make sense of; no good guys in these riots.
Such a good collection; Jesmyn Ward knocked it out of the park.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: The Death-Bed Edition. New York: Modern Library, 1993.
No person has ever loved anyone as much as Walt Whitman loves Walt Whitman; nice, meandering poems.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983.
Dark but feeling “light”; the story itself is thoroughly predictable, leaving much to be desired.
The “Rainbow Theory” is bunk: machines really only served Irish-Americans; illuminating.
His answer sits oddly with his own case for contingency; ideology dies hard, and he under-plays it.
Americanism as a political language rather than an ideology, still mapping onto left and right today; highly recommend.
New Deal and GI Bill policies excluded African Americans by design; I just wish he’d dived deeper.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden & Civil Disobedience. New York: Signet Classics, 2004.
A bit naive, but his asides are hilarious; I liked “Civil Disobedience” more than Walden.
Lehman, David and Tracy K. Smith, eds. The Best American Poetry 2021. New York: Scribner, 2021.
My first real foray into poetry; I am enamored and want to read a lot more.
Atwan, Robert and Kathryn Schulz, eds. The Best American Essays 2021. New York: Mariner Books, 2021.
An incredible collection crowned by Jesmyn Ward’s “Witness and Respair.”
Just not a very good study, missing the propaganda’s contradictory aims; since surpassed.
A really great monograph on leisure shared with the ethnic community rather than the class; it reshaped my thinking.
A snooze-fest; anyone with even surface-level knowledge should read something else.
Harder than Making a New Deal, but worth it to make sense of America’s idolization of consumerism.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1999.
I found tranquility reciting it aloud; the tragic ending is still too optimistic.
The asymmetry struck me: deep on becoming literate, deliberately shallow on finding freedom.
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999.
Really important to American feminism, but the meandering style made it harder than it needed to be.
The most depressing Oxford History volume: nobody to root for as Reconstruction’s promise collapses.
Bird, Robert Montgomery. Sheppard Lee: Written by Himself. New York: NYRB Classics, 2007.
Scathing satire of Jacksonian class; probably my favorite nineteenth-century American novel.
Walks back Poverty and Progress; it shows me, a sociology skeptic, the importance of quantitative methods in history.
Received wisdom by now, but still worth reading as the starting point of a whole wave of scholarship.
Dry but done well: workers’ modest gains felt significant to them, and I see myself in that pride.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.
Emerson is really hard for me, but the man has quite the way with words.
Illuminating but adds little; any other book on American involvement would have covered the same ground.
Much more interesting than I expected; her thalassological approach speaks directly to my own writing on Tunisia.
The revised edition’s claim about black Americans is ahistorical mumbo-jumbo; too many oversights to be of value now.
The war was no fait accompli; Logevall makes abundantly clear the Vietnam War is virtually impossible to justify.
The origin of a historiographical tradition, not a good argument; blaming Boston’s ills on the Irish reads like victim-blaming.
An unsolved murder becomes a study of how New Yorkers policed Chinese men and white women; really nicely done.
An admirable study of SNCC that recovers the community organizing tradition; it changed how I think about the Movement.
Perhaps the first Native American autobiography, a religious testimony worth taking at face value.
Good writing, coverage as balanced as possible; this enormous miscarriage of justice should be remembered.
I don’t love labor history, yet absolutely love this book; eminently readable, highly recommend.
Absolutely fascinating: Chinese things, ideas, and people fundamentally shaped modern America; highly recommend.
A really transgressive book that sadly reneges in its last chapters; still my favorite early American novel.
Asseraf, Arthur. Electric News in Colonial Algeria. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Rejects “ages” of media for media piling up together; a must-read well beyond MENA.
A book that doesn’t know what it wants to be; disjointed, and I can’t recommend it.
Etulain, Richard W. César Chávez: A Brief Biography with Documents. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002.
A nice little book placing Chávez beside King and Gandhi, though it feels thin.
McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Dated, really two books with the military smothering the political, but riveting: a real page turner.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.
Not a well-written novel, but worth historicizing for its part in American racial formation.
