I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Katherine Anderson Howell, Disability and Fandom: ( long and somewhat grumpy review )

Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America: ( transnational history )
Erin Thompson, Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments: ( monuments are instructions )
Jeffrey A. Engel, When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War: ( hegemonic dreams )
Brooke Lindy Blower, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am's Yankee Clipper: ( snapshot of (white, cosmopolitan) diversity )
Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History: ( two Jews, three opinions )
Andrew J. Bacevich, America's War for the Greater Middle East: ( controlling the oil )
Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia: ( bad men )
Eric Klinenberg, 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed: ( a vulnerable nation )

Annette Gordon-Reed & Peter S. Onuf, "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination: ( How Jefferson imagined himself )

Isabella Alexander, Copyright and Cartography: History, Law, and the Circulation of Geographical Knowledge: ( I like copyright l )

Craig N. Murphy & JoAnne Yates, Engineering Rules: ( history of standardization )

Matthew Guariglia, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York: ( NYC as colonial power )

Timothy J. Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia and Populist Politics: ( when they tell you  )

Emily Monosson, Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic: ( fungal apocalypse )
Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet: ( the finding out stage )


Jonathan Blitzer, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis: ( another fine mess )

Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won:( it wasn't inevitable )
Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory:( awful echoes )
Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated: ( and sequel )

Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy: ( Here, have a comprehensive summary )
Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender: ( Butler questions the TERFs and their allies )
Gary J. Bass, Judgment at Tokyo: ( war crimes )
Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789 – 1848: ( peace crimes )
Edward J Larson, Summer for the Gods:( monkey trial )
Jill Burke, How To Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity: ( comes with recipes )
Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine: ( paean to the Luddites and modern successors )
Jennifer M. Black, Branding Trust: Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America: ( for advertising nerds like me )

Joyce Appleby, Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination: ( o brave new world )
Kate Manne, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia: ( A philosopher on fatphobia )

Martha Hodes, My Hijacking: ( history v. memory )
Arthur Holland Michel, Eyes in the Sky: ( tracking people is very possible )

Ralph Watson McElvenny & Marc Wortman, The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived : Tom Watson Jr. And the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age: ( IBM corporate history )

Scott Reynolds Nelson, Oceans of Grain: ( one-commodity history )
Sarah Milov, The Cigarette:( growing tobacco )cut-tag difficulties mean you just get these short takes:

John Bew, Clement Attlee: I didn’t know much about Attlee; this book is a little long for an amateur but it gave a good sense of his rise as a politician in an age when it was possible to do that out of solid political conviction coupled with personal awkwardness. His clarity of vision and willingness to work with others, Bew argues, are significantly responsible for the enactment of Britain’s New Deal; he was also not committed to keeping the Empire in place, unlike Churchill.

Adam Goodheart, The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth: History of outsiders’ attempts to encounter people living on a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Goodheart recounts what’s known about them (not much, other than that they are violent towards outsiders) and how the related tribes near them have slowly started to have more and more outside contact.

Robin Higham, Mark Parillo, & Richard B. Myers, The Influence of Airpower upon History: My takeaway—though not the authors’—is that claims for its importance are overstated, but controlling the air is very important to winning battles now. That said, winning the war takes second place to winning the peace, as we’ve seen again and again.

Barbara Tversky, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought: Interesting if occasionally repetitive book on how our physicality channels our thinking, and how we think with our bodies—I loved the finding that preventing people from using their hands while they talk makes them worse at verbal explanations.

S.C. Gwynne, His Majesty's Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World's Largest Flying Machine: Highly recommended! You know that this ship is going down, but each chapter before the denouement is basically about a different reason that airships were never going to do what their proponents wanted because of unresolvable engineering problems. This story is also about British attempts to use technology to shorten distances between imperial outposts and thus enhance their control, which contributed to their unwillingness to press pause on the airship program.

Kidada E. Williams, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction: Black freedom prompted all-out white backlash. Reconstruction “did not simply fail; white conservatives overthrew it.” They targeted Black homes as well as other spaces that should have offered safety. Depressing but detailed.

Vicki Howard, From Main Street to Mall: History of the rise and fall of department stores and their replacement by Wal-Mart; despite the tectonic shifts in the economy represented, the book is fairly bloodless.

