I made it before January ends. Here are my best books of 2024 from the second half of the year! So many amazing history books.
If you haven’t checked it out, I’m STILL having a blast with my bookstagram account. It’s such a great community of readers and my tbr has never been longer. Follow me @obsessivelybookishjojo to see what I’m up to at all times!
When I was reading Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer and Still Life With Bones by Alexa Hagerty, books that touch upon the brutal history of state-sponsored violence against its own people in Latin American countries, I kept thinking, how come these sound so familiar?
The tactics of terror used against civilians—disappearances, torture, murder—are so resonant with what I know about my own country’s history. It turns out that they are indeed connected, and Bevins draws a straight line between the anticommunist campaigns in Indonesia and Latin America in this ambitious book.
Bevins traces the history of the formation of the Third World, comprising of countries in Asia and Africa, newly independent and freed from colonialism, trying to shape a world that is unshackled by imperialism. They were not aligned entirely with the US nor the Soviet Union. Sukarno, the Indonesian leader, was a key figure in this movement.
The way history unfurled, however, proved this to be a short-lived dream, as the US deployed anticommunist operations all around the world.
This is such an impressive book for what it tries to do, building the thesis that what happened in Indonesia in 1965 and Brazil in 1964 “led to the creation of a monstrous international network of extermination—that is, the systematic mass murder of civilians—across many more countries, which played a fundamental role in building the world we all live in today.” Major props to Bevins for telling such undertold histories.
This book recasts the history of the United States through the lens of the non-mainland territories, i.e., the regions shown on the book cover plus tiny islands and the numerous military bases around the world.
It. is. fascinating. There’s so much here that makes you see history in a heterodox way, and it is always good to uncover blindspots and round up our own understanding of history.
I read this book together with The Jakarta Method and they complement each other. How to Hide an Empire is mostly about the countries, regions, and territories that are/were under the purview of the United States, while The Jakarta Method shows its imperialistic power on countries that are not in its direct control, but are still in US interest to influence. After all, post WWII and in the Cold War era, it is not necessary to colonize territories to exert power, as this book discusses at length (although it skips the topics discussed in The Jakarta Method).
What is fascinating about the American imperialistic project is the hiddenness of it all, I think, because it doesn’t quite fit the mythical version of the nation’s history. I’ll be thinking about this for a while.
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Wow. This is my first dive into a history book on Asian Americans and I learned so much from this concise-but-powerful book! It’s also great to read another book that has a lot of tie-in to the first 2 books on this list!
Choy goes through much of the key historical landmarks that eventually shape today’s make up of American society. What are the policies behind Filipino nurses that make up a large portion of US healthcare workforce (also covered in How to Hide an Empire), the stories behind those who provide us with an abundance of Asian food varieties and services in our communities (the donut shops, the nail salons, etc.), the backstory behind a lot of mixed-race Asians, and many more.
I found myself baffled that a lot of these information was new to me. Many aspects of this history are never mentioned in popular American culture.
The book also emphasizes the diversity of Asian American history, because the migration stories of each region and timespan are motivated by different histories (many tied to US history in other countries). Written as a response to the rise of anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, the book feels urgent for this moment we inhabit, because the issues that come up as a result of historical ignorance will inevitably resurface.
I highly recommend this book as a quick overview of Asian American history. It certainly whets my appetite for more.
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A 5-star, enthusiastic endorsement from me! This is an incredible collection of essays that trace the legacy of slavery in every key aspect of American society.
I love how each essay delineates a through line from America’s colonial and founding years all the way to the 21st century, giving an illuminating picture of how laws, attitudes, and systems evolve over time, explaining how we get to now. There are many things that we can’t understand fully unless we traverse 400 years of history. In this telling, many issues get explained from the roots, from their very inception. This book connects so many dots for me. Its breadth is its depth.
The quote from historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman in Matthew Desmond’s essay titled Capitalism captures the essence of this book:
“Small wonder then that American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism,” replace capitalism with any other subject covered in the book, like policing, self-defense, land ownership, politics, medicine, church, and many others. “The task now, they argue, is cataloguing the dominant and recessive traits that have been passed down to us, tracing the unsettling and often unrecognized lines of descent by which America’s national sin is even now being visited upon the third and fourth generations.”
The audiobook is an encompassing experience, combining poetry, fiction, bits of historical facts, made more powerful with the voices of the authors. This book is such an education, I can’t say enough good things about it. Shelved under must-read!
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This expansive book covers a sweeping history of Native American lives, speedily from ancient times to 1890, the date of the Wounded Knee massacre, then in phases from 1890 to 2018. But more than dates and history, the strongest and most distinctive part of this book is the narrative it offers.