Beautifully written: the Open Door makes American self-determination talk impossible to take seriously; read it closely.
Dense and theory-heavy but important: a history of American citizenship defined as “healthy” and “clean.”
A good, Foucauldian study of engineering colonial India through epidemic medicine; the style can be difficult.
Outstanding ethnography, one of the most fascinating anthropological works I’ve ever read.
Probably the best introductory text on Japanese internment, a great way into the field’s debates as of 2000.
He overstates his case and needs a grain of salt, but it’s good historical analysis.
Fills the “black hole” between Exclusion and repeal; as always, I love Erika Lee’s work.
Rural black southerners built a new political “nation” without surrendering agency; historical writing of the highest order.
Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow carry the collection; the British-oriented stories are nowhere near as magical.
All rights carry obligations; a subtle but necessary argument that has made me think about citizenship differently.
Reframes immigration as dislocation and exile, but I’m skeptical of the premise; worth skimming, not more.
A strong case that Chicago and the Great West built each other, in beautiful prose.
Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland: Or, the Transformation. New York: Modern Library, 2002.
A transitional Gothic piece whose characters ride rails; glad I read it, won’t come back.
Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
A bit dated, but clearly argued, convincing, and readable; I can’t ask for much more than that.
Good and mostly comprehensive, though Gordon Wood synthesizes better; still essential for the early nineteenth century.
A damned good narrative of the Second American Revolution; the Radicals didn’t go far enough.
Super brief on internment; the “loyalty” surveys and redress coverage are the fascinating parts.
Rowson, Susanna and Cathy N. Davidson. Charlotte Temple. Charles Ewer, 1794.
So melodramatic, and I love it: eminently readable in a way most eighteenth-century novels are not.
Kwong, Peter. The New Chinatown. New York: Noonday Press, 1987.
Dated and a bit conspiratorial, but it pulled me into a story I had no idea existed.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Important but meandering; forgivable from Franklin, from anyone else a big no.
Remarkably illuminating seventy years on: the shift to Jim Crow was slow, and former Whigs “redeemed” the South.
Mexican immigrants forging Chicano identity through unions and civil rights rather than social mobility; really interesting stuff.
The starting point for American literature, though an idealization written for a European audience.
Illuminating interviews, but everything is pulled so far into abstraction that the “so what?” is tough to reach.
Dower, John. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
The Pacific War as race war; one chapter is my favorite history chapter of all time.
Slaveholders radicalized as expansion became existential; I really can’t speak highly enough about this one.
Cheney, Lynne. James Madison: A Life Reconsidered. New York: Viking, 2014.
American history through Madison’s eyes rather than a biography; pass and find something better.
Blew me away: a nation forced to mourn together; mandatory reading.
Second-generation immigrants revised what family is; unconvinced by assimilation, but it reshapes how I think of family.
Good for context but mostly dated; the sharpest insight is “refugee” as a Cold War concept.
Makes you feel smarter, beautifully written; a marked increase in quality from The Glorious Cause.
An American Making of the English Working Class; a good and important argument, but was this ever a slog.
Salerno, Reynolds M. Vital Crossroads. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.
A pretty obvious argument with massive blindspots; still an acceptable primer on late-1930s Mediterranean politics.
Imperial history at its finest, fusing nation-building and empire-building into a “nation-empire”; simply astounding.
A tough read: peasant-immigrants labored not to “make it” but for family well-being and respect.
A dated work I didn’t find particularly useful; a decent starting point, not the last say.
Treats American slavery as an institution in motion; I love this book so much.
The repetition reads like a parakeet, but it clarified Jefferson and Madison’s worldviews for me.
A concise case that democracies need the humanities; it won’t convince anyone who doesn’t already believe.
Halter, Marilyn. Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity. New York: Schocken Books, 2002.
Americans attached identity to products rather than communities; obvious-seeming, but never stated in these terms before.
Quantifications imprecise to the point of (nearly) pseudoscience; I wouldn’t recommend it to historians.
Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983.
The Second Party System collapsed from too much consensus, not conflict; highest recommendation.
