I knew as soon as I heard that Kamala Harris was publishing a book about the 2024 election I was going to buy it. I was very curious to know her thoughts about her opponent and her election loss. 107 Days does not disappoint that regard. If you have any curiosity in learning more about Kamala Harris, I recommend reading this book.
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What drew me to Tanya Talaga’s The Knowing is Kent Monkman’s incredibly vivid painting called The Scoop that is reproduced on the cover. It is a terrifying and infuriating image of Mounties, priests and nuns tearing Indigenous children away from their desperate parents in order to take them to residential schools. Talaga’s book is about Canada’s dark history of the segregation and forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples. This is an important book to read if you want to understand why residential schools have had a lasting, traumatic impact on generations of Indigenous families.
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The Inconvenient Indian is a great book if you are looking for an introduction to the history of the relationship between Indigenous people and white people in Canada and the US. For someone like me who has already read many different books about Indigenous people, The Inconvenient Indian is just a broad level look at this relationship and does not really examine how it affects Indigenous people on an individual level.
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The Radium Girls is a nonfiction account of the incredibly horrifying story of the radium-dial factory workers in the United States. Their job was to paint watches, clocks and military dials with a luminous substance made from radium, but what they did not know is that radium is a dangerous element that would eventually kill them. I had heard of the Radium Girls before reading this book, but Kate Moore’s book really hits home the mistreatment of these women by the companies they worked for, medical professionals, and even their own communities.
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The thought of sitting through Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour long movie based on David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI does not excite me, but I have no problem with reading for hours, so I bought the book instead. Killers of the Flower Moon is an especially fascinating non-fiction account of an incredibly dark period of early 20th century American history known by the Osage as the “Reign of Terror”. I think this is the type of book that true crime aficionados will eat up, and it also provides an important lesson on the history of white people’s treatment of indigenous peoples.
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The Devil in the White City is a well reviewed historical non-fiction book, which is why I decided to read it. It is about the construction of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a serial killer who used the fair to lure people, mainly young women, to their deaths. I realized not far into the book that it is not for me, which is too bad because Larson wrote the book in a novelistic style that incorporates direct quotes from historical records, which made it more interesting and easier to read, but it turns out that true crime is just not my thing.
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A Knock at Midnight is definitely making it onto the short list of the best books I have read this year. It is the remarkable true story of a young lawyer, Brittany K. Barnett, who takes on a racist criminal justice system and fights against the incarceration of Black people on drug charges in the US.
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I purchased The Witches while I was in Salem, MA from a bookstore called Wicked Good Books, which has a special section reserved for books about the Salem witch trials. A cute historical town overrun by tourists, it is sad how modern Salem has monetized a tragic piece of American history where twenty innocent people were executed on suspicion of witchcraft and hundreds more languished in prison. I have always been fascinated by the Salem witch trials. What caused a group of girls to writhe and contort their bodies and claim that they were being attacked by witches? Why did the group of men who presided over the trials give in to the hysteria and essentially murder a bunch of innocent people? The Witches is a fascinating and detailed nonfiction account of the Salem witch trials that does its best to answer both questions with the limited resources passed down from history.
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I thought I would enjoy Sapiens, but I was not as engaged by it as I was by Humans: A Brief History of How We F***ed It All Up by Tom Phillips. You cannot blame Yuval Noah Harari for this because he does do a good job of telling a comprehensive, but also succinct history of humanity, and he does have an engaging narrative voice. But I found Sapiens to be a bit of a slog to get through, especially when it came to certain subjects like the evolution of mathematics, science and capitalism. What can I say, I am more of a humanities girl. My biggest take away from Sapiens, though, is that Sapiens should not have evolved, and that we have been destroying this planet we call home since pretty much the very beginning of our existence.
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If you have not seen it yet, I highly recommend you watch the TV miniseries Dopesick. It is about the opioid crisis in the US and how it was started by one family, the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma which is the maker of Oxycontin. Dopesick the TV show is based on Dopesick the book by Beth Macy. I decided to read Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Empire of Pain instead because it came out just last year and has been well received, and its focus is on the Sackler family rather than the opioid crisis in general. I was curious to know what has made the Sackler family so ruthlessly greedy that they do not care at all that they have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone since Oxycontin was introduced in 1996.
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