My 2007 best-of list includes several books that were published in the recent past, but I only got around to reading this year. It includes a few that I read for job-related reasons, but I think others outside of academia could and should enjoy them.
Here’s my Top Ten:
Imperial Life in the Emerald City. I’m not quite finished with this one, but it’s already one of the most maddening books I’ve ever read. If you read it and get so mad at your government that you stop paying income taxes and the IRS prosecutes, don’t blame me. Blame Dick Cheney. Or Donald Rumsfeld. Or Doug Feith. Gen. Tommy Franks famously described Feith, the Pentagon official responsible for postwar planning in Iraq as “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” This book makes it clear that Franks was being charitable.
The Wild Trees. The best book I read this year. Something about Preston’s prose makes me sit up a little straighter.
From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice. This fresh look at King recasts him as a democratic socialist who also happened to be a black leader. It’s a striking intellectual biography.
Freedom Riders. The best narrative history of the civil rights movement I know of, it combines two compelling but different stories: the drama of the freedom rides and the less noticeable but equally important long-term organizing of the black communities through which they traveled.
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. My students in an honors US history survey course loved this book. It deserved all of the major awards it won last year.
What is the What. I guess this belongs in non-fiction. Whatever it is, it’s a remarkable book.
Death in the Haymarket. Another book that I’ve assigned to a class, this is a timely reminder that Americans have been dealing with (and overreacting to) terrorism on home soil for a while now.
Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. As Ed Ayers, a terrific historian himself, writes in this review, Lemann “tells a story we keep trying to forget.” The period of Reconstruction and “Redemption” was doubly damaging for the US: not only did the people of the US not take advantage of the window of opportunity they had to remake a slave society after defeating the CSA, they have mischaracterized and misunderstood the period ever since, learning none of the lessons they (we) should have learned from it.
The Dangerous Book for Boys. I’m psyched to tie some knots, build some forts, start some fires, etc., using how-to guides from this book, with my boys when they get a little older.
And since a Top Ten list has to have ten items: About Alice. I actually haven’t read this one yet, but I mean to, and I feel like I knew Alice Trillin from Calvin Trillin’s essays that have appeared in the New Yorker and in other collections over the years. Trillin is my favorite writer about one of my favorite subjects, food. Of all the people I have never met — and there are billions of them out there — Trillin is the one person I would most like to take to Kreuz Market in Lockhart, Texas, for barbecue. His food essays are about food, sure, but a lot else besides. Take this one, which at first glance is about the difference between take-out food in New York and San Francisco (and a paean to the Mission burrito, one of the great inventions of the last two centuries). But it’s really about how deeply he loves and misses his daughter — and Alice, whom Trillin had recently lost when he wrote this.
Books, To Checkout | Tim | 
February 26, 2008 7:35 am | 
Comments (11) 
Subscribe