Maureen Ryan, Burn It Down: ( genius does not require the suffering of other people )

Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present: ( very angry )
Bartow J. Elmore, Seed Money: ( Monsanto: threat or menace? )
Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them: ( hard to call it luck )

Harvey Levenstein, Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry About What We Eat: ( morality and eating )
Jay Timothy Dolmage, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education: ( barriers in culture and practice )
Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War: ( the most depressing of the bunch )

B.R. Ambedkar, An Undelivered Speech: Annihilation of Caste, and Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development:( A critic of Gandhi )
Alexander Monea, The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight: ( when they come for the porn, it's not for all porn )

M. E. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate: ( How did we get here? )
Cynthia Enloe, The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy:( Essays )
Emily Flitter, The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America: ( Banks, wealth advisors, and more )
Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century: ( interesting despite some dryness )
Telmo Pievani, Imperfection: A Natural History: ( where the light gets in )

Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being: ( the meaning of living when your death is society's demand )
Saul Griffith, Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future: ( wouldn't it be nice )
Jordan S. Rubin, Bizarro: The Surreal Saga of America’s Secret War on Synthetic Drugs and the Florida Kingpins It Captured:( a corner of the drug war )
Helena Hansen, Jules Netherland, and David Herzberg, Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America: ( long review of one way people die of whiteness )

More of these to come when I find the time to write up my notes.

Gregory Nobles, John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman: ( artist as hustler )
Rory Cormac, How to Stage a Coup: And Ten Other Lessons From the World of Secret Statecraft: ( everyone does it )
Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: ( ethical capitalism? )
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution:( history from another time )
Adrienne Mayor, Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: ( cryptozoology )
Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain: ( tolerance = not all the pogroms were religious )
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: ( in country )
Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis: ( historical rhymes )
Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires:( read the essay )
Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Who Makes and Who Takes from the Real Economy: ( economics is a rhetoric )
David Levering Lewis, The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order: ( really? )
Nancy L. Mace & Peter V. Rabins, The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People Who Have Alzheimer Disease, Related Dementias, and Memory Loss: Useful for walking through the realities of caring for someone with dementia. Hard to read.


Kaitlyn Tiffany, Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It: As with any fan, Tiffany maybe overattributes causation to her own fandom (One Direction) and I know I’m prone to it too so I can’t say too much. But she sets out how everything is fannish and fandom now, in ways both good and bad, commercialized (often exploitatively so) and not (a lot of online vitriol, from Qanon to fans of specific singers).

Marc McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon: Essays centering around the idea of Amazon and its effects on our consciousness, specifically literary consciousness and readerly consciousness (the reader as consumer). I found it too dense for my taste/interested in things I’m not interested in (e.g. the modern realist novel), but interesting to see someone unite a kind of survey of ordinary works in general fiction with reflections on the economic conditions producing them.

"You Are Not Expected to Understand This": How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World, ed. Torie Bosch: Short essays on code, good and bad, buggy and intentional, from the origins of code in weaving and music to the Volkswagen defeat device to the “like” button to the first police profiling algorithm (in 1968!) and more. Ethan Zuckerman, who coded the first pop-up ad, writes: “Sometime around 1997, I wrote a line of JavaScript code that made the world a measurably worse place.” “Brand safety” was the motivation: “The pop-up specifically came about after an auto company complained about their ad appearing on a personal homepage about anal sex. My boss asked me to find a way to sell ads while ensuring brand managers wouldn’t send us screen shots of their precious brands juxtaposed with offensive content. My slapdash solution? Put the ad in a different window than the content. Presto! Plausible deniability!”

Joi Lisi Rankin is one author exploring the ways race and gender affected code: “Among the high schools connected to the Dartmouth network as part of the [1960s] NSF Secondary Schools Project, the coed public schools—all predominantly White—had only 40 hours of network time each week. By contrast, the private schools—which were all male, wealthy, and almost exclusively White—had 72 hours of network time each week.” And access was only for students in math/science classes, from which girls were often excluded. BASIC, developed at Dartmouth to be taught in a standard math class, was therefore a way of transitioning computing from women’s work to work from which women were excluded. From Meredith Broussard: “When same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, … [t]he database redesign process was informally called Y2gay.”

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House: ( tw: domestic abuse; incredible book )

Edward Niedermeyer, Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors: ( he was always a scammer )

Cory Doctorow & Rebecca Giblin, Chokepoint Capitalism: ( creators as the canary in the consolidation coalmine )

Elena Cooper, Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image: ( history of British copyright )


Patrick Radden Keefe, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks: ( shorter pieces )
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life: ( data science as life advice )

Andrew Liptak, Cosplay: A History: ( padded like a costume )

Ryan North, How to Invent Everything: ( advice for time travelers )
Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended on It: ( Beyond Getting to Yes )