Each month my goal is to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in July 2023. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy.

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Upstream: Selected Essays (2016) by Mary Oliver is a beautiful and moving set of essays where Oliver describes how she discovered her life as a writer. Oliver writes words in a way that suggests, but these are suggestions that compel the reader to go to the source of their own lives. Nature — and other writers — are both keys to Oliver’s self-discovery and she writes about them simply yet eloquently. Oliver, more than anything, calls us to pay attention, noting that, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” This is a book where we should pay attention to what Oliver is saying as we savor it over and over again.

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Sleeping With the Ancestors: How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery (2023) by Joseph McGill, Jr. and Herb Frazier is a compelling work about a crusading effort to draw attention to the preservation of dwellings where enslaved people lived, worked, and raised their families. Joe — who founded and leads The Slave Dwelling Project — and his co-author Herb Frazier have compiled a captivating account of his years working to “change the narrative, one slave dwelling at a time.” In it, the authors recount the broadening of a modest regional effort into a national force. For this blog post, Joe graciously agreed to chat with me about the book and his work.

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The Alaska Native Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2009) edited by Maria Sháa Tláa Williams is a good place to seek understanding of the Indigenous perspective in our 49th state. Home to more than 200 federally recognized tribes, the voices and history of these Native Alaskans are nonetheless often overlooked or silenced, as Alaska’s history is told through the stories of “Russian fur hunters and American gold miners, of salmon canneries and oil pipelines.” However, Native Alaskans have been here much longer and have stories, histories, landscapes, ways-of-living, and cultural perspectives worth knowing and preserving. The selections in this fascinating work “provide new models for viewing knowledge and the indigenous perspective on math, science, astronomy, and the cosmos.” We are all the richer for hearing these voices.

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Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America (2020) by Adam Cohen is a devastating and damning argument against today’s extremist Supreme Court and the Republican party’s fifty-year plan to circumvent the constitution, overturn the gains of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras, and cement inequality into American law and life. Cohen surveys Supreme Court rulings on a variety of topics from poverty, education, and campaign finance to labor, corporations, criminal justice, and democracy itself to expose how little the Court does to protect the rights of the poor and disadvantaged. In fact, since the Nixon era “the Court has, with striking regularity, sided with the rich and powerful against the poor and weak, in virtually every area of the law.” Cohen shows how the Supreme Court has made a power grab in order to drive the law far to the right in service of an agenda that most Americans don’t share.

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Death in a Strange Country (1993) by Donna Leon is the second in what has become a 32-book series featuring the Venetian detective Guido Brunetti. Leon describes Brunetti as someone whose “clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman.” As one gets closer to the end of this compelling story, we fear that Brunetti’s great detective work will come to naught when faced with the might of the military-industrial complex. However, a distraught and vengeful Sicilian mother provides some small sense of justice in this world of deceit and destruction of things beautiful and meaningful. This very satisfying work whets the appetite for more of that great Italian architecture — damp and crumbling as it is — as well as a glass of wine and a cup of espresso.

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What’s on the nightstand for August (subject to change at the whims of the reader):

• South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry
• Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last by Wright Thompson
• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré
• Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer
• The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914 by David McCullough (a re-read for me in anticipation of trips through the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal in the next year)

Keep reading!

More to come…

DJB

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NOTE: Click to see the books I read in June of 2023 and to see the books I read in 2022. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

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The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

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Photo by Ben White on Unsplash