Taking the Measure of Our Time: Great 2024 Nonfiction from the New School Community
Titles that caught our attention during the past 12 months.
Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation, by Brenda Wineapple (Part-time Assistant Professor in Creative Writing, School of Public Engagement), Penguin Random House.
With schools taking controversial books from library shelves and with religion’s role in the classroom in the headlines, this lively new account of the celebrated 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” could hardly be timelier. It is, a New York Times reviewer wrote, “history at its most delicious, presented free from the musty smell of the archives where it was clearly assembled with great care. And if you have been awake for the past 16 years or so, you won’t miss the point. This is a story from a past that isn’t even past.”
The Wannabe Fascists, by Federico Finchelstein, (Professor of History), University of California Press.
A distinguished scholar of right-wing movements around the globe outlines four criteria for evaluating where a country sits on the fascist spectrum: political violence; propaganda and misinformation; xenophobia; and dictatorship. “It is, to put it mildly, disconcerting,” Ben Rhodes, former national security advisor to President Barack Obama, notes in the New York Review of Books, “to see where the United States now finds itself on that spectrum."
Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967-1973, by Oz Frankel, (Associate Professor of History), Stanford University Press.
As the U.S. became Israel’s primary military supplier, its impacts on Israeli daily life also ramified in surprising ways. Frankel describes how Fiddler on the Roof influenced Israeli pop culture, how an Israeli Black Panther Party battled bias against African and Middle Eastern Jews, and how Coca-Cola redesigned its bottles to fit smaller Israeli fridges. “Readers will be rewarded by this perceptive history” of the crucial years between the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars, Publishers Weekly writes.
Sad Planets, by Dominic Pettman (Professor of Media and New Humanities) and Eugene Thacker (Professor of Media Studies), Wiley.
How should we feel about climate change and species extinctions? About the predicted disappearance of Saturn’s marvelous rings? About the dimming of Earth’s blue luster in outer space as oceanic pollution increases? Do we grieve what’s happened to our planet – or realize it was never actually ours at all? The authors challenge us to reckon with the unsettling moods that our language, so far at least, seems inadequate to capture. “Provocative, wry, and eloquent,” as Foreword Reviews describes it, “Sad Planets muses on interplanetary topics to convey a sense of global urgency and inchoate loss.”
Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, by Julia Sonnevend (Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications), Princeton University Press.
At a time when personal magnetism increasingly defines political life, “charm,” defined by Sonnevend as authenticity and accessibility portrayed via social and mass media, is key to winning and holding power. She illustrates her argument with profiles of political leaders ranging from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to Germany’s Angela Merkel to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. “I have been waiting for a book like this,” writes Ruth Ben-Ghiat, biographer of Benito Mussolini, “and recommend it highly.”
Infrastructure Policy and Inequality, by Michael A. Cohen (Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Doctoral Program in International Policy), Routledge.
A distinguished scholar reviews decades of experience in scores of cities across the globe, describing how closer attention to user needs in designing and building urban infrastructure could do more to reduce inequality and increase opportunity for low-income communities. “More infrastructure is not enough,” he concludes. “Different and better is needed.”
And don’t forget these previously highlighted works.
Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy, by Teresa Ghilarducci (Professor of Economics and policy analysis and director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at The New School), University of Chicago Press.
One of the nation’s top experts on the economics of retirement tells of elders locked into working – not because they love their jobs, but because it’s how they must make ends might. Ghilarducci briskly and compellingly argues for a more humane and realizable social contract. “There is humanity – and at times righteous fury – in these pages,” Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne writes in the book’s foreword.
Life’s Short, Talk Fast: Fifteen Writers on Why We Can’t Stop Watching Gilmore Girls, edited by Ann Hood (part-time associate teaching professor in the School of Public Engagement), WW Norton.
With a title quoting a mainstay of the philosophy of Lorelai Gilmore, this lively, thoughtful anthology asks: Why, nearly 25 years after it first appeared on television, does this comedy-drama series remain an endlessly revisited, regularly streamed cultural touchstone for so many devoted viewers?
A Termination, by Honor Moore (graduate faculty, Writing Program), A Public Space.
In what The New York Times called “a slim, searching memoir,” the author relives the experience of ending an unwanted pregnancy in pre-Roe America – and relates it to the current post-Dobbs contraction of reproductive rights. A haunted, and haunting account, told in masterful fashion.
Bushwick’s Bohemia: Art and Revitalization in Gentrifying Brooklyn, by Mario Hernandez (Ph.D. in sociology, 2019), Routledge.
A tale of decline and development, culture and commerce, displacement and defiance. Drawing on extensive interviews with residents and a deep dive into the historical record, Hernandez tells the story of a Brooklyn neighborhood’s remarkable odyssey from symbol of post-industrial blight to emblem of hip urbanity.
New Narratives on the Peopling of America: Immigration, Race, and Dispossession, edited by T. Alexander Aleinikoff (Dean of the New School of Social Research) and Alexandra Délano Alonso (Professor of global studies), Johns Hopkins University Press.
A collection of 20 original essays about the complex tapestry of American identify, contributed by a diverse and stellar lineup of journalists, scholars, activists, and others. One reviewer describes this anthology as “a pathbreaking book…beautifully written.” Another predicts that it will be “read and taught for generations.”
Lauren Leiker is a research assistant and Bruce Cory is editorial advisor at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School.