Gordon, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Far too narratively driven and inventive; I wish Gordon had taken a much more analytic angle.
Interesting but not novel: Singapore’s technocracy was good stuff, the rest familiar and a bit too positive on Modi.
Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.
Undoubtedly important, but the paternalism thesis doesn’t hold much water today; only the religion argument convinces.
Ostensibly about West Indian immigrants, really an indictment of how thoroughly broken American racial structures are.
Almost an extended footnote to DuBois’s Black Reconstruction: foundational rather than definitive.
Good but dated: best in the first third, while women, African Americans, and Native Americans barely appear.
Foner, Eric and Lisa McGirr, eds. American History Now. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.
Only ten years old and already a dated collection on American historiography.
Xenophobia doesn’t come in waves but is central to American history; I love Lee’s fresh, clear writing.
Expansive on American whiteness’s three phases; stop applying late-twentieth-century racial terminology to earlier decades.
Nearly single-handedly launched American environmental history, but surface-level and now ingrained in the surveys.
Revelatory core: more Native Americans exported from Charlestown than Africans imported.
Utterly fascinating history that vindicates gender history in its totality; the account of T Hall is gripping.
I learned a ton about the Know Nothings: political history at its finest, lacking everything else.
An oldie but a goodie, probably the classic on American xenophobia and nativism; engaging and thoughtful.
Surely surpassed since, but eye-opening on the competing grievances pushing Virginia’s gentry toward independence; highly recommend.
Tough but almost mathematically beautiful: the illegal immigrant as a caste created by the 1924 quotas.
A good comparison of New York’s old and new immigration; a welcome contribution.
Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
Eminently readable but overstated: a country one-third enslaved sounds less like revolution than settler colonialism.
Dated and surely surpassed, but I love this book: the logic is tight and easy to follow.
Legalistic and statistical, with weird chronology problems; nevertheless, some great nuggets in here.
A solid argument that immigrants were fundamentally modern yet rooted in community, family, and work.
Nash, Gary B. The Urban Crucible. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
The northern seaports as incubators of American capitalism: social history at its best.
Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990.
Probably the best starting point on American immigration history, though his immigrants are all groups already “white” by 1951.
A study of historical memory, not cultural history; fascinating, but academic, best for graduate students.
White-power genocide can happen here but isn’t a foregone conclusion; the teach-in framing is captivating.
Rhodes, Ben. After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made. New York: Random House, 2021.
America has become more Russian and Chinese, with Trump the symbol, not the start.
Dense and academic, but the information carries it for anyone interested in immigration history.
Rebrands “riots” as rebellions against ham-fisted policing; a must-read on the continuing rebellions.
Who is even the audience? I can’t say it would be of good use to anyone.
Emmerson, Charles. 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. New York: PublicAffairs, 2013.
Great popular scholarship with solid reach beyond Europe, though lacking on the European empires.
Blair, John. The Anglo-Saxon Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
A decent starting point; the faults are the source base’s, not the text’s.
His three myths of American nationhood all fail; I’m not wholly convinced, but it’s worth thinking about closely.
Bogged down in details, but as a history of philosophy without gaps it performs admirably.
Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
Deserves a place on comparative-empire reading lists; the Comanches earn a label usually reserved for Eurasian polities.
The populism section is best, but the claim that populism is inherently American is absolute nonsense.
Interesting topic, outshone by “Alo fetva” rendered as “Hello Islamic Legal Opinion.”
Endlessly fascinating and suddenly relevant again; Wright takes “Patriot” adherents at their word.
Cilliers, Jakkie. Africa First!: Igniting a Growth Revolution. Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2020.
Infectious optimism, but policy-only solutions and thin text with very little human component.
Dimont, Max I. Jews, God, and History. New York: Signet Classics, 2004.
Jewish exceptionalism riddled with false statements; better to read something else.
Kurlansky, Mark. 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005.
Feels a bit weak; just about all of the countless books on the Global 60s are better.
Adamson, Peter. Philosophy in the Islamic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
A much harder read than earlier volumes, but the Andalusian portion simply fascinated me.
Pleased to report that making things up as you go is not listed as a fallacy.