Tag Archives: book recommendation

Book Recommendation: Ruin Their Crops on the Ground

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Whether you are a seasoned food justice activist, legal scholar, or just anyone interested in dipping their toes into neglected parts of American history, Andrea Freeman’s Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch is likely to teach you a bunch of things you didn’t already know about food-related policies and their use as tools of control.

The book is written in a really accessible style, with lots of interesting anecdotes from members of impacted communities in their own words. The scholarship uniting those tidbits with the large-scale social/political patterns in which individual lives unfold is pretty impressive.

I was initially drawn to Freeman’s work on milk/dairy, but I’m glad I didn’t stop there – she provided lots of insight about Native foodways, assimilationist pressures on various immigrant communities, and the ways in which slavery and its aftermath were/are intertwined with food policies, among other things!

Book Recommendation: Transfarmation

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One of the best, if not the best, book I read in 2024 was Leah Garcés’ Transfarmation: The Movement to Free Us from Factory Farming.

Garcés and her colleagues at Mercy for Animals are doing amazing work bridging the gap between (a) the many, many farmers who are fed up with being deeply in debt, with polluting the lands they love, with being bullied by multi-national food corporations, and with treating animals like mere machines and (b) the members of the vegan, environmental, and culinary communities who seek to abolish factory farms and transform the food system as a whole.

Transfarmation tells compelling, accessible stories about various individual farmers in different contexts, about the big picture of how the American farm system got so broken in the first place, and the positive impacts the partner farmers are bringing about for themselves and their communities by transitioning away from animal agriculture.

This book really hit home for me. My mom grew up on a farm, which my grandparents were still actively farming when I was little. I also lived in a (different) farming community throughout childhood – I had friends, classmates, teachers, and all sorts of other people around me who I loved and who depended on farming for both a livelihood and an identity. Even then, with very limited understanding, I had plenty of qualms about what happened on those farms.

But things have only gotten worse. American farming has changed virtually beyond recognition in living memory. And the existing farm system’s cruelty to farmers, to agricultural workers, to farm animals, and to the people who must eat the food produced on factory farms is beyond measure. It cannot be allowed to continue. The Transfarmation Project is finding real solutions for everyone impacted, one farm at a time. I found this book so energizing – I can’t recommend it highly enough!

Book recommendation: When Doing the Right Thing Is Impossible, by Lisa Tessman

book recommendations, philosophy

I’ve been meaning to read Lisa Tessman’s When Doing the Right Thing Is Impossible for some time – and I’m very glad I finally got around to it!

This book is both accessible for a general audience and dense with food for thought. When we see people around us, in the news, and maybe ourselves in positions where some sort of moral failure seems guaranteed, that can really wear on us. But I think it feels better to openly acknowledge that reality, as Tessman does, than to try to fool ourselves about the possibility of always keeping our hands clean.

I’ll admit that I went into the book already very sympathetic with the conclusion that, indeed, sometimes one is going to violate a moral duty no matter what one choose to do, but I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why nearly as eloquently and thoroughly as Tessman has. I’m less sure where I stand on Tessman’s constructivism, but that is something to continue pondering for the future (for me).

If lots more people would read this book and take some of the central ideas on board, I think that maybe we could be both more forgiving of ourselves and each other, and also more motivated to change social structures for the better – so that the moral dilemmas she discusses wouldn’t arise quite so often in the first place!

Book recommendation: Solidarity, by Leah Hunt-Hendrix & Astra Taylor

book recommendations, justice,

I can’t tell you how many times, over how many years, I’ve said, “Why don’t people write/talk/study about solidarity more? I want to read a book about solidarity! When is someone going to write a good, detailed book focused on solidarity?”

Well, the universe (or more specifically, Astra Taylor & Leah Hunt-Hendrix) listened and granted my wish!

Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea is a great place to look for a more-than-introduction to the important concept of solidarity. Whether you are an activist, a historian, a philosopher, or just an engaged member of a community (large or small), this book almost assuredly has something that you didn’t already know about and that is worth thinking about some more. I know that I’m going to be returning to it again and again!

a color image of mountains in the American West superimposed with a gold foil dollar sign

Book recommendation: Billionaire Wilderness, by Justin Farrell

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Yale sociologist Justin Farrell’s new book, Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West, is an amazing piece of scholarship that provides detailed insight into how wealth concentration is shaping the human (and more-than-human) communities in Teton County, Wyoming, which is both the richest county in the United States and the county with the highest wealth inequality (on various measures).

Farrell’s research, both qualitative and quantitative, is meticulous and presented in clear and accessible prose. The excerpted interviews provide candid (and sometimes stomach-churning) insight into the hearts and minds of both the ultra-wealthy and the working poor whose labor makes their lifestyles possible in Teton County and thereabouts. For various reasons that Farrell thoughtfully articulates, rural communities are under-researched, and accessing the ultra-wealthy for research purposes is challenging. But we can no longer afford to neglect such research and this book provides a model for much work that is yet to be done.

I strongly recommend this valuable book to anyone who is working on or simply interested in issues relating to climate change, conservation, wealth inequality, and/or social justice more broadly.

Book recommendation: Utopia for Realists, by Rutger Bregman

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The cover of Utopia for Realists

I love reading books that explicitly encourage us to stretch our imaginations. You don’t have to be an optimist to think that the way we organize the world and live our lives isn’t the best possible way. People with very different views can often agree that things, in general, could be better.

And Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek pushes us to consider the possibilities for significant positive change at the social level by reflecting on some changes we’ve already made (and some opportunities that we missed out on). It is a welcome change of pace for me to see someone looking to the future with some excitement, and I’m betting that I wouldn’t be alone in feeling that.

One of the things I liked most about this book is how it brings to our attention various historical events that aren’t as well-known as they probably deserve to be. The author has clearly done his research, but the writing is still quite accessible and conversational. It would be an especially good starting place for folks who haven’t previously given much thought to the specific policies he advocates (universal basic income, shorter workweeks, and open borders).

Book recommendation: The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber & David Wengrow

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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was one of the first books I picked up purely for my reading pleasure after liberating myself from the ridiculously demanding work schedule that I had as a university professor. I am so glad that I did (that is, both pick up the book and leave that job behind)!

The book cover of The Dawn of Everything

This hefty book has been getting a lot of press, positive and negative, so there are already tons of places that you might look for a summary, if you are so inclined. I’m not so sure that one can really successfully summarize a book like this one, though, so I’m not going to try.

I will mention some of the things that I most appreciated about it. From the start, it forced me to confront (not for the first time) the shortcomings and miserable failures of my own education when it comes to the indigenous cultures of North America. As the book progressed, I learned a lot about various cultures across wide swaths of space and time. Gaining a greater understanding of the great diversity of ways in which humans have intentionally chosen to organize their societies would be reason enough for many people to give some time and attention to the book.

But what I probably found most valuable for getting the old brain juices flowing were the authors’ discussions of some very fundamental freedoms. Over many years as a student and then also as a teacher, I’ve thought a lot about the ways in which many of us are socialized into obeying authorities rather than deciding for ourselves what a good life looks like (and how best to pursue it). This book enabled me to think about a whole host of related issues from a new angle, and I suspect some of the ways it has changed my thinking will be quite long-lasting.

Of course I’m neither an anthropologist or an archaeologist, so I don’t have the right kind(s) of expertise to assess the methods used to collect, analyze, and interpret data in the background research, but the book did also help me learn a lot about the preoccupations, habits, and assumptions that are common to many practitioners of those disciplines, which was both interesting and useful for me.