Treuer writes this book as a response and counter narrative that Indian lives reached some kind of end in 1890, represented by the Wounded Knee massacre and the declared end of America’s western expansion. It’s the kind of narrative that books like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee offers (see my review here).
Instead, this book is about Indian lives and how Native Americans continued on living, reinventing, surviving, and evolving through each phase of government policies and struggles. The power of this counter narrative is more than just information.
“This book is a counternarrative to the story that has been told about us, but it is something more as well: it is an attempt to confront the ways we Indians ourselves understand our place in the world. Our self-regard—the vision and versions we hold of who we are and what we mean—matters greatly. We carry within us stories of our origins, and ideas about what our families, clans, and communities mean.”
Each section of this book is a fight to reshape the image of Native Americans in both native and non-native people, and forge a different identity than what is common in popular imagination. I read Bury My Heart by Dee Brown before this one and I’m glad I did it. It made me appreciate the contrast that Treuer is making in this book, which covers a broader scope and more complete story than Brown’s book.
I love this book so much! The language, the theme, the illustrations—there’s a lot of beauty packed in this small but healing book.
Kimmerer draws a contrast between an economy that is based on scarcity—real or made-up—and an economy that relies on abundance, kindness, and mutuality. The serviceberries illustrate the generosity of the natural world, how it produces bounty without transactions, and it spreads its gifts to all who want to receive it.
This frame of mind positions us as recipients of gifts more than the initiator of things. And “gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of [this] gift economy,” where relationships matter more than revenue.
I deeply appreciate Kimmerer’s prophetic voice that calls us to imagine an alternate world. In fact, I can’t help overlaying the reflections in this book with Walter Brueggemann’s voice in his classic The Prophetic Imagination and Sabbath As Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, where he compares market philosophies with the Sabbath economy, commodity vs. covenant/relationship, hoarding vs. sharing, empire vs. prophet. (See my thoughts on those books here).
For the theologically inclined, the Sabbath economy taught in the Old Testament story of manna (the bread that falls from heaven), for example, says so much about living and relying on the abundance of gifts, the practice of ‘enoughness’—taking only what you need, and a strong warning against greed and hoarding. Imagine the absurdity of commoditizing and trading manna.
The danger of the scarcity economy is that it commoditizes even human beings, something we see no lack of.
I was looking for a particular mood in December—something reflective, poetic, soothing—and this book delivered. This was a library check-out, but there are so many passages I wanted to underline that I’m going to get my own copy.
Prayer in the Night explores the landscape of darkness in our human experience. It’s a gentle invitation to face our pain—both acute and chronic; physical, mental, and spiritual—our grief, our weariness, and our vulnerability, instead of distracting ourselves from their reality with our various addictions, books and bookstagram included! 😆😅
It wrestles with theodicy—the question of God’s character in the face of all the suffering in the world—not in a cerebral way, but in a heartfelt and soulful way. How do we live with darkness and suffering? How do we maintain our capacity for joy?
I appreciate Warren’s writing because this book is not the “commercial Christian” type. (Steps on soapbox). It’s not one of the gimmicky versions that sells positivity and posterity with faith. This one is real about life, and it doesn’t promise a God who doesn’t let bad things happen. (Steps off).
It’s such a perfect book to end the year and recalibrate my preparation for 2025. I already know work is going to be rough, and then, you know, the rest of world.
I realized that I was already adopting a posture of hardness, toughening myself to brace for impact. But I also felt how unhealthy this was and I didn’t want to live like that. This book is a reminder to maintain a softness in the face of hardship, because hard doesn’t always mean strength.
If you enjoy these reviews, come over to @obsessivelybookishjojo! These are essentially repurposed from my posts there.
Favorite Books Lists
2024: Best Books of 2024 Part 1
2023: Best Books of 2023 Part 1, Best Books of 2023 Part 2.
2022: Best Books of 2022 Part 1, Best Books of 2022 Part 2.
2021: Best Books of 2021 Part 1, Best Books of 2021 Part 2.
2020: Best Books of 2020 Part 1, Best Books of 2020 Part 2.
2019: Best Books of 2019 Part 1, Best Books of 2019 Part 2.
2018: Best Books of 2018 Part 1, Best Books of 2018 Part 2.
2017: Best Books of 2017 Part 1, Best Books of 2017 Part 2.
2016: Best Books of 2016 Part 1, Best Books of 2016 Part 2.
2015: Best Books of 2015 Part 1, Best Books of 2015 Part 2.
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