Neil Burgess:

Black Sun (Photobook)
By Soren Solker | Edition Circle, Denmark 2021.

Ancient peoples thought you could read the future in the movement of birds.  Solker’s astonishing pictures of murmurations might revive the idea.  These are not photoshopped images, he says not a single bird has been added or excluded.

A life in Parts (Biography)
By Brian Cranson | Seven Dials 2017.

I’m not big on biography, but this is a straight-forward, down to earth memoire from an actor who knows how lucky he is to have got the parts he’s had. From a difficult family upbringing to Malcolm in the Middle’s Dad, to Breaking Bads, Walter White he expresses himself with warmth, humour and humility.

Sandra Cate

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History
By Lea Ypi | W. W. Norton 2021

A young Albanian woman comes of age as her country breaks from its authoritarian, socialist past as a Soviet satellite to attempt a “free” capitalist path forward. With humor, compassion and keen observations, Ypi learns of the lies that shaped her worldview and yet opened her future, to confront the many shaded meanings of freedom. 

When the Mountains Dance: Love, Loss and Hope in the Heart of Italy
By Christine Toomey | Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2023 (Amazon)

How do communities survive, thrive, or even disintegrate after major earthquakes? Christine Toomey considers these questions through a very personal lens — her beloved home in Amadola, Italy, damaged by the 2016 earthquake and the former home of a priest who asked the same questions of earlier earthquake tragedies. Her moving account, graceful and profound, encourages those living in earthquake-prone areas to meditate on their risks and consequences. 

Stuart Freedman

Caste Matters
By Suraj Yendge. India Viking 2019 (Powell’s Books)

A really disturbing but important work on Dalits in India by a young Dalit scholar. Might be tricky to get because it’s published in India by Penguin/Viking but I finally got a copy

The Bell of Old Tokyo
By Anna Sherman. Picador USA 2020 (Powell’s Books) 

A bit of a masterpiece in that it weaves reportage about Tokyo in with interviews about the bells at different points (usually temples) of the city and as such is a discussion about the wider and changing Japanese culture. 

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
By Shehan Karuntilaka. W. W. Norton 2022 (Powell’s Books)

Won the Booker – A story told from beyond the grave by a Sri Lankan photojournalist. I can’t really say more because it’ll give the game an away – but it’s cracking.

Weaponsing Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbnyn
By Asa Winstanley OR Books 2023. (Powell’s Books)

Now, out of all the books, I think as a scholarly work of journalism this is the stand out. Absolutely forensic detailing of Israeli government interference in the democratic process (it also touches on Bernie). I read this in one sitting. TBH, I am only half Jewish and I don’t know how you feel about Israel or the Zionist project (you can probably guess my views) but this is a story that touches us all and it’s important.

Peter Olney

Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
Hector Tobar Farrar | Straus and Giroux 2023

A wonderful exposition on Latinos in the USA written by the son of Guatemalan immigrants, a prominent journalist in California. As its title suggests, it is a meditation not a political diatribe.

Mussolini’s Grandchildren – Fascism in Contemporary Italy
David Broder | Pluto Press 2023

Giorgia Melloni is the Prime Minister of Italy. Georgia Melloni traces her political roots to the Movimento Sociale Italiano, a direct descendant parliamentary party of Mussolini’s brownshirts. What does her election in 2022 mean for the future of democracy and politics in contemporary Italy? Broder, an astute observer of Italian history and politics, gives us a comprehensive analysis.

Molly Martin*

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad
By Matthew F. Delmont | Viking 2022 (Powell’s Books)

The US Army and military services were white supremacist organizations (they put it in writing). How Black soldiers, harassed and murdered in the South, fought for fair treatment and won.

God, Human, Animal, Machine
By Meghan O’Gieblyn | Penguin Random House 2021

What does it mean to be human in a world with AI? Philosophical but never boring.

Mr. Know-it-all: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder
By John Waters | Macmillan 2019

Sometimes we just need a good laugh. Hilarious.

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland 
By Fintan O’Toole | Bloomsbury Publishing 2021 (Powell’s Books)

How Ireland has remade itself.

Gary Phillips**

Fixit
By Joe Ide | Hachette Book Group 2023 To order

Joe Ide’s Fixit is the sixth outing of his unlicensed cerebral private eye, Isiah Quintabe, (IQ) a young Black man based out of East Long Beach, California. Isiah in his young life has faced down the likes of white supremacists, a serial killer, members of a triad, hunted down his brother’s murderer, and for his troubles earned a $25,000 bounty on his head leveled by another ‘hood gangster. As Ide realistically posits in this new outing, IQ is understandably exhausted and suffering from PTSD. The story starts with a bang when another whackjob from IQ’s past, a psycho hitman named Skip Hanson kidnaps his girlfriend Grace Monarova.

Hanson of course has captured Grace to draw IQ, or Q Fuck as he likes to refer to him, out to kill him. Utilizing this minimalist plot, the propulsive narrative doesn’t let up. There’s plenty of twists and turns, backtracks and backstabbing, and most importantly, illumination of character and edgy humor as the writer physically and psychologically challenges IQ, his running buddy Juanell Dodson and the villains too before he brings the reader to a slam-bam satisfying conclusion. You don’t have to read the previous books in this series to jump onboard the IQ train. Get your ticket now and ride.

Queenie: Godmother of Harlem (graphic novel)
By writer Elizabeth Colomba and artist Aurélie Levy | Sistah SciFi 2023 

In the graphic novel Queenie: Godmother of Harlem by writer Elizabeth Colomba and artist Aurélie Levy the thrust of the main plot is her often bloody battle with Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer in 1933 New York City as he tries to muscle in on her action. While she also has to  deal with crooked cops. For Stephanie “Queenie” St. Clair, born in Martinique, was a boss of the numbers racket in Harlem. 

On any given morning for as little as a nickel denizens bet on what would be the ending three-digit number derived from the tabulation of the daily New York Clearinghouse total, arrived at as the result of trading among banks. The last two numbers from the millions column of the exchange’s total plus the last number from the balance’s total — both published in the late afternoon newspapers. In that way, no one could dispute what the winning numbers were. Dream books, soothsayers, a pigeon flying by an address over a doorway and so on were called upon to derive what might be the winning number combination. In the graphic novel there’s a two-page layout called “How to Run a Lottery Numbers Operation.”Throughout the story, which also includes flashbacks to St. Clair’s early days and the harrowing experiences that shaped her, Columba and Levy drop in other real life historical figures such as heavyweight champ Jack Johnson and conman spiritualist George Baker better known as Father Devine. St. Clair was more than a clever gangster as an opening scene depicts when various Harlemites comes to call at her office asking for a loan at a decent interest rate to seeking street justice. A deed possibly her erudite right-hand man Elsworth Raymond “Bumpy” Johnson (recently portrayed by Forest Whitaker in the Godfather of Harlem streaming series set in the early ‘60s with him and his friend Malcolm X) would dispense. As this graphic novel demonstrates, as well as prose efforts such as The World of Stephanie St. Clair: An Entrepreneur, Race Woman and Outlaw in the Early Twentieth Century Harlem by Shirley Stewart, Queenie’s life and times will reach a larger audience via her own TV series. 

Myrna Santiago:

The Great Earthquake Debate:  The Crusader, the Skeptic, and the Rise of Modern Seismology
Susan Hough | U of Washington 2022  

This book focuses on the history of earthquake science in Southern California through the biographies of the two men most involved in the debates about whether Los Angeles was going to experience a devastating quake like the one in 1906 in San Francisco.  It is a book about the history of earthquake science in the early 1930s, but by focusing on the two competing geologists, the author makes it lively and easy to digest.  And you do learn a lot about what scientists thought they knew about earthquakes then.  Spoiler alert:  the big one IS coming.

Vagina Obscura:  An Anatomical Voyage.
Rachel E. Gross | W. W. Norton 2023  

If you ever wondered why women’s reproductive and sexual health still makes headlines because it is so bad, this book will give you a glimpse about why that is the case.  The author reviews the many ways in which medical profession, medical schools, and researchers have failed to study basic female anatomy and the social reasons for it.  And this is not ancient history, folks.  This is today.

Jay Youngdahl:

The South: JIM CROW AND ITS AFTERLIVES
By Adolph L. Reed, Jr., from Verso

This is a personal book by Mr. Reed.  It details experiences in Arkansas and Louisiana, during a time I lived in those states.  Anything by him is important in trying to understand the confusion on the left today, especially for those living in fauxgressive enclaves in the US.

After Black Lives Matter
By Cedric Johnson | Verso 2023

Here is a new book I just bought and am starting to read which was written by one of the most important writers on class and race in the US (along with Mr. Reed).

…

* Wonder Woman Electric to the Rescue, by Molly Martin. Memoir, Essays, and Short Stories by a trailblazing tradeswoman.  All proceeds from the sale of this book benefit Shaping San Francisco a quarter-century old project dedicated to the public sharing of lost, forgotten, overlooked, and suppressed histories of San Francisco and the Bay Area. The project hosts a digital archive, and conducts public walking tours, bicycle tours, and even has a monthly Bay Cruise covering alternating routes of shoreline history with FishEmeryville.com. Our motto is that “history is a creative act in the present,” underscoring our commitment to the ongoing improvement and refinement of our knowledge and understandings of history, a process that is both contentious and necessary, as well as loads of fun!

**One-Shot Harry, “The latest mystery novel from Gary Phillips puts a spin on classic Golden Age noir” The Washington Post