A skeptic's quest for books, science, & humanism
Ijeoma Oluo was the first author that I ever read on race. I didn’t review So You Want To Talk About Race when I read it in June 2020, because I read it merely to absorb information. I reviewed Mediocre more harshly than I should have, only correcting it, well, now. But I really like Oluo. Something about her being the author that introduced me to social justice makes me feel a deeper connection to her work than others’. Be a Revolution was no exception.
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Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, and Mike Merryman-Lotze, is the hardest-hitting book I’ve read on Palestine so far. I wish I’d started with it, rather than Palestine: A Socialist Introduction and Except for Palestine. Unlike those, Light in Gaza didn’t wade through the political history of the region, which can be overwhelming for uninitiated readers like me. Instead, 15 authors each spend a chapter telling their own stories. How has the occupation impacted them? How have their families survived? What do they want readers around the world to take away from their stories?
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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson took readers by storm in late 2020, so I was fashionably late reading it at the end of 2023. While something about its ubiquity made me hesitate to read it, it’s intrigued me for years.
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Palestine: A Socialist Introduction by Sumaya Awad and Brian Bean was an easy choice for me when looking to begin reading about Palestine and the Israeli settler occupation. I’m new to both Palestine and socialism, and the road of social justice seems to lead inevitably to both.
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Author’s Note: It feels odd to be putting out a post right now that, while important, feels relatively trivial compared to what is going on in Palestine right now. There is a US-sponsored genocide occurring as I write this. Both the United States and Israel want you to think the “situation” is “too complicated” for you to condemn genocide and apartheid. It is not. Please take the time to learn about the history of Israel and its violent colonization of Palestine. I hope to have blog posts sharing what I learn in these books—some of which are free right now—up in the near future and as a continual part of my blog.
Free Palestine. 🇵🇸
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I wanted to like Gregory D. Smithers’ 2022 book Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America. It was my first Two-Spirit read, so I felt compelled to like the book due to the subject matter. But I found myself plodding through it for over a month, never seeming to have the energy or motivation to keep going.
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“This is the book that changed my life. If you only read one, make it this one.”
These words from a trusted fellow reader (and writer) were all it took for me to crack open William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction.
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To be an atheist means to not believe in God. Nothing more. Nothing less.
I just saved you $15.
David G. McAfee’s Hi, I’m an Atheist!: What That Means and How to Talk About It with Others caught my eye as I was wandering my favorite bookstore a couple of weeks ago. I had never heard of the book or of McAfee, so for only $15, I gave it a try. I hoped that this pocket-sized guide might fill a gap in atheist literature on how to come out to others.
It didn’t.
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The Supreme Court has been captured by shadowy right-wing mega-donors. It doesn’t sound like it could be true, but it is. In The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Jennifer Mueller put the Court itself on trial and make an airtight case that the integrity of the Court has been sold. For hundreds of billions of dollars.
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I held off on buying and reading Preparing for War until I met Bradley Onishi at my organization’s conference, the Summit for Religious Freedom, in April, because I couldn’t imagine that there could be more to say about Christian Nationalism that hadn’t already been said. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it—he proved me wrong.